EN123 is becoming a WRIT course

You the EN123 student will be able to reference your passing EN123 as evidence that you're meeting the Brown University writing requirement.

You will receive individual writing criticism from Prof Daniels who
* won a cash award from the Wright Institute for his essay, "The Slow Corrosion of Oedipus Robot," describing his life as a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
* Won a cash award from the American Society for Engineering Education for his essay on "Improving Digital Circuit Design Teaching."
Had published by John Wiley & Sons a 615 page textbook, Digital Design From Zero to One, which contains not one instance of the words "very" or "interesting" or "easy" or "difficult."

 To qualify as a WRIT course every student who passes the course must have submitted at least two written works that were critiqued by the instructor and revised by the student.

In EN123 we present you with two writing assignments, described below. There is nothing about what you will write that requires you to be technically correct...you may be speculative, humorous, predictive...or you can if you wish be dryly correct in technical details.

In general, technical writing often describes a graphic--a figure caption as it were, of: a schematic, a picture of a machine, a graph of real data or a mathematical simulation, a video of dynamics, a SolidWorks 3D rendering, a drawing of a dissection, a chemical formula, or a listing of amino acids in a protein are examples.

(1) WRIT 1

Study the detail below, from a patent application diagram.

Write more than 250 words and less than 500 words describing what you think (or know) is going on here. Think about why the drain stack (15) is included in the diagram.

Double space and print out your essay (giving it a title) and hand me a copy at your convenience. I will mark up your essay and return it to you for revision. At length revise your essay; print it out and hand me your revised copy--MARK IT "REVISED" AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE; I will make in most cases a judgment about your revisions that will allow me to sign your scorecard and give you credit for the assignment. In a few cases I may conclude you misunderstood my crit and we can agree that you take into account a corrected view of my opinion of your writing.

Allow at least one day/one weekend before you can expect my markup of your writing.

(2)WRIT 2
Blood pressure of a human is normally taken by a nurse who inflates a pressure cuff on the patient's upper arm until no pulse can be detected with a stethoscope on the lower arm. She the nurse then opens a valve to slowly lower the pressure and listen for return of pulse. From observing a pressure meter when the pulse returns she concludes what the patient's systolic and diastolic pressures are, in mm Hg. A typical reading is 120/80.

Your assignment: Write more than 250 words and less than 750 words about a better way (with cost no object) to measure blood pressure--which would be faster and more accurate than the pressure cuff-stethoscope method. You may include one diagram in your essay.

Again, turn in your double-spaced essay and wait for markup to suggest revisions. Revise, hand-in again, and you will be close to receiving credit on your scorecard.

Here again you can be speculative and can consider a broader definition of blood than the two numbers normally assigned to the matter. You can imagine a difficult-to-build-with-current-technology invention. Please provide details about the invention, as you conceive it.