Welcome, Commissioners!

Thank you so much for your interest in the Public Writing Initiative! We're thrilled to have you on board (or potentially on board), and this page should provide you with some key bits of information about our more intensive, semester or multi-semester programs that will produce tangible, useful documents for your business or organization. We'll work to match you up with a 202 class that suits the needs of both you and the students, in order to produce the highest-quality project we can.

What You'll Do

As an assignment commissioner for PWI, your task will be to provide a project that will take at least one semester to complete, and that will give students the opportunity to use their writing skills in a real-world context. This can include website copy and redesign, brochure production, long report production, advertising documents, and anything else that you can think of - or that your business can use to its advantage.

To this end, then, you'll be working closely with a PWI coordinator and a 202 instructor to design a project that can serve as a semester-long learning tool for the class. Keep reading to see how this process typically unfolds.

The Process

Your Project: First, you can start off by Contacting Us with a project that you'd like to have a 202 class tackle - again, these projects are only limited by your creativity, so feel free to challenge us with something! We'll see what we have available at the moment - it's rare that we have an exact match in numbers between interested instructors and commissioners, so we'll let you know the moment we have a class that would best suit your needs.

Meet your Instructor: Once we've set you up with an appropriate class, the PWI coordinator with whom you've been working and the instructor of the class that will be taking on your project will meet with you over lunch or coffee to discuss details - what you're looking for, and how the instructor can best work with your parameters to fit the 202 curriculum and produce the highest-quality document possible. The instructor will then be responsible for designing his or her syllabus around your project, and dividing it up into assignment-like chunks over the course of the semester. This syllabus will be sent on to you, for review and input.

Progress Throughout the Semester: You'll then periodically, at both your and the instructor's convenience, check in on the progress of your project over the course of the semester. You can visit the class to provide personal guidance, if you like, or you can be a a presence over email - whatever suits your needs and comfort level. This will be your opportunity to make sure the project is going in a favorable direction, and to see just how much students can learn by tackling real-world document production projects! It's very rewarding. Trust us.

Feedback and More Food: Towards the end of the semester, you'll meet again over lunch or coffee with your PWI coordinator (who will also have been checking in on progress over the course of the semester) and your class instructor to discuss how things went. The instructor will bring feedback from students and you can discuss future projects. We have often had commissioners come back for several projects with different classes, and we hope that your experience will be rewarding enough that you will do the same!

That's It: That's the process in a nutshell. Thank you so much again for your time and committment to this exciting program at Penn State. And as always, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to Contact Us.