Downloads: Assignment (doc) Evaluation Criteria (doc)

Project Resources

For this project you must identify a technical process related to sustainability and create a description that explains that process for an expert, technician or manager reader in your field.. Your description must incorporate one (or more, as needed) definitions. This assignment is based primarily on the principles in Chapters 9 of Technical Communication by Mike Markel, as well as on our class discussions of these genres. To do well on this project, you’ll also need to demonstrate mastery of the skills and strategies described in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the textbook. Your finished product should be appropriate for publication in a technical report, proposal, white paper, or training/education program for people in your field. Your target reader is technicians, or students with some expertise in your field, not lay people.  This project helps you attain the following goals for this course:

• Write to multiple audiences, for various purposes (e.g., to persuade, to inform, to earn or maintain good will)
• Plan and manage short- and long-term writing projects
• Draft, design, revise, and edit documents
• Design and implement appropriate research strategies
• Follow and adjust to business and technical writing conventions
• Develop effective style and tone
• Design documents (e.g., using page design principles to format documents, incorporating graphics/visuals into documents)

Possible topics for the technical description project

• How are glass products (or a particular glass product) recycled?
• How are plastic products (or a particular plastic product) recycled?
• How is paper recycled?
• How are organic crops (or a particular crop e.g. raspberries) cultivated?
• How are alternative fabrics (or a particular fabric e.g. hemp) cultivated?
• How are alternative fuels (or a particular fuel e.g. solar, biodiesel, wind) generated?
• How does composting work?
• A topic of your choosing as long as it’s sufficiently technical, a process (as opposed to an object or mechanism) and meets the instructor’s approval

Deliverables for the technical description project

For this project you will create the following deliverables:

1. Technical description
2. Project Assessment Memo that describes the rhetorical choices you made

Caution!

Here are some areas where this assignment might go astray:

• The main focus of this project is a description of a technical process (i.e. how something happens). Your description may also entail descriptions of objects or mechanisms, but these descriptions must in some way support your process description. You will fail the assignment if you submit only an object or mechanism description.
• Technical descriptions are NOT the same as instructions. Instructions include numbered steps and are intended to guide a specific user through a particular task. Technical descriptions give readers an overview of a process (i.e. How does composting work? NOT “How, do you, Jim Bob, compost?).
• Avoid circular definitions, synonyms in definitions, and definitions that are not user-oriented (see TC Chapter 9).
• It’s easy to cross the line into plagiarism on this type of assignment. Borrowing content for this assignment – from any source without proper attribution – results in instantaneous failure of the course and referral of your case to the Dean’s office. Be meticulous about your research, citation, and summarizing/paraphrasing/quoting practices. We’ll use APA format for our citations. Find out everything you need to know about APA here: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/
• Using a pre-formatted template of any kind is a no-no for all of our deliverables (except for memos, use our course memo template for those). One of the purposes of this assignment is to get you comfortable using MS Word to format documents from scratch. You will fail the assignment if you build your document on a pre-existing template.

Evaluation criteria for the technical description project

1. Product

Your description must:

• Include appropriate components—an introduction, background, parts, and characteristics, visuals, conclusion—divided by headings and subheadings
• Provide descriptive detail at a level for the target audience
• Use appropriate document architecture and a consistent organizational strategy—general to specific, spatial, or chronological—dictated by audience and purpose
• Make effective use of at least two of the following types of definitions: definitions that describe, definitions that compare and contrast, definitions that classify, definitions that provide examples, and definitions that illustrate with visuals
• Integrate definition(s) at appropriate location(s) within the description
• Successfully integrate text and visuals to meet readers’ needs

   

2. Process

Your document must show evidence of:

• Careful analysis of your audience and purpose (i.e. your document connects with a specific audience for a specific reason)
• Meticulous research and use of source material. This includes appropriate list of citations, in-text citations, proper summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and generally giving credit where credit is due
• Careful editing and proofreading

3. Production

Your document must show evidence of an effective production process, including:

• Competent use of word processing features including styles, columns, and other appropriate formatting features
• Submission on time and in accordance with the submission requirements posted in our class web space
• Completion of a Project Assessment Memo and submitted at the same time as the project

Project Assessment Memo

You’ll submit a Project Assessment Memo (PAM) with each major assignment. In the PAM, you are expected to reflect (think about and analyze critically), how the work you did for the assignment helped you understand/achieve the learning objectives for this course. Your PAM should make explicit connections between course goals, readings/class discussions, and your finished product. (See relevant course goals at the top of this page.)

The Project Assessment Memo gives you an opportunity to tell the instructor precisely how and why you applied specific principles and strategies you picked up from our readings and discussions. The only way you can cut yourself short is by not thinking about or adequately explaining your process. You can use the following prompts as a starting point fore a 1-2 page memo (in correct memo format) describing the rhetorical choices you made when you were creating your description.

• How did your audience influence your deliverable? Which types of definitions did you include? Why were they necessary? Which organizational strategy did you use (e.g chronological)? Why?
• What kind of background research did you do to help you understand the process (or any objects or mechanisms involved in the process) so that you could explain it?
• What challenges did you encounter in trying to design a document that was attractive and helped your reader understand/process the information?