Syllabus

Administrative details

Location and time

Porter Acad 144, MWF 3:30--4:40

Instructor and TA

The office hours may change during the quarter, due to conflicting schedules---it is a good idea to verify the hours before coming.

Tutors

We will have one or two writing tutors this quarter (depending on enrollment).

You will be expected to see a tutor about every two weeks (four or five times during the quarter). Some students may be requested to work with the tutors more frequently. Past experience has been that the best writers were also the most diligent about seeing the tutors (or that the students who used the tutors most ended up writing best---cause and effect are a little hard to separate here).

Required Texts

Strunk and White,

The Elements of Style [SJW79]. Strunk and White is the best short book on writing style. You should read it from cover to cover at the beginning and the end of this quarter, and re-read it every five years thereafter. The examples are subtly humorous, but you might not appreciate the humor on the first reading.

Huckin and Olsen,

Technical Writing and Professional Communication for Nonnative Speakers of English [HO91]. We used the first edition of this text (which was called English for Science and Technology: a Handbook for Nonnative Speakers) with good results for two years, and the new edition for a few more. The new edition seems to be even better---it is well-organized, has good examples, both positive and negative, has a fairly good chapter on the use of visuals and a good chapter on oral presentations, and is available in paperback. Chapter 1 is a good explanation of why technical writing is a required course for computer engineers---reading it may help you understand the importance of the entire course.

Also, Chapters 29 through 38 are a handbook designed primarily for advanced non-native speakers of English, a necessity for this class. Parts of this handbook are useful for native speakers too; for instance Chapter 32 deals with modal verbs ( would, could, should, and so forth), which many native speakers have difficulty using correctly in writing. The appendixes include a good short summary of English punctuation of use to everyone.

The text's major weakness for this class is that it is not aimed at computer engineers, but at engineers in general, and especially mechanical engineers, judging from the examples and illustrative material in the text.

We will assign some chapters to read from Huckin and Olsen, but you'll find that browsing through the unassigned chapters will yield useful information. The book is well-written and easy reading---unlike so many of the writing textbooks on the market.

Karplus and Scripture,

Workbook for CMPE 185 Technical Writing for Computer Engineers. This workbook, which will be available electronically, is where your assignments actually are, as well as some other material. We are providing them electronically, rather than as a pre-printed workbook, to save paper and money (the pre-printed ones cost more per page than laser-printing them would have!).

These assignments are designed to be appropriate for computer engineering, and have mostly been developed in 1988 and 1989, although some of them go back several years to other courses at other universities. We welcome motivated, specific, written comment on ways you think they might be improved. Don't just tell us there are too many and they're too hard! We know that, and there's not much we can do about it without seriously weakening the class.

Recommended texts---on reserve in the Science Library

Hornby, Harris, Stewart,

Oxford Student's Dictionary of American English [HRHS86]. Particularly recommended for non-native speakers, this may be the only dictionary that reports such important properties as whether a noun is an uncountable noun (like information or bread) or a countable noun (like bits or computers).

Diana Hacker,

A Writer's Reference [Hac89]. A dull, boring, but very straightforward undergraduate reference grammar. Easy to use, clear examples, no mystification. Good for clearing up some of the fine points of punctuation and grammar.

Scott Brookie,

UNIX for Luddites [Bro86]. You should already know most of the material in this manual, but it is a good example of documentation for naive users.

Also on reserve

Marie-Claire van Leunen,

A Handbook for Scholars [van78]. A well-written book that is a real pleasure to read, despite the unpromising title.

Edmund Tufte,

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [Tuf83]. This is a superb book, but too expensive to require. The publisher has a strange pricing policy (no discount to bookstores), so this book is not often available in bookstores---you'll have to order it directly from the publisher if you want a copy. We will not spend as much time on the subject of graphical design as it deserves. We've been told that Computer Literacy in San Jose, and Stacey's in Palo Alto occasionally carry it. There is a companion volume Envisioning Information, which has much of the same material, but is aimed at a somewhat more general audience.

Other interesting books, not on reserve

The following books have been put on reserve in the past, but demand for them has not been high enough to justify limiting their circulation in this way.

Wilson Follett,

Modern American Usage [Fol80]. This book explains words that are often mis-used. Unfortunately, it only covers words in general usage, not the jargon used by engineers and computer scientists.

Donald Knuth,

TeX, the Program [Knu86]. You are not expected to read much of this book, as it is a complete source listing for the TeX document compiler. It is included as an example of what good in-program documentation looks like.

Knuth, Larrabee, and Roberts,

Mathematical Writing [KLR88]. This report is based on a course [CS 209] of the same name given at Stanford University during Autumn quarter, 1987. We have deleted the mathematical writing exercise from the course this year (it is now given in CE/CIS 200), but those of you planning to go on to graduate school may want to learn something about mathematical writing anyway.

Homework Assignments

In previous years, the instructors distributed the workbook as .dvi and PostScript files, which some people had difficulty reading. In 1995, Kevin tried setting up World-Wide Web files, so that access would be easier, but the latex2html translator had difficulty with a number of the constructions in the LaTeX source code. He provided a table of contents for the assignments, and provided pointers to the .dvi and Postscript files that Mosaic or Netscape could follow. In Fall 1995, Carl Roth found a workaround for a bug in the PERL implementation, and Tracy Larrabee managed to get the entire workbook through latex2html. Let's hope it works again this quarter! Learning to use the World-Wide Web is a valuable skill for a computer engineer or scientist in any case.

To read the files on-line, use Mosaic (or Netscape or one of the other World-Wide Web browsers), and open the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~karplus/. This is the home page for Kevin Karplus, and contains pointers to several other documents, including the assignments for this course. If you have not used Netscape before, almost any of the CATS consultants in any of the computer labs can help you, because browsing the World-Wide Web has become a major form of recreation for the consultants.

Although it is possible to print directly from many World-Wide Web browsers, I'll also provide PostScript files generated directly from the LaTeX originals. These will generally produce a better looking printed copy that will take up less paper. There will be hypertext links (pointers) from the WWW pages to the PostScript files.

Please read each of the assignments carefully---don't rely on a vague memory of in-class discussion. Common problems that have come up with the assignments in the past are discussed in the assignment writeups, but still about half of the problems we see in turned in work are things that we specifically warn about.

Evaluation

CE185 has no mid-term or final exams. You will be judged about 80% on the papers you write, 10% on the oral presentation near the end of the quarter, and 10% on in-class work, participation in discussions (both in class and electronic) peer editing, and so forth. The final paper is about a quarter of the total weight for the papers (20% overall).

We will have no final exam, and Kevin has to be in St. Louis on the day the exam is scheduled. Everything must be turned in by the last day of class, Friday June 7.

Collaboration

Each paper you turn in must have the names of the authors prominently displayed at the beginning. Anyone caught using a term paper service or copying from books, journals, or fellow students will be punished as severely as the University allows. Flunking the course is an absolute minimum.

On some assignments (like the final project), we will encourage group authorship, and on others we will insist on single authors. If you are not sure which category an assignment falls into, please ask.

We encourage you to have someone else read your drafts, point out errors and unclear passages, and make suggestions, but not do re-writing for you. We will frequently use class time to exchange drafts of papers and discuss them in small groups.

We also encourage you to use the tutors who are assigned to the course. In the past, predictably, only the best students have made substantial use of the tutors. The tutors are students who have taken the course previously, and who know what we want you to learn, and how to help you do it.

This is a difficult course, but anyone who uses the resources we provide can pass it, as well as learn something worthwhile. A lot of you hate to write and think that you are not very good at it. We don't guarantee that you will learn to like to write, but we can guarantee that if you do what we ask, and work hard at it, that you will learn to write competently, and perhaps a good deal better.

The colleges also provide writing tutors, and we encourage you to seek their aid as well.

Anyone whose help you use (including the instructors, tutors, classmates, spouse, ...) should be acknowledged in the turned-in assignment. Formal reports should have an acknowledgement section, but other document styles usually need a separate cover memo to the instructors for acknowledgements---you should regard this cover memo as a standard part of anything you turn in, even if it is not specifically requested for an assignment. Of course, any books or journals you use as sources should be properly cited, and we intend to teach you how to do this, so that you do not plagiarize (copy without citing) unintentionally.

Claiming someone else's work as your own is the biggest academic sin.

If you are not certain about how much help is permitted, how much is encouraged, and how much will be considered cheating, please talk with us. You may be pleasantly surprised to find out that we allow more assistance than you thought.

Special guest lecturers

We are trying to arrange to have some guest lectures this quarter. As a courtesy to our guest lecturers, please make an extra effort to be on time for their lectures. We are hoping to schedule the following guest lectures:

Schedule (due dates)

The following schedule lists the assignments for this quarter with due dates. If the due dates are changed, we will inform you in class. Note that many assignments overlap; this is the normal case for people who write for a living, as engineers do (30--50% of the work day).

You are required to turn in your early drafts, as well as the final copy---the early drafts allow us to see how well you edit and how well you respond to suggestions from your peers.

Save your assignments after we return them to you! We will ask you to turn them all in at the end of the quarter, so that we can write a fair evaluation of your work. Get a large envelope to keep all returned assignments in, so that you can turn in the entire portfolio at the end of the quarter.

Note: no final exam is scheduled. All work must be completed and turned in by June 7.

Reading assignments

We have collected all the reading assignments scattered through this reader into the following schedule, and have included chapters to read that are not mentioned explicitly in the individual assignments. Several of the chapters are listed repeatedly---this does not mean you need to read them repeatedly, but that you should read them the first time they appear, and review the relevant parts for the later assignments. Note that this reading is in addition to reading the material in this workbook, which should be read in order, with each section read a week or two before the corresponding assignment is due.

It is probably a good idea to read ahead, since you wil have more time at the beginning of the quarter than the end of the quarter.

We have not scheduled the reading of Chapters 6, 20, and 31--38, but you should make time to read them. Non-native speakers are particularly encouraged to read Chapters 29--38 early in the quarter.