The theory and practice of technical writing. Offered yearly. Prerequisites: ENG 111 (and ENG 201 for English majors and minors).

English 439 is a Writing Flag course in the WSU University Studies Program. The program is designed to provide a broad base of skills and knowledge to equip students for informed, responsible citizenship in a changing world. The purpose of the Writing Flag requirement is to reinforce the outcomes specified for the basic skills area of writing. These courses are intended to provide contexts, opportunities, and feedback for students writing with discipline-specific texts, tools, and strategies. These courses should emphasize writing as essential to academic learning and intellectual development.

As a Writing Flag course, English 439, Technical Writing, offers section enrollment that allows for clear guidance, criteria, and feedback for the writing assignments; a significant amount of writing distributed throughout the semester; writing assignments that comprise a significant portion of the students’ final course grade; and opportunities for students to incorporate readers’ critiques of their writing.

1. practice the processes and procedures for creating and completing successful writing in their fields;
2. understand the main features and uses of writing in their fields;
3. adapt their writing to the general expectations of readers in their fields;
4. make use of the technologies commonly used for research and writing in their fields; and
5. learn the conventions of evidence, format, usage, and documentation in their fields.

1. Students will practice the processes and procedures for creating and completing successful writing in their fields.

On a daily basis, students can be expected to make use the processes and procedures for creating and completing successful technical documents. Introductory assignments provide opportunities for students to assess technical documents and situations, in the process honing their abilities to understand the dynamics of technical writing. A series of increasingly complex writing projects requires students to work with contemporary office software packages, formulate action plans, collaborate with colleagues, and produce successful technical documents. Supporting classroom activities will engage students, on a daily basis, in a variety of activities, both written and oral, to support the development of technical writing abilities: for example, review sessions will engage students in the careful critique of colleagues’ work, and online exercises will provide opportunities for students to experiment with visual rhetoric and document design.

2. Students will understand the main features and uses of writing in their fields.

Technical writing communicates and interprets specialized information for readers' needs. It includes literature reviews, project proposals, progress reports, newsletters, product descriptions, instructional materials, funding requests, analytical reports, and business correspondence. Reader oriented and efficient, technical documents must be precise, concise, and unambiguous. Although some technical documents are composed individually, others are produced by project teams working in document cycles to meet strict deadlines. Some are written for the printed page, others for the computer screen. And some are designed as aids for oral presentations, others as self-sufficient documents. Furthermore, most technical documents are subject to complex cultural, legal, and ethical considerations that have significant personal and organizational consequences. Finally, they must incorporate elements of visual rhetoric and document design that enhance readability and usability. Students will study—and be expected to demonstrate their accomplishment with—these main features and uses of writing in the field of technical communications.

3. Students will adapt their writing to the general expectations of readers in their fields.

Technical writing necessitates the delivery of technical information to readers in a manner that is adapted to their needs, level of understanding, and background. Technical writers thus strive to accommodate the needs of their readers when structuring their work, when adapting their tone, and when evaluating their content. Critical reading assignments will include the study of different technical writers’ approaches to adapting structure, tone, and content to an audience. In the process of writing in different genres and for different audiences, students will practice these strategies for adapting their writing to varying situations. In fact, the ability to adapt work to an audience is one of the cornerstones of this course: students are challenged to write about highly technical subjects but in a way that a beginner—a nonspecialist—could understand. This ability to "translate" technical information to nonspecialists is a key skill for any technical communicator. In addition to the notion of "translation," students will learn, and practice writing in, common technical genres, such as those mentioned in (b) above.

4. Students will make use of the technologies commonly used for research and writing in their fields.

Technical writing demands highly developed knowledge, and much of the work of this course will demand rigorous library and field research. The ability to find, locate, evaluate, and use information relevant to the subject matter is crucial to technical writing projects. Students will use WebPALS (including the online catalog, ERIC, EAI, etc.) and other current databases (such as Lexis–Nexis, FirstSearch, J-Stor, Project MUSE, and Encyclopedia Britannica) for their research writing. To a lesser extent, students will practice strategies for field research—interviews, direct observations, surveys, document review—and incorporate their material into writing for variety of audiences.

Technical writing is, also, an inherently technological field. Technical writers typically use computers to discuss, collaborate, research, design, present, revise, and publish, and so English 439 provides an introduction to the technologies commonly used for writing in the field. Students can expect to work with contemporary software applications for workplace writing. They will further use these technologies to improve the accuracy, clarity, coherence, and appropriateness of their writing, as well as to prepare a professional portfolio of their technical writing work.

5. Students will learn the conventions of evidence, format, usage, and documentation in their fields.

Certain features are germane to nearly every technical writing situation: concrete language, varied sentencing, cohesive paragraphs, correct English, and appropriate vocabulary. Through a series of assignments, in-class exercises, and handbook review, students will be taught and encouraged to use these features of formal technical writing style. Projects will be held to an exacting standard of correctness. Through in-class and other exercises and activities, students will practice proofreading and editing strategies for finding and correcting errors. Finally, some of the work for the course will demand accurate, purposeful use of MLA documentation format, though given the variety of rhetorical situations students encounter in the course, other systems and strategies for documenting source material will necessarily be used as well.

The theory and practice of technical writing. Offered yearly. Prerequisites: ENG 111 (and ENG 201 for English majors and minors).

English 439 is a Writing Flag course in the WSU University Studies Program. The program is designed to provide a broad base of skills and knowledge to equip students for informed, responsible citizenship in a changing world. The purpose of the Writing Flag requirement is to reinforce the outcomes specified for the basic skills area of writing. These courses are intended to provide contexts, opportunities, and feedback for students writing with discipline-specific texts, tools, and strategies. These courses should emphasize writing as essential to academic learning and intellectual development.

As a Writing Flag course, English 439, Technical Writing offers section enrollment that allows for clear guidance, criteria, and feedback for the writing assignments; a significant amount of writing distributed throughout the semester; writing assignments that comprise a significant portion of the students’ final course grade; and opportunities for students to incorporate readers’ critiques of their writing.

1. practice the processes and procedures for creating and completing successful writing in their fields;
2. understand the main features and uses of writing in their fields;
3. adapt their writing to the general expectations of readers in their fields;
4. make use of the technologies commonly used for research and writing in their fields; and
5. learn the conventions of evidence, format, usage, and documentation in their fields.

Although nearly every equipment and learning activity promotes each of these five outcomes, sessions with special emphasis on one or more of the five outcomes are identified by letter in the tentative course meeting schedule.

English 439/539, Technical Writing, is a course in the theory and practice of writing technical documents. Here, students will use computers to discuss, collaborate, research, design, present, revise, and publish. This will be a workshop class, in which the aim is to fulfill high expectations by spending class time on task-through collaborative learning, prompt feedback, and close student-faculty contact.

Technical writing communicates and interprets specialized information for readers' needs. It includes literature reviews, project proposals, progress reports, newsletters, product descriptions, instructional materials, funding requests, analytical reports, and business correspondence. Reader oriented and efficient, technical documents must be precise, concise, and unambiguous. Furthermore, they must incorporate elements of visual rhetoric and document design that enhance readability and usability.

Although some technical documents are composed individually, others are produced by project teams working in document cycles to meet strict deadlines. Some are written for the printed page, others for the computer screen. And some are designed as aids for oral presentations, others as self-sufficient documents. Finally, most technical documents are subject to complex cultural, legal, and ethical considerations that have significant personal and organizational consequences.

In English 439, students can expect to produce carefully-designed technical documents; to collaborate on project and review teams; to work with contemporary software applications for workplace writing; to improve the accuracy, clarity, coherence, and appropriateness of their writing; and to prepare a professional portfolio of technical writing documents.