Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/Technical Communication (Lipuma and Scharf) Summer 2011/Course description

Course description
Eng 352 “Technical Communication” develops the ability of the student to understand and utilize the process of communication to accomplish desired communication tasks. This course strives to teach the basics of good communication and the importance of understanding and using specialized forms and formats when interfacing with different targets in a variety of situations to understand and accomplish specified goals. It uses real-world situations to both learn and have students produce final packages. The core ideas of the course are intended to introduce the concept of communication and the tools used to meet a variety of challenges that the student may encounter in college and in his or her career. This will assist students to improve both the form and content of various forms of communication. Through the course of the class, each student will be exposed to aspects of the communication process as it applies to: business correspondences, critical analyses, process descriptions, proposals, résumés, letters, and memos amongst others. The material in this course is intended to provide students with an understanding of the elements of different communication mediums and forms that are commonly encountered as they seek employment and begin working in their chosen careers.

This course will use Moodle to deliver course content and allow you to turn in reflection assignments, quizzes, discussion forum posts and larger project assignments as MS Word 2003 files You need to review the submission guidelines for general instructions about how to submit work and understand the comments that are returned. As an online class, it will be your responsibility to keep current with the work, meet deadlines for readings, postings, and other submissions. The course has several overarching goals that fit together to accomplish the learning objectives as well as provide you the needed skills to accomplish the final projects. At its heart, the course teaches about how to most effectively craft a communication package that accomplishes a student's goal in a given situation for a specified target. To do this, the students will learn about:


 * 1) 	How to use clear communication techniques and correct form for a specified situation
 * 2) 	Assessing personal goals
 * 3) 	Identifying targets and accurately understanding what will work best for those targets
 * 4) 	Adopting appropriate tone and adjusting tone when needed
 * 5) 	Selecting the correct scope for work,
 * 6) 	Critiquing the work of oneself and others to develop judgment about what is better and worse for creating the package.
 * 7) 	Assessing sources of material to judge quality