Welcome to Engineering Communication CE 333T! This major sequence, undergraduate course is the Civil Engineering version of the required technical communication course in the College of Engineering.

The principle objective of this course is to prepare you for all the communication activities you will engage in as a professional engineer, including various forms of writing, speaking, illustrating, collaborating, and presenting. Since an important part of engineering work is to disseminate the results of research and data collection, the course focuses on reports and presentations. But we also try to duplicate many of the conditions of the workplace, where you will often work with cross-functional teams on collaborative projects and where you will often be communicating to people who are NOT engineers.

This course prepares engineering students to communicate engineering innovations and solutions to a range of audiences, from non-technical to technical. To acheive this objective you will produce communications in all available forms -- print documents, oral presentations, electronic documents -- culminating in a final report and presentation for a management client. Teamwork skills and the relevance of communication ethics to engineering practice are taught through case studies and collaborative assignments. The course is designed to help you accomplish the following goals:

• develop a clear technical writing style through drafting and revising written documents
• gather and manage information and data effectively
• organize, evaluate, and select information appropriately for the audience
• use appropriate formats for proposals, reports, instructions, and correspondence
• incorporate unambiguous and readable graphics in documents
• give effective oral presentations
• collaborate well with others (including electronically)
• work successfully to solve problems as both a member and a leader of a team
• use appropriate communication strategies to handle ethical dilemmas
• develop an understanding of the ethics of engineering communication, research, and practice

In this class, we will use a progressive sequence of assignments and exercises to help you develop your communication skills. We'll start with a small document (see "Memo" under Written Assignments) and work up to a full-scale formal report and presentation on an engineering disaster that you wish to investigate.

In this class, you get to write and talk about whatever engineering topic interests you. Just remember that you have to interest your reader or listener, too!