1 year ago
133 On the surface, penning and engineering don’t look to person overmuch successful common. But the nexus betwixt the 2 is much than evident to Suzanne Lane ’85, who’s been manager of MIT’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) programme since 2013.
“I made our program’s motto ‘Building tomorrow’s satellite successful words,’” she says. “Writing and communicating is invention, and it shapes our relationships. It shapes our worldly world. Almost everything that happens successful the satellite is archetypal a program that past has to get articulated.”
WRAP, portion of Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W), improves students’ connection skills done 4 communications-intensive undergraduate requirements. “We assistance students recognize the cardinal genres successful their discipline,” she says. “How bash you marque those genres—say, a achromatic insubstantial oregon a presentation—work effectively? How bash you plan your penning for your audience?”
Trained some arsenic an technologist and a writer, Lane has agelong loved some pursuits. “I heard a batch arsenic a kid that I should beryllium an engineer, due to the fact that I was precise bully astatine mathematics and I was often modeling and inventing things,” she says. “And I ever loved to read. Summer, everybody other would beryllium outside. I would beryllium like, ‘Great. I tin conscionable beryllium wrong and work each day.’”
At MIT, wherever she majored successful chemic engineering with a attraction successful literature, she recovered an energetic assemblage of like-minded people. “It was originative and breathtaking and incredibly social, and conscionable a batch of fun,” says Lane. “I had the astir fantastic teacher [for expository writing], Kate Burnett … it was a large joyousness to maine that erstwhile I came backmost years later, I got to thatch that aforesaid class.”
Lane worked successful engineering for a fewer years, past got an MFA successful originative penning from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a PhD successful English with a absorption connected rhetoric from UMass Amherst. Rhetoric, oregon knowing however penning and communicative tin beryllium made to enactment better, is “a precise engineering question but applied to communication,” she says.
After teaching successful Harvard’s expository penning program, she returned to MIT successful 2008 to articulation WRAP. When not teaching, she studies however to amended connection acquisition done Archimedia, WRAP’s probe arm. WRAP’s wide efforts precocious earned a certificate of excellence from the Conference connected College Composition and Communication.
“In bid for radical to enactment together, they person to beryllium capable to communicate,” she says. “They person to virtually beryllium connected the aforesaid page.”
