Lecture 1

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to your first lecture session for English 119.

Please understand that you all have very different backgrounds in reading and writing skills; therefore, my lectures may seem a bit too simplistic for some and a bit difficult for others. If you find yourself struggling with the material for an extended period of time, please contact me, so that we can find alternatives for your coursework or facilitate dropping the course before your grade suffers and you lose your tuition fees.

Writing vs. Speaking

Many students in writing courses freely exclaim that they have difficulty with writing tasks: “I hate writing papers for school.” But, these same students are often the ones who speak openly in class and are good communicators when given the opportunity to speak. If you are one of those people, go ahead and nod your head—no one is looking.

The problem that many of us seem to have with writing tends to be a disconnection between the brain and the fingertips; yet, that problem doesn’t happen when the message travels to the mouth. In order to get past this short circuit, I would like to suggest that before you use your verbal skills to discuss the writing task with anyone—even your cat—prior to putting your fingers on the keyboard. Then write down those thoughts, with a keyboard or a pen, before you have a chance to forget the profound ideas that you just expressed. At this point, don’t worry about organization, grammar or how silly your ideas might be.

Then, once you have your thoughts down on paper, or in a saved file, you can work with those thoughts to develop documents that you can proudly present to your audience: your instructor, your classmates, your peers, or an even larger audience.

Technical and Business Communication

The difference in Technical and Business Communication and other types of writing is primarily purpose and audience. The purpose of your Composition papers for those English 117 and 118 (for DMACC students), or 104 and 105 (for ISU students), and the documents you will write for Technical and Business Communication is in the goal of the document and the people to whom you are writing. The purpose of a Composition paper is to demonstrate your knowledge of a subject or express your opinion on a subject to a wide audience including your instructor and your peers. Technical and Business documents will have more specific purposes, like selling a service or describing a scientific process, and a much more specific audience, like women who suffer from breast cancer.

As a result of the specific purpose and narrow audience, you must know exactly what your document must accomplish and to whom you are writing the document. You will even find yourself using the second person pronoun, “you”, in your documents—something that gives many English teachers bad cases of “the willies”.

Audiences of Technical Documents

So, you must research your audience and determine several key points about that audience, including

How that audience will receive the information (will that audience be open to accepting your information?)?

How much time the audience will, or can, spend with your document?

How can you best present the information for your audience’s use? And,

What methods can you use to make the material easier for your audience to access?

We must all learn to present information in a manner that best suits the needs of our audience and the purpose of our documents—that attention to audience and purpose makes us better technical communicators.