Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report results from an evaluation of an online abstract mentoring programme to support early career and less experienced human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) researchers improve their chances of acceptance to International HIV/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Conferences. Design/methodology/approach: An…

Contained in this report is a description of the technical assistance and training phase of the Document Design Project, a program funded by the National Institute of Education and intended to address and correct the readability problems posed by public documents. The first section of the report provides background material on the assistance and…

The accomplishments of a team of writers, designers, and education specialists commissioned by the National Institute of Education (NIE) to suggest solutions to the problems that public documents often pose for readers are summarized in this report. Following an overview, the report offers a section on the history and rationale of the Document…

Describes a two-semester writing program that prepares English majors for professional writing careers in business or industry. (AEA)

Brigham Young University's first-year legal writing course uses professors of small sections to develop and grade assignments and shifts primarily to others the tasks of lecturing on legal writing and teaching legal research. It also provides teaching assistants to lighten the workload. Dividing duties avoids burnout and interference with other…

According to the 1980-81 edition of the "Occupational Outlook Handbook," the market for graduates of technical communication programs is good and likely to get better during the 1980s, especially in the areas of electronics and computer and environmental science. The first step in setting up a technical communication program at a college or…

Writing seminars designed for the business community reveal that this population is motivated and willing to attack problems of logic, organization, and coherence. The approach used includes instruction in the basic principles of clarity in writing and a required oral presentation about a piece of company writing needing revision. (MSE)

Articles in these proceedings of a conference of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication represent the views of professional communicators and academicians who share a concern for providing breadth and quality of preparation for present and future technical communicators. The 10 papers discuss the following topics: (1)…

A workshop was developed at the Bank of Canada to give instruction in writing brief summaries of financial analyses to junior economists entering the bank after university. These employees were expected to write these analyses for the senior officers of the institution. It had been found that the specialists had not learned strategies for…

Describes the process of designing professional writing courses in the community college curriculum. Discusses the incorporation of computer-assisted composition, reader-centered writing, adult learning styles, interviewing for information, project management, and team design into the curriculum. (MM)

A city planner's writing is usually not "technical" in the sense that the writing of engineers is technical. In each planning genre, extremely complex information, some of it "technical"--numbers, projections, and so forth--must be communicated clearly. For the professional planner, there are often severe time constraints and the need to proceed…

The Technical-Professional Communication (TPC) Option at Maryland's Frostburg State University is a response to the growing demand from government, business, and industry to prepare MBAs to meet the high performance requirements of managers who must communicate and communicators who must manage. Students taking this 15-hour writing-intensive…

A Georgetown University course in English writing for academic purposes for foreign linguistics graduate students is described. The Writing Lab was conceived as a discussion session to accompany two commonly selected linguistics courses in which much writing is required. The initial class consisted of seven Japanese and two Taiwanese students with…

Currently two-year colleges are faced with the challenge of developing and implementing programs of technical communications that will serve the wide range of needs of the vocational-technical student. Cedar Valley College (Texas) responded to this challenge by developing a communications course for the developmental student. The course has four…

While research in international technical communication has flourished during the last 10 years, there has been little published on technical communication programs outside the United States. This article addresses this need by describing 12 representative academic technical communication programs in Germany, including Germany's first master's…