Course Overview
ENGL 202C, Technical Communication, serves students who are studying and preparing for careers in the sciences and applied sciences, including engineering. This advanced course in writing familiarizes students with the discourse practices prized in their disciplinary and institutional communities and helps them to manage those practices effectively in their own written work. In this way, the course teaches those writing strategies and tactics that scientists, engineers, and others will need in order to write successfully on the job.
Course Approach
So how will this work? Though you will never meet with your instructor and classmates in a physical classroom, ENGL 202C is still a cohort-based course and not an independent study.
This class is paced, which means that there is an established start and end date, and that you will have weekly deadlines to meet throughout the term. In each week of the course, you will be asked to participate in two primary activities: 1) a class discussion about a core aspect of the course and 2) a writing workshop related to a formal course project. Like taking a course on campus, it will be important to keep up with the course work, as you will be required to participate in class discussions and workshops that have specific time frames and deadlines.
Course Objectives
Students in this course will learn how to:
· Discover and understand the discourse features that distinguish their disciplinary and institutional communities from others.
· Discover and specify the purpose(s) of their writing.
· Develop a range of writing processes appropriate to various writing tasks.
· Identify their readers and describe the characteristics of their readers in a way that forms a sound basis for deciding how to write to them.
· Invent the contents of their communications through research and reflection.
· Arrange material to raise and satisfy readers' expectations, using both conventional and rhetorical patterns of organization.
· Reveal the organization of their communications by using forecasting and transitional statements, headings, and effective page and document design.
· Observe appropriate generic conventions and formats for technical documents.
· Design and use tables, graphs, illustrations, and other visuals.
· Compose effective sentences.
· Evaluate their documents to be sure that the documents fulfill their purpose and to ensure that they can be revised if necessary.
· Collaborate effectively with their peers in a community of writers who provide feedback on each others' work and occasionally write together.
· Write several specific kinds of documents that recur in technical, scientific, and other communities.
· Employ computer technologies effectively in the solution of communication problems.
· Communicate in an ethically responsible manner.
Required Textbook
The following electronic textbook is required:
· Technical Communication by Mike Markel and Stuart A. Selber. Bedford/St. Martin's,
2021. Thirteenth edition. E-book, standard version.
You can purchase access to this e-book directly at the publisher's website. B
(https://store.macmillanlearning.com/us/product/Technical-Communication/p/1319245005)
Note: For this class, we will be using the e-book version of Technical Communication. You'll be able to read the full book online once you purchase access to it. The e-book version is considerably cheaper than the print version, and it is accessible wherever you can access the web.
Required Software
This course requires you to use Microsoft Word for your formal assignments. Unless otherwise specified, files should be submitted using either the .doc or .docx file types. (In some cases, your instructor may ask you to submit an assignment as a .pdf file to preserve your intended formatting. Your instructor will advise you when to do so.)
If you do not have Microsoft Word, you should know that Penn State makes the full Microsoft Office suite, which includes Word, available to Penn State students for free.
To acquire this free version of Microsoft Office, simply login to Office365 B (https://office365.psu.edu) using your Penn State credentials.
Course Requirements and Grading
You will complete five projects for this course, participate in weekly class discussions, and complete weekly writing workshops.
Assignment Grade Value
Project 1 10%
Project 2 15%
Project 3 15%
Project 4 20%
Project 5 20%
Class Discussions 10%
Writing Workshops 10%
Class Discussions and Writing Workshops
In this class, you will participate in class discussions and writing workshops, which are where you will interact with your classmates and work together to learn and grow as technical communicators.
Each discussion and workshop is asynchronous, which means you'll never have to be available at a specific time or place to participate. Instead, you'll be given deadlines by which you'll be expected to complete various parts of each discussion or workshop.
Note: Only completing part of a class discussion or writing workshop is considered unsatisfactory. You will not receive credit (no points) for a discussion or workshop unless you complete all of its work on time.
Projects
This course will hold you to the professional standards that prevail in your field. Each of your formal writing projects is expected to look professional and polished. At work, even a single error in spelling, grammar, or proofreading can jeopardize the effectiveness of some communications (depending on the rhetorical situation). Whether it is a resume, memo, or report, your communication should exhibit complete and appropriate format. Grading will reflect the seriousness with which these matters are frequently viewed in the working world. You must submit all major projects to pass the course.
There are five major projects:
Project 1: Basic Rhetorical Analysis
Technical communication is meant to be used and not just read. Good technical communication communicates information to an audience who will act on that information in a variety of ways: in making hiring decisions, in following technical procedures, in developing research plans, and more. In this project, you will evaluate the usability of a piece of technical communication; that is, you will analyze whether the document effectively communicates the necessary information to its audience and where it fails to do so. In this way, the project will introduce you to basic elements of technical communication.
Final Length: Approximately 1000 words.
Project 2: Internet Resource Guide
Through this project, you will become familiar with online communication resources specific to your field of study, including research tools, professional societies, and other Internet sites that members of your field should find useful. You will present and describe those resources to other members of your field in a technical guide. You will need to make decisions about organization, format, and style as a means of creating a usable document for readers. And you will need to learn to write effective abstracts.
Final Length: Front matter plus five abstracts (one or two paragraphs each).
Project 3: Job Application Package
The process of applying for a job is extremely important for technical communicators. As a job applicant, you have a vested interest in communicating your suitability for a position with the specific audience making employment decisions. This project will ask you to create resumes and cover letters attuned to the rhetorical situations of two actual job offerings in your field. You will also discuss your writing and communication decisions in a reflective memo.
Final Length: two resumes, two cover letters, and a roughly 1000-word cover memo.
Project 4: Technical Description
Engineers and scientists are often required to describe a technical object, concept, or process to someone who has little knowledge or experience with the subject at hand. For example, an engineering firm might write a proposal to bid on a contract to develop a helicopter for the Defense Department; one section of the proposal would be a detailed description of the product the company proposes to develop. Technical descriptions are used before products and processes are developed (as part of proposals and planning documents), during development (in progress reports, for instance), and afterwards (as part of marketing and promotional literature and technical support documents). You will write a technical description for an object, concept, or process in your field.
Final Length: Approximately 1000 words.
Project 5: Instruction Set
Instruction sets are common technical documents in many disciplines and occupations. Employees read instructions to learn how to assemble a product or complete a procedure. Supervisors write out company policies that oftentimes serve as instruction sets. Customers read instructions for using a product. You will develop a set of instructions that shows users how to perform a specific task.
Final Length: approximately 1000 words.
Grades
The grades of A, B, C, D, and F indicate qualities of academic performance. When grading each of your projects, your instructor will ask one overriding question: Does this document do its job successfully? That is, would your communication have the intended effect on the reader you are addressing. You instructor will, of course, recognize the difference between a competent performance (a “C”) and good and excellent performances (“B” and “A”). A competent performance is one that stands a chance of succeeding; an excellent performance is one that seems assured not only of success but also of winning praise.
A = Superior. The work is of near professional quality. The document meets or exceeds all the objectives of the assignment. The content is mature, thorough, and well-suited for the audience; the style is clear, accurate, and forceful; the information is well-organized and designed so that it is accessible and attractive; the mechanics and grammar are correct.
B = Good. The document meets the objectives of the assignment, but it needs improvement in style, or it contains easily correctable errors in grammar, format, or content, or its content is superficial.
C = Competent. The document needs significant improvement in concept, details, development, organization, grammar, or format. It may be formally correct but superficial in content.
D = Marginally acceptable. The document meets some of the objectives but ignores others; the content is inadequately developed; or it contains numerous or major errors.
F = Unacceptable. The document does not have enough information, does something other than the assignment required, or it contains major or excessive errors.
Final Grading Scale
At the end of the term, the following scale will be used to determine final course grades:
Letter Grade Point Range
A 94-100
A- 90-93.99
B+ 87-89.99
B 84-86.99
B- 80-83.99
C+ 77-79.99
C 70-76.99
D 60-69.99
F 0-59.99
Deadlines
Unless otherwise specified, the work you do in this class must be submitted by 11:59pm Eastern Time U.S. on the day that it is due.