Academic, professional & technical communication

Professor Chris Winberg,

Fundani Centre for Higher Education Development,

Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Professional communication

Academic communication

Technical communication

Academic, professional & technical writing

Communicating outside the discipline

Communicating inside the discipline

Why writing is important Reading and writing are linked to cognitive

development (this is the main role of academic writing);

Being developing good professional and technical writing is key to promotion and success in the workplace;

How can we make students’ multilingualism an asset in preparing students for the workplace?

Professional writingCreate opportunities for professional writing (cv, letters, minutes, etc.)

Academic writing

http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/2009/04/writing-essay-in-english.html

Set academic writing tasks (e.g., reflective reports) to accompany practical tasks.

Technical writingShould be integrated with coursework…

Implications for teaching Students need to be aware of the three

different ‘genres’ (academic, technical and professional);

Students should be alerted to inappropriate mixes of informal and academic/professional/technical types;

Students need to be familiar with the acronyms and abbreviations of the field (particularly for technical writing);

All students need to develop editing skills – they should use spellcheck and grammatik to check spelling and correct common grammatical errors;

Introduce students to on-line writing resources.

There are many resources out there

Make sure students have help students with their writing;

Make writing fun; Bring in a guest lecturer to

explain the important of writing (e.g., engineers spend 30% of their work time writing);

Display examples of students work.

More questions… Would it be possible/desirable to have a multi-pronged

approach (lexical level, structure/process, genre, and socio-cultural)?

To write like a scientist, you need to read like a scientist (Stoller et al., 2005).

Are there forms of academic writing that are more (or less) aligned with technical writing forms? (e.g., reports rather than academic essays).

What is the tolerance for language errors in technical fields? Can communication teachers teach technical

communication?! (or should this be done by discipline specialists?).