 | | | |
One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.
View all 215 works published by Journal of Technical Writing and Communication |
Perceptions Of Memo Quality: A Case Study Of Engineering Practitioners, Professors, and Students
http://baywood.metapress.com/link.asp?target=contribution&id=ML5NEYG1T3F7RER6
 access restricted (by the publisher) to members/subscribers/customers only
 peer-reviewed
Amare, Nicole and Charlotte Brammer
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
2005
Abstract: One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.
|
|
| |
There are 23 readers currently online: 1 registered user and 22 guests. Register.