I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come about by accident; they came by work.
-- Thomas Edison
Welcome to the Strategies for Engineering Communication website. This site offers a teachers' guide, featuring PowerPoint slides (.ppt) which can be downloaded and used as currently formatted or which can be can be reformatted for use as overhead transparencies. The site also includes Adobe Acrobat slides (.pdf) which can be provided to students electronically or which can be printed as handouts to students. Each presentation is organized thematically and arranged for the most part in the order topics are presented in the text.
Rhetorical effectiveness and strategies are key concepts underpinning our approach. We want students to primarily focus on strategies for achieving their goals and not merely on a set of rules (which may or may not be applicable or effective in any given situation). We also want students to think critically about the various elements of a rhetorical situation and to use those elements to determine for themselves the appropriate content, organization, style, and format for a document. These concepts help strengthen confidence and reduce the need to copy models or to use boilerplate text.
For a stand-alone course, you may choose to simply follow the sequence of topics in the order presented, using our thematic presentations as the basis for lectures and classroom activities. Alternatively, you can address issues in whatever order makes sense to you, having students move backward and forward through the text to suit your approach. For example, rhetorical situation and persuasion (Chapter Three) could be addressed first while students write proposals, and then students could turn to Chapters One and Two after their documents are written in order to critique their writing processes. Discussions and examples of various genres (Chapter Eight) can be introduced at any point, and various sections can be highlighted or skipped over to accommodate the focus and goals of a particular course.
If, like us, you teach communication courses that are integrated with core
engineering courses, you can select and organize topics to suit the documents
or presentations students are preparing for their core courses. For example,
our program includes six communication courses. The first in the series is co-requisite
with a course on engineering and society in which students must write persuasive
research papers and make group presentations. In this case, we concentrate on
chapters one, two, part of three, and five: the writing process, research strategies,
rhetorical situation, persuasion, and oral presentations. In the second course,
students are writing reports, and we focus on the remainder of chapter three
and on six, seven and eight: informative writing, format, style, and genre.
In the same vein, we focus on the workplace issues raised in chapter four and
on the sections on résumés and cover letters in chapter eight
when students are applying for work terms.
The .ppt files have been produced using Microsoft PowerPoint 2002. We encourage you to make changes to these files as required for your own circumstances. The .pdf files have been produced using Adobe Acrobat 5.0. Because of copyright issues, we request that you do not remove any of the attached notes; however, we encourage you to add further notes to these files as needed
This website is a work-in-progress that we will update and improve as new examples
become available, as we develop new techniques in the classroom, and in response
to input we receive from those of you who adopt our text. We encourage you to
get in touch. For comments and questions related to the content, we encourage
you send us both e-mail at stevenso@sfu.ca
and whitmore@cs.sfu.ca. For comments or questions relating to the website
or file format, please contact whitmore@cs.sfu.ca.
| Page maintained by: Steve Whitmore |
Last
updated: September 24th, 2001
|