Professor Laurie Anderson
Office: UW1-349 Office Phone: 425.352.3594
Office hours: M/W 5:45pm-6:30pm, T/Th 5:00pm-5:45pm, or by appointment

Purpose

If you are already employed as a software engineer, you know that exams and grades are replaced with promotions, choice work assignments, raises, and stock options when it comes to rewarding your competence. Workplace performance is judged not only on your technical abilities, but also on your ability to communicate your knowledge (in writing and speaking) to colleagues, clients, and even the general public.

However, an engineer’s natural competence is to be great at communicating with their peers, and usually poor at communicating with other audiences of people who are not like them. Various communication problems are overly technical descriptions and a tendency to leap from one complex concept to the next without building the reader’s understanding.

Objectives

Therefore, to assist you both professionally and personally in your CSS degree, CSS301, “Technical Writing for Computing Professionals” is part of the CSS core curriculum.You will learn to:

• Analyze the communication situation fully and accurately.
• Organize a document.
• Reveal the organization of your communications.
• Write several specific kinds of technical documents.
• Demonstrate a clear, concise, and accurate writing style.
• Design usable, clear, persuasive, and accessible documents.
• Collaborate effectively with your peers.
• Recognize a variety of technical writing forms.
• Revitalize your knowledge of grammar from a technical writing perspective.