Syllabus
Texas State Technical College Harlingen
ENGLISH 2311--Technical and Business Writing
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Principles, techniques, and skills needed for college-level scientific, technical, or business writing. Standard technical documents and the internal report are emphasized.
COURSE PREREQUISITES:
A grade of “C” or higher in English 1301.
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Instructor: J. Santoy |
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Office: Science & Technology W 317 |
Office Phone #: 364-4837 |
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Office Hours: TBA |
**Contact instructor via email before the first day of class.** |
REQUIRED TEXTBOOK:
McMurrey, David A.Online Technical Writing which can be accessed online: http://www.io.com/~hcexres/textbook/
Other readings will be available online.
Optional: dictionary, thesaurus, MLA Handbook, grammar handbook
COURSE WEBSITE:
You will be required to access http://english.harlingen.tstc.edu/techwriting. I will send you a username and password before the first week of class.
OTHER
- Flash/thumb drive
- Install Audacity and Lame on computer to produce audio files
GRADING POLICY:
Grading Criteria
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Writing |
50% |
| Participation | 25% |
| Exam/Portfolio | 25% |
Plagiarized or copied work will receive a "0" (F) and may result in expulsion from or failing grade in course.
Grading Scale
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90-100 |
A--Excellent |
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80-89 |
B--Good |
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70-79 |
C--Average |
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60-69 |
D--Passing |
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0-59 |
F--Failing |
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The lowest possible passing grade for this course is a 60. |
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Overview
The aim of this course is to prepare you for writing and designing documents in technical and professional discourse communities. You will produce a number of technical genres—correspondence, reports, a proposal, and instructions—for various technical and lay audiences. Some of these assignments are taken from cases based on real-world situations and present you with a set of rhetorical considerations and constraints. Other assignments ask you to help identify actual situations to which you will respond. In both cases we will approach technical writing rhetorically, discussing such topics as organizational conventions, visual design, and style in the context of specific rhetorical situations.
Class will usually take place in a discussion or workshop format in which you will at different times discuss assigned readings, complete writing and other exercises, critique sample documents, critique peers’ documents. Because technical writing in the workplace is often collaborative, you will work on one team activity.
Objectives
• Understand some of the features and processes of technical and professional discourse communities.
• Specify and adapt to the constraints of specific rhetorical situations, including audiences, purposes, and uses.
• Develop strategies for accommodating multiple audiences in one document and for accommodating both technical and lay audiences.
• Learn strategies for making documents accessible and user-centered. These include setting the context and creating pathways through a document.
• Learn to strategically orchestrate elements of document design, including type, spacing, and color.
• Design and integrate tables and figures in a user-centered way.
• Develop individual and collaborative writing processes appropriate for technical documents.
• Learn superstructures and conventions for common technical documents such as correspondence, reports, proposals, and instructions.
• Refine writing style for more strategic clarity, concision, coherence, cohesion, and emphasis.
• Critique and revise your own documents to insure that they fulfill their purposes.
• Form a community of writers with your peers in which you provide one another with extensive written and oral feedback
COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITIES
Your active participation in the class is expected. After a prewriting assignment designed to stimulate your thinking about a topic, you will be asked to present their best insights to the full class for further discussion.
You may be asked to exchange early drafts of your paper with others. You will read the other papers and respond with comments about anything you don’t understand or would like the writer to elaborate more fully about. (This activity not only helps students to discover possibilities for further development, it also reinforces the crucial habit of formulating questions while reading and writing.)
ASSESSMENT PROCEDURES
GRADING POLICY:
Daily assignments and first drafts will ask you to explore different ways to produce writing on paper. This writing will be graded “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory” with the sole criterion being whether or not you have completed the assignment on time and given it serious attention and effort. Three or more unsatisfactory grades may lower your course grade by a letter. From this pre-writing you will develop six essays. I will return each paper with reactions to guide your revising it for a second submission. At the end of the semester you will give me copies of the “final,” polished revisions of your essays, along with the earlier drafts and my responses to each essay. Your papers must be typed, double-spaced, and formatted according to MLA guidelines.
- There will be no tests in this class. Rather, you will be “tested” through your assignments, the rhetorical choices paper that accompanies each assignment, and on your work in in-class activities.
- Your grades on activities will be weighted to count toward 25% of your final grade.
- Your grade on your portfolio will be weighted to count toward 25% of your final grade.
- Your grades on assignments will count toward 50% of your final grade. Each assignment is equally weighted.
SUMMARY OF ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY:
This system of grading rewards you for timely, serious effort on daily assignments and in workshops. It gives extra weight to your highest level of achievement near the end of the semester. It does not penalize you for mistakes and experiments that go wrong, if you learn from the mistakes how to produce good finished work. In fact, this system assumes that finished, effective communication is often the product of a very messy process in creation, in which you take risks, follow false trails, make lots of mistakes, go back and start over again. This system encourages you to engage in the recursive and sometimes disordered process of becoming a productive and fluent writer. Early in the semester we will arrive at an understanding of the standards by which our writing is judged, both within the community of our class and within the larger public audience of readers. The course assumes that your final essays will also observe the conventions of grammar, spelling, and punctuation of “standard written English.” If you have trouble with these conventions, you will be able to get help from me and your classmates.
ASSIGNMENTS:
- You will have the opportunity to revise every assignment in this class except the presentation. I will return your assignments to you, and revisions will be due as part of your portfolio during the last unit of class.
- I will accept late assignments but if you turn in an assignment late (regardless if the assignment is two hours or two weeks late), you forfeit your opportunity to receive comments in a timely manner and revise the assignment for a better grade.
- Every assignment you do for this class will be accompanied by a paper that details the rhetorical choices you made to complete the assignment; in other words, this paper will provide a rationale for how you completed the assignment and will give me insight into your mastery of the concepts associated with each assignment. This paper should provide evidence that you have completed the assigned reading and thought critically about your assignment. See each individual assignment sheet for more details on how to complete this portion of the assignment.
- All assignments are due by midnight central standard time on the date specified in the class calendar and on the assignment sheet. Please send your assignments to me as specified in each assignment sheet.
- I do not have any specific requirements regarding assignment formatting because the way you format your assignments will be part of your grade.
- I expect all assignments to be submitted without spelling and grammar errors. If you have an excessive number of errors in your assignment, I will return it to you for revision without grading it and you must turn in your revised assignment to receive a grade. In this case, you will not have the opportunity to revise your paper for a third time.
- The evaluation criteria for each assignment will be included on each assignment sheet. Meeting the criteria of each assignment will merit a C for your work. Mastering the criteria of each assignment will merit an A for your work. Should you fall short of meeting the criteria for the assignments, you will receive an F for your work.
- Participation/Discussion and Group Work: Shorter writing samples will reinforce the concepts we will cover in this course. These assignments will be in response to a variety of writing prompts; each will build on the other to help you with your longer writing assingments.You will be asked to respond to two discussion questions posted by the instructor each week. Your response to the instructors question should be at least 1-2 well developed paragraphs in length. In addition, you must respond to at least two of your classmate’s postings, and these should be at least 2-3 well-developed sentences in length. So you should have a total of at least four postings to the discussion forum per week. This work counts toward your participation grade, which constitutes 250 points or 25% of the course credit. The discussion are designed to allow you to engage with the readings, and connect with the class community, I think you will find this the most enjoyable aspect of the course.
ATTENDANCE POLICY:
Writing never occurs in a vacuum but within the context of audience, and the immediate audience for writing in this course is ourselves. The course requires a commitment to the community, and you can’t participate in a community of writers unless you are here. Attendance in class is required which translates into logging into the course at least three times per week.
Plagiarism Statement: "The attempt of any student to present as his or her own work that which he or she has not produced is regarded by the faculty and administration as a serious offense. Students are considered to have cheated if they copy the work of another during an examination or turn in a paper or an assignment written, in whole or in part, by someone else. Students are guilty of plagiarism, intentional or not, if they copy material from books, magazines, or other sources or if they paraphrase ideas from such sources without acknowledging them. Students guilty of, or assisting others in, either cheating or plagiarism on an assignment, quiz, or examination may receive a grade of F for the course involved."
