Story in Technical Communication
8-16 weeks
4 projects
Technical communicators are storytellers. Develop skills and learn concepts to utilize effective technical communication skills relevant to various disciplines and professional fields. Skills and concepts within this course can have significant connections to engineering, nursing and healthcare, political science, law, lab sciences, and other fields. Students cultivate their writing and presentation skills, learning how to use story and narrative to inform information design to produce technical documentation that demonstrates an awareness of audience. Students are introduced to storytelling and narrative as a way to engage with technical communication, allowing them to engage with and learn information architecture and best practices for constructing documents and presentations based on core design principles and audience-aware meaning making.
A sample syllabus is provided below.
Possible Projects:
– Job Materials Introduction
– Instructions
– Technical Communication Narrative Project
Dr. Chelsea Murdock
Thoughts on the course:
When teaching this course, I center student interests so that they can build a portfolio of writing that can be used toward their professional goals.
“Telling your research story” has become a more and more common phrase across the disciplines. It is becoming increasingly important that complex topics be accessible and understandable to larger audiences.
Chelsea J. Murdock 