INTRODUCTION
Len Ferry
{1} Communicating in the Technical Workplace targets students like you who are about to face two major transitions in your writing and communication practices: (i) from secondary school to college and (ii) from college to the workplace. Common to both transitions is your college experience. One source of change is the shift to a field specific context–that is, from general studies to studies focused on content specific to your technical program. This will affect both the content and the forms of communication you engage in and with. As a civil engineering student, for example, you will learn about some of the types of report, such as short informal reports and longer feasibility studies, that are regularly required by municipal planning departments. What goes into such documents is the knowledge, theoretical and applied, that you will acquire through your program of study and practical experience. One of the aims of Communicating in the Technical Workplace is to improve your ability to share that content-specific knowledge with others.
{2} In your first transition, although you will continue to draw on and produce documents using techniques and strategies introduced in secondary school, the content and form of those documents as well as the application of the techniques and strategies will change. At this stage in your career, you are being inducted into the technical problems and solutions specific to your field of study as well as a new vocabulary. By the end of your academic career, future employers will look to you as someone with the requisite skills and expertise to contribute to their projects. You will be a subject matter expert. In your second transition, therefore, you will be expected to communicate effectively and efficiently using the new content that you are learning (your program specific knowledge and experience) in forms of written communication (memos, emails, letters, descriptions, specifications, reports, arguments, studies, etc.) common to the workplace.
{3} To keep you engaged, each chapter will begin with a brief introduction that focuses on what a student should learn from and be able to apply after reading the chapter. Each introduction will invite you to understand the chapter content through the experience of an imaginary student named Val. Assume that like many of you Val is being exposed to and learning about the specialized knowledge of a technical field, such as construction engineering, electrical and electronics, mechanical engineering, photonics, and renewable energies, for the first time. Moreover, Val is expected not only to learn the theory and apply it practically, but also to communicate their understanding with fellow students, professors, and, for those completing work-placement experiences, potentially with members of the general public and professionals in their future field of work.
