Course Description
WRD 204 is designed to familiarize you with the fundamentals of technical writing and provide you with structured practice creating technical and workplace documents. The course highlights the action-oriented goals that readers bring to technical and workplace documents, and teaches you strategies to write for these audiences and situations. We will explore key concepts such as analyzing audience and purpose, organizing information, designing documents and visuals, usability, and writing clear and precise prose. The assignments in WRD 204 will ultimately prepare you to write a range of text types common in the technical professions, including professional correspondence, instructions, digital documentation, proposals, and reports.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- Assess rhetorical situations typical in the technical professions and write documents that respond appropriately to these situations.
- Write emails, memos, proposals, reports, and instructions that align with conventional best practices.
- Use visual design elements—including headings, lists, tables, and figures—to create navigable and usable workplace documents.
- Write with the plain style, brevity, and frontloaded organization characteristic of professional documents.
- Use writing technologies in ways appropriate to professional and workplace contexts (e.g., collaborative writing tools, digital authoring tools, advanced word-processing features).
- Demonstrate social habits that are valued in technical workplaces, including the ability to work on writing teams and to give and accept critique on workplace writing.
Readings
Canavor, N. (2018). “Building relationships with everyday messages,” in Business writing today (3nd ed.) (pp. 155–180). Los Angeles: Sage.
Goodman, A. et al. (Johnson-Sheehan, R. (2011). Working in teams. In Technical communication strategies for today (5th ed.) (pp. 34-57). Boston: Longman.
Krug, S. (2014). “Usability testing on 10 cents a day,” (chapter 9) in Don’t make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web and mobile usability. New Riders. Available: http://proquestcombo.safaribooksonline.com.ezproxy.depaul.edu/book/web-design-and-development/9780133597271/making-sure-you-got-them-right/ch09_xhtml?uicode=depaul
Markel, M. & Selber, S.A. (2017). “Organizing your information,” in Technical communication (12th ed.) (pp. 146–168). Boston: Bedford.
Markel, M. & Selber, S.A. (2017). “Emphasizing important information,” in Technical communication (12th ed.) (pp. 192–214). Boston: Bedford.
Tebeaux, E. & Dragga, S. (2017). The essentials of technical communication (4th ed.). New York: Oxford UP.
Projects
- Fundamentals of Writing in the Technical Professions: deliverable is a packet of typical workplace-writing documents, including a short report written in memo format, a set of instructions, and two revised professional emails
- Team Writing & Professional Reports: deliverables are a collaboratively written team work plan, an individually written user research report, a collaboratively written usability report, and an individually written team performance review
- Digital Technical Documentation: deliverables are a project proposal, a piece of digital technical documentation—such as an instructional video for users or a Jupyter notebook for code documentation—and a completion report