Contexts
1. Planning your communication
Assessing the rhetorical situation
Displaying evidence and reasoning (logos)
Conveying credibility (ethos)
Accommodating audience needs, values, and priorities (pathos)
Writing within genres
2. Understanding your audience
Analyzing stakeholder audiences
Listening to stakeholders
Techniques for listening
3. Meeting your ethical obligations
Ethics in engineering The engineer's rights and duties
Analyzing consequences of action and ethical principles
Types of unethical communication
4. Accommodating global and cultural differences
Recognizing cultural values and assumptions
Emphasis on the individual or the group
Preference for equality or hierarchy
Experiences of time
Role of the writer or the reader in conveying meaning
Considerations for
face-to-face communication
5. Designing documents for users
Professional audiences as users
Chunking: dividing content into manageable units
Relationships among content: proximity, alignment, repetition, contrast
Setting type for ease of reading
Using color
Audiences
6. Engineers
Who they are and how they think: credible arguments required
Why you communicate with your engineering peers
How to communicate with your engineering peers
7. Technicians and technical staff
Who they are and how they think: implementers
Why you communicate with technicians
How you communicate with technicians
8. Executives
Who they are and how they think: authorizers
Why you communicate with executives
How you communicate with executives
9. Clients
Who they are and how they think: it's in the
contract
Why you communicate with clients
How you communicate with clients
10. The public and the public sector
Who they are and how they think: health and safety are first priority
Why you communicate with the public
How you communicate with the public
Genres
11. Reporting in a research community
Writing for a technical audience
Elements of the IMRaD format
Experimental reports
Reports that advance theory
Literature reviews
12. Reporting in an industrial organization
Writing for decision-making audiences in industry
Elements of the "answers-first" format
Progress and status reports
Design reports
Feasibility studies
13. Corresponding
Maintaining a professional tone in correspondence
Letters
Memos
Email
Phone calls
Social media
14. Proposing
Common
elements of proposing
External proposals and responding to requests for proposals
Internal proposals
15. Instructing
Principles of writing instructions
Usability testing
16. Applying for a job
Targeting the audience
Résumés
Application letters
Academia: the curriculum vitae and statement of purpose
Processes
17. Researching
Consulting with experts
Finding scholarly sources
Using patents to review prior art Integrating sources: paraphrase and direct quotation
Citing sources
18. Drafting
Planning
the argument
The sequence of drafts
19. Revising
From revising to editing to proofreading
Revising content and argument based on feedback from experts and peers
Revising structure and organization
Revising and editing for clarity
20. Collaborating
Avoiding the
common pitfall of collaboration
Planning a document as a team
Drafting a document as a team
Integrating and unifying a document
21. Meeting
The first team meeting: roles, responsibilities, charters
Why meet? (agendas)
What happened? (minutes)
Optimizing virtual
meetings
Components
22. Headings
Communicating the argument to the hurried reader
Unifying style and voice
23. Paragraphs
Focusing paragraphs on a single idea
Moving coherently from one sentence to the next
24. Sentences
Solidifying the sentence core
Coordinating and subordinating ideas
Avoiding sentence fragments, fused sentences, and comma splices Increasing conciseness while maintaining clarity
25. Words
Achieving precision without needless jargon
Selecting precise verbs
Using pronouns precisely
Managing
emotive language
26. Summaries
Executive summaries
Abstracts Submitting an abstract as a proposal
27. Front and back matter
Front matter: title pages, tables of contents, and lists of figures
Back matter: notes, appendices, and bibliography
Visuals
28. Graphs
Choosing the best graph for the task
Shared conventions of graphs
Pie charts, bar graphs, and dot plots
Scatterplots and line graphs
Box-and-whisker plots and histograms
Fine-tuning your graphs:
Enhancing visual clarity with text
29. Illustrations
Choosing the best illustration for the task
The range of illustrations, from pictorial to schematic
Commonly encountered types of illustrations
Fine-tuning your illustration
30. Tables, equations, and code
Designing tables
Writing mathematics
Writing
chemistry
Writing computer code
Media
31. Print pages
Creating a page layout
Managing the appearance of paragraphs
Selecting typefaces
32. Talks
Overcoming stage fright and connecting with listeners
Analyzing audience & setting Identifying the genre,
purpose, and desired outcome
Rehearsing and preparing the talk
33. Presentation slides
Recognizing the limitations of slideware
Designing slides using assertion-evidence style
Using Prezi to illustrate spatial relationships
Adapting slide designs for other purposes
34. Posters
Understanding the audience for a poster presentation
Delivering the poster talk
Placing major elements of the poster
Applying design principles to the poster
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Richard House is a Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received a B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. In addition to engineering communication and pedagogy, he has scholarly interests in sustainability
and Shakespeare.
Richard A. Layton is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and past Director of the Center for the Practice and Scholarship of Education at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from
the University of Washington. His areas of scholarship include data visualization, student teaming, and undergraduate retention.
Jessica Livingston is an Associate Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She received a B.A. from The University of Georgia, an M.A. from
the University of Kentucky, and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Her areas of interest include humanitarian engineering, the intersections of gender and work in a global economy, and documentary film.
Sean Moseley is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman
Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. from The Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of interest include effective engineering education techniques, solid mechanics, and humanitarian engineering.
