[ATTW-L] STEM Targeted Intro TW Courses?

[Northcut, Kathryn]

Cagle’s materials were great fun to look over – Thanks!

TLDR: Following is a recommendation for an edited collection, another textbook, an article, and an assignment that adds to Cagle’s suggestions.

Paul, consider the following book despite the gratuitous self-promotion? Many of the names you’ll see in the ATTW list (including Cagle and Katz) contributed chapters to it. Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies. Yu & Northcut, 2018. It was written to address the kind of question you’re asking, with evidence-based arguments across every chapter. Identifying real audiences for STEM student writing emerges as a theme.

Another textbook (besides Katz and Penrose) I find very useful is House et al’s The Engineering Communication Manual. It helps some folks break away from MLA style essays that they may otherwise default to when they think of “papers.” Cagle mentioned Wolfe’s book – she also had a great article in TCQ titled “How Technical Communication Textbooks Fail Engineering Students,” much or all of which applies across sciences as well, and which we require graduate teaching assistants to read.

In various courses at Missouri S&T, we added some additional genres including hazard/warning signs, instructions, technical descriptions, and process analysis. In courses beyond the service course, white papers and specialized reports have been assigned.

I taught a one-off honors prof & business writing course for STEM majors in F21 in which the students had to determine the genre for the response, so it departed from the genre-focused approach. We examined a case study of an explosion (through documents and a guest speaker who’d been a witness at the hearing). The explosion was in a St Louis facility and students were asked to “go back in time” and create a text that may have helped to prevent the disaster (people were killed and wounded). They could use any genre, including a script for a telephone call they’d make or a watercooler conversation – any text they thought they could effectively prevent the explosion. The students claimed to really loathe the assignment, but the evaluations of the course were high, and one student said she changed her major to tech com because of that course.

Kathy

From: ATTW-L <attw-l-bounces at attw.org> on behalf of Paul Sawyer <psawyer at selu.edu>
Date: Saturday, September 24, 2022 at 9:07 PM
To: attw-l at attw.org <attw-l at attw.org>
Subject: [ATTW-L] STEM Targeted Intro TW Courses?
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Hello everyone--

My department is thinking of offering some of our Intro to Technical Writing courses targeted specifically to our science-based/STEM majors on campus.

I'm having a hard time finding examples of universities that offer such a course.  Does anyone know of/teach such a course at your university?  I'm wondering  what assignments would be in such a course?

Thanks!  I appreciate your help.

--Paul
--
Paul R. Sawyer, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Director, Technical and Professional Writing Program
Southeastern Louisiana University
SLU 10861--English Department
Hammond, LA  70402

Voice:  985 549-5759
Fax: 985 549-5021
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