A Master of Arts in Technical and Expository Writing program has been implemented in the English department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Designed to make future teachers and technical writers into better writers, the program gives them a larger view of the writing process in which they are participating. Three required courses…

Consulting can give college writing instructors the opportunity to teach in a radically new environment. The conditions under which writing is taught in-house for business and industry are not as highly structured as they are in academia, and, in fact, point up the distinction between training and education. Training, focused on singular and…

This document describes the processes involved in writing an effective user manual intended to give the reader a working knowledge of a computer program named FUND-RAISER. Written in UCSD PASCAL, FUND-RAISER was developed by the Winter Park Library Association to ease the record keeping and letter writing tasks involved in the association's annual…

Designed for use by professionals interested in the field of environmental communications, this resource guide contains sources of information pertaining to employment opportunities especially in the area of written environmental communications. References are compiled under the headings of: (1) subject headings (listing key descriptors for…

Intended for the growing number of composition faculty members involved in training graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and adjunct faculty to teach, as well as new teachers, this book presents essays addressing how best to prepare new teachers to teach writing, and what advice to offer new teachers about particular aspects of teaching writing.…

This collection of essays addresses the challenges of technical communication and provides detailed information for instructors and researchers who wish to further their knowledge of particular areas within technical communication. The essays in this collection also address the problems of a large, complex, and growing academic endeavor. The…

Technical writing instructors lack a framework for evaluating pedagogical materials. One framework for classification divides the pedagogical materials into three groups: those locating their heuristics in form, context, and method. Formal pedagogies (the modes, sentence generation) can produce generic writing, separated from audience, purpose,…

Cognitive psychology, which investigates how people learn and how people know, can aid writers, who want readers to read their material easily, understand the material, or comprehend the material--three levels of processing complexity. Because readers vary from being very knowledgeable in the subject of a document to lacking in knowledge, and…

The three papers included in this report address typography for graphic communication, typographic access structures for educational texts, and typography as macropunctuation. The first paper considers the consequences of an aesthetic bias in the literature of typography, and identifies two misleading assumptions about textbooks; i.e., that print…

Students could gain considerable insight into the philosophy and methods of scientific experimentation if instructors adopted procedures based on an understanding of and respect for writing as a process. Laboratory courses in psychology offer such an opportunity. These courses usually involve a heavy workload for both students and faculty, for, in…

Writing and speaking are so closely integrated that educators can no longer continue to isolate them for separate study. Students can benefit from the teaching of writing and speaking simultaneously in that they learn to develop personal expression in more than one medium and gain a sense of immediate feedback. By recognizing that meaning implies…

Focusing on a meeting held in January 1983, this pamphlet describes the Forum on the Productivity of Plain English, from which grew the permanent Plain English Forum, which is committed to spreading the message that plain English is good business. The pamphlet includes quotations from leaders in business and industry explaining why they feel that…

Information for preparing technical reports is presented in this guide. This information includes: (1) descriptions of a technical report, an abstract, and a technical paper; (2) guidelines for writing abstracts and technical reports; (3) guidelines for developing an outline; (4) a sample student report format; and (5) a technical report appearing…

The chief aim of this style manual is to promote clarity and consistency in writing for publication. The chapters are intended to help writers understand the publication process that begins with a need to communicate with a particular audience and ends with the distribution of the finished product. The first chapter on planning and producing a…

Writing in the first person is not usually tolerated in academic writing under the illusion that the third person insures some kind of objectivity. But writing in the first person is honest, permitting the reader to know that what is being said is a matter of opinion. It is a direct way of speaking about what a writer sees or feels or thinks, and…