Course Description:

The University of British Columbia’s English 301 is an online technical writing course. The intention of the course is to teach students how to write for business in a concise and easily understandable way.

Students reflect on their own technical writing skills in form of blog posts, write peer reviews of other class mates technical and professional writing, and practice technical writing. The course is also useful for developing employment opportunities through UBC’s career services unit.

The course is broken up into four units:

• Unit 1: Students learn how to write business correspondence while studying the basic principles of  technical writing with the text book, Technical Communication 13th Edition. Students also create teams with drafted proposals during this time.
• Unit 2: Students, in their teams draft report proposals. Those proposals are analyzed by other team members. Resumes are build and Linked in is explored in this unit.
• Unit 3: Students draft a formal outline, and it it analyzed by team members. A job application package is then drafted using UBC’s career services website.
• Unit 4: Students complete their final report. Networking strategy will also be visited in this unit.

*Note that there will be continuous peer reviews and blogs throughout every unit.

Expectations:

Upon the completion of English 301 students will have designed online web portfolios to be used for employment purposed and resumes for the employment social network, Linkedin, and be more confident in their ability to write for business and professional purposes.

English 301 will be useful for those who have started a business and have written a business plan while having limited knowledge of technical writing (such as the writer of this blog), as well as those seeking gainful employment in the near future.