Phil Druker/Department of English/ University of Idaho

    Technical and Engineering Report Writing, English 317:  
Basic goals and course description

Phil Druker.  Department of English. University of Idaho. January 22, 2001

Who should take the course?

    Technical and Engineering Report Writing is designed for junior and senior students who need to learn how to write technical documents for professional settings. The course works especially well for seniors, and other upper division students, who are engaged in a research or design project in their major.

Course goal:

    English 317 gives junior/senior students experience with the process of completing research and writing reports about that research for a professional setting. The course focuses on teaching students to write for various audiences with different levels of expertise, which involves presenting information to people who do not know what the student knows (this is different from writing for a professor who probably knows more about the subject than the student knows).

      Through the course students learn to write proposals, final reports, instructions, descriptions, résumés, and cover letters.  In some sections, students give oral reports and post documents on the Web.

  Course focus:

In the course, each student picks a topic to research for the semester.  The goal is to produce a 10 – 20 page technical report on the research the student completes.  The research must be appropriately sophisticated and involve primary and secondary research.  The student then works on completing the project in increments during the semester.  So, students write progress reports, a proposal, sections of the report, and then they compile the information and text from these documents into the final report.

  A typical list of assignments: