English

Mission

The English Department at UMass Lowell provides a rigorous and diverse curriculum for its majors, combining solid disciplinary foundations with opportunities for research, writing, performance, community engagement, and practical experience, leading to a range of possible career pathways and graduate programs for students to pursue. The curriculum across our five concentrations encourages the development of critical thinking, reading, and writing skills that serve English majors well beyond the university. Small class sizes encourage active learning, interaction with student peers, and engagement with faculty who are renowned scholars, writers, and artists publishing and performing in a wide variety of literary and cultural traditions. The English Department serves the broader university community with its First Year Writing Program and its required College Writing sequence, and by offering a range of General Education/Core Curriculum courses that appeal to students from a variety of departments and colleges across campus. The English Department also believes in service to and partnership with the broader community and regularly integrates scholarship, creative work, teaching, and service with community engagement.

Requirements of the Major

Journalism and Professional Writing Learning Outcomes

Students who complete their degree in English with a concentration in Journalism and Professional Writing will be able to do the following:

  1. Produce accessible, well-designed end products through an on-going process of individual and collective critique, substantive revision, and careful editing
  2. Adapt content, format, and style to different situations, audiences, and purposes, and organize material clearly and effectively for the intended audience
  3. Develop collaboration skills and work and write effectively in a professional context
  4. Develop good research questions and strategies, and gather, evaluate, interpret, and use information accurately, logically, and ethically
  5. Demonstrate basic competence in technology associated with traditional and new communications media
  6. Identify and analyze works of literature in a variety of genres
  7. Accurately identify their own strengths and weaknesses as a writer and communicator and develop a long-term plan for strengthening their skills