E011 Technical Communication is recorded under banner number ITEC 5321 and is worth 3 competency units. It teaches IT managers to convey complex information to both technical and nontechnical audiences through writing, presentation and visual communication, with audience analysis as the starting discipline. E011 and ITEC 5321 are one requirement. It is the course whose skills show up in every other course you take, which makes it worth doing early if your plan allows.
Audience analysis is the whole method compressed
Every decision in technical communication follows from the answer to four questions: who reads this, what do they already know, what decision or action does it support, and what will they do with it. A message written without those answers is written for the author. The same information going to an engineering team and to a finance committee is genuinely two documents, not one document with the jargon removed.
The nontechnical audience problem is more subtle than simplification. Removing terminology without replacing the underlying idea produces writing that is vague rather than accessible. The technique that works is substitution of consequence for mechanism: instead of describing how a failover works, describe that service continues without interruption and what that costs. The mechanism is available if asked; the consequence is what the reader needs.
Structure carries more weight than prose quality in professional communication. Readers do not read documents linearly; they scan for what concerns them. Putting the conclusion first, using headings that state findings rather than topics, and keeping one idea per paragraph are the habits that make a document usable, and they are usually more heavily rewarded than elegant sentences.
Visual communication is a scored element rather than decoration. A chart makes a comparison instantly available and a badly chosen one misleads faster than any paragraph. Choosing the visual form that matches the relationship you are showing, labelling it fully, and stating in the caption what the reader should take from it are the three habits that cover most of what this element assesses.
Work here returns Competent or Not Competent, with no letter grades and no ordinary grade point average behind them, with 3 competency units describing its share of a flat-priced six month term.
Turning aspects into a communication package
If your version of E011 uses a performance assessment, the deliverable is often several artifacts for different audiences plus a justification of the choices. WGU requires a score of 2 in each aspect for a task to pass and judges each aspect alone, so a polished presentation will not carry an unaddressed audience analysis aspect.
Budget across artifacts and justification. Take a rubric with six scored aspects and a written component near 1,900 words alongside the artifacts you produce. Reserve 130 words for the situation and 100 for the close, leaving 1,670. If three aspects are demonstrated by artifacts, allow 170 words each to introduce them and state their audience and purpose, which is 510. The remaining 1,160 covers three justification aspects at roughly 386 each, enough for a decision, its reason and its alternative.
Write the audience analysis before any artifact and keep it visible in the document. Every later choice about vocabulary, length, structure and visual form should trace back to something in that analysis, and making the trace explicit is what turns a set of documents into a justified communication strategy.
Reserve budget for the revision discussion. Communication work improves through drafting, and describing what you changed between drafts and why is often its own aspect, as well as being the most honest evidence that a process happened.
Shape for a technical communication deliverable
E011 tasks typically produce artifacts for different audiences plus an analysis. These proportions fit the analysis document.
| Section | Content | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | The technical matter to be communicated and why communication is needed now. | 10 percent |
| Audience analysis | Each audience with prior knowledge, interest, decision at stake and preferred channel. | 20 percent |
| Message strategy | What each audience needs to know, in what order, and what is deliberately omitted. | 17 percent |
| Written artifact | The document itself, with structure choices explained in the analysis. | 16 percent |
| Presentation artifact | The spoken version, with what changes because it is heard rather than read. | 14 percent |
| Visual choices | Each visual, the relationship it shows, and why that form rather than another. | 15 percent |
| Close | What you revised and why, plus how you would know the communication worked. | 8 percent |
Sourcing in a communication course
Communication principles have a research literature, and citing it is what makes your justification more than personal preference. Claims about how readers scan documents, how much information an audience retains from a presentation, or how visual encodings are perceived belong to published research rather than to style guides repeating each other.
Where you make a claim about a professional convention, cite the relevant standard or a recognised style authority. Where you make a claim about the technical subject you are communicating, cite it as you would in any technical document, because a communication artifact that gets its facts wrong has failed at something more basic than style.
The artifacts themselves are evidence and should be complete enough to judge. A presentation submitted as bullet points with no speaker notes cannot demonstrate spoken communication choices, and a chart submitted without its underlying numbers cannot be checked for accuracy.
Accessibility belongs here too. Contrast, text alternatives for meaningful images, and structure that works when read aloud are part of communicating with an audience rather than an optional extra, and mentioning them shows a professional standard.
Cite in whatever style your task sets out and place each reference beside the claim it supports. A caption reading "cost rises sharply after year two" does more work than one reading "cost over time".
Competent communication work and returned work
Competent submissions differentiate genuinely between audiences, justify choices from the audience analysis, structure for scanning rather than for reading, and choose visuals that match the relationship being shown.
Returns follow four shapes. The two audience versions differ only in vocabulary, showing no real differentiation. Audience analysis is present but never referenced when choices are made. The document buries its conclusion at the end. Or visuals are decorative, unlabelled, or chosen by habit rather than by the relationship in the data.
Length is itself a communication decision and one that graduate students frequently get wrong in the generous direction. A document twice as long as it needs to be does not communicate twice as much; it communicates less, because the parts that mattered are now diluted. When you cut, cut whole ideas that the audience does not need rather than trimming words evenly, and say in your justification what you removed for which audience. That sentence demonstrates the discipline more clearly than any amount of polished prose.
Tone deserves a note as well. Technical communication to a nontechnical audience fails in two opposite directions: writing that condescends, and writing that assumes shared knowledge nobody has. The reliable middle is to respect the reader's intelligence while assuming nothing about their vocabulary, which in practice means defining terms briefly at first use and never apologising for the subject being technical.
A useful test: give your nontechnical artifact to someone outside the field and ask what decision it is asking them to make. If they cannot say, the message strategy has not landed, and that is a structural problem rather than a wording one.
WGU attaches no grade penalty to a revised and resubmitted performance assessment, so completeness beats polish when you are deciding whether to submit, and let the evaluator find the last gap faster than you would. If your section also carries an objective assessment, WGU objective assessments are proctored and our boundary is fixed: preparation only, with structure drills, audience analysis practice and a candid read on your preassessment result. We never sit an exam, give no help from the moment it starts, and we would refuse portal credentials if they were offered.
Two versions that read the same?
Send the E011 rubric and your artifacts. We rebuild the audience analysis and make every choice trace back to it, with word targets per aspect.
Eight mistakes that cost time in E011
- Simplifying by deleting. Replace mechanism with consequence rather than removing the technical content and leaving vagueness.
- Audience analysis that never gets used. Every structural and vocabulary choice should trace back to it explicitly.
- Conclusion at the end. Professional readers scan. Lead with the finding and support it afterwards.
- Topic headings. A heading that states the finding does work; one that names the subject does not.
- Decorative visuals. Match the visual form to the relationship in the data, and say what the reader should see.
- Presentations without speaker notes. The spoken version cannot be assessed from slides alone.
- Ignoring accessibility. Contrast, alternatives and readable structure are part of reaching an audience.
- No revision account. What you changed and why is evidence of process and frequently its own aspect.
Three questions students ask about E011
Is this the same as the general education communication course?
Do I need presentation software skills?
Should I take this early in my program?
Where E011 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 3 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.