SPRING 2013 — Information and Computer Science — UC Irvine

ICS 139W Course Reference
CRITICAL WRITING ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, OR
COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS FOR COMPUTER SCIENTISTS 

Instructor: David G. Kay, 5056 Donald Bren Hall (kay@uci.edu)

Teaching assistant: Steve Slota (sslota@uci.edu). Steve will devote some of the scheduled discussion section time to individual consultations; he will also be available at other times to be arranged, and by appointment.

Quick links: Email archive Piazza Public Q&A References

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.

This course satisfies UCI's upper division writing requirement, which gives students the opportunity to do writing in ways that are specific to their own academic disciplines, guided by faculty from that discipline rather than from English.

Prerequisite concepts: Satisfaction of the lower division writing requirement is a prerequisite for this course, so we will expect every student to be able to write cogent, grammatical English at the level expected in Writing 39C.

Meeting place and times: Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:30 to 1:50 in ICS 180. The discussion sections are scheduled Wednesdays at 9:00 and at 10:00 in ICS 243; some section days will involve required activities, but others will be set aside for individual consultations on your work.

Office hours: I will be in or near my office during these scheduled hours, during which course-related matters will have first priority: Tuesdays from 11:30 to noon and Thursdays after class. Of course emergencies may come up, but I will try to give advance notice of any change. If I'm not immersed in something else, I'll be glad to answer short questions whenever I'm in my office, so feel free to drop by any time. I'll also be happy to make appointments for other times during the week. The quickest and most effective way to reach me is by electronic mail, as described below.

Questions and announcements: You can usually get a response to your course-related questions most quickly by posting them at Piazza.com; these postings are public to the whole class. For individual questions, send electronic mail to the ID ics139w@uci.edu. This goes to both of us, and whoever reads it first can respond. If you need to reach one of us individually, our individual addresses are listed above.

We may also send course announcements by Email to the official course mailing list, so you should check your Email at least daily. Note that this mailing list goes to the Email address that the registrar has for you (your UCInet ID). If you prefer to read your Email on another account, you should set your UCInet account to forward your Email to your preferred account (from http://www.oit.uci.edu/email/deliverypoint.html). Don't let this slide; if you miss official announcements, your grade could suffer.

This course has a home page at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kay/courses/139w; EEE provides an archive of official course Email.

Course materials: Every student in the course should have:

• An English dictionary. 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 paperback thesaurus is also useful, though you should remember that a thesaurus doesn't give the connotations or appropriate contexts for the synonyms it lists. If it's easy to get access to dictionary and thesaurus functionality on your computer, that's also fine.
• A writing guide, such as UCI's Anteater Guide to Writing or some more comprehensive work that can answer your mechanical questions. The UCI Writing Center has a large set of resources, mostly on line.

These additional materials are not required in the sense that we don't have any exams on their content nor do we use them directly for our assignments. Nonetheless, they are valuable for various reasons and we recommend that you acquire one or two that match your needs and interest. We haven't made them available in the UCI Bookstore; you can get the ones you want just as easily on line.

• Writing for Computer Science, second edition, by Justin Zobel. This guide gives mechanical advice but also addresses writing research papers and giving oral presentations.
• The MIT Guide to Science and Engineering Communication, second edition, 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.
• Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making, by Edward R. 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.
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, second edition, by Edward R. Tufte. Tufte presents evidence that "PowerPoint, comparied to other common presentation tools, reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence."

Course requirements and 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). In addition to satisfactory participation and completion of the assignments, to pass 139W you must successfully complete an in-class writing sample (described in more detail in the following section) demonstrating your ability to write a short passage in clear, correct, grammatical, cogent academic English.

• Four main writing assignments, each with multiple parts: "Writing Instructions" (about 10% of the course grade), "Influencing Policy" (about 20%), "Changing the System Introductory Tutorial" (about 15%), "Changing the System Proposal" (about 25%).
• Two or three smaller exercises, each worth about 5%.
• Class attendance and participation, including three or four oral presentations, worth about 20% overall. The importance of participation in this course is clear from its weight. Much of the learning comes from activities we conduct in class; there is no other way to make them up, and your grade will suffer if you miss them. The course outline indicates certain activities with a bullet (•); it is particularly important that you attend class or lab on those dates.

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.

Special needs: Any student who feels he or she may need an accommodation due to a disability should contact the UCI Disability Services Center at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to explore the possible range of accommodations. We encourage all students having difficulty, whether or not due to a disability, to consult privately with the instructor at any time.

In-class writing sample: Being able to produce clear and correct writing is a requirement for completing lower division writing, so we expect everyone in the class to be able to demonstrate this ability.

The first in-class writing sample is scheduled for Thursday, April 4; if you don't pass the first sample, you will have another chance in section on Wednesday, April 10. The topic for each sample will be something designed to be easy to write about, so you can concentrate on your writing rather than the underlying ideas. In the hour-plus class period, we will ask you to write roughly 300 words (for comparison, this paragraph contains about 150 words); this should give you plenty of time to revise and rewrite your passage. To pass, your writing must have essentially perfect mechanics, grammar, and usage, and it must be reasonably clear and well organized. You may bring a dictionary or any other reference works on paper. These samples are short enough, and you have enough time, that we do expect everyone to write these samples by hand (unless you have an officially recognized disability, of course).

Computer access: For the rest of your work, 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.

Assignment requirements: The separate sheet titled "Writing Assignment Requirements" contains important advice that can affect your grade. Read it now and check it again every time you start a new assignment. There are also mechanical details for submitting assignments; each major assignment is submitted in two ways: on paper (including all the previously submitted, marked versions) and electronically via checkmate.ics.uci.edu). In a class this size, it's important that every assignment be precisely where it's supposed to be at the time it's supposed to be there.

What you must do right now to get started in ICS 139W:
— If you prefer to read your electronic mail on an account other than your UCInet account, redirect your mail at http://www.oit.uci.edu/email/deliverypoint.html.
— Give a snapshot of yourself (with your name written on the back) to your TA. This will help us learn your names quickly. (This is not just for fun—it's a course requirement.) Also log on to eee.uci.edu, choose Surveys, and complete the ICS 139W Questionnaire (by the end of the first week for full credit).
— On the Web, go to checkmate.ics.uci.edu, log in with your UCInet ID, choose "Course Listing" for "Spring 2013," click "Go" next to ICS 139W, and then click "List me for this course." You'll submit some of your work electronically; this step is necessary to set that up.
— Sign yourself up for ICS 139W at Piazza.com and read a little bit there about how the site works.

Good advice and helpful hints:

Check your electronic mail regularly; this is an official channel for course announcements.

Attendance in class is important (and essential on the days marked with a bullet (•) in the outline below). Class participation of various kinds is rewarded at 20% of the course grade.

Always keep your own copy of each assignment, both electronically and on paper; if an assignment should get lost in the shuffle (or if some server should crash, which has happened in the past), we'll expect you to be able to supply a replacement easily.

If you find yourself having trouble or getting behind, speak with a TA or the instructor. But never take the shortcut of copying someone else's work and turning it in; the consequences can be far worse than just a low score on one assignment. The ICS department takes academic honesty very seriously; for a more complete discussion, see the ICS academic honesty policy: http://www.ics.uci.edu/ugrad/policies/index.php#academic_honesty

The best advice we can give you is to read all the materials with care and pay close attention to what they specify. Even if a natural language like English is not quite as precise as a formal language like Java, precise expression in English is precisely what this course is about and we have tried to reflect that in our course materials. The time it takes to read each assignment twice will be time well spent.

Approximate course outline:

Week	Date	Topic	Item(s) Due [see notes below]
1.	2 April	Introduction to the course
	3 April (section)	Consultation on "Changing System" topics and "Writing Instructions"
	4 April	• In-class writing sample I	"Changing System" Email to Steve Slota (sslota@uci.edu)
2.	9 April	Oral presentation techniques
	10 April (section)	• Using other people's writing  • In-class writing sample II (if necessary)	"Writing Instructions" (draft, 3 copies)*
	11 April	• Oral synopsis of system changes	"Changing System" synopsis (oral)
3.	16 April	• Group editing of letter influencing policy	"Influencing Policy" (draft)* "Writing Instructions" (final)
	17 April (section)	• Group editing of introductory tutorials	"Changing System" intro (draft)*
	18 April	• Oral tutorial introduction to system (videotaped)	"Changing System" intro (oral)
4.	23 April	• Oral tutorial intro to system continued (video)	"Influencing Policy" (revised)
	24 April (section)	Consultation hour	"Changing System" intro (final)
	25 April	• Group editing of change proposals	"Changing System" proposal (draft with slides)*
5.	30 April	Effective typography and presentation graphics [guidelines; specimen]; Information visualization
	1 May (section)	• Review of videotapes
	2 May	Résumés and cover letters	"Changing System" proposal (revised with slides)
6.	7 May	Professional ethics	"Influencing Policy" (final)
	8 May (section)	Consultation hour	Graphics Activity (optional)
	9 May	Nature and structure of language
7.	14 May	Nature and structure of language (continued)
	15 May (section)	• Testing of PowerPoint files
	16 May	• Oral proposal of change to decision-makers	"Changing System" proposal (oral)
8.	21 May	Consultation hour	"Changing System" proposal (final)
	22 May (section)	• Oral proposals (continued once)
	23 May	• Oral proposals (continued twice)
9.	28 May	• Oral proposals (continued thrice)
	29 May (section)	Consultation hour
	30 May	• Group editing of promotion pieces  or résumés and cover letters	"Changing System" promo or résumé/cover letter (draft)*
10.	4 June	• Oral promotion of change to users	"Changing System" promo or résumé/cover (final)  "Changing System" promo (oral)
	5 June (section)	Consultation hour
	6 June	Epilogue

All assignments listed above must be submitted in two ways (on paper at the start of class and via Checkmate), as described on the previous page, with these exceptions:

• Of course the Email message listed above should not be submitted any other way.
• The assignments marked "oral" do not entail any other submission (though most of them have related parts that do have to be submitted in multiple ways; those parts are all listed separately).
• The assignments marked with an asterisk (*) should be submitted in class on paper only; they do not have to be submitted electronically.