Argues that a carefully designed and skillfully moderated asynchronous Internet classroom environment can help minimize problems related to gender in traditional classrooms. Discusses class “climate” and class discussion in the traditional classroom and in the online classroom. Notes research related to gender and the online classroom. Outlines course design and teaching strategies. Offers a policy for online class conduct.

Details a first-year college composition course that blends journalism instruction with first-year composition. Describes how students learn about news gathering and news writing techniques common to feature writing and complete a profile writing project which encourages a level of discourse that bears closer kinship to everyday workplace writing. Discusses course design, implementation, and evaluation.

The problems in technical communications are related more to logical structure than to language. Structure problems occur at document, section, paragraph, and sentence levels. Editing is most effective if it deals with structure first. Structure deficiencies can be detected by applying a range of logical analysis criteria to each text part: looking at the nature and quality of its content and the use of the appropriate discourse sequence. The nature of the content determines where the text part belongs in the section or elsewhere in the document structure. Sufficient definition eliminates vagueness. The correct discourse sequence determines the internal structure of the text part. Lists, headings, classifications, and organograms must comply with the laws of categorization and relevant logical criteria, including some arrived at by lateral thinking.

Technical communication curricula vary because faculty use a variety of approaches to develop them. This essay suggests guidelines for curriculum and program development in technical communication based on a review of the relevant survey literature on the professional roles played by technical communicators, a review of academic literature on technical communication programs, and a review of the relevant demographic data on technical communicators. It then discusses the implications of the above for designing technical communication curricula and programs.

This article describes a course design that resulted from an academic and in dustrial collaboration. Unlike most simulation courses, the one described here was developed and taught by university professors and business professionals. One aim of designing the course was to find a way of teaching students that would better prepare them for writing in the workplace. A second aim was for the design-team members, through the experience of planning and teaching, to learn more about writing in the workplace and the teaching of writing. This article gives background on the development of the collaboration and on the decision to design and teach a simulation course, then describes the course and its results.

Government writing has often been called gobbledygook—vague, windy, and pretentious prose thrust on unwilling readers [1]. Nowhere, it seems would a writing course hold such rich promise as in a state or a federal agency. While many of these programs have been conducted [2], there is little in print on designing them or on dealing with the management or course development problems unique to them.1 This case study will document the effort to design and conduct such an in-house writing program. It will provide resource materials and strategies for those who, in the future, will be faced with developing and delivering such courses.

Of graduating seniors, businessmen assume basic writing skills. Graduates of business administration curriculums are assumed to have, additionally, not only basic language competence but also some expertise in report writing. Experience, both in the classroom and with personnel in formal organizations, bears out that neither students nor practitioners have a real grasp of organization, rhetorical techniques, and reader devices. Consumerism in Communication suggests what is being done in the College of Business Administration's undergraduate communications course to prepare students to meet realistically, confidently, and competently the expectations of their employers. Based on both research and experience, the course design pragmatically aims at reducing frustration on the part of employers who are dismayed at the verbal deficiencies of college graduates.

This paper describes an industrial training program designed to bring continuing engineering educational programs to several thousand engineers distributed in plants over a wide geographical area on a flexible time schedule, using a practicing engineer's time effectively and efficiently while utilizing good teaching and learning techniques. Using video tape as the teaching media and supplementing this with textbooks, especially developed studying guide materials, visual aids designed for TV presentations, and an associate instructor at the plant location to act in a resource capacity, a successful engineering personnel educational program has been developed economically that can be used at any plant location. Other industries could utilize the techniques described to bring quality engineering-updating programs to the majority of their engineers, as could universities, to take graduate-level programs to locations distant from the campus at a time convenient to the engineers involved.

Freshman composition is a large, expensive, undisciplined operation. The course is taught to students who have little to say by people who are more interested in analyzing literature. It should be replaced by a course designed for seniors. The author draws on his experience at the University of Michigan and describes at what stage composition is taught to engineering students.

It is tragically interesting that throughout the first twelve years of formal education in our society, the typical school curriculum does not contain a single course of study in idea handling and communication. In most college curricula, the art and techniques are confusingly taught and de-emphasized, largely because of specialization and professional parochialism. The net result is that our present system of personal development has produced a generation and a half of nonthinkers and noncopers. This paper argues that a proper synthesis of the skills of perception, inquiry, problem solving, and communication can be taught as such in a single course of study, preferably in high school or even before, but most certainly at least in college. The author describes a semester-length “idea-handling and communication core” course designed to supplant several traditional high-school and college courses, or for adult education.