This edited collection examines engagements between health literacies and undergraduate writing instruction, providing research, case studies, and practical guidance on developing an interdisciplinary writing pedagogy. Bringing together works from scholars in rhetoric and composition, technical communication, UX, public health, nursing, and writing center administration, this collection showcases a range of evidence-based practices for composing, teaching, and assessing health literacies, which the readers can apply to their own contexts. Using non-specialist language accessible to instructors from a variety of backgrounds, the chapters consider the use of writing assignments including image analyses, public service announcements, podcasts, health education materials, illness narratives, public presentations, research proposals, and journal articles. The book offers a holistic overview by profiling entire writing programs, both online and face-to-face, that teach health literacies across their curricula. This evidence-based collection is essential reading for scholars and instructors in rhetoric and composition, writing in the health professions, technical communication, and health humanities, and can be used as a supplemental textbook for pedagogy courses in these fields.

To maintain their own health and the health of their families and communities, consumers rely heavily on the health information that is available to them. This information is at the core of the partnerships that patients and their families forge with today's complex modern health systems. This information may be provided in a variety of forms â€" ranging from a discussion between a patient and a health care provider to a health promotion advertisement, a consent form, or one of many other forms of health communication common in our society. Yet millions of Americans cannot understand or act upon this information. To address this problem, the field of health literacy brings together research and practice from diverse fields including education, health services, and social and cultural sciences, and the many organizations whose actions can improve or impede health literacy. Health Literacy: Prescription to End Confusion examines the body of knowledge that applies to the field of health literacy, and recommends actions to promote a health literate society. By examining the extent of limited health literacy and the ways to improve it, we can improve the health of individuals and populations.

This collection provides a research-based guide to instructional practices for writing in the health professions, promoting faculty development and bringing together perspectives from writing studies, technical communication, and health humanities. With employment in health-care sectors booming, writing instruction tailored for the health professions is in high demand. Writing instruction is critical in the health professions because health professionals, current and aspiring, need to communicate persuasively with patients, peers, mentors, and others. Writing instruction can also help cultivate professional identity, reflective practice, empathy, critical thinking, confidence, and organization, as well as research skills. This collection prepares faculty and administrators to meet this demand. It combines conceptual development of writing for the health professions as an emergent interdiscipline with evidence-based practices for instructors in academic, clinical, and community settings. Teaching Writing in the Health Professions is an essential resource for instructors, scholars, and program administrators in health disciplines, professional and technical communication, health humanities, and interdisciplinary writing studies. It informs the teaching of writing in programs in medicine, nursing, pharmacy and allied health, public health, and other related professions.

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Just as the majority of books about computer literacy deal more with technological issues than with literacy issues, most computer literacy programs overemphasize technical skills and fail to adequately prepare students for the writing and communications tasks in a technology-driven era. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age serves as a guide for composition teachers to develop effective, full-scale computer literacy programs that are also professionally responsible by emphasizing different kinds of literacies and proposing methods for helping students move among them in strategic ways. Defining computer literacy as a domain of writing and communication, Stuart A. Selber addresses the questions that few other computer literacy texts consider: What should a computer literate student be able to do? What is required of literacy teachers to educate such a student? How can functional computer literacy fit within the values of teaching writing and communication as a profession? Reimagining functional literacy in ways that speak to teachers of writing and communication, he builds a framework for computer literacy instruction that blends functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns in the interest of social action and change. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age reviews the extensive literature on computer literacy and critiques it from a humanistic perspective. This approach, which will remain useful as new versions of computer hardware and software inevitably replace old versions, helps to usher students into an understanding of the biases, belief systems, and politics inherent in technological contexts. Selber redefines rhetoric at the nexus of technology and literacy and argues that students should be prepared as authors of twenty-first-century texts that defy the established purview of English departments. The result is a rich portrait of the ideal multiliterate student in a digital age and a social approach to computer literacy envisioned with the requirements for systemic change in mind.

Interactive Writing is specifically focused on the early phases of writing, and has special relevance to prekindergarten, kindergarten, grade 1 and 2 teachers.

The development of better processes to relay medical information has enhanced the healthcare field. By implementing effective collaborative strategies, this ensures proper quality and instruction for both the patient and medical practitioners. Health Literacy: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice examines the latest advances in providing and helping patients and medical professionals to understand basic health information and the services that are most appropriate. Including innovative studies on interactive health information, health communication, and health education, this multi-volume book is an ideal source for professionals, researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in the improvement of health literacy.

For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women's health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality. While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the reader's empathy? To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading. Illness as Narrative seeks to draw wider attention to this form of life writing and to argue for new approaches to both literary criticism and teaching narrative. Jurecic calls for a practice that's both compassionate and critical. She asks that we consider why writers compose stories of illness, how readers receive them, and how both use these narratives to make meaning of human fragility and mortality.

This edited collection examines engagements between health literacies and undergraduate writing instruction, providing research, case studies, and practical guidance on developing an interdisciplinary writing pedagogy. Bringing together work from scholars in rhetoric and composition, technical communication, UX, public health, nursing, and writing center administration, this collection showcases a range of evidence-based practices for composing, teaching and assessing health literacies, which readers can apply to their own contexts. Using non-specialist language accessible to readers and instructors from a variety of backgrounds, the chapters consider the use of writing assignments including image analyses, public service announcements, podcasts, health education materials, illness narratives, public presentations, research proposals, and journal articles. The book offers a holistic overview by profiling entire writing programs, both online and face to face, that teach health literacies across their curricula. This evidence-based collection is essential reading for scholars and instructors in rhetoric and composition, writing in the health professions, technical communication, and health humanities, and can be used as a supplemental textbook for pedagogy courses in these fields.

This volume, edited by Grace Veach, explores leading approaches to teaching information literacy and writing studies in upper-level and graduate courses. Contributors describe cross-disciplinary and collaborative efforts underway across higher education, during a time when "fact" or "truth" is less important than fitting a predetermined message. Topics include: working with varied student populations, teaching information literacy and writing in upper-level general education and disciplinary courses, specialized approaches for graduate courses, and preparing graduate assistants to teach information literacy.