English 3105 and 3107: Technical Writing

Links, Spring 2009

• Modern Language Association Documentation. Look for documentation of Electronic Media under Electronic/Online Resources in the Table of Contents. The English Department prefers MLA style.
  
• APA Style , used often by psychology departments. I have also seen sociology and gender studies articles which rely on this style.
  
• UConn Libraries Citation Website, with links to MLA, APA, Turabian, and ASA styles.
  
  

• Legalethics.com: The Internet Ethics Site.
  
• FindLaw Cyberspace Law Center is a resource for issues on law in cyberspace. The site claims to be evolving.
  
• Center for Democracy and Technology. This site deals with all sorts of issues, including censorship, dangers of technology, and privacy.
  
• Plagiarism
• Plagiarism.org. A site founded to help professors weed out plagiarized work.


• EVE, the Essay Verification Engine crawls the Internet to check student papers against on-line sources. I own this piece of software, incidentally, and it works.

 

Grammar and Spelling Assistance

• Merriam-Webster Dictionary on Line. Mostly useful if your connection to the Internet is always on, but if you have to use a modem, you might be better off using the hard-copy dictionary.
  
• Thesaurus.com. Ditto. Caution: Always use any thesaurus carefully and with thought. Don't substitute a word unless you know its definition. And remember, technical writing doesn't require you to switch terms.
  
• Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style. Prof. Lynch teaches English at Rutgers.
  
• How to Get an A on an English Paper, also by Jack Lynch of Rutger's University. This site's advice is directed toward students who are writing argumentative type papers, but still has useful advice for technical writers.
  

• Alphadictionary.com, provided by Colin Thomas. This site not only gives you access to English words and definitions but to many other languages.
  

• Dr. Watson. The HTML equivalent of a spell and grammar check, and it's free, unlike some other sites of this type. You are free to use this site's coding checker on your projects.

Free Graphics, Fonts, and Other Goodies

Remember: you may use freely graphics, fonts, and other goodies if and only if the site says that these things are "public domain" or "free to use for the public" or "free to use for non-commercial purposes" (if you plan to use them for non-commercial purposes).

• The Free Site. Massive directory for all sorts of free stuff, including fonts and graphics.
  
• Absolute Background Textures Archive. A huge collection of backgrounds from free sites all over the web, organized by color and style (background, textures). There are also links to other graphics sites and to sites that allow you to customize graphics. Thank Crystal Pretola for finding this resource.
  
• Absolute Web Graphics Archive. The companion site to the Absolute Background Textures Archive. Heather Binda found this site and says it's really good.
  
• The Cool Archive. This site has a button maker, along with free graphics.
  
• Leo's Icon Archive.

• The Banner Generator, with which I made graphics for previous technical writing pages.
  
• CoolText.com. An on-line graphics generator which also offers other free graphics.
  
• 007 Fonts and Logos. Some fonts are free; others are shareware.
  
• Microsoft's Recommended Font List contains exactly what it advertises: recommended fonts for use on web pages.

• Standard Fonts lists the fonts that come standard with various operating systems.
• Gimp, a free graphics manipulation program.

PowerPoint Help

• PowerPoint 2000 Tutorial Supplied by the helpful folks at URI's computer center. It walks you through the basics.
• PowerPoint in the Classroom. Although this site seems to be aimed at a younger audience, the information is still there. Watch out for the bells and whistles.
• "PowerPoint is Evil" by Edward Tufte, Wired magazine. Beware the dangers of PowerPoint!

Search Engines

Let's start with the basics.

• Google, the great and powerful.
• Vivisimo, a search engine that "clusters" or organizes its searches for you.
• AltaVista
• HotBot
• Lycos
• WebCrawler
• the old stand-by, Yahoo!

Here are a few more sophisticated search engines. Although the basic search engines do an adequate job, it's always a good idea to use one of these more powerful engines in conjunction.

• Ask allows you to ask a normal question, but makes you search through possible sub-questions, and doesn't always give you the answer you're looking for.
• Cyber 411 also allows you to ask a question in normal syntax.
• Mamma: The Mother of All Search Engines now allows you to submit your own site to them.
• Search.com metasearches with other search engines.
  

Writing for the Web

• Writing for Multimedia is an excellent site about writing in different media. Especially useful is the Writing on the Web section.

• Yale's Web Style Manual. Recommended by Eric Lord. The site covers aspects of site design, page design, graphics, and multimedia.

This web page was originally created for my English 249s and 249cw classes at the University of Connecticut and modified for English 3107 at Tennessee State University on January 10, 2008.  Modified for English 3105 on August 21, 2008.  Last update, January 21, 2009.