Business Writing – Course Introduction
This page contains a rough outline of the aims and objectives of the course, subdivided into separate areas. For additional information, such as a list of potential topics, etc., as well as a brief introduction to some of the relevant aspects of the course, please see my introductory presentation.
Reading, Referencing & Summarising Skills
Aim: Identify various reading skills and apply them in reading, summarising and referencing literature on engineering and other related disciplines.
Associated activities:
- Developing a basic understanding of academic &. business writing practice and such notions such as appropriate citing & referencing in order to avoid plagiarism. This includes learning about and practising different referencing types and methods.
- Developing general library and online research skills, so that these can form the basic for research into the scenarios explored in the various types of writing.
- Exploring definitions and summarising/paraphrasing techniques, and practising them in order to develop associated skills for technical descriptions.
Formats of Business Comunication
Aim: Identify the text structures and language features characteristic of business correspondence, and apply them in producing short types of business correspondence.
Associated activities:
- You’ll work alone or in groups to identify the text structures and language features characteristic of business correspondence (emails and letters) typical of a technical setting through inquiry and corpus-based self-discovery.
- You then apply these in producing simulated business communication.
Writing Application Documents
Aim: Identify the text structures and language features characteristic of Application documents.
Associated activities:
- You’ll work alone or in groups to identify the text structures and language features characteristic of business correspondence (emails and letters) typical of a technical setting through inquiry and corpus-based self-discovery.
- You then apply these in producing simulated business communication.
Understanding & Writing Reports (3 wks)
Aim: Identify and compare the structures and language characteristics of various types of reports, focussing mainly on incident and progress reports, and applying this knowledge in writing one of the latter.
Associated activities:
- Through various corpus-based guided activities and discussions (see an example here), you will identify the structure and language characteristics of a number of different types of reports.
- One of the main points of emphasis here will also be to develop an understanding of the similarities and differences between different reports, and how these relate to their individual purposes or stages of a project.
- You will also apply the knowledge gained in this way in producing a standard written progress report.