#22835
The Grading System of the Real World
At the beginning of each semester, the instructor hands out a syllabus packet which often contains a course outline or schedule and an explanation of the grading policy. The work world has grading systems too, and you need to know about them in advance so you can prepare for Performance Reviews.
Perry, Lynellen D.S. ACM Crossroads (2001). Careers>Workplace>Assessment
#14331
Grammar Exercises: Fragments, Comma Splices, Agreement, Parallelism
Select the sentence that avoids errors in grammar (you may have to scroll to see all of the items), and then press the Click here ... button.
McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Interactive
#10717
Normal rules of English grammar are often violated in technical writing, sometimes with good reason. However, writers are often not aware of these violations. This guide identifies some of the rules that are most commonly violated.
Author's Guide (2001). Reference>Writing>Grammar
#21820
Graphics, Design and Technical Communication: Exploring Disciplinary Boundaries 
How much about graphics and visual design should the courses in our technical communication programs cover? This has become a programmatic issue because technical writing has become more graphically dependent. This is true in many arenas: when designing electronic or print documents suchas brochures, issues such as color theory, perspective, and proportionality come into play along with the rhetoric of the written word. The crossover between the visual and the linguistic is most evident in newmedia, especially in Web design.
LaGrandeur, Kevin. CPTSC Proceedings (2001). Design>Graphic Design>TC
#29049
Traditional models of usability assume that usability is a quality that can be designed into a particular artifact. Yet constructivist theory implies that usability cannot be located in a single artifact; rather, it must be conceived as a quality of the entire activity in which the artifact is used. This article describes a distributed approach to usability, based on activity theory and genre theory. It then illustrates the approach with a four-decade examination of a traffic accident location and analysis system (ALAS). Using the theoretical framework of genre ecologies, the article demonstrates how usability is distributed across the many official and unofficial (ad hoc) genres employed by ALAS users.
Spinuzzi, Clay. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2001). Articles>Documentation>Usability>History
#18548
The American Society of Indexers identifies criteria for measuring a great index. An index is not an inverted table of contents, nor is it a simple listing of where certain terms appear in a document. An index consists of a 'compiled list of topics covered in the work, prepared with the reader’s needs in mind.'
Brown, Fred. Allegro Time! (2001). Articles>Indexing>Assessment
#21103
Greymatter, RSS, and Syndication
Greymatter is an excellent web content management system. After you install it, you can begin to syndicate your content using XML. This article gives you an explicit step-by-step overview of how I created RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.92 files using Greymatter. It is assumed that you have some knowledge of HTML and XML, and that you have already installed Greymatter. Many examples and references are provided to help you along the way.
Rhodes, John S. WebWord (2001). Design>Content Management>XML>RSS
#21123
Ground Floor Perspective on the Usability Job Hunt
This is a guest written article by Berna Tural, a recent college graduate from Carleton University in Ottawa. She is looking for a job in the usability field. I asked her to tell me more about her experiences so that WebWord readers would understand what it is like to be on the ground floor in usability. Similarly, I wanted people to see the other side of the hunt.
Tural, Burna. WebWord (2001). Careers>Usability>Regional>Canada
#27449
Group Communication Specifications: A Comprehensive Study 
View-oriented group communication is an important and widely used building block for many distributed applications. Much current research has been dedicated to specifying the semantics and services of view-oriented Group Communication Systems (GCSs). However, the guarantees of different GCSs are formulated using varying terminologies and modeling techniques, and the specifications vary in their rigor. This makes it difficult to analyze and compare the different systems.
Chockler, Gregory V., Idit Keidar and Roman Vitenberg. MIT (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Groupware>Semantic
#14302
Group Project Peer Evaluation Form 
Use this form to evaluate the other members of the group. Write the name of each group member in one of the columns, then assign a score of 0 to 10 (0 being the lowest grade, 10 the highest) to each group member for each criterion. Then total the scores for each member. Because each group member has different strengths and weaknesses, the scores you assign will differ. On the back of this sheet, write down any comments you wish to make.
Markel, Mike. Bedford-St. Martin's (2001). Careers>Workplace>Workflow
#18444
A Guide for Website Developers About How to Accommodate Users with Low Education, Low Motivation
Users with low education are users who have obtained limited level of education. These educationally disadvantaged people acquired and applied complex reasoning, but the lack of basic reading comprehension and communications skills hinder their success in education and skilled occupations. Low level of education effectively equals to functional illiteracy. Even though there is a significant increase in Internet use for individuals with elementary education (129%) from 1998 to 2000, only 9.1% of those with elementary education versus 75.5% with Bachelor's Degree or more uses the Internet [2]. More than one out of five adult Americans are functionally illiterate, and their ranks are swelling by about 2.3 million persons each year. Nearly 40 percent of minority youth and 30 percent of semiskilled and unskilled workers are illiterate [1]. It is hence necessary to address website accessibility issues pertaining to this group of users.
Lim, Ser Nam. Universal Usability (2001). Design>Usability>Accessibility
#11875
Un Guide for Writing a Funding Proposal
This Proposal Guide has been created to provide both instructions on how to write a funding proposal and actual examples of a completed proposal. The Guide is designed as a tool for advanced graduate students and others to learn more about the actual proposal writing process. (This Guide is a companion to the Guide for Writing and Presenting Your Thesis or Dissertation.)
Levine, S. Joseph. Michigan State University (2001). Careers>Business Communication>Proposals
#13316
These notes are a miscellany of grammatical rules and explanations, comments on style, and suggestions on usage I put together for my classes. Nothing here is carved in stone, and many comments are matters of personal preference — feel free to psychoanalyze me by examining my particular hangups and bêtes noires. Anyone who can resist turning my own preferences into dogma is welcome to use this HTML edition.
Lynch, Jack. Rutgers University (2001). Reference>Style Guides
#10652
A web-based complete guide to English syntax and grammar.
Darling, Charles. Capital Community College (2001). Reference>Style Guides>Grammar
#19898
Health and Safety Information for Specialized Vocational Audiences
Using examples from commercial fishing and farming, this article shows how models of health beliefs and risk communication can inform the creation of health and safety materials and campaigns for specialized vocational audiences. These models state that risk communication efforts must balance strong statements of risk with equally strong statements of ways to reduce or avoid risk if they are to motivate change. Audience research can help communicators address attitudes that impair workers’ perceptions of risk, as well as workplace practices, norms, and conditions that the limit the methods that can be used to reduce risk.
Freeman, Krisandra S. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Writing>Biomedical>Risk Communication
#13126
Health and Safety Information for Specialized Vocational Audiences
Using examples from commercial fishing and farming, this article shows how models of health beliefs and risk communication can inform the creation of health and safety materials and campaigns for specialized vocational audiences. These models state that risk communication efforts must balance strong statements of risk with equally strong statements of ways to reduce or avoid risk if they are to motivate change. Audience research can help communicators address attitudes that impair workers’ perceptions of risk, as well as workplace practices, norms, and conditions that the limit the methods that can be used to reduce risk.
Freeman, Krisandra S. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>Communication>Scientific Communication>Risk Communication
#23010
Most developers don't think about individuals who are deaf when they think of Web accessibility. For too many developers, Web accessibility consists of adhering to a few guidelines that ensure accessibility to screen readers for the blind. On one level, this is understandable. People who are blind will have the most trouble, since the Web is a visual medium...or is it?
WebAIM (2001). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Audio
#23709
This is a site that links you to Web sites useful for finding venues and writing for publication.
Murdick, William. Comcast (2001). Resources>Directories>Publishing>Writing
#19950
As Help Authors, we often treat online help as a 'thing,' not an activity. We’ve favored the noun over the verb! This preference is natural for writers, who enjoy producing books. If we hope to survive on a dynamic development team, we must train ourselves away from writing books, toward helping people. This shift means examining the bigger picture and adopting different ways of working.
Sisler, Paul and Catherine M. Titta. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Documentation>Help>Online
#15140
Offers tips on eliminating hype from editorial copy.
Eyman, Carol L. Intercom (2001). Articles>Editing
#14213
Help! It's Not Just a Beatles Movie
Windows Help has steadily improved to the point where the Windows XP Help and Support Center provides nearly exhaustive answers to your queries. Here’s how the Help and Support Center works.
Crawford, Sharon. Microsoft (2001). Articles>Documentation>Help
#21021
Helping Users Find Physical Locations
When we asked users to find a nearby store, office, dealership, or other outlet based on information provided at a parent company's website, users succeeded only 63% of the time. On average, the 10 sites we studied complied with less than half of our 21 usability guidelines for locator design.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability
#22465
Heuristic Evaluation - a Step By Step Guide
Evaluation and testing is an important part of your website development process. Usability tests gather data about the usability of your site by a group of users performing specific tasks.
Danino, Nicky. SitePoint (2001). Articles>Usability>Methods>Assessment
#29438
Hockey and the Art of Technical Communication
If STC would fund an appropriately intensive study of the NHL, I have no doubt we could inspire dramatic changes in technical communication; the contrasts between the NFL and NHL approaches have profound consequences for our work.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2001). Articles>TC
#13194
This paper explains what e-commerce is and the two different types of e-commerce. The advantages of e-commerce are covered along with the steps needed to setup e-commerce. The different forms of advertising over the internet is covered next. How internet security works is covered in detail including the use of digital certificates and SSL (secure sockets layer). The processing of payments over the internet is the last subject covered including the different ways to pay and how credit card transactions are processed.
Wokosin, Linda. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>Information Design