English 8115 Project

This final project is a chance for you to apply what you learned in this class to practical technical writing situations. For this project, anything that falls within the broad category of technical writing is appropriate.

Project Options
For this project, you have three different options:

1. Your own project
2. Professional design for a client
3. Website usability testing

Option 1—Your Own Project
You may be in the process of writing a thesis or dissertation, a thesis proposal, a dissertation prospectus, a research proposal, a narrative/justification for a non-thesis project. Any of these can be your final project for this class. If you choose this option, this project will be individual.

If you choose this option, consider the time limitation of this class. For example, if you choose your dissertation as your final project but you haven’t started on it, it’s not going to be practical. You should at least have a rough draft or most of it done already. On the other hand, a 15-30-page dissertation prospectus would be much more doable. 

Option 2—Professional Design for a Client
You may also research and design a professional project for a real client. Your project can be, for example,

• a pamphlet for the Career Services office,
• a grant application for a non-profit organization,
• a web site for a company,
• some online documentation for a software program,
• a recommendations report for solving the communications problems for a company, etc.,
• …

If you choose this option, your project can be collaborative. Of course, under the current pandemic situation, collaboration will be a bit more challenging. You can certainly choose to do this as an individual project. One thing to keep in mind is the appropriate scope of the project. For a collaborative project, my expectation for its scope will naturally be more substantial than that for an individual project. If you’re not sure about the scope, describe the project in detail in your initial proposal, and I’ll help you assess its feasibility.

Option 3—Research Paper
For this option, you will write a research paper similar to those that are published in the academic journals of your field. This option is recommended for those of you in the doctoral program or those of you who plan to apply to a doctoral program.

For this option, you’ll be required to identify a specific journal. Your content and format design should comply strictly with the journal’s submission guidelines. Once you have identified the target journal, you should research into its guidelines for authors. Carefully analyze the following aspects of the journal:

• Its target audience–Some journals may have a predominantly academic audience while others might be geared more toward practitioners. For example, Technical Communication Quarterly and Journal of Business and Technical Communication target the academic audience while Technical Communication published by the Society of Technical Communication has a largely practitioner audience. In addition to this journal’s intended audience, you have a secondary, sometimes more important, audience to consider: your reviewers. For peer-reviewed journals, the reviewers will often be well-published people in the field.
• Its publication conventions–Each field, and even each journal, has its own conventions to follow. These conventions may range from the organization of the article to the particular style the journal uses.
• Its past publications–It’s always a good idea to check out the journal’s publications in the last 12 months. For example if a journal has already published a special issue on content management in the past year, most likely they’re not going to publish another article on content management anytime soon, unless it’s an article that blows the editor away and has the promise of effecting a paradigm shift in your field.