Teaching Students How to Illustrate Documents

Illustration Visuals: Drawings Graphs Tables Common Problems Incorporation Equations Illustration Exercises: Exercise 1 Exercise 2 Exercise 3 Exercise 4 Exercise 5 Teaching Resources Writing Guidelines Writing Exercises Writing Courses

This web page presents presentation visuals and exercises for teaching illustrations in a design or laboratory course. Included are seven sets of presentation visuals given to mechanical engineering students at Georgia Tech. The presentation visuals cover a variety of topics: designing drawings, designing graphs, designing tables, avoiding common errors, telling stories with graphs and drawings, and incorporating equations. Also included are five exercises that are assigned to mechanical engineering students at Georgia Tech. These exercises are best given to students just entering their design/lab sequences. At Georgia Tech, this period occurs either late in the sophomore year or early in the junior year. These exercises are short reports describing the results of experimental or design projects. The goals of these exercises are to have students both describe figures, tables, drawings and equations, and use Excel to prepare the graphs and data tables. The goal here is not for students simply to write a report, but to be sure that students can have their figures look correct and show up in their reports. For that reason, to keep students honest, instructors should distribute these assignments in hardcopy (preferred) or as pdf files (second best). Enterprising students can unlock pictures in Word files, and even more enterprising students, in some cases, can pry them out from pdf files.

Last updated 7/00 http://www.me.vt.edu/writing/handbook/ You are more than welcome to use these materials in your classroom as long as you acknowledge the source.