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

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

Technical writing Should 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?).