Welcome this student blog by Mike Powar for his UBC course on technical writing titled English 301: Technical Writing. That student, Mike Powar, is me, the writer writing this posting. As I work my way through the course description, I will also get a sense of things such as the expected degree of formality posts such as this are to be written.
The intention of this course is for students from a variety of faculties at the University of British Columbia to learn about different ways of communicating in what are referred to as “business and professional contexts”. The types of writing students will produce for these contexts will be “abstracts, proposals, applications, reports, correspondence and online communications” — such as “emails, texts, Web Folio (I am interested to learn about this, since I have never heard of a web folio before) and networking”.
This course is fully online. For the most part, all UBC classes this term are online due to safety measures the university has put in place as part of its response to COVID-19. This section of English 301 however, was always meant to be online and has been for several years.
The course is made up of four units:
- Principles and practices (business correspondence and the “principles of audience, tone, clarity, and presentation”)
- Report proposals & Terms with Audience in Mind
- Report outline / design & Job Application documents and tools
- Formal report writing & networking strategies
I expect this course to be helpful practice for the type of writing I will do after graduation from University. I like the idea of a course intended to assist me with skills I believe I have lots of room to improve on and look forward to the opportunities to learn by practice. The part that I expect to be challenging is the online learning aspect of it. The work from home situation has not been one I have thrived in thus far. My favourite places to work from – on campus are no longer accessible and I have yet to find alternatives that come close to matching the things I look for in a place to work from.
To close, I will add that even this writing feels like a step in the right direction that I hope to extend until the completion of the course.