The writing skills of undergraduate Information Technology (IT) students concern many educators (Utley, 1998, cited in Tench, 2001). This paper examines the relationship between students' business writing results and their technical computing papers results. Some unexpected findings are presented highlighting the need for the inclusion of a writing paper in an IT degree.

It is widely recognized that 21st-century college graduates around the world need strong communication skills to fulfill their roles as professionals and contributing members of their local, national, and global communities. Yet, studies continue to report that colleges are falling short in this important educational area [Hor05, IfM08, Wei09]. In regions like Europe that don’t have a tradition...

In today dynamic information technology era, technical documents are becoming bigger and are updated frequently more than ever. As a result, people have to spend a huge mount of time and efforts to digest these technical documents. Although the traditional technical writing technique helps to produce cohesive and easy-tobe-understood technical documents, it does still suffer the essence problem...

CROSSING DISCIPLINES—CROSSING BORDERS 32 Web page authoring poses a double challenge as both a technical and a writing task. During fall 2000, Watauga College offered two linked courses aimed at providing first-year students with both the technical and editorial know-how to write for online audiences. Tom Van Gilder, computer consultant for the College of Arts and Sciences, taught “Exploration ...