SPRING QUARTER 2000 -- Information and Computer Science -- UC Irvine

ICS 139W Course Reference

COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS FOR COMPUTER SCIENTISTS

Instructor: David G. Kay, 408E Computer Science (824-5072; kay@uci.edu)

I will be in or near my office during these scheduled hours, during which course-related matters will have first priority: Tuesdays from 10:00 to 11:30 and Thursdays from 2:00 to 3:00. Of course emergencies may come up, but I will try to give advance notice of any change. If I'm not immersed in something else, I'll be glad to answer short questions whenever I'm in my office, so feel free to drop by any time. I'll also be happy to make appointments for other times during the week.

Teaching Assistant: Manish Rawat (mrawat2k@gsm.uci.edu). Manish will devote some of the scheduled discussion time to individual consultations, and he will also be readily available by appointment.

Course goals: Even if you intend to spend your entire professional life designing software or configuring networks, you will spend more of it writing prose--memos, proposals, documentation, electronic mail--than you will writing code. Yet in most of your courses, this vital skill is exercised only after the last test case is run, in the half-hour before the due date. Here we have the luxury of concentrating on your writing skills, with an emphasis on writing to meet the specific needs of different audiences; you will also make oral presentations and design presentation graphics.

This course satisfies UCI's upper division writing requirement, which is designed to give students the opportunity to do writing in ways that are specific to their own academic disciplines, guided by faculty from that discipline rather than from English.

Prerequisite concepts: Satisfaction of the lower division writing requirement is a prerequisite for this course, so we will expect every student to be able to write cogent, grammatical English at the level expected in Writing 39C.

Meeting place and times: Lecture meets Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:50 in Steinhaus Hall 128. Discussion meets Mondays and Wednesdays 10:00-11:50 in CS 243; some discussion days will involve required activities, but others will be set aside for individual consultations on your work.

Questions and announcements: You can usually get a response to your course-related questions within a few hours (though a bit less frequently on the weekends) by sending electronic mail to the ID ics139w@uci.edu. This goes to both of us, and whoever reads it first can respond. If you need to reach one of us individually, our individual IDs are listed above.

We may also send course announcements by Email to the official course mailing list, so you should check your Email regularly. This mailing list uses the Email address the registrar has for you--your UCInet ID (whatever@uci.edu) unless you have changed it--so if you usually read your mail somewhere else, you should forward it from your uci.edu account or change your address with the registrar. This course has a home page at http://classes.uci.edu/00s/36145 (which you can reach more mnemonically from the instructor's home page, http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kay); official course Email is archived at http://e3.uci.edu/00s/w3m3/36145; a course Note Board (discussion group for student postings) is available at http://classes.uci.edu/00s/36145/NB.

Course materials:Introduction to Technical Writing, Process & Practice, second edition, by Lois Johnson Rew. This book addresses different forms and aspects of technical writing as well as general writing guidelines.

An English dictionary. Ideally you should have a paperback dictionary as well as a large, unabridged dictionary where you'll do most of your writing. The former has faster access time but the latter has greater capacity, so both are valuable. A paperback thesaurus is also useful, though you should remember that a thesaurus doesn't give the connotations or appropriate contexts for the synonyms it lists.

Writing from A to Z (currently in the third edition) by Ebest, Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu. This is the writing reference for lower division writing at UCI. Everyone needs a general writing reference, and you should get this one if you don't have it or an equivalent. Earlier editions are fine.

(Optional) Bugs in Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose, by Lyn Dupré. The author has worked as an editor for a wide range of famous computer scientists. Her book addresses the very hardest, but most essential, part of becoming a good writer: developing an "ear for language."

Course requirements and grading: To satisfy the upper division writing requirement, you must receive a grade of C or better in this course; you may also take this class on a pass/not-pass basis (which also requires work at the C level to pass). In addition to satisfactory participation and completion of the assignments, to pass 139W you must successfully complete an in-class writing sample (described in more detail in the following section) demonstrating your ability to write a short passage in clear, correct, grammatical, cogent academic English.

* Three main writing assignments, each with multiple parts, each worth 15-25% of the course grade.

* About three smaller exercises, each worth 5-10%.

* Class attendance and participation, including four oral presentations, worth about 25% overall. The importance of participation in this course is clear from its weight. Much of the learning comes from activities we conduct in class; there is no other way to make them up, and your grade will suffer if you miss them. The course outline indicates certain dates with a bullet (*); it is particularly important that you attend class on those dates.

There will be no exams.

In-class writing sample: The first in-class writing sample is scheduled for Thursday, April 6; if you don't pass the first sample, you will have another chance during the second week. The topic for each sample will be something designed to be easy to write about so you can concentrate on your writing rather than the underlying ideas. In the 80-minute class period, we will ask you to write roughly 300 words (for comparison, this page contains nearly 600 words); this should give you plenty of time to revise and rewrite your passage. To pass, your writing must have essentially perfect mechanics, grammar, and usage, and it must be reasonably clear and well organized. You may bring a dictionary or any other reference works. Being able to produce clear and correct writing is a requirement for completing lower division writing, so we expect everyone in the class to be able to demonstrate this ability.

Computer access: Students in ICS 139W this quarter have access to the ICS open labs. These machines run Windows NT and have the full Microsoft Office suite of software, including Word and PowerPoint. For this course you may use any system to which you legitimately have access; we will require that you learn and use PowerPoint for part of one assignment.

Drafts: For most assignments, you will turn in a draft. Don't think of the draft as a haphazard "rough draft" or first attempt. Every one of your drafts should be as good as you can make it--thoughtful, polished work with no spelling or sentence-level errors. Typically we will edit these drafts in class; for the longer assignments, you will turn in a revised draft based on the in-class editing, which we will grade and return to you before you turn in your final version. Don't use your group editing time for proofreading; it's your job to do that in advance, so your reader can address the content.

For revised drafts that we grade, the draft accounts for one-third of the assignment's grade (the other two-thirds being the final version, of course). For each later version of an assignment that you turn in, you must turn in copies of all the earlier versions.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism means presenting somebody else's work as if it's your own. You may use whatever outside sources (books, friends, interviews, periodicals) are appropriate for an assignment, so long as you cite them (that is, so long as you indicate the source of anything you didn't think up and write yourself). Plagiarism is academically dishonest, and we expect that nobody in the class will engage in it. Enough said.

Grammatical mechanics: We expect you, as upper-division students who have satisfied the lower-division writing requirement, to have a good command of the mechanical principles of English syntax, spelling, and punctuation. The focus of this course is on content, organization, audience, and style. We expect that you will take the time to make your assignments nearly flawless from a mechanical standpoint. We will not mark every mechanical error on your papers, but they will lower your grade, and we will ask you to resubmit assignments with significant mechanical problems. Students wishing to hone these mechanical skills should contact the Learning and Academic Resource Center on campus (http://www.uci.edu/~ugs/larc/).

Spelling and spelling checkers: Never rely solely on an automatic spelling checker; they help, but they do not substitute for human intelligence in proofreading. Spelling checkers locate some typographical errors, but they cannot identify such commonly occurring errors as incorrectly used words ("of" for "or," "it's" for "its," "there" for "their" or "they're") or inadvertent substitution of one valid word for another (such as "consistency" for "consistently" in the following paragraph). Always leave yourself the time for a calm, undistracted review of your document for these mechanical errors, independent of your revisions for content and style.

Counting words and pages: So that we can speak consistently of the length of assignments, "one page" will refer to one standard, double-spaced typewritten page. At roughly 30 lines of text per page and roughly 10 words per line, one page by this measure contains roughly 300 words. Typeset material from books and magazines is typically denser. You should use this as a general guideline, and not waste time counting individual words by hand. Most word processors have automatic word counters, however, which you may use if you wish.

Typography: Your papers must be typewritten or word-processed. Drafts should be double-spaced; all papers should follow the rules of good typographic design discussed in class. If at all possible, use a laser or ink-jet printer, such as those in the ICS labs. If you must use a dot-matrix printer, you must use a new, dark ribbon.

Binding: Do not use any kind of report cover. A simple staple in the upper left-hand corner is perfectly fine.

Approximate course outline:

Week	Date	Topic	Item(s) Due
1.	3/5 April (sec.)	[No section meetings this week]
	4 April	Introduction to the course
	6 April	* In-class writing sample I
2.	10/12 April (sec.)	Editing Exercise	"Changing System" Email to TA (mrawat2k@gsm.uci.edu)
	11 April	Oral presentation techniques
	13 April	* In-class writing sample II (if necessary)	"Editing Exercise" (final)
3.	17/19 April (sec.)	* Using other people's writing	"Writing Instructions" (draft)
	18 April	Effective typography and presentation graphics [example]
	20 April	* Oral synopsis of system changes	"Changing System" synopsis (oral)
4.	24/26 April (sec.)	* Group editing of introductory tutorials	"Changing System" intro (draft)
	25 April	* Oral tutorial introduction to system (videotaped)	"Changing System" intro (oral) "Writing Instructions" (final)
	27 April	* Oral tutorial introductions (continued)
5.	1/3 May (sec.)	* Review of videotapes
	2 May	* Group editing of change proposals	"Changing System" proposal (draft with slides)
	4 May	Résumés and cover letters	"Changing System" proposal (revised with slides)
6.	8/10 May (sec.)	* Group editing of letter influencing policy	"Influencing Policy" (draft)
	9 May	Case studies on effective writing	"Changing System" intro (final)
	11 May	Consultation on résumés and cover letters	"Influencing Policy" (revised)
7.	15 May (sec.)	Consultation on presentations
	16 May	* Oral proposal of change to decision-makers	"Changing System" proposal (oral)
	17 May (sec.)	* Oral change proposals (continued)
	18 May	* Oral change proposals (continued again)
8.	22/24 May (sec.)	Consultation on change proposals	"Influencing Policy" (final) (May 22)
	23 May	Information visualization
	25 May	Web page design issues	"Changing System" proposal (final)
9.	29 May (sec.)	-- Holiday --
	30 May	Nature and structure of language
	31 May (sec.)	Consultation on promotion pieces	Graphics Exercise
	1 June	* Group editing of promotion pieces	"Changing System" promo (draft)
10.	5/7 June (sec.)	Consultation on promotion pieces
	6 June	* Oral promotion of change to users	"Changing System" promo (oral)
	8 June	Epilogue	"Changing System" promo (final)

Friday, March 24, 2000 -- 9:25 AM