Planning: Technical and Professional Writing

I realized recently that I need to plan out a class for the summer. I’m teaching Technical and Professional writing, which I taught last fall. But I can’t run the course exactly the same; now I have two and a half hour meetings twice a week.

And besides, I learned a lot about how to do it last semester, and I want to improve.

So I’ll start with the simple things that I have, the goals and basic structure. The goals of the class, as I see them, are to teach students how to communicate in a professional setting, and to prepare them for the business world as far as communication is concerned. What does that mean?

Getting ready for the C’s, planning classes

Tomorrow at a god awful hour of the morning, I board a plane that, through a series of other destinations, will eventually get me to San Francisco. At least, that’s the plan-there’s a chance the snow will decide otherwise. But most likely, I’m off to the C’s.

This is not my first conference, but it is one of the scariest. It’s without a doubt the biggest conference I’ve ever been to. So I’ve done more preparation for this than I have for any other conference. I may even have a power point presentation (though I am limiting myself to 7 slides, including a title screen).

In the meantime, though, I wanted to get back to my ‘class planning’ project.

Last time around, I came up with course goals. The next step is reading lists.

Technical communicator: author and extreme usability

Though not yet finished my reading for this week, I wanted to blog about two of the articles I am reading. The first is by Jennifer Daryl Slack, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. It’s called “Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” The second is “Extreme Usability and Technical Communication” by Bradley Dilger. Both are within Critical Power Tools edited by J. Black Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Katherine V. Wills.

So, first Slack Miller and Doak.