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ICS 139W Critical Writing Fall 2010

Administrivia

News:

• Website in construction.
• In-class writing samples on Monday Sept 27 and Wednesday Sept 29.
• No class on Friday October 2.

Course goals

Even if you intend to spend your entire professional life designing software or configuring networks, you will spend more of it writing prose - memos, proposals, documentation, electronic mail - than you will writing code. Yet in most of your courses, you exercise this vital skill only after you have run the last test case, in the half-hour before the deadline. Here we have the luxury of concentrating on your writing skills, with an emphasis on writing to meet the specific needs of different audiences; you will also make oral presentations and design presentation graphics.

Prerequisites

Every student should be able to write cogent, grammatical English at the level expected in Writing 39C. We will verify this by requiring an in-class writing sample in the first week of class.

Required course materials

• An english dictionairy. Ideally you should have a paperback dictionary as well as a large, unabridged dictionary in the place where you'll do most of your writing. The former has faster access time but the latter has greater capacity, so both are valuable.

• A general writing reference such as Writing from A to Z by Ebest, Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu (this is the reference typically used in lower division classes).

• The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a classic concise reference available online.

• Library reference materials graciously prepared by Julia Gelfand.

Optional materials

• The MIT Guide to Science and Engineering Communication by James Paradis and Muriel Zimmerman. This brief guide describes the various forms of scientific and technical writing, including sections on oral presentations and document design. Reasonable online references with similar material include The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing by L. C. Perelman, J. Paradis, and E. Barrett and Handbook of Technical Writing by G. J. Alred, C. T. Brusaw, and W. E. Oliu.

• Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making by Edward Tufte. This reprint of Chapter 2 of Tufte's book, Visual Explanations, describes two situations where the way information was presented had life-or-death consequences. Tufte goes on to describe the dangers of Powerpoint in The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Grading

To satisfy the upper division writing requirement, you must receive a grade of C or better in this course; you may also take this class on a pass/not-pass basis (which also requires work at the C level to pass).

• Five main writing assignments, each with multiple parts: "Writing Instructions" (15%), "Wikipedia" (20%), "Changing the System: Tutorial" (15%), "Changing the System: Pitch" (15%), "Resume and Cover Letter (10%)".

• Two oral presentations worth 5% each.

• The remaining 15% will be in-class peer editing and in-class particiation. There is no way to make up a missed session as an editor.

In general we will assign scores on a 100-point scale, with 95 a clear A, 85 a clear B, and below 70 not of passing quality (i.e., below C). It is possible but not guaranteed that the cutoffs for course letter grades of A and B will be assigned more leniently; that is, an overall score of 89% might receive an A or A-. There will be no exams. We're required to say that in unusual circumstances, these criteria could change, but we do not expect that to happen.

Computer access

Students in ICS 139W have access to the ICS open labs. These machines run Windows and the Microsoft Office suite of software, including Word and PowerPoint. For this course you may use any system to which you legitimately have access; we will require that you learn and use PowerPoint (or Apple's Keynote or an open-source equivalent) for part of one assignment.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism means presenting somebody else's work as if it's your own. You may use whatever outside sources (books, friends, interviews, periodicals) are appropriate for an assignment, so long as you cite them (that is, so long as you indicate the source of anything you didn't think up and write yourself). We will randomly pass assignments through automated detectors searching for matches across a large database of online material. Plagiarism is academically dishonest, and we will take violations very seriously.