This section of ENG 115 is offered by NVCC through the Extended Learning Institute (ELI). For information about ELI and how to register, go to the ELI Policies and Procedures Screen.
This Course Guide explains what you can expect to do and learn in Technical Writing. Please start by reading through this entire Course Guide. The table of contents on the left will help you to go back to specific areas later. Please print out the Course Guide, so you will have a paper reference handy.
English 115 will
help you to develop your technical writing ability through extensive practice writing a variety of technical documents, including a research report. You will learn to write useful descriptions, proposals and reports that your intended readers can understand and respond to. You will work on audience, voice, tone, style, and content in your writing. The topics will depend on your own interests and field of study.
Since appearance and visual support are essential to modern technical writing, you will work with layout and the use of simple graphics, such as tables and charts, to enhance your technical writing. You will need to learn a bit about
preparing documents and simple visuals for the WWW, so that you can post them to the course forum.
The methods of analysis, writing and presentation that you learn in this course will be useful to you immediately, in your work, in school, and in your personal business.
The textbook will give you the basic concepts and exercises to help you put each concept into practice.
The Exercises will allow you to practice these concepts and share your writing with other students. Having a real audience for your writing will encourage you to be aware of what your readers need to know, and this in turn will help you to clarify the way you express your ideas.
I encourage you
to select topics to write about that are relevant to your own work or career field; some assignments may coincide with actual work projects that you are involved in, such as a technical report about an issue at your workplace. Your Research Report should draw on your primary field of interest and help you to solidify your research and writing skills in that field.
