What is professional communication? Why is technical writing important for engineers?
Professional communication is
the practice of conveying technical information to multiple audiences who may
have very different goals and varying technical needs for that information. In
this class, you not only learn how to research, organize, and present technical
information, but also how to write effectively, work in collaboration with
other professionals, and use various technologies to support your communication
efforts.
This course is designed to
help students master a variety of communication strategies and genres of
writing relevant specific professional disciplines. In this class, we are focused on writing for the sciences, specifically engineering. We will focus primarily on
the composition and design of larger documents such as proposals, instructions,
and formal reports using collaborative writing; however, we will also compose
and design smaller documents such as memos, letters, resumes, and informal
reports--as well as construct formal presentations. Each of these documents can be tailored specifically to your field of engineering. This allows the opportunity for those surveying engineering to explore various specializations; students already dedicated to a specific field will be able to increase their focus in a specific are of their field.
Central to this course is the analysis of
writing situations that are common in the technical workplace. Then we will use the strategies
for audience-analysis, organization, style, and page layout to develop
documents that address those rhetorical situations. The objective of this class
is to help you learn how to write, revise, and edit technical documents for the
professional community you will join. In other words, while this course is tailored specifically to engineering students, it is not necessarily a course where new concepts about the engineering discipline will be revealed. Instead, this is a rhetoric and composition course.
General Education Learning Outcomes
Students must pass this course with a “C” or
better to satisfy the CLAS requirement for Composition (C). Earning general
education composition credit, students will:
- Demonstrate forms of effective writing (focusing on analyses, arguments, and proposals)
- Learn different writing styles, approaches, and formats and successfully adapt writing to different audiences, purposes, and contexts; effectively revise and edit their own writing and the writing of others
- Organize complex arguments in writing, using thesis statements, claims, and evidence
- Employ logic in arguments and analyze their own writing and the writing of others for errors in logic
- Write clearly and concisely consistent with the conventions of standard written English
- Use thesis sentences, claims, evidence, and logic in arguments
The University Writing Requirement (WR) ensures
students both maintain their fluency in writing and use writing as a tool to
facilitate learning. Course grades now have two components. To receive
University Writing Requirement (WR) credit (E6), a student must earn a course
grade of C or higher and papers must meet minimum word requirements totaling
6000 words.
