http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Education/Writing A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Education and Writing in the field of technical communication (and technical writing). en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Education/Writing http://tc.eserver.org/35585.html http://tc.eserver.org/35585.html When you set yourself up as a grammar expert it's better than being an expert on plastics. To be an expert on plastics you actually have to know something about plastics. With grammar the analogous thing doesn't hold. Nobody asks, nobody checks, nobody knows enough to get suspicious. You are free as a bird to publish any garbage you might want to type out. http://tc.eserver.org/35132.html http://tc.eserver.org/35132.html Rensselaer’s Technical Writers' Institute, the first program of its kind, had a profound impact on technical communication. It enabled technical communicators without formal education in the field to gain important knowledge, provided a forum for communicators from different industries to meet in order to solve mutual problems, played a key role in defining the field and its needs, encouraged recruitment (including the hiring of more women), promoted professional societies and formal degree programs, and seriously affected industry training programs by enabling them to use institute teaching materials. Knowledge gained through the Technical Writers' Institute enabled Rensselaer to develop many other innovations. http://tc.eserver.org/35138.html http://tc.eserver.org/35138.html In working with business executives, engineers, and government officials to improve their writing, I learned that it is much easier to teach clarity than tone. To bolster lessons on tone, I now draw on theory and research from interpersonal communication and social psychology. In the following discussion, I describe one such approach: applying the concept of defensiveness to business and technical writing. http://tc.eserver.org/35121.html http://tc.eserver.org/35121.html The value of learning effective nonfiction nonnarrative writing ("technical writing") for middle- and high-school students has been cited repeatedly in official and unofficial academic standards starting in the early 1990s. http://tc.eserver.org/34986.html http://tc.eserver.org/34986.html This research article reports the results of an online survey distributed among technical writing instructors in 2006. The survey aimed to examine how we teach intercultural communication in basic technical writing courses: our current practices and methods. The article discusses three major challenges that instructors may face when teaching about intercultural communication. These challenges concern teacher preparation, time and proposed goals and objectives, and teaching materials and methods. This article provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum. http://tc.eserver.org/34990.html http://tc.eserver.org/34990.html Many authors give advice to students about how to write the Introduction section of their articles. Some give examples of different ways of doing this in general, and a few discuss the opening sentence in particular. In this article, 13 different types of opening sentences are outlined, and their usage contrasted in British and American journals in the Sciences and Social Sciences. Implications for teaching are considered. http://tc.eserver.org/35004.html http://tc.eserver.org/35004.html A significant problem for practitioners of technical communication is to gain the skills to compete in a global, multicultural work environment. Instructors of technical communication can provide future practitioners with the tools to compete and excel in this global environment by introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the service-level classroom. By practicing how to use these heuristics in "real-world" contexts, instructors can prepare students to function as both information architects and symbolic-analytic operators within this global work environment. In this article, I first examine common cultural heuristics as they pertain to business communication. Next, I articulate how technical communicators can benefit from incorporating these heuristics into the classroom. Finally, I offer a pedagogical approach to introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the service-level technical communication classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/34919.html http://tc.eserver.org/34919.html The traditional distinction between writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines (WID) as writing to learn versus learning to write understates WID's focus on learning in the disciplines. Advocates of WID have described learning as socialization, but little research addresses how writing disciplinary discourses in disciplinary settings encourages socialization into the disciplines. Data from interviews with students who wrote lab reports in a biology lab suggest five ways in which writing promotes learning in scientific disciplines. Drawing on theories of situated learning, the authors argue that apprenticeship genres can encourage socialization into disciplinary communities. http://tc.eserver.org/34827.html http://tc.eserver.org/34827.html What do teams, writing, time, technology, and critiques have in common? If you said they all have the letter 't' in them, you were correct. There can be so much more, though, when we connect each of these words in our course written assignments. Most of us use teams in our graduate and undergraduate organizational communication classes. What follows is a brief description of written (letter) assignments that use student pairs in a virtual Blackboard-based discussion board. http://tc.eserver.org/34829.html http://tc.eserver.org/34829.html When I was assigned to teach graduate-level business writing in a Master's of Professional Communication (MPC) program, I was unsure what to do with the course. What kind of writing instruction do students need that they have not already received in their undergraduate business writing classes or in other required graduate writing courses? What makes an advanced writing class advanced? In order to answer those questions, I began looking for articles by other teachers and scholars in the field of professional and business writing. I discovered that in terms of assignments, teachers and scholars seem to agree that client projects form the cornerstones of business writing curricula. http://tc.eserver.org/34523.html http://tc.eserver.org/34523.html The mere act of reading good books, if you are not stopping to scrutinize the moves and tools used by the writers, examining and dissecting the choices they have made and why they work, will do nothing for you when you sit down to write. If you want a journal to accept your paper, or a federal agency to grant you coin, you have to make clear what is at stake and why the reader should care. Then you have to put forward the strongest reasoning based on evidence you provide in the clearest language you are able to rally. And then you need to know when you need help. http://tc.eserver.org/34398.html http://tc.eserver.org/34398.html I have been dwelling for some time with ideas for rethinking the professional writing major in response to phenomena that aren’t going away, such as the inadequacy of the university for life-long learning and the unsustainable way that public education is funded. http://tc.eserver.org/34060.html http://tc.eserver.org/34060.html In an age when students gravitate to online sources for research—and when tremendous amounts of both reputable and questionable information are available online—many have come to regard the Internet itself as a culprit in students' plagiarism. Some teachers go so far as to forbid students from researching online, in the mistaken assumption that if students are working from hard-copy sources only, the problem will disappear. We believe that an approach far different from either warnings and punishment or attempts to curtail online research is warranted. http://tc.eserver.org/33621.html http://tc.eserver.org/33621.html This article examines the concept of technê in relation to situatedness. Technê is conceived as techniques for situating bodies in contexts. Although many theorists and practitioners in technical communication are working from ecological and posthuman perspectives with regard to interface designs, this article argues for extending those perspectives to workplace and classroom situations. Starting from a Heideggerian reading of technê, the article moves toward the concept of post-technê, which remakes pedagogical techniques for writing and inventing in institutional contexts. http://tc.eserver.org/33157.html http://tc.eserver.org/33157.html I enjoy creating content. I like to take words and arrange them to convey ideas, paint pictures, spur thought, and give guidance. I like thinking about what arrangement of the words will bring the best impact. I write not necessarily because the world turns on ideas or because information is a buyable product, but because words have a lasting effect on people. http://tc.eserver.org/32618.html http://tc.eserver.org/32618.html This research article reports the results of an online survey distributed among technical writing instructors in 2006. The survey aimed to examine how we teach intercultural communication in basic technical writing courses: our current practices and methods. The article discusses three major challenges that instructors may face when teaching about intercultural communication. These challenges concern teacher preparation, time and proposed goals and objectives, and teaching materials and methods. This article provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum. http://tc.eserver.org/32167.html http://tc.eserver.org/32167.html The study uses Foucault's framework of governmentality to understand the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on teachers' writing instruction and attitudes toward writing in high- and low-income schools. Using interviews and observations of 18 teachers, the study identified four themes: emphasis on testing, curricular effects, awareness of lower-achieving students, and concerns for English language learners. While teachers shared concerns in those areas, there were differences in how teachers from high- and low-income schools experienced the impact of NCLB on their writing instruction. The study suggests that NCLB has affected teacher morale as well as the nature and amount of writing instruction, but that school contexts figure into teachers' instruction. The example of one teacher from a low-income school demonstrates the potential for teachers to resist the coercive aspects of NCLB through their writing instruction. http://tc.eserver.org/32169.html http://tc.eserver.org/32169.html The authors' goal was to model the role played by the relationship between a writing teacher and her students in the feedback and revision cycle they experienced in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. Participants included a nonnative teacher of English and 14 students enrolled in her English writing class in a Korean university. Data came from formal, informal, and text-based interviews; semester-long classroom observations; and students' drafts with teacher comments. Findings showed that caring was enacted in complex and reciprocal ways, influenced by interwoven factors from the greater society, the course, the teacher, and the student. Students' level of trust in the teacher's English ability, teaching practices, and written feedback, as much as the teacher's trust in particular students based on how they revised their drafts, played a great role in the development of a caring relationship between them. http://tc.eserver.org/31811.html http://tc.eserver.org/31811.html Over the course of each semester, students in 300-level business communication courses can expect to produce a number of various types of messages and reports with emphasis on the psychological development of the message. Although education has traditionally demanded an individual approach to most writing tasks in order to assess student performance, most practitioners in the field of business communication recognize the importance of collaborative writing as a necessary skill in preparing students to enter the job market where teams rather than individuals are the primary work unit. http://tc.eserver.org/31812.html http://tc.eserver.org/31812.html Narrative is a valuable genre to use in composition classes to help students understand their own identity, develop writing skills, including understanding how to structure and use personal experience with a rhetorical purpose in an essay or argument. Once they get to upper division writing courses, however, students are exposed to writing that places less emphasis on that personalized, subjective genre and moves toward the impersonal. Such writing limits the use of narrative, which is generally perceived as highly personal and subjective because it generally conveys only the narrator’s perspective. Narrative includes precise details of an event that occurred in the past which are reported in the same order in which they occurred, as well as an observation or evaluation of the information by the narrator. http://tc.eserver.org/31787.html http://tc.eserver.org/31787.html To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/31646.html http://tc.eserver.org/31646.html Teaching writing to engineering students representing Indian, Middle Eastern, Asian, and American cultures can be daunting as their cultural perceptions of time, gender, source of authority, individualism and risk taking, affect learning styles. However, despite cultural differences, many International students have no difficulty with much of American instruction and, in some cases, perform better than American students. Their ability to adapt to American instruction appears to depend primarily on the educational goals of their cultures. http://tc.eserver.org/31378.html http://tc.eserver.org/31378.html Proposes that educational institutions continue to improve the uses of writing in society in two ways: extend writing across the curriculum efforts and raise the awareness of students, the university community, and the public to the role of writing in society by having those who study writing teach an introductory liberal arts course on it. Both are important steps toward removing the remedial stigma attached to writing and its teaching, and toward combating the myth of autonomous literacy that reinforces the remedial stigma. http://tc.eserver.org/31081.html http://tc.eserver.org/31081.html Humor in the classroom is about engagement and involvement. Learn some new techniques to use and when to tread carefully. http://tc.eserver.org/31049.html http://tc.eserver.org/31049.html This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings. http://tc.eserver.org/30725.html http://tc.eserver.org/30725.html This study investigates the influence of students' perceptions of task similarity/ difference on the transfer of writing skills. A total of 42 students from a freshman ESL writing course completed an out-of-class writing task. For half of the students, the subject matter of the writing task was designed to be similar to the writing course; for the other half, it was designed to be different. All students were also interviewed about the writing task. Reports of learning transfer were identified in the interview transcripts, and students' performances on the task and on a recent assignment from the course were assessed. Results indicate that the intended task similarity/difference (i.e., in subject matter) did not have the expected impact on learning transfer; however, students' perceptions of task similarity/difference did influence learning transfer. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future research are discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/30722.html http://tc.eserver.org/30722.html To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect--a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge. In Study 2, we evaluated an online tutor designed to improve writers' predictions of other's word knowledge by providing them with feedback on the accuracy of their judgments. http://tc.eserver.org/30598.html http://tc.eserver.org/30598.html Technical writing may be seen as a marginal activity without clear economic benefit to an organization. Yet writing and editing can be tied to an organization's bottom line. Writers can use training and other interventions to demonstrate their own effectiveness. Such interventions can raise the efficiency with which their organizations produce documents and improve the quality of the documents themselves. Customer-oriented organizations will be most receptive to these interventions, but even unreceptive organizations can change their practices. Successful interventions require working with others and will mean added responsibilities for the writer. http://tc.eserver.org/30537.html http://tc.eserver.org/30537.html Most graduate students at the Air Force Institute of Technology's School of Logistics and Acquisition Management write their theses as a team project. However, the Institute has gathered no systematic information about how students manage their collaborative thesis-writing processes. This research gathers descriptive quantitative and qualitative data from 1992 graduates concerning how they composed the teem-authored thesis. In addition, this research extends the collective vocabulary concerning collaborative writing, particularly when applied in academic settings. http://tc.eserver.org/30542.html http://tc.eserver.org/30542.html Producing brochures for real clients teaches college-level technical writing students about constraints of cost, time, and the availability of materials. Brochure writing also provides opportunities for learning more about editing, collaborative work, document design, and the problems which may occur during the production of real documents. Brochures of good quality can be produced by a class in approximately three weeks, or nine classroom hours. Grading brochures is expedited through the use of a simple heuristic. http://tc.eserver.org/30432.html http://tc.eserver.org/30432.html The use of real materials in a technical writing class involves both advantages and drawbacks. Use of real materials makes the class relate well to the work environment, improves self-esteem, critical thinking, and student motivation. Drawbacks include the problem of finding materials, a lack of course continuity, a lessening of use of the class text, and legal implications. Overall, the use of real materials for classroom editing is recommended. http://tc.eserver.org/30369.html http://tc.eserver.org/30369.html Addressing a department's learning requirements is a tough call because of the different levels of complexities and challenges involved. With learning requirements poorly understood and sometimes even out of sync with department goals, a majority of training programs fail to achieve any major business objectives. What you need is the right approach to develop, monitor and standardize a cost-effective, people and result-oriented training program that works magic for you and your department. http://tc.eserver.org/30335.html http://tc.eserver.org/30335.html Whether one teaches business communication or technical writing (or some amalgam of the two), the first statements an instructor makes in class should be to apprise students that the course upon which they are embarking is but a specialty within a larger field of writing, that their courses in English composition, philosophy and survey of literature (and the papers written for those courses) will all apply to the specialized communication field they now must address. http://tc.eserver.org/30176.html http://tc.eserver.org/30176.html A hypothetical 'technical writing machine' was created as an aid in teaching writers how to develop troubleshooting procedures. Students use a schematic diagram of the 'machine' to determine possible faults and their causes. They learn to consider factors such as reliability and support equipment requirements as they determine a fault isolation strategy and presentation format. The 'machine' eliminates the need for students to have specific system technical knowledge and allows them to concentrate on the techniques of writing troubleshooting procedures. http://tc.eserver.org/30137.html http://tc.eserver.org/30137.html The Engineering Writing sequence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teaches fundamental college writing and research skills emphasizing the discourse and genres common to professional engineering. The first quarter emphasizes library, electronic-database, and literature-type searches, culminating in a literature review on a current technological topic. The second quarter integrates primary research and interviewing with the above, while the students design solutions to actual university building and plant resource problems. The third quarter involves advanced issues of document design and publication, as students post web sites not only pertinent to this year's theme, Engineering and the Environment, but also useful to the local community. http://tc.eserver.org/30153.html http://tc.eserver.org/30153.html Teaching non-writers how to write can be challenging, especially when they are adults using new software to do their jobs. But who knows best how to write about their jobs than the end users. Through field experiences and case studies, this paper describes methods and approaches for eflectively including the end user in the documentation process, as well as educating experienced writers who are new to the system. http://tc.eserver.org/30128.html http://tc.eserver.org/30128.html Even the most confident writers may panic when they are asked to teach a writing class for their company. Ensure success with this basic tenet of adult education: Teach what the learners want to know. The second tenet follows: Don't teach any more than the learners need to know. Focus on three to five writing problems you see within your company. Use a 'teach and do' method: Teach a topic, such as passive voice, then do an exercise to practice what you have just taught. Adults like hands-on writing experience, and they like to work as teams to analyze problematic writing. Provide handouts that participants can use later, and include resources for future reference. Get evaluations from the participants so that you can improve with each subsequent workshop. And don't forget to order the donuts! http://tc.eserver.org/30090.html http://tc.eserver.org/30090.html To teach technical writing effectively, technical writing teachers should know enough about their students' fields to understand what their students write and help them learn how to write appropriately for non-academic audiences. This paper discusses the need for additional preparation to teach technical writing. It presents the results of an informal survey of science and business faculty, identifying resources teachers can use to learn basic concepts in science and business. Also, the paper considers the value of such a survey in developing writing assignments and rapport with faculty whose majors take technical writing courses. http://tc.eserver.org/29891.html http://tc.eserver.org/29891.html The demands of former students, of industry, and of the accreditation board have prompted the engineering education community to investigate the integration of communication proficiencies into the four-year engineering curriculum. While much literature has been devoted to this task in the last several years, the engineering communication programs at most institutions can be described as employing either a peripheral or diffuse model to offer technical communication instruction. Each of these models is problematic. This article describes a novel 'hybrid' engineering communication education model under development at NC State University that is vertically integrated and discipline conscious. http://tc.eserver.org/29893.html http://tc.eserver.org/29893.html This study uses an online survey of technical communication educators to examine trends in the technical writing service course with regard to web design. Participants for the study were representatives of programs in technical communication in four-year institutions of higher education throughout the United States. The study contributes to research into the function of the technical writing service course in the current technological climate. Identifying trends is one component in an evaluation that will aid effective evolution of this significant course. http://tc.eserver.org/29886.html http://tc.eserver.org/29886.html The conviction that writing can be improved with a knowledge of grammar has prevailed for quite a long time. But research has shown no correlation between grammatical knowledge and writing ability. http://tc.eserver.org/29823.html http://tc.eserver.org/29823.html Students in business communication classes are expected to write various types of documents. Research has illustrated that undergraduate student writing skills have not improved even though most states have begun writing proficiency tests at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. By the time students enroll in college, students are expected to be proficient writers. In some cases, this is true. In far too many cases, students continue to need writing development. In business communication classes, these weaknesses cannot be ignored. This article's purpose is to give guidance to instructors to motivate their students to produce better written products. The difficulty is how to do this most effectively. The authors present some ideas on how to improve student writing through some creative teaching and evaluation strategies. http://tc.eserver.org/30291.html http://tc.eserver.org/30291.html Trainers and others in the professional development field have a dual mission (among other responsibilities): to identify written 'coffee stains' and, equally important, to find and use as many effective approaches as possible to get the word out to the largest number of users. http://tc.eserver.org/29378.html http://tc.eserver.org/29378.html English departments, eager to boost enrollment, may press teachers into duty teaching technical writing courses on short notice and with little preparation. http://tc.eserver.org/29377.html http://tc.eserver.org/29377.html Let's resist seduction by the mythologies of teaching and keep our grasp on the realities of learning. http://tc.eserver.org/29379.html http://tc.eserver.org/29379.html Recommends in-service training programs, including summer institutes and monthly workshops, to teach technical writing techniques to literature-trained English teachers who have plunged into unknown waters. http://tc.eserver.org/29283.html http://tc.eserver.org/29283.html Over the past 14 years blogging has evolved from crude and blunt internet ramblings, technical or inspired dialogues to a diverse and creative web phenomenon capable of calling the world's media to scrutiny, and no longer the province of late-night diarists but increasingly a platform and media release opportunity for industry and commerce. http://tc.eserver.org/29215.html http://tc.eserver.org/29215.html Technical communication practices have been changed dramatically by the increasingly ubiquitous nature of digital technologies. Yet, while those who work in the profession have been living through this dramatic change, our academic discipline has been moving at a slower pace, at times appearing quite unsure about how to proceed. This article focuses on the following three areas of opportunity for change in our discipline in relation to digital technologies: access and expectations, scholarship and community building, and accountability and partnering. http://tc.eserver.org/29204.html http://tc.eserver.org/29204.html Because of accreditation, budget, and accountability pressures at the institutional and program levels, technical and professional communication faculty are more than ever involved in assessment-based activities. Using assessment to identify a program's strengths and weaknesses allows faculty to work toward continuous improvement based on their articulation of learning and behavioral goals and outcomes for their graduates. This article describes the processes of program assessment based on pedagogical goals, pointing out options and opportunities that will lead to a meaningful and manageable experience for technical communication faculty, and concludes with a view of how the larger academic body of technical communication programs can benefit from such work. As ATTW members take a careful look at the state of the profession from the academic perspective, we can use assessment to further direct our programs to meet professional expectations and, far more importantly, to help us meet the needs of the well-educated technical communicator. http://tc.eserver.org/29246.html http://tc.eserver.org/29246.html In light of growing interest in technical communication around the world, cross-cultural teaching opportunities may challenge basic assumptions about teaching and learning for both teachers and students. A faculty-development project in the People's Republic of China illustrates various ways facilities, educational practices, and worldviews from each side of the exchange require significant compromise. A negotiated, student-centered classroom environment may be a significant strategy for instruction in such settings. http://tc.eserver.org/29233.html http://tc.eserver.org/29233.html Composing hypertext documents can be an enriching path into the world of technical communication. In learning to produce hypertext, students are introduced to an important form of written composition that encompasses not only text generation, but also visual communication and information architecture. In this article, I provide a rationale for teaching hypertext composition and then some specific curricular suggestions in two parts, one for teaching beginners, and one for teaching more advanced students. http://tc.eserver.org/29015.html http://tc.eserver.org/29015.html While some models of computer writing environments have emerged in the literature on writing, most of them are done with the purpose of helping writers in an academic context and very few, if any, with the aim of facilitating the work of professional writers or students in professional writing. We think, however, that we can learn from the previous models to build a multi-purpose computer writing environment that will take into account the needs of the professional writers as well as those of the students learning to write. We will begin by looking at some models of writing proposed by Hayes and Flower in 1980 and also at the model of White and Arndt. Afterwards, we will review the model of professional writers developed by Clerc and link it with the previous models. We will then have to look at some computer writing environments described in the literature and see how these environments take into account the process and tasks identified in writing. Finally, we will suggest our model. http://tc.eserver.org/29095.html http://tc.eserver.org/29095.html The article outlines the technical writing tutorial (TWT) that preceded an advanced ESL writing course for students of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University. Having assessed the English skills of those students at the end of the semester, we found a statistically significant increase in the performance of the students who had taken the TWT in comparison to the control group who spent the time of TWT doing more traditional exercises. This result indicates that technical writing books and journals should be considered as an important source of information for teachers of writing to ESL students. http://tc.eserver.org/29073.html http://tc.eserver.org/29073.html If you wish to start an undergraduate professional and technical writing program at a small liberal arts college, you will find good arguments for your project in the educational writings of Sir Francis Bacon. Unlike other Renaissance Humanists, Bacon located the New Learning (what we now call the humanities) within the related contexts of scientific discovery and invention and professional training and development. His treatise, The Advancement of Learning, proposes to draw knowledge from and apply knowledge to the natural and social world. Bacon's curricular ideas can benefit emerging PTW programs in the humanities in three ways: They make a convincing apologia for most English departments and writing programs, wed humanistic education to public service, and provide a rich but practical theoretical framework for program development and administration. http://tc.eserver.org/29044.html http://tc.eserver.org/29044.html Teachers at all levels of college instruction use service learning, a popular pedagogical tool since the mid-eighties, to teach students both social consciousness and pragmatic, real-world writing skills. This article explores the concept of service learning as rhetorical action in the field of technical communication in general, and the question of whether service learning is appropriate in beginning level technical writing courses. Using my experience through two years of service learning instruction in community college classes, I respond to the charge that students in lower-division courses may lack the maturity to successfully enact service learning assignments. I also analyze the appropriateness of the community college as a catalyst for community-based writing projects. http://tc.eserver.org/29118.html http://tc.eserver.org/29118.html Individual students in two different sections of an undergraduate civil engineering laboratory were tasked with preparing three professional-quality laboratory reports. The teaching assistant and/or instructor used established criteria to grade the first two reports prepared by students in one section. The first two reports prepared by students in the other section were peer evaluated by assigned fellow students within the same laboratory section using identical grading criteria. The peer evaluated section had a higher class average than the teaching assistant/instructor graded section on the fist two reports. The third report prepared by students from both sections was graded by a professional educator/architect without knowledge of a student's class section. The peer evaluation students also had a higher class average on the third report, suggesting that the peer evaluation process may have positively contributed to those students' writing skills. http://tc.eserver.org/29140.html http://tc.eserver.org/29140.html The successful communicator is expected to provide communications that are not only complete but also representative of effective thinking (i.e., original). Creating complete and creative communications begins with a disciplined process of discovery--identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and integrating the articulated and embedded purposes. Expanding on the work of Linda Flower and John Hayes, this article first explores a means to promote a thorough examination of purpose. It then provides tools for capturing and integrating these insights into communications that are complete, capable of satisfying the rhetorical challenges, and compelling reflections of the student's creative problem solving abilities. http://tc.eserver.org/29147.html http://tc.eserver.org/29147.html Previous research has indicated that engineering faculty do not follow best practices when commenting on students' technical writing. However, it is unclear whether the faculty prefer to comment in these ineffective ways, or whether they prefer more effective practices but simply do not enact them. This study adapts a well known study of response in composition to ask whether engineering faculty prefer authoritative, form-focused comments, or whether they may prefer to write different sorts of comments. We asked ten civil engineering faculty to comment on a sample paper and then rank their preferences for provided versions of comments on the same paper. One provided version emphasized comments on content, one emphasized comments on form, and one was balanced. Comparisons of the respondents' preferences and practices suggest that the engineering faculty recognize and value content-focused, non-authoritative responses, but generally do not write comments that conform to these values. We consider the implication of these findings for research on response to technical writing as well as for technical writing faculty in their own course. While recognizing the need for more research, we also discuss ways in which writing professionals, including WAC administrators and technical writing professors, can encourage engineering faculty to enact their preferences for response styles that reflect best practices. http://tc.eserver.org/29107.html http://tc.eserver.org/29107.html Typeface personality impacts the rhetorical effect of students' documents, yet it receives little attention in textbooks. Technical writing students should stand the definition of "appropriate" in relation to typeface selection, the difference between type's functional and semantic properties, the difference between type family and personality, the effect of a typeface's history, and the contribution of a typeface's anatomy to its personality. Understanding these, students can make informed decisions about typeface appropriateness. http://tc.eserver.org/28829.html http://tc.eserver.org/28829.html As the semester's first assignment in a first-year writing course, I have used the professional e-mail assignment for several years in both face-to-face (f2f) and virtual classes, and have experienced great success as well as positive feedback from students. I have also shared this assignment with colleagues who have remarked on the value of critically thinking about e-mail since the genre cuts across every class, every discipline, and almost all employment and home situations. The assignment also sets the tone for all of my assignments because it fits within my pedagogical/theoretical framework, incorporating three important principles: community, critical engagement, and application (Digital 231). As with all of my assignments, this one has a theoretical underpinning, is framed by readings, is distributed to students via a written document that itself serves as 'good writing,' provides scaffolding for later assignments, and emphasizes digital literacies that are crucial if students are to be engaged and empowered citizens. http://tc.eserver.org/28119.html http://tc.eserver.org/28119.html Collaborations between disciplines in middle school usually occur between language arts and social studies, or between math and science; however, we found a collaboration between language arts and science to be a fruitful experience for our students in their learning both disciplines and in improving our own teaching. http://tc.eserver.org/28110.html http://tc.eserver.org/28110.html This paper documents an ongoing experiment designed to integrate the teaching of college algebra and college rhetoric and writing at Montgomery College in Conroe, Texas. These are the first two college-level math and English courses that students take within the college's core curriculum. Our approach focuses on the concept of models and model building and might be easily adapted to a variety of math and writing classes. We believe we have maintained the necessary rigor of both disciplines while providing a foundation which links them. http://tc.eserver.org/28114.html http://tc.eserver.org/28114.html Writing- and communication-across-the-curriculum programs often develop as independent initiatives focused on improving students' writing and/or speaking by incorporating these activities into coursework and helping teachers to use them more effectively in their instruction. However, there is now much anecdotal evidence of the conditions that work against the cultivation of cross-curricular programs: faculty complacency; the weakening of a program's original spirit; reduction or elimination of funding; and the continued avoidance of involvement by some programs, administrators, or faculty (see White). http://tc.eserver.org/28120.html http://tc.eserver.org/28120.html When students use poetry to imagine and explore academic subjects, they examine the topic in new, creative ways, resulting in interesting and lively writings that stimulate thought and class discussions. The following poems are examples of student poetry written in a variety of classes throughout the curriculum. I am pleased to showcase student writing in this section, and I hope reading these poems will suggest possibilities and adaptations for teachers and students elsewhere. http://tc.eserver.org/28117.html http://tc.eserver.org/28117.html Faculty often tell their students that conversations contribute to the collaborative writing process. The first plenary session was planned as a generative activity: conversations, first, among the panelists, and then involving the whole audience, to begin collaboratively writing the future on a grand scale. The result of these conversations should impact policymakers, leaders in many institutions, and legislators who control state funding. http://tc.eserver.org/28113.html http://tc.eserver.org/28113.html Work for this essay began with a problem that will sound all too familiar to most of us in higher education: It has recently dawned upon administrators and faculty in many departments across our university's curriculum that our students can't write. Or more accurately, enough of our students write poorly enough that we have cause for concern. This concern is usually expressed in the uneqresolution that something ought to be done. http://tc.eserver.org/28112.html http://tc.eserver.org/28112.html We know that many WAC initiatives start as grassroots efforts to meet local curricular needs, and that success depends on the extent to which these initiatives gain institutional support. However, as the missions of institutions change to account more fully for preparing students for their roles as citizens and workers, WAC initiatives need to be more aware of the needs of the larger community as well as the university community. http://tc.eserver.org/28111.html http://tc.eserver.org/28111.html Responding to a 1999 City University of New York (CUNY) Board of Trustees resolution mandating a five-year university-wide WAC Initiative, Hostos Community College/CUNY, an urban, bilingual community college with a predominantly Spanish-speaking, low-income student population, has established a comprehensive WAC program. The Hostos Initiative reflects the University-wide philosophy that writing ability is developed through extensive writing practice across a broad range of academic experiences at all levels of a student's academic life and draws on research which illustrates the interrelationship between language and learning (Barnes, et al., Britton, Emig, Martin et al.). http://tc.eserver.org/28116.html http://tc.eserver.org/28116.html The five panelists addressed this very large question from different points of view and different areas of expertise. In general, however, they endorsed, in Schneider's term, an approach to intercultural learning that supports 'a vision of civic responsibility in a diverse and still deeply unequal world.' This summary captures some of the issues raised in the discussion and suggestions for addressing these issues. http://tc.eserver.org/28115.html http://tc.eserver.org/28115.html With the turn of a new century, it seems as though everyone has gone into the forecasting business--especially stockbrokers and academics. Our own field has marked the emerging era with a wonderful essay collection, WAC for the New Millennium (ed. McLeod, et al., NCTE 2001). In the same spirit, this panel looked to the future by reflecting on best current theory/practice (guided by the stockbrokers' caution that past performance is no guarantee of future results.) To set the stage for the discussion, the moderator briefly considered the title assigned by the conference organizers: 'What Must Be Done to Ensure That College Students Communicate Well in Their Fields?' http://tc.eserver.org/27705.html http://tc.eserver.org/27705.html The popularity of technical writing and communication has caused many colleges and universities to scramble to hire qualified tenure-track faculty members. So-called lone ranger candidates are often lured to workplaces in which they are the sole technical writing faculty members by promises of autonomy and the ability to develop programs in ways, and at a pace, that would not necessarily be possible at other institutions. This article explores challenges faced by several such lone ranger faculty members and outlines survival strategies that may help lone rangers sustain and build their technical writing programs. http://tc.eserver.org/27321.html http://tc.eserver.org/27321.html Recently a striking change has taken place in the organization and visibility of what we writing teachers do. http://tc.eserver.org/26724.html http://tc.eserver.org/26724.html At some point in their careers, many writers may teach writing courses, either before a 'live' classroom audience or, these days, online. But how does a new teacher develop that first course proposal? What elements should go into it? http://tc.eserver.org/26707.html http://tc.eserver.org/26707.html This webtext 'talks' in all the ways we are asked to talk about teaching digital writing: in the hallways to colleagues, in policy documents to administrators, in classroom exercises to graduate and undergraduate students, and to colleagues at conferences, in journal articles, and other scholarly genres. http://tc.eserver.org/26577.html http://tc.eserver.org/26577.html The paper examines whether writing tutors control the subject matter discussed in tutoring sessions with engineering students, topic-raising in six tutoring sessions was analyzed. Over 81% of the topics were raised by tutors, suggesting tutors control subject matter. To examine the subject matter that tutors and students focused upon, topics were categorized by type. Over 55% of the topics raised were related to sentence clarity, conciseness, and mechanics. Tutors and students also raised topics related to content, rhetorical situation, and textual organization and formatting. Writing tutors and engineering students focus on sentence-level issues even though students might benefit from more attention to discourse-level issues. http://tc.eserver.org/26578.html http://tc.eserver.org/26578.html For many students, their role as customers is their most significant interface with the business world. They understand, at some level, the organizational importance of building customer loyalty for the success of companies. Building on that understanding can provide a context that amplifies their knowledge of business and reinforces the value of effective communication. Using the organizational goal of building customer loyalty as a framework for class discussion and activities gives instructors a real-world rationale that brings the world of business into communication courses. This fresh approach shows you ways to focus student writing, presentations, and group process assignments around the theme of evaluating and improving customer loyalty. http://tc.eserver.org/26322.html http://tc.eserver.org/26322.html Computers are not 'just tools' for writing. Networked computers create a new kind of writing space that changes the writing process and the basic rhetorical dynamic between writers and readers. Computer technologies have changed the processes, products, and contexts for writing in dramatic ways—and writing instruction needs to change to suit how writing is produced in digital spaces. http://tc.eserver.org/26293.html http://tc.eserver.org/26293.html I want to make two arguments. The first, a largely implicit one, concerns the life cycle of online scholarship and is marked by my added emphasis on the word 'article' in the opening sentence of this essay. My second argument, the explicit one, is about the value of blogging in the writing classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/25882.html http://tc.eserver.org/25882.html This article examines the concept of techne in relation to situatedness. Techne is conceived as techniques for situating bodies in contexts. Although many theorists and practitioners in technical communication are working from ecological and posthuman perspectives with regard to interface designs, this article argues for extending those perspectives to workplace and classroom situations. Starting from a Heideggerian reading of techne, the article moves toward the concept of post-techne, which remakes pedagogical techniques for writing and inventing in institutional contexts. http://tc.eserver.org/25580.html http://tc.eserver.org/25580.html Just as the nature of and expectation for literacy has changed in the past century and a half, so has the nature of writing. Much of that change has been due to technological developments, from pen and paper, to typewriter, to word processor, to networked computer, to design software capable of composing words, images, and sounds. These developments not only expanded the types of texts that writers produce, they also expanded immediate access to a wider variety of readers. With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice. http://tc.eserver.org/25585.html http://tc.eserver.org/25585.html The concept of genre, as developed in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars like Carolyn Miller, Charles Bazerman, and Richard Coe, offers a key to understanding both formal features and motivations for weblogging, and their view of genres as dynamic and evolving complements Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of new media: remediation. Our goal in this paper is to bring some greater specificity to, and advance the understanding of, weblogs as educational tools relevant to any class that takes writing and reading seriously. http://tc.eserver.org/25598.html http://tc.eserver.org/25598.html Education and skills development are vital to a technical writing career. While there are no set-in-stone educational requirements for a technical writer, there are very few writers in the field who do not have a college degree. http://tc.eserver.org/25432.html http://tc.eserver.org/25432.html Web logs (also called 'weblogs' or 'blogs') are frequently updated website commentaries, short or long, organized chronically and sometimes include the blogger’s personal life. http://tc.eserver.org/25433.html http://tc.eserver.org/25433.html In many ways, blogs combine the best elements of portfolio-driven courses, where student work is collected, edited, and assessed, with the immediacy of publishing for a virtual audience. http://tc.eserver.org/25434.html http://tc.eserver.org/25434.html The global reach of the World Wide Web helps create connections between many people with diverse opinions and interests. This strength, combined with the ease of publishing to the Web when compared to traditional publishing endeavors, and the ability to reach a large audience have fostered a phenomenon known as weblogs. http://tc.eserver.org/25306.html http://tc.eserver.org/25306.html Composition faces the daunting task of promptly translating its theories into pedagogical strategies and often these teaching experiences lead to new questions for scholarship. http://tc.eserver.org/25022.html http://tc.eserver.org/25022.html Collaborative writing and editing are common in business and industry, so they’re often taught in the technical writing classroom and the writing intensive classroom. However, more than dividing the tasks and sharing knowledge in a "real world" simulation is necessary to provide students with a "good" collaborative experience or writers and editors with good teamwork in business and industry. Technical writing students at Cincinnati Technical College worked in teams on developing a manual for prospective students, but they also applied more sophisticated collaborative techniques. They completed a battery of psychological tests and participated in experiential learning on group process. http://tc.eserver.org/25021.html http://tc.eserver.org/25021.html I've heard lots of reasons offered for the surprising success of WAC over the last 27 years. But you know, the I think it's the acronym. WAC. Have you ever had colleagues good naturedly kid about the acronym. 'This is WACy!' There is something a little crazy about this whole thing. http://tc.eserver.org/24905.html http://tc.eserver.org/24905.html Do technical writing professors teach what practitioners practice? Do practitioners practice what professors preach? We surveyed writers and teachers nationwide, asking each group to rate the importance of types of writing, writing skills, electronic communications, computer usage, and nonwriting topics, such as oral presentations and graphics. Teachers and writers agree that ethics, revision, and document design are important. However, writers focus on manuals, whereas professors teach reports and resumes. Writers emphasize grammar, punctuation, hypertext, and total quality management, whereas teachers emphasize passive voice and personalization. The two groups differ often and significantly. http://tc.eserver.org/24893.html http://tc.eserver.org/24893.html This panel segment focuses on lessons learned from teaching technical writing via Interactive Compressed Video ([C V). Although ICV has limitations, its two-way audio and video have distinct advantages, especially when combined with document cameras at each site. With some ingenuity, the discussions, hands-on exercises, workshops, and individualized coaching that are the mainstay of writing instruction can be adapted for teaching at a distance. http://tc.eserver.org/24616.html http://tc.eserver.org/24616.html As is the case with the first-year composition class, we tend to think of WAC programs as an exclusively U.S. phenomenon, or at least a North American phenomenon. http://tc.eserver.org/24534.html http://tc.eserver.org/24534.html To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, we should add multiculturalism to the widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction, thus transforming the classroom into a contact zone (Pratt). The practical necessity of intercultural communication in a global marketplace necessitates internationalization. The international perspective, accounting for the heterogeneity of the technical communication audience, focuses on audience analysis and leads us to encourage students to learn about the multiple, cultural layers of audience. A multicultural perspective, however, can teach students of professional communication about the complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language. Multiculturalism's critical component provides insights into the structures and ideologies of domination/subordination and provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting fear and prejudices. Likewise, the international perspective in professional communication can inform issues of audience analysis in composition. http://tc.eserver.org/24473.html http://tc.eserver.org/24473.html For my dissertation, I am analyzing technical writing textbooks from the early 1900s to the present to determine whether technical writing pedagogy has undergone or is undergoing a paradigm shift. When I began this study, my hypothesis was that technical writing pedagogy, like composition and rhetoric pedagogy, has shifted from the product orientation to the process orientation. Textbooks that are product oriented emphasize the study of examples or models, and textbooks that are process oriented emphasize the study of the writing process. Now that I have completed my study and am in the process of analyzing the results, my hypothesis is that technical writing pedagogy shifted from a product orientation to a combined product and process orientation. http://tc.eserver.org/24272.html http://tc.eserver.org/24272.html Popular opinion maintains that people should be able to locate, collect, and evaluate information on the world-wide web without any substantial instruction. To test this premise eighty students at four disciplinary divergent schools participated in a study to evaluate their performance in retrieving and assessing electronic information. While the author is willing to admit that changes in performance are likely to occur over time, the present study found students (and by extension employee) performance to be relatively poor. http://tc.eserver.org/24243.html http://tc.eserver.org/24243.html Teaching students how to write about science for the general public involves helping them research subjects, publications, and audiences. They should learn about research, organization of articles, audience analysis, and writing strategies, and use human interest, background information and examples, proper terminology and pace, and techniques to motivate readers to read the article. http://tc.eserver.org/24207.html http://tc.eserver.org/24207.html This workshop outlines the rationale for teaching college courses in online documentation, issues to consider, suggests a strategy for teaching the course (including topic sequence, exercises, and simulation), and demonstrates useful electronic resources. http://tc.eserver.org/23883.html http://tc.eserver.org/23883.html The collection of materials included here are designed to assist those, who for the first time, find themselves administering and developing an ongoing program for training teachers to use technology in the composition classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/23831.html http://tc.eserver.org/23831.html Since 1949, when the Conference on College Composition and Communication was founded in Chicago, the terms composition and rhetoric have been linked in a social-constructionist move that is now ubiquitous in many United Statesian English departments as well as in many free-standing composition-rhetoric programs. http://tc.eserver.org/23696.html http://tc.eserver.org/23696.html The transition from being a technical writer to becoming a Visiting Professor of Technical Communication has meant, so far, that 1) I work a whole lot more, and 2) I finally have a chance to see the effect of the things that we create on the user. My students have helped me to do this. http://tc.eserver.org/23545.html http://tc.eserver.org/23545.html The CORE method of teaching technical writing begins with a short core document and builds up from there. The method follows advances in writing technology and pedagogy, realizing the advantages of computer-assisted writing as well as the 'process' approach to teaching composition. The workshop creates opportunities for participants to evaluate the CORE method and apply it to their own teaching or training tasks. http://tc.eserver.org/23445.html http://tc.eserver.org/23445.html For most readers of TC-Forum, technical communication is an activity undertaken by dedicated technical communicators, for whom writing, editing, illustrating, or page-making is their chosen vocation. Yet there is also a much larger community for whom technical communication is only a secondary activity, although it remains an essential part of their work. http://tc.eserver.org/23375.html http://tc.eserver.org/23375.html I am asking my program to incorporate more of the liberal arts into the course's title and course description to better appeal to (and serve) students in a liberal arts college. The course will have one or two new sophomore level iterations: as a technical/research writing course in which students complete a semester long service project, researching and writing a final report while focusing on writing, research, and mathematical skills, and/or as a technical writing/document design class where students focus on the document design and writing skills needed to produce items such as a resume, flyers, brochures, posters, and more. http://tc.eserver.org/23374.html http://tc.eserver.org/23374.html The smaller the program, the more stretchable/permeable the borders of the service course must become. http://tc.eserver.org/23371.html http://tc.eserver.org/23371.html Technical writing faculty who work in solo situations are often seen as the 'other' in their home departments, whether we are housed with literature, business, or engineering faculty. We are thus inscribed in a unique border location, and consequently are further inscribed in a peripheral location within the greater technical writing academy. http://tc.eserver.org/23337.html http://tc.eserver.org/23337.html The two growth areas right now are the English as a second language (ESL) courses and the business and technical writing courses. The ESL courses fall outside the province of this paper, but the business and technical writing courses are very pertinent. http://tc.eserver.org/23336.html http://tc.eserver.org/23336.html It's Monday, September 8, your first day in law school. Tonight you'll start your classes. You'll be taking Criminal Law and Procedure on Mondays, Basic Contract Law on Tuesdays, and Property and Law on Wednesdays. But before going to any of those classes, you are, at eight o'clock this morning, given your first task as a law student. You'll be trying a case in superior court. It doesn't matter what the case is; the defendant's future is on the line, and you are responsible for it. The fact that you've never taken a law course before and basically have no idea what to do in court also doesn't matter. After all, the way to learn to do something is by doing it. And if this defendant gets cheated out of the right to the best lawyer possible, and if the next several defendants also get cheated, does that really matter? Someday, chances are, you'll be a great lawyer. The above scenario is nothing less than ridiculous, yet in English departments across the country a similar scenario takes place at the start of every semester. http://tc.eserver.org/23341.html http://tc.eserver.org/23341.html The service curricula in this survey include institution-wide general education courses, English courses required in addition to institution-wide general education courses for preprofessional students (those pursuing four-year or longer non-arts and sciences degrees), and other specialized preprofessional English courses, such as technical writing. http://tc.eserver.org/23330.html http://tc.eserver.org/23330.html The future of the English curriculum is being argued and discussed in academic settings across the country. Students, more and more, seek courses of study that will lead directly to jobs. The buzzword is 'relevance.' The bottom line is 'big bucks.' http://tc.eserver.org/23344.html http://tc.eserver.org/23344.html If your faculty thinks it is not the place of a liberal arts school to get involved in anything 'vocational,' not the role of an English department to counsel students about job seeking, and not the job of a faculty member to learn about career planning, then the student probably cannot get an answer to the question. Chances are you and your department do not really comprehend the significant practical impact of this discipline even though it is your life's work. http://tc.eserver.org/23335.html http://tc.eserver.org/23335.html Increasingly, English teachers, their departments, and their administrations have been investigating the use of word processing and computer aids in writing. For those who integrate computer use into instruction, the question of access becomes crucial. Although some schools—like Carnegie Mellon and Drexel—solve this question by requiring their students to purchase computers, most colleges and universities are providing access, at least in part, through on-campus computer labs. On some campuses, the English department or writing center plays a significant role in establishing and running a computer lab for writing and may even have primary responsibility for doing so. Many of us, however, have had no training that prepares us for the technical and administrative problems involved in such an undertaking. http://tc.eserver.org/23347.html http://tc.eserver.org/23347.html What can I say about composition that will be useful to the Yale English department in setting up a good writing program? It's clear to me that I won't need to say anything about special teaching methods that are tailor-made for the Yale scene. Yale's admissions policy guarantees that entering freshmen are going to be very diverse in their backgrounds and in their writing skills, and Yale will want to adapt to this diversity by using methods that are flexible and eclectic. Even if Yale did try to create a novel program that could serve as a model for the rest of the nation, it's doubtful that the elements of the program could be new or that the human mind could devise more methods and programs than have already been tried out. The problem will be to choose methods intelligently and to apply them well; and in order to do this, the one thing needful is not machinery but motivation—professorial motivation. http://tc.eserver.org/23343.html http://tc.eserver.org/23343.html The 1984–85 survey of the English sample represents the second phase of the survey series the MLA launched in 1983–84. Using a stratified random Sample of institutions, these surveys attempt to provide the profession with statistical information useful for assessing trends and planning for change. 1 The 1984–85 survey sought information about three topics: faculty salaries, institutional general education requirements in English, and the English major. The findings on salaries were published in the Fall 1987 ADE Bulletin (Huber, “English Salaries”). The results of the inquiries into general education requirements and the English major are presented here. http://tc.eserver.org/23346.html http://tc.eserver.org/23346.html Increasingly, graduate programs are reflecting new critical approaches and making provision for their students to acquire skills in areas outside of literature. A number of departments offer alternate tracks, especially at the Master's level, for students interested in high school and community college teaching, in English as a second language, in creative writing, and so on. There are currently about 150 Ph.D. programs in English in this country; and, while it would be a gross exaggeration to say that each is unique, the differences among them are remarkable. http://tc.eserver.org/23342.html http://tc.eserver.org/23342.html Lack of faculty consensus has combined with a multiplication of university programs to convince the public that universities serve secular needs and that their priorities should be established by the marketplace. This view threatens to disenfranchise the faculty. http://tc.eserver.org/23339.html http://tc.eserver.org/23339.html This decade is a very good time to be a writing teacher. Those of us who were foresighted or brash or lucky enough to have chosen this career five or ten years ago now find ourselves in the midst of a ferment of professional activity. http://tc.eserver.org/23328.html http://tc.eserver.org/23328.html The textbook one chooses for a technical writing course will contribute a definition of the subject, whether implicit or explicit, but the definition and scope of what is loosely called technical writing are by no means agreed http://tc.eserver.org/23313.html http://tc.eserver.org/23313.html We have heard a great deal of talk in recent years about the growth of business and technical writing courses in English departments. But very little, if any, factual information exists on how much enrollments have grown and whether they are expected to grow in the near future. Furthermore, no study has attempted to assess the impact these relatively new, rapidly expanding courses are having and will continue to have on English departments and their faculty members. http://tc.eserver.org/23314.html http://tc.eserver.org/23314.html We cause ourselves problems by not knowing what our counterparts in industry are doing. In my case, I taught the textbook in my first business and technical writing courses at Indiana University East, Richmond. http://tc.eserver.org/23007.html http://tc.eserver.org/23007.html The case for assessment of college writing programs no longer needs to be made. Although none of us would have chosen the words, we all have come to accept the truth of Roger Debreceny’s words: the 'free ride' for America’s colleges and universities is indeed over (1). All writing programs face difficulties in selecting the means for the most effective evaluations for their individual programs. Key concerns include how appropriately, practically, and cost effectively various assessment tools address this problem. http://tc.eserver.org/23006.html http://tc.eserver.org/23006.html Program directors could use data from protocols and interviews to identify 'natural sources of resistance', and 'translation and follow-up problems'. http://tc.eserver.org/22982.html http://tc.eserver.org/22982.html My preliminary studies have shown that students do indeed acquire basic communication strategies appropriate for their chosen field that help them to become acculturated in workplace contexts. In other words, they begin to genre their 'way through social interactions, choosing the correct form in response to each communicative situation [they] encounter,' which they do 'with varying degree of mastery'. The subject of my CCCC 2003 presentation is a series of events that occurred in the life of one of my longitudinal study participants. In the presentation, I related these events to the audience and then analyzed them using Rhetorical Genre Studies as a theoretical tool. http://tc.eserver.org/22765.html http://tc.eserver.org/22765.html A course objective that addresses communication simply states what you would like students to learn from or about communication in relation to scientific or technical knowledge in your course. We recommend placing this objective on the first page of your course syllabus, next to any other objectives you have listed for your course. If placed on your initial syllabus, students will see that communication is an important part of the course from the beginning. http://tc.eserver.org/22769.html http://tc.eserver.org/22769.html Peer review is an exercise in which students review each other's written work. Peer review is often connected to revision, a part of the writing process in which writers refine and make substantive changes to their written work. http://tc.eserver.org/22768.html http://tc.eserver.org/22768.html Revision refers to the process of reviewing one's work and making changes (either local or global) to improve the writing.  Most teachers of writing encourage students to revise their work by creating drafts and going through a process of review -- either by having teacher review drafts or having other students review drafts. http://tc.eserver.org/22771.html http://tc.eserver.org/22771.html These books provide helpful instruction on a number of communication topics such as memos, letters, proposals, reports, resume and cover letters, rhetorical principles, and research in writing. http://tc.eserver.org/22766.html http://tc.eserver.org/22766.html Including communication-intensive assignments does not need to radically alter your course. The best source for ideas is your own original assignments. We recommend taking traditional writing assignments and simply enhancing them to address other communication concerns. http://tc.eserver.org/22609.html http://tc.eserver.org/22609.html 'More technical writers. Better technical writers.' This is the mantra I have in mind while I write this column. http://tc.eserver.org/21823.html http://tc.eserver.org/21823.html The Modern Language Association recently outlined numerous changes in English Studies, citing the significant growth of jobs in technical and professional communication. Since 1997, thenumber of academic positions advertised in our field has increased by 76 percent. The reasons are simple: the job market for capable communicators has expanded (primarily due to technology), andmore and more students want a major or minor that provides the knowledge and skills necessary to meetthe increased demand. Many English departments, including our own (Virginia Tech and University of Nebraska at Omaha [UNO], are responding to students’ needs by hiring faculty to build programs inprofessional/technical communication.