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to BTW Forum main pagePlease remember to encourage CM/EH 301 students in the web cognate to choose a topic relevant to the web. Designing a website for a customer is an appropriate project for these students, as long as they meet the library research requirement.
Client: Dauphne Maples, chapter President, Society for Technical Communication (STC), president@stc-na.org
Interview officers and other board members about how they do their job, and document the details in a handbook intended for future board members.
Client: Dr. Rose Norman, chapter Employment Coordinator, NormanR@uah.edu
Interview technical communicators from a variety of jobs about what they do on the job. Write these up as a series of interviews to be published in Pen & Brush, the chapter newsletter on as updates to the Technical Writing Jobs website (mortonweb.uah.edu/EHTJobs/career_info.htm). Do library research on career paths in technical communication, and wind up with a report on the range of opportunities Huntsville offers under the umbrella term “technical communicator.”
3. Guide to Making Charts and Graphs with Excel
Client: Cynthia McPherson, UAH Instructor, mcphercy@email.uah.edu
The Huntsville/North Alabama chapter of the Society for Technical Communication informally surveyed local technical communicators about software they use for creating charts and graphs. The great majority use Excel. The UAH English department would like to have a simplified manual to use in CM/EH 301 labs. In Fall 2004, an EH 301 student did an excellent manual for doing scatter plots using Excel. Using that work as a model, another student could create another manual for steps to create bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts. Research would include incorporating material on the appropriate graphs for various kinds of information and could be incorporated in the manual (i.e., a documented manual). With the instructor’s permission, the author(s) should test a draft of the manual on classmates in a CM/EH 301 lab to see how well the instructions work.
4. Website Feasibility Study for [fill in client name]
A good project for web cognate students is to find a client who wants a website and research what would be feasible for that client.
A client may want to know what kind of website would be most appropriate for his/her business, what ISP costs would be, what level of HTML expertise would be needed to maintain a site once launched (or what it would cost to pay for maintenance). Research could include gathering information from other sites of this kind in order to propose various options. The final report could take this to the stage of sketching out (not coding) preliminary web pages, perhaps collecting useful links that would draw people to the site, etc.
Beware: this topic lends itself to generic ("canned") descriptions of how to do a website. Even when students analyze websites of a kind appropriate for the client, they tend to do to little analysis of what can be learned from existing sites to benefit the client.
5. Usefulness of Message Boards for X (research area)
Client: Depends on research area.
Message boards are often a good source information about practical questions on
any topic, such as "How much should I charge for X?" This topic requires you to
study archives of several message boards about a particular topic, such as grant
and proposal-writing, assessing how useful and reliable the materials are, which
are the best boards, how long it takes to get an answer, who frequents the
boards (any experts? you would have to search on names), etc. You would also
need to do library research to see what books and articles say about the
usefulness and reliability of message boards. For example, recent books on grant
writing probably recommend one or more message boards for keeping current.
It would probably be useful to collect a list of frequently asked questions and
their answers.