Fall 2024 Course Review: TC 496

2024-12-20

Course Title: Advanced Technical Communications

Rating: 3.5/5

Instructor (Amy Pavlov)

She made a statement on the first lecture: she cares. Whether it's the preferred name policy, or the acknowledgment to the Anishinaabe people. These gestures formed my respect for her on the first day.

Although grades can come out later than one would expect, she always provides thoughtful feedback.

She and her children are also tøp fans. They were at Clancy Tour as well, though I did not know that until the lecture next day.

Course topics

This course typically accompanies a student's MDE (major design experience), i.e. capstone. We talked about the MAPS of technical communication:

  • Mode: document format and conventions
  • Audience: who's reading it, who could read it, what do they need or expect to know
  • Purpose: after they read it, what do you hope they do
  • Situation: context of a certain piece

We were asked to write stuff, and then sometimes write a reflection discussing MAPS. We needed to justify our choices: Why did you use a bullet point on this slide? Why did you enlarge the figure on the poster? Why didn't you wear fancy shoes on the presentation? etc etc. (Lack of fancy shoes is not a deduction.)

Assignments

The course material is reflected in the assignments. I will talk about the substantial ones I did.

Core assignments: everyone has to do them.

  • Email: how to write professionally
  • Project team charter: a contract which was supposed to be enforced in our project team but has never been cited once after it was written
  • Two presentations: one on any topic, the other on our capstone projects, along with reflection for each
  • Rhetorical analysis: comment on a group's poster and report in a previous year with MAPS principles

Non-core assignments: we can pick 3-4 from a list. I picked:

  • Resume and reflection
  • Poster and reflection
  • Report and reflection

(The reflections are immensely helpful because I can just copy them here)

Presentation 1

Sample slide:

Slide titled "Real-Time Linux has non-embedded use cases". A MIDI keyboard with an arrow labeled "MIDI events" leading to a piano roll. A gamepad with an arrow labeled "Gamepad events" leading to a screenshot from the Untitled Goose Game.

From my reflection:

My presentation is titled “Real-Time Linux is now just Regular Linux,” […]. I could have gone with any other topic, but once I came up with the title, there was nothing else.

The idea came to me when I saw on the news that Linus Torvalds […] has merged the last patch from real-time Linux. […] However, it would be boring for the embedded system folks if I just repeated Prof. Brehob’s words. Therefore, I decided to focus instead on non-embedded implications.

Although the presentation was supposed to be purely informative, I was in fact making an argument that real-time Linux being official is good news, and implicitly suggesting that more people should consider using Linux.

Section "Delivery":

Of all presentations I have made, this is my best one. First of all, I showed a level of confidence that I wish I had in the past few years. I came up to the stage with the expectation that everyone was anticipating my talk, not judging it. I also managed to made it both informative and entertaining. Furthermore, the presentation was timed perfectly, clocking almost exactly 4 minutes, covering exactly what I had prepared for.

One thing I dislike about my delivery is that I was pacing around too much. I was alternating between pointing to the projector screen and reading from the speaker notes. If I could do it again, I would stay close to the laptop, and point to the screen with the laser pointer.

My attire was the best I could do. The pants were on sale at JCPenney, and the shirt and belt were bought on eBay. I have no dress shoes.

Section "Comment":

Watching this video is a form of self-affirmation. Over the year that I spent in Michigan, my self-esteem has grown tenfold, and now I’m doing things I could never have done in Shanghai. Today I went to a Halloween event dressed in a tablecloth with a schematic of the 370 pipeline processor drawn on it and didn’t feel nervous at all.

I sent this video to my mother. Over the month she has been showing it to her coworkers, who don’t understand a word I’m saying but all agree that I look grown up and professional. I’m very thankful that I have the opportunity to reform my opinion of myself.

Verdict

I wrote in my exit survey:

What I learned in TC496 was not a doctrine; even the Assertion-Evidence was a suggestion (the fact that it has a website makes it look like a cult, honestly). It was more subliminal. It reduces the risk that I’m writing something that only makes sense to me.

When artists create digital artwork involving anatomy, they (including me) routinely mirror the canvas to check if something is horribly off. TC496 is that mirror button. It is an inner voice to remind me to think of the audience. I’ve always been doing that since ENGR 100, but this course requires me to explicitly answer the questions: who am I writing for, and what do they need to know? Answering them helps me to stop elaborating on common knowledge and to explain jargon.

Now, a rant. All the tech comm courses I’ve taken over these years (ENGR 100, TC 300, TC 496) seem to have taken a toll on my creative writing. I cannot write a piece of fiction or poetry without the urge to make it basically an event log. Sometimes I need something to make sense only to myself, e.g. the kitchen sink. I need to separate serious writing from casual writing. Sometimes colorless green ideas can sleep furiously.