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Module Code - Title:

ME6051 - ADVANCED TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION FOR ENGINEERS

Year Last Offered:

2025/6

Hours Per Week:

Lecture

1

Lab

0

Tutorial

1

Other

0

Private

0

Credits

3

Grading Type:

Prerequisite Modules:

Rationale and Purpose of the Module:

Syllabus:

This module builds a foundation for the dissemination of research results by preparing engineering students for publishing/writing as a part of their professional careers and/or further postgraduate studies. Students in this module examine the communicative, metacognitive, affective and social strategies that they employ as they negotiate their way through their writing, research and publishing processes. Students develop criteria for measuring the effectiveness of the strategies they employ as they go through these three processes and develop strategies for developing alternatives to ineffective strategies. Students also learn to assess the context into which they write in order to better inform their lexical, grammatical, rhetorical and ethical choices. Such choices take audience and purpose into account as well as genre: industrially focused conferences/seminars, academic conferences and academic journal articles. Students learn the transferable value of skills employed for contextual assessment to other professional writing contexts and develop and begin exercising a long-term writing-for-publication strategy.

Learning Outcomes:

Cognitive (Knowledge, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Evaluation, Synthesis)

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: 1. Demonstrate that they can communicate technical matter with due consideration of editorial, ethical and legal issues and policies, and that they can organise and prioritise technical material/data and communicate such material in print in an authoritative and ethically correct manner (in-class exercises and written examination). 2. Demonstrate that they can communicate technical material to a variety of audiences, taking into account that engineers engage both academic and professional audiences and that, in the latter case, audiences may range from investors to engineers to lay persons (in-class exercises and written examination). 3. Demonstrate that they can write technical papers for conferences (industry or academic focused) and journal publication with clear, logical, easy-to-follow conceptual and/or argumentative frameworks on relevant subjects, using appropriate language and rigorously defended data-collection methodologies and data analyses (in-class exercises and written examination). 4. Outline the structures and styles used for each of these types of documents (in-class exercises and written examination). 5. Demonstrate their ability to identify and communicate their understanding of their writing and research processes and the various stages in the conference and journal publishing process as well as the strategies they employ in order to achieve goals related to research, writing and publishing and evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies in the context of the writing purpose and audience (in-class exercises and written examination). 6. Recount the process of getting a paper accepted and published for a conference and for a journal (in-class exercises and written examination). 7. Understand the concept of copyright and apply acceptable procedures for dealing with copyrighted information (in-class exercises and written examination). 8. Understand the concept of plagiarism and apply appropriate strategies and academic and stylistic techniques and conventions typically employed in an effort to avoid an accusation of plagiarism (in-class exercises and written examination).

Affective (Attitudes and Values)

1. Students will value academic and scientific rigour (in-class exercises and written examination). 2. Students will value the transferability of the writing, research and publication skills learned for this module to other research and writing contexts (in-class exercises and written examination). 3. Students will write with more confidence and develop strategies that foster positive associations between themselves and their own writing process (in-class exercises and written examination). 4. Students will value the peer review process as a means of 'getting it right' as that concept is understood in an academic and publishing, engineering context, including features such as impact factors and validated engineering procedures (in-class exercises and written examination).

Psychomotor (Physical Skills)

N/A

How the Module will be Taught and what will be the Learning Experiences of the Students:

Research Findings Incorporated in to the Syllabus (If Relevant):

Prime Texts:

Rubens, P. (2001) Science & Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, 2nd ed , New York: Routledge
Valiela, I. (2009) Doing Science: Design, Analysis, and Communication of Scientific Research, 2nd ed , New York: Oxford University Press.
Young, T. (2005) Technical Writing A-Z: A Commonsense Guide to Engineering Reports and Theses, British English Edition. , New York: ASME Press.

Other Relevant Texts:

Huff, A.S. (1999) Writing for Scholarly Publication , London: Sage.
Ballenger, B. (2006) The Curious Researcher: A Guide to Writing Research Papers, 5th ed , New York: Pearson Longman.
Klingner, J., Scanlon, D. and Pressley, M. (2005) How to publish in scholarly journals , Educational Researcher, 34: 14-20.
American Psychological Association (2001) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 5th ed , Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Books.
Murray, R. (2005) Writing for Academic Journals , UK: Open University Press
Strunk, Jr., W. and White, E.B. (2000) The Elements of Style, 4th ed. , New York: Longman.

Programme(s) in which this Module is Offered:

Semester(s) Module is Offered:

Module Leader:

alan.odonovan@ul.ie