Technical Writing

Supervised writing, with emphasis on clearness, correctness, conciseness, completeness, and appropriate tone; practice in organizing paragraphing, sentence structure, word choice, grammar, and punctuation. Purpose: The purpose of this course is to teach students how to plan, write, and produce formal technical reports, memo reports, and other short technical documents commonly written by technical and business professionals in a wide variety of workplace settings.

Course Objectives and Student Learning Outcomes:

Upon successfully completing this course students should be able to complete the following tasks:

By the conclusion of this course the student should be able to:

• define technical writing.

• identify audience and purpose by evaluating and analyzing various models of technical writing.
• define and apply the proper format and language to a technical document for each audience
• Examine sources in his/her field for relevance and credibility
• use numerous research sources such as the library, the Internet, interviews, surveys in order to produce and support credible documents.
• collaborate in teams using process in order to compose and produce technical writing projects.

• identify what formal rules for writing govern his/her discipline.
• learn and apply formal rules for writing as required in this class.
• organize and present arguments effectively [written and oral].
• avoid plagiarism through proper use of paraphrasing, quoting, attributions and documentation.
• formally present projects in class [written, visual, oral].
• identify legal and ethical issues in technical writing.
• edit one’s own work and the work of peers for content, organization, style, and mechanics.
• produce competent versions of most common workplace document types and understand how to adapt them to serve specific informational and rhetorical purposes.
• employ an effective writing process involving analysis of the rhetorical situation; discovery and development of ideas; and arrangement, drafting, revision, and editing of final documents.

Course topics and projects:  We will work with the following major topic areas during the semester: 

1.     Writing process in technical writing (purpose, audience, strategies)

2.     Elements of document design, analyzing documents

3.     Informative writing, describing and defining, arguing,

4.     Job related documents (resumés, cover letters, etc)

5.     Reports and proposals, abstracts, summaries,

6.     Ethics and legal issues in professional writing, plagiarism

7.     Oral presentations

Both individual and group projects or tasks will be used in approaching and discussing these topics, and the focus will be on identifying the communication problems present in a given situation and how best to resolve these problems.  Class writing will follow a process approach to writing.