Engineering 100-980

Tech Comm Assignment #1

Contents

• Tech Comm Assignment #1
  • Contents
  • Purpose
  • Task
  • Criteria for Success

Purpose

The purpose of Tech Comm Assignment #1 is for you to reflect on how and why communication misunderstandings can occur because of genre. It will also help you to gain experience with the basic unit of technical writing: a paragraph with a clear topic sentence that is supported with evidence.

Task

Your task is to write one paragraph that recounts your experience with a communication misunderstanding. It doesn’t matter what this experience was, or what type of communication genre it occurred within.

Your paragraph should include a topic sentence that makes a clear, specific claim, then body/evidence sentences that support your claim. Because this assignment asks you to recount a personal experience, your topic sentence will likely make a claim about the misunderstanding, and your body/evidence sentences will likely describe the misunderstanding and how/why you believe it occurred.

Communication genres we talked about in lecture and discussion include websites, Google Drive, Canvas, Slack, and email. There are many other genres, including: text, group texts, messaging apps like WhatsApp and Discord, social media (public comments and direct messages), Zoom and other video software (FaceTime, etc.), and countless others. All of these are fair game to write about.

Here are some hints to keep you from doing extra work:

• You can also choose an in-person communication genre such as a conversation

• When describing the misunderstanding, it will likely be helpful to think about things like age, gender, socio-economic class, and race. Remember, you want to explain how and why the misunderstanding occurred.

• Please write only a single paragraph. It is not necessary to write more

• Please do not include any visual aids or do any external research. We’ll work on these skills in later exercises.

Criteria for Success

I will grade your paragraph based on completion; however, I expect a substantive response. Paragraphs that are too short, too vague, or don’t fulfill the assignment criteria will not earn credit.