IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication

Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.

Technical experts and writers often disagree about what constitutes accuracy in popular writings about science and technology, such as news media reports. In previous attempts to quantify accuracy in science news reporting, many of the sources' comments pointed to objective errors, but a sizable number dealt with lack of completeness or stylistic issues. There has been no consensus among communication researchers on the kind of scheme that should be used to code such information. We suggest a scheme for categorizing empirical information about the different kinds of perceived "errors" that technical sources identify in articles about their work by journalists and other writers. This study may lead to strategies for enhancing the accuracy of popular writings about science and technology.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Professionals involved in the creation of text-based communication face a number of challenges. These include overburdened and often uninterested users juxtaposed with the writer's desire to communicate relevant topical information. Uninvolved users are likely to ignore the message. This may be exacerbated by increases in text length designed to increase the amount and/or detail of information to be communicated. An experiment was conducted to examine the effect of rhetorical figures in text headings as to how users read and process the text (hereafter readership, as used in marketing). To the extent that higher levels of text readership increase user knowledge and skills, enhance topic-related attitudes, and facilitate beneficial topic-related behaviors, higher readership should yield desirable communication outcomes. Headings with rhetorical figures were hypothesized to enhance readership, particularly under conditions generally associated with relatively low readership, namely, lower perceived information relevance and longer text. Results generally support rhetorical figures' abilities to enhance readership, especially with longer texts.