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Re: revising a tw course

Subject: Re: revising a tw course
From: Martha J Davidson <editrix -at- nemasys -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 15:12:18 -0800


At 04:25 PM 12/12/2003 -0500, Joe Pellegrino asked:

It's the end of another semester teaching tech writing, and I'm itching to revise my syllabus.
<...>
1. a machine-readable resume
2. a cover letter
3. a personal web site
4. a group web site
5. a tri-fold brochure
<...>
Is there another assignment I should include?

From my perspective, your class projects would not adequately prepare a student for many on-the-job technical writing assignments. I see nothing where students must learn about a technical subject or product and write a conceptual description of the underlying technology and accompanying procedural instructions for using at least one aspect of the product.

I suggest you also include discussion of how to organize a technical manual, be it a tutorial, a user guide, a reference guide, or an online help system. None of these need be all that elaborate, but preparing students to understand the basic structure of each type of document and how to write one would be excellent preparation for the types of TW jobs I've had for the past umpteen years.

Two more ideas: have students study examples of existing documents or help systems and critique them to discover what works and what doesn't work; have students take on small open-source projects as examples of real-world software that needs to be documented.

martha
--
Martha Jane {Kolman | Davidson}
Dances With Words
editrix -at- nemasys -dot- com

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
--Albert Einstein



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