English 2140: Introduction to Technical Communication: Course Overview

English 2140: Introduction to Technical Communication is a course designed for those students who will be writing in the technical professions and students who may have careers where skills from Technical Communication may be needed. In this course, you will learn about writing clear, concise content, creating visually-appealing design geared toward specific users, and understand more about usability and user experience. In this course, we will also explore what it means to be a technical communicator in the current job market. To do this, you’ll be seeing user-generated resources (what we might call “tactical technical communication”) from technical communicators and professional writers shared online that seek to show what skills technical communicators use and learn about digital platforms they may utilize in their documentation practices.

English 2140 Course Goals and Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• CO 1: Define technical communication as both a field and an action.
• CO 2: Define audiences in any given context and make lexical choices appropriate for that audience.
• CO 3: Distinguish between and replicate professional and casual writing voices.
• CO 4: Write successful, detailed instructions and determine usability for a designated audience.
• CO 5: Design clear, concise, correct, and usable documents in PDF, digital, and web forms.
• CO 6: Edit documents line-by-line for errors spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, mechanics, spacing, and general formatting.
• CO 7: Compose an evaluation report based on research.
• CO 8: Correctly cite sources in MLA or APA format (depending on student’s major/area of interest)
• CO 9: Collaborate with classmates via Google Docs and through file sharing
• CO 10: Test user-experience for various document styles and evaluate degree of visual and written success in others’ documents.