Laura’s Winning Ideas

I subscribe to The Scout Report, a publication that’s been monitoring the web since 1994 and provides brief descriptions of sites we might otherwise miss.

Here are two with material you can use to help technical professionals improve their ability to win work:

Rhetoric for Engineers
http://www.tcnj.edu/~rgraham/rhetoric/

As a field of study, rhetoric has enjoyed a popular resurgence in at the college level, and when deployed effectively, various rhetorical devices can make any piece of writing much more compelling. Ron Graham has created this site designed to help engineers and “other practical people” with the practice and art of rhetoric. The site includes a summary of basic rhetoric, along with some “Two-Minute Drills”, which are designed to help engineers with developing answers to questions like “Are engineers made or born?” and “Define ‘reliability’”. Visitors can also look over the site’s complete contents via an interactive guide which covers everything from abstraction to workplace distractions. [KMG]

Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students
http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/

Crafting meaningful and articulate lab presentations and correspondence can be difficult for anyone, including engineers and other scientists. This particular set of resources is deigned to teach engineering and science students about creating and writing materials such as resumes, formal laboratory reports, presentation slides, and so on. The guidelines are gathered into several different sections, including “Introduction”, “Presentations”, “Correspondence”, and “Formal Reports”. There is material for instructors here as well, and the offerings include pieces on the design
of writing assignments, the interactive teaching of writing, and the evaluation of writing assignments.  Finally, the site also contains a number of writing exercises on grammar, punctuation, and word usage. [KMG]

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2008.
http://scout.wisc.edu/

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