Students write a report about the technical communication skills they will need as professionals. Students interview professionals in their field and research the websites of potential employers, writing a report that summarizes and synthesizes information about technical communication skills in the student’s field of study.
Students create a job portfolio. The purpose of this unit is to get students to think rhetorically, analyzing their audience and purpose and creating documents that meet those needs. Deliverables include the following:
What am I going to write as an engineer? Well, you'll write quite a number of documents. Here is a sample of what you could expect to write or encounter as an engineer.
Standards and Codes - A Standard is a "best practice" and an established convention for testing or using component or process. A Code is a law. There are many different standards for different functions and processes, some of which overlap, duplicate, or conflict with each other.
Patents - A Patent is a property right granted to an inventor by the country in which they live/work. For a limited commercial and copyright protection, the claims of a patent are made available to the public to show a novel idea which can be built upon by others.
Academic/Scholarly Articles - An Academic Article is a work that usually fits the following criteria: peer-reviewed by scholars in that field, published in academic journals, written by an someone in a field with appropriate credentials, consults previously published academic literature, and uses vocabulary relevant and specific to that field.
Trade Literature (Technical Reports) - In some respects this is similar to academic/scholarly literature, but it is rarely published in journals or treated as such. Often trade literature and technical reports advertise products or services, and are published in trade magazines (rags).
Lab Reports - These documents are similar to Technical Reports, but they are often of internal company or laboratory use only. Like other types of documents, these often follow the IMRAD format.
