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Technical Communication, 9th Edition

Paul V. Anderson

  • Copyright 2018
  • {{checkPublicationMessage('Published', '2017-01-01T00:00:00+0000')}}
Starting At $77.95 See pricing and ISBN options
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Technical Communication 9th Edition by Paul V. Anderson
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Overview

Faculty have used Anderson's TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION: A READER-CENTERED APPROACH to prepare thousands of students for the writing they will do in their careers. Known for its rhetorical treatment of workplace writing and speaking, this text helps students learn practical, flexible strategies for creating useful and persuasive communications on the job. Reorganized and streamlined to enhance student learning, the ninth edition includes greatly expanded attention to social media. It also introduces to technical communication pedagogy a set of exercises and instruction that help students transfer their technical communication knowledge and skills from school to workplace.

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Meet the Authors

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Paul V. Anderson

Paul V. Anderson is Senior Researcher at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. He was previously Director of the Roger and Joyce L. Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University (Ohio), where he also served as the founding director of the university's programs in technical and scientific communication. To support various individual and collaborative projects, he has received more than $1,000,000 in external grants for research and program development in technical communication. As a researcher and consultant to business and government, Dr. Anderson has conducted workshops and made presentations in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as across the United States. His publications, which have won awards from the Society for Technical Communication and the National Council of Teachers of English, address such topics as technical communication practice and theory, ethical issues in research and teaching, research methods, pedagogy, and assessment. Dr. Anderson has been selected as a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and Miami University's Institute of Environmental Science. He has received the Jay R. Gould Award for Excellence in Teaching Technical Communication from the Society for Technical Communication.

What's New

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  • A new chapter on writing for social media (Chapter 22) offers comprehensive coverage of this timely topic; several other chapters also provide expanded attention to social media.
  • A new chapter on organizing (Chapter 6) integrates into a single, cohesive discussion the advice that earlier editions presented in several chapters.
  • Explicit discussion and numerous exercises throughout the text (including a new Appendix) increase students' ability to transfer the writing knowledge and skills they gain in your class to their other courses, internships, coops, and future jobs. This material represents the first application to a technical communication text of the emerging research on transfer of learning.
  • Documentation instruction (Appendix A) includes the new and greatly improved MLA style, as well as current APA and IEEE styles.
  • A simplified organization increases your ability to show students how the lessons of the various chapters fit together.
  • The streamlined presentation highlights key points, a feature suggested by engineering and science students when the author asked them how the text could be modified to enhance their learning.
  • This edition gives increased attention to helping students integrate and build on the writing and speaking skills they bring to the course.
  • Enhanced MindTap® annotations identify opportunities for integrating digital resources into your class. MindTap® English for Technical Communication, 9th Edition engages your students to become better thinkers and writers by blending your course materials with content that supports every aspect of the writing process. Resources include grammar activities, a professional tutoring service, a database of scholarly sources and interactive videos to support students in writing research papers, a dictionary, and a paper management system for electronic submission, grading, and peer review.

Features

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  • READER-CENTERED APPROACH: The book's premise is that students' success in the writing they do in their careers will be measured by their readers' responses. If they write communications that help their readers easily find and use the information they want or need, and/or communications that influence their readers' attitudes in the intended way, they will write effectively. As this book addresses each aspect of writing, it supports instructors' efforts to help students learn how to meet workplace readers' needs and expectations and how to impact these readers' attitudes and actions.
  • FLEXIBLE SUPPORT FOR DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE COURSE: The reader-centered approach and the design of the book provide a flexible teaching resource, enabling instructors to select any array of chapters and projects while still preparing their students, whatever their majors, with sophisticated yet transferable skills they will need wherever they choose to work after graduation.
  • IN-DEPTH COVERAGE IN AN EASY-TO-LEARN MANNER: In most chapters, the major points are distilled into easy-to-remember guidelines whose implications and applications are then elaborated. The guidelines themselves reinforce one another because they all flow from a common set of reader-centered principles and processes.
  • WRITER'S TUTORIALS AND PLANNING GUIDES AVAILABLE IN MINDTAP®: Faculty can download the "Planning Guides" and also "Revision Checklists" so they can adapt them to their specific assignments.
  • NUMEROUS RICHLY ANNOTATED EXAMPLES AND SAMPLE DOCUMENTS: Throughout, the book includes sample communications with annotations that illustrate the application of its advice. These annotations are written in a way that emphasizes the writer's purpose, in order to focus students' attention not on the features of the communication but on the decisions and strategies of the writer and by implication on the decisions they can make and the strategies they can use.
  • CAREFUL ATTENTION TO INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION: Global Guidelines, integrated into the chapters, help students learn the many ways that cultural differences affect communication and provide concrete suggestions for increasing their effectiveness in cross-cultural communications.
  • MARGINAL ANNOTATIONS highlight the book's reader-centered strategies used in sample documents -- making it easy for students to see how to apply concepts when creating their own communications. Two other categories of margin notes summarize major principles, provide cross-references among chapters (Learn More), and challenge students to apply key strategies to their own experiences (Try This).
  • ETHICS GUIDELINES are integrated into the chapters, so ethics becomes a continuous topic throughout a course rather than the topic for one day's reading. In addition, most chapters include special exercises that focus on ethical issues particular to the topic under discussion.
  • EXERCISES at the ends of chapters promote students' ability to apply the book's advice by asking them to Use What You've Learned. The exercises are grouped in five categories: Apply Your Expertise, Explore Online, Collaborate with Your Classmates, Apply Your Ethics, and Reflect for Transfer.

Table of Contents

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PART I: INTRODUCTION.
1. Communication, Your Career, and This Book.
2. Overview of the Reader-Centered Approach: Writing for a Job.
PART II: THE READER-CENTERED COMMUNICATION PROCESS.
3. Defining Your Communication's Goals.
4. Conducting Reader-Centered Research: Gathering, Analyzing, and Thinking Critically About Information.
5. Using Six Reader-Centered Research Methods.
6. Organizing Reader-Centered Communications.
7. Drafting Reader-Centered Communications.
8. Using Eight Reader-Centered Patterns for Presenting Information and Ideas
9. Persuading Your Readers.
10. Developing an Effective, Professional Style.
11. Writing Reader-Centered Front and Back Matter.
12. Creating Reader-Centered Graphics.
13. Creating Eleven Types of Reader-Centered Graphics.
14. Designing Reader-Centered Pages and Documents.
15. Revising Your Drafts.
16. Testing Your Drafts for Usefulness and Persuasiveness.
PART III: APPLICATIONS OF THE READER-CENTERED APPROACH.
17. Creating Communications with a Team.
18. Creating and Delivering Listener-Centered Oral Presentations.
19. Managing Client and Service-Learning Projects.
20. Creating Reader-Centered Websites and Professional Portfolios.
21. Writing Reader-Centered Correspondence: Letters, Memos, and Emails.
22. Writing Effectively on Social Media at Work.
23. Writing Reader-Centered Proposals.
24. Writing Reader-Centered Empirical Research Reports.
25. Writing Reader-Centered Feasibility Reports.
26. Writing Reader-Centered Progress Reports.
27. Writing Reader-Centered Instructions.
Appendix A: Documenting Your Sources.
Appendix B: Reflecting for Transfer.
References.
Index.

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Each MindTap product offers the full, mobile-ready textbook combined with superior and proven learning tools at one affordable price. Students who purchase digital access can add a print option at any time when a print option is available for their course.

This Cengage solution can be seamlessly integrated into most Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Brightspace by D2L, Canvas, Moodle, and more) but does require a different ISBN for access codes. Please work with your Cengage Learning Consultant to ensure the proper course set up and ordering information. For additional information, please visit the LMS Integration site.

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  • ISBN-10: 1305672526
  • ISBN-13: 9781305672529
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  • ISBN-10: 0357690990
  • ISBN-13: 9780357690994
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  • ISBN-10: 1305667883
  • ISBN-13: 9781305667884
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Supplements

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Cengage provides a range of supplements that are updated in coordination with the main title selection. For more information about these supplements, contact your Learning Consultant.

FOR INSTRUCTORS

MindTap English, 1 term (6 months) Instant Access for Anderson's Technical Communication

ISBN: 9781305672529
MindTap English for Anderson's Technical Communication, 9th Edition is the digital learning solution that helps instructors engage and transform today's students into critical thinkers. Through paths of dynamic assignments and applications that you can personalize, real-time course analytics, and an accessible reader, MindTap helps you turn cookie-cutter into cutting-edge, apathy into engagement, and memorizers into higher-level thinkers. As an instructor using MindTap, you have at your fingertips the right content and unique set of tools curated specifically for your course, all in an interface designed to improve workflow and save time when planning lessons and course structure. The control to build and personalize your course is all yours, focusing on the most relevant material while also lowering costs for your students. Stay connected and informed in your course through real-time student tracking that provides the opportunity to adjust the course as needed based on analytics of interactivity in the course.

FOR STUDENTS

MindTap English, 1 term (6 months) Instant Access for Anderson's Technical Communication

ISBN: 9781305672529
MindTap English for Anderson's Technical Communication, 9th Edition is the digital learning solution that helps instructors engage and transform today's students into critical thinkers. Through paths of dynamic assignments and applications that you can personalize, real-time course analytics, and an accessible reader, MindTap helps you turn cookie-cutter into cutting-edge, apathy into engagement, and memorizers into higher-level thinkers. As an instructor using MindTap, you have at your fingertips the right content and unique set of tools curated specifically for your course, all in an interface designed to improve workflow and save time when planning lessons and course structure. The control to build and personalize your course is all yours, focusing on the most relevant material while also lowering costs for your students. Stay connected and informed in your course through real-time student tracking that provides the opportunity to adjust the course as needed based on analytics of interactivity in the course.