Part 1: Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing

Part 1: Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing offers four chapters to introduce you to the topics you will cover this semester in Professional and Technical Writing (ENGL 30503). You’ll learn about what technical writing is, and how technical writers think about and incorporate ethical actions into their work. Additionally, you’ll learn about setting goals for the semester, tracking those goals over the next weeks, and practicing your first technical writing genre in Project 1: the Course Goals Memo.

Part 1 contains the following:

• Chapter 1: Introducing Technical Writing: In this chapter, you will learn about the characteristics and conventions of technical writing and practice identifying the rhetorical elements of sample technical writing documents.
• Chapter 2: Ethics in Technical Writing: This chapter expands on the importance of ethics for technical writing. You will learn about seven ethical principles to follow, common ethical issues in technical writing, and steps for writing ethically.
• Chapter 3: Setting Your Course Goals: This chapter describes the process of setting course goals, provides the assignment sheet for Project 1 (Course Goals Memo), and explains the memo genre and its formatting conventions.
• Chapter 4: Tracking Your Course Goals: In this chapter, you will read about how to keep track of your progress towards the course goals you’ve set for the semester. You will learn about two documents that will help you in this process: the work log and the writing journal.