Current Status Of Business And Technical Writing Courses In English Departments

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.

Rivers, William E. ADE Bulletin (1985). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Technical Writing

Developing Industrial Cases For Technical Writing on Campus  

At the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the World's Engineering Congress met and included special section, 'Division E, Engineering Education.' This division was the seed for The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and one paper delivered in the section was 'Training of Students in Technical Literary Work,' evidencing early concern about engineers' education in technical writing. But concern alone did not solve the problem. Two decades later Edward D. Sabine, a terminal engineer, complained that most college graduated engineers could not even write a decent letter. And in the same year F. W. Springer, a professor of electrical engineering, spoke of the need for teaching 'engineering-English.' Fifty years ago Hale Sutherland, a professor of Civil Engineering, described how Case School of Applied Science had instituted a two-course, technical writing requirement to overcome 'the engineer's ancient weakness, his inability to speak and write effectively.' One approach to solving this problem has been cooperation. Seventy years ago C. W. Park wrote an article about the cooperative program at the University of Cincinnati, in which members of the Engineering and English Departments worked together to promote better writing; obviously the idea of teaming up is hardly new. Thirty years ago The Journal of Engineering Education published another description of a cooperative effort and just five years ago devoted an entire issue to technical writing. The need for teaching engineers to write and the difficulties in accomplishing the objective even cooperatively have been recognized for almost a century; we are still grappling with the problem.

Mair, David and John Radovich. JAC (1985). Articles>Education>Writing>Technical Writing

Hot Cogntion: Emotions and Writing Behavior  

Although contemporary psychologists generally acknowledge the significance of affect in human experience, few attempts have been made to understand its role in cognitive processes. Important books on cognition barely mention the subject of emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Unlike the strictly cognitive and physiological psycholoúgists, social psychologists are deeply concerned with affect. These psychologists contend that to consider people dispassionate, information processing systems is a poor if not badly inaccurate model of the human being. A positivistic psychology has been too “cold' to carry the entire motivational burden. What is needed is some way to heat up cognition—a theory that unites the cognitively blind but arousing system of affect with the subtle cognitive apparatus. In an otherwise cold-blooded tradition of cognitive science and flow chart intelligence, the idea of hot cognition became a major humanizing counterstatement during the mid 1960s and early 1970s.

Brand, Alice G. JAC (1985). Articles>Rhetoric>Emotions>Cognitive Psychology

Special Topics of Argument in Engineering Reports  

As a discussion of writing-across-the-curriculum programs in universities, his essay focuses on disciplinary discourse within academic settings. Nonacademic discourse also occurs with particular conventions, purposes and institutions; such discourse can be subjected to similar study.

Miller, Carolyn R. and Jack Selzer. North Carolina State University (1985). Articles>Writing>Reports>Engineering

Teaching Critical Thinking in The Technical Writing Class  

It is probable that the Technical Writing course provides for upperclassmen the most intensive and extensive experience with written English that they will have during their undergraduate education. Traditionally, the course has bridged the world of work and the world of school. We instructors try to prepare our students for on-the-job professional writing, and it would seem that this objective is met through the special goals of the course: writing to particular audiences, using precise language, mastering formats, and using graphics. Such observable skills are valuable: indeed, Green and Nolan indicate, in their piece in the recent 'Education' issue of Technical Communication, that the fundamental requirements of an entering technical communicator's job are writing, editing, and researching. Yet, what are we to make of the prediction that Paul V. Anderson cites in that very same issue, that the advent of more highly sophisticated computer software will eliminate up to 75 percent of the present jobs in technical communication, rendering entire categories of jobs obsolete? We must teach, then, in addition to these surface writing abilities the deep structure reasoning skills that nourish them, those skills that are highly esteemed by business, industry, and academia.

Meyers, G. Douglas. JAC (1985). Articles>Education>Writing>Technical Writing

Teaching Punctuation to Advanced Writers  

Most discussions of punctuation are confined to the mechanics sections of handbooks and rhetorics and thus tend to be of value only to basic and freshman writers. Occasionally, some texts allude to uses of punctuation that would be of interest to advanced writers, such as using punctuation to create acceptable sentence fragments or comma splices, but rarely do these texts explain these usages in much detail or provide many good examples of them. I wish to focus in this paper on the uses of punctuation that advanced writers need to be taught. Specifically, I will discuss how we can teach advanced writers to use punctuation to create rhetorical effects.

Meyer, Charles F. JAC (1985). Articles>Education>Writing