Instructor: Pai H. Chou
<br>Email: phchou@cs.nthu.edu.tw
<br>
<br>1. Course Description
<br>
<br>This course covers the grammar, vocabulary, style, logic, and tools needed
<br>for writing and reading technical English materials.  The grammar review part
<br>covers sentence construction and common mistakes.  The vocabulary part
<br>compares similar but often misused words in technical English.  A large
<br>portion of the course will cover style with editing exercises on making
<br>the writing concise, precise, professional, coherent, easy to read, and
<br>persuasive.  The logic part deals with the organization of ideas and
<br>reasoning, with a review of common logical fallacies.  The course will be
<br>using collaborative writing tools including LaTeX and version control
<br>tools to produce professionally formatted documents.
<br>
<br>2. Textbooks
<br>
<br>- Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills. 2nd
<br>	Edition. Crane Publishing Cl., Ltd.
<br>
<br>- Strunk and White, the Elements of Style, available online
<br>
<br>- Course reader
<br>
<br>
<br>3. Teaching Methods
<br>    The course will review grammar and style rules for technical English.
<br>    The format will be lecture with interactive sessions for the class to
<br>    participate in reading and editing technical English.
<br>    Exercises will be taken from textbooks and provided by instructors.
<br>
<br>4. Evaluation
<br>    30% class participation
<br>    50% take-home assignments
<br>    20% final paper
<br>
<br>5. Tentative Schedule
<br>
<br>- overview
<br>- tools
<br>    - LaTeX intro
<br>    - version control
<br>- logic
<br>    - logical fallacies
<br>    - problem statements
<br>        - requirements
<br>        - constraints
<br>        - objectives
<br>- contributions
<br>    - originality (how "new")
<br>    - novelty  (how "non-obvious")
<br>    - significance  (how "important")
<br>
<br>- grammar review
<br>    - noun-verb agreement
<br>    - count noun vs mass noun
<br>    - subordinate clauses
<br>    - relative pronouns, which vs. that
<br>    - prepositions
<br>    - auxiliaries, can not vs cannot
<br>    - conjunctions, disjunctions
<br>    - verb transitivity
<br>    - hyphenation of compound modifiers
<br>
<br>- semantics
<br>    - concrete vs abstract terms
<br>    - literal vs figurative terms
<br>    - absolutes vs relatives
<br>    - qualifiers: very, only, 
<br>    - contrapositive
<br>    - expectation vs obligation
<br>    - overloading
<br>
<br>- style
<br>    - strong vs weak constructs
<br>    - eliminate verbosity
<br>    - punctuations
<br>    - math and symbols
<br>    - noun chains
<br>    - colloquial and informal speech
<br>    - Oxford comma
<br>    - use of slashes /
<br>
<br>- larger units
<br>    - topic sentences
<br>    - opening paragraphs
<br>    - roadmap 
<br>    - headings
<br>    - introduction
<br>    - background vs related work
<br>    - problem statement
<br>    - technical approach
<br>    - implementation
<br>    - evaluation and analysis: arithmetic vs geometric mean
<br>    - conclusions
<br>    - bibliography
<br>
<br>6. Course Website
<br>http://lms.nthu.edu.tw/course/13310