This course is designed to help
you write typical technical documents and to give you experience creating
web pages using hypertext mark-up language -- tasks technical writers in
most fields must do. You will employ advanced editing skills, practice
writing on-line documentation, and develop hypertext links. Instruction
throughout the course stresses the rhetorical skills needed to create effective
texts that meet the constraints of particular writing contexts.
You will write detailed rhetorical analyses
for each writing assignment and produce effective letters, memos, technical
descriptions, proposals, progress reports, and other appropriate documents
for course projects.
This particular section of English 414 focuses on problems in online
information design. We'll examine design issues in a variety of contexts,
each of which has a writing component:
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Hypertext theory and design
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Diffusion of technological innovations
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Intellectual property
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Human-Computer Interaction and Usability
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Intercultural Communication
About one-half of the writing you do in this class will be done collaboratively,
in groups of three to four; we'll discuss patterns of collaboration, the
ups and downs of peer-revising and editing, and effective project management.
At the end of the course, you'll have an electronic portfolio of writing
samples and online projects.
Our readings along the way include various social, cultural, and political
contexts surrounding the uses, definitions, and philosophies of technology,
which will help put our own work into perspective. But I also want to use
these readings to help us reflect on how technology affects our personal,
day-to-day lives, as Sherry Turkle suggests in The Second Self:
"Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do but how
we think. It changes people's awareness of themselves, of one another,
of their relationships with the world."
Because Technical Writing is ultimately advocating for an end-user, this
seems to me a reasonable place to start.
