Writing and communication skills are important in all fields of employment. During the course of everyday life, people have to perform tasks they have never done before, or learn a technology they have never used. Most tasks are processes, and it takes some time to learn how they work. Instructions are the most common method of explaining how to…

As teachers of writing, the authors know that choices matter: the more choices they can give their students, the better their writing will be--and the better writers they'll become. Many teachers design their courses as writing workshops, so that students make choices about the genres they compose in. They structure writing assignments so that…

Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss…

An integrated technical writing and design course has been developed at Rowan University. This course was developed using aspects of project-based learning and recent discussions about design education, as well as pedagogical approaches from the write-to-learn and the writing in the disciplines (WID) movements. The result is a course where the…

Explains an assignment for the audience analysis segment of a business writing course which compares the front page design of "The Wall Street Journal" with that of a local daily newspaper in order to emphasize the use of design devices in effectively writing to busy people. (SR)