One Department for All? Revising a Technical Communication Program through Interdisciplinary Collaboration  

As faculty and administrators responsible for program implementation continue to explain to each other how engineers, computer programmers, business managers, and technical communicators view the world, I hope that a new and genuinely collaborative, interdisciplinary program will emerge. The resulting opportunities for students will--I hope--be worth the trouble.

Ecker, Pamela S. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Education>WPA

Online-Help Modeling Project

The following includes the instructions for creating a model of a small help project and how to name and send it to your instructor.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2004). Academic>Course Materials>Documentation>Help

Oral Presentations in Professional Settings

This course is designed to help you improve your oral presentation skills and strengthen your ability to make a good argument and communicate effectively to an audience. You will gain these skills by studying rhetorical principles, analyzing other presentations, and practicing your own speaking.

Ratliff, Clancy. University of Minnesota (2004). Academic>Courses>Presentations>Rhetoric

Organization

This section was part of a chapter made up of the following: Content—provides strategies for thinking of useful content for writing projects, in other words, developing the content of a project. Organization—provides strategies for reviewing the sequence and arrangement of the contents of a writing project. Transitions—provides review strategies for checking the coherence of a writing project, in other words, the 'flow' of the project as created by the transitions.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides

Organizational Communication (and Writing)

The practice of effective electronic group communication has evolved as a primary consideration for efficient management of engineering and other creative group projects, in similar lines of those handled by EMAC students and in other engineering disciplines

Roy, Debopriyo. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2004). Academic>Courses

Organizing Paragraphs  

Just as Socrates said, ‘Every discourse must be organized, like a living being . . .,’ a document must be organized in a logical, coherent fashion, with its parts ‘composed in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.’ Although research has led to more sophisticated guidelines for creating reader-based documents, Socrates’ principles are still valuable. Writing organized, coherent documents is still a primary goal for technical writers—one you should follow as you develop your professional writing style. This file contains text about the refining, bleaching, and deodorizing processes of sunflowerseed oil. Your task is to make this text more organized and coherent so that readers will understand the process.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Editing

Organizing Sentences into Paragraphs  

This exercise will give you practice in organizing sentences into effective paragraphs. This computer file contains 12 sentences that you need to group, order, and connect so that you can create coherent, cohesive paragraphs.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Writing

Organizing Visual and Verbal Information  

For this exercise, you will create a two-panel brochure about carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) that could be distributed with other medical literature in your campus’s health center. The text and visual aids you will use are contained in this file, though they will require significant modifications using design principles presented in Technical Communication/5e.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Visual>Visual Rhetoric

The PageMaker Guy  

Because technical communication involves the knowledge of technology, expertise is associated with anything practical. I've come to think about this battle in terms of what my colleague Allan Heaps used to call the PageMaker Guy. In practical terms, the PageMaker Guy is the person in an organization or a group who 'knows' how to use technology, who can fix other people's technological messes, or who sacrifices valuable research time helping other people use technology. The PageMaker Guy is a phenomenon for which a person is anointed. Those of us in 'PageMaker Guy' situations often resent this role because it subsumes our identity to the extent that we fear our colleagues might ignore the depth of knowledge necessary for this role as well as our equally deserved scholarly accomplishments.

Bridgeford, Tracy. CPTSC Proceedings (2003). Careers>Academic>Workplace

Peer Review  

The purpose of the peer review is twofold: First, the suggestions you give to your peers should help them revise their papers. Second, carefully reading others' work should help you better reevaluate your own writing.

Charney, Davida. University of Texas. Academic>Course Materials>Editing

Planning Successful Internships: Matchmaking for Organizational Culture  

The collaborative nature of information development departments create special challenges for student interns, challenges which require that the student, the academic department, and the information development department can meet with careful planning and preparation. An intern must not only be well prepared academically, with knowledge and skills that support a company’s needs; each intern must also understand and accept the organizational culture in which he or she must be deeply involved in order to work and learn effectively. The information development department can use each internship as an occasion to examine its own culture and communication patterns.

Rosenquist, Deborah J. and Katherine E. Staples. STC Proceedings (1994). Academic>Internships

The Politics and Practices of Interface Design

This studio/seminar course will contribute to students' practical and theoretical knowledge of user-centered interface design. In the move from Engineering English to Technical Communication, technical communicators increasingly work with and within computer interfaces, as content developers, as human-factors and usability experts, and as information designers. This course examines both the work of interface design, focused on web and multimedia interfaces, and the theory of such work, particularly where it intersects with critical and cultural theory. We'll be looking at the development of user-centered and participatory design (Johnson, Ehn, Winograd), critical theories of technology (Foucault, Feinberg), and design strategies for critiquing or politicizing design (Laurel, Kolko).

Carter, Kellie Rae. Wayne State University (2004). Academic>Courses>User Interface>User Centered Design

Portfolio

A portfolio is a collection of materials you have created. You will present five or six substantial samples of your work, each one prefaced with a statement that explains the circumstances under which you created it, as well as an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses.

Boise State University. Academic>Portfolios

Portfolios Across the Curriculum: Whole School Assessment in Kentucky  

When the Kentucky Supreme Court declared the public education system unconstitutional in 1989 and the legislature passed the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) to revamp the existing system, we Kentucky English teachers became involved in the broadest reform ever attempted by any state in the nation. As part of the reform, a yearly state-wide performance-based assessment of each school was instituted in 1991. Along with other components, the assessment included a writing portfolio, holistically-graded by teachers in each school, that would count 14% in the total assessment.

Moore, Lizabeth and David R. Russell. English Journal, The (2001). Academic>Portfolios>Assessment

Power Tools for Technical Communication

You may find this website rather different from the obligatory websites for other textbooks. I've packed in nearly 200 exercises, quizzes, projects, and other sorts of activities that will keep your students busy all semester!

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>TC

Principles and Concepts of Technical Communication

This site will be the locus of your one-hour class treating the core principles and concepts you'll likely encounter in developing an understanding of the basic framework of thought in technical communication.

Herrington, TyAnna K. Georgia Institute of Technology (2003). Academic>Courses>TC

Principles of Technical Communication

This 'syllaweb' is provided for an ASU-East Online Course. As a student in this class, you'll be: exploring the wide range of professional possibilities in the world of technical communication; learning and discussing principles and techniques for a variety of technical writing and communication tasks; developing an awareness for audience and purpose; understanding how all of these impact content, logic, and organization; practicing writing and document design.

Wambeam, Cynthia A. Arizona State University (2003). Academic>Courses>TC

Print Production

A spring 2002 tech comm course on offset printing, paper and graphic design for technical communicators.

Sauer, Geoffrey. University of Washington-Seattle (2002). Academic>Courses>Undergraduate

Private Literacies, Popular Culture, and Going Public: Teachers and Students as Authors of the Electronic Portfolio  

In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, Richard Lanham suggests that perhaps those most resistant to the 'digital revolution' are members of English departments, those who are often divided between what does and what does not constitute a text. Often at the heart of this debate is the privileging of one literacy paradigm, that of print, and the marginalizing of another, primarily that devoted to the production of electronic discourse. To further complicate the issue, even when we do recognize electronic models of literacy, we tend to shape our experience, as Johnson-Eilola has so eloquently pointed out, through our nostalgia for earlier models of literacy, again, those focused on print and the printed page. It is no doubt important to teach students the ways in which rhetorical and literary texts are produced, distributed, and consumed; however, it is equally important for teachers of writing, primarily members of English departments, to acknowledge the production and consumption processes of texts external to the genres of the academy and to recognize that the essay is a printed form that admittedly for our students has little use outside the academy.

Wilferth, Joe. Kairos (2002). Academic>Portfolios>Writing

Professional and Technical Writing

According to the university catalog, the subject matter of WRT 307, Professional Writing, is: professional communication through the study of audience, purpose, and ethics; rhetorical problem-solving principles applied to diverse professional writing tasks and situations.

Murray, Joddy. Morrismurray.net (2002). Academic>Courses>Writing>Technical Writing

Professional Editing

This course is designed to be an introduction to the work of editing in a variety of settings. This screen provides your introduction to this site.

Williamson, William J. University of Northern Iowa (2003). Academic>Courses>Editing

Professional Report Writing

Instruction covers primary and secondary research techniques, analysis and interpretation of information, audience analysis, report design, format and graphics, and oral reporting. Instruction also covers writing in its social context and the management of complex research and writing projects.

Barker, Thomas. Texas Tech University (2004). Academic>Courses>Writing>Reports