RE: Tech Writing Curriculum

[bryan -dot- westbrook -at- amd -dot- com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Flo Gherman [mailto:flore36 -at- hotmail -dot- com]
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 9:34 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Tech Writing Curriculum

I am currently co-teaching a technical writing course at a college in 
Toronto. I have always wondered if adding some special topics like the ones 
described before is a good idea. I mean, we do have to keep in mind that 
technical writing does not necessarily mean writing on technical topics.

-----Reply-----

Perhaps not, but a significant percentage of the jobs are in high tech fields, and your students are more likely to be familiar with the material in those other industries.

Also, if they are technophiles that is the direction they will probably head, and if they are neo-Luddites and know nothing of the material it would teach them one of the most important skills of technical writing: learning how to use something unfamiliar.

The biggest complaint I've always had about technical writing classes is that the typical assignment is usually: Write a manual for something you know. Here is a proposal for an alternative assignment that I wrote for a homework assignment a couple weeks ago:

Instead of this stock assignment, I would suggest that student me made to research material with which they are unfamiliar because that is truer to the type of assignments they will be given in the workplace.  Whenever students approach Techwr-l with requests for software to document, they are always referred to certain share/freeware and open source development organizations.

The members of these organizations are usually developing software with little or no budget and no money set aside for documentation.  A teacher could approach one of these groups--I would recommend the share/freeware groups because the open source projects would likely require the students to have a computer with the Linux operating system--before making the assignments and find a selection of applications that are in need of documentation and make arrangements with their owners.

Then these assignments could be made either randomly or by student choice to allow for special interests, but again the goal is to work with unfamiliar material so I would recommend random.  Successfully completing such an assignment would not only help students learn how to write in the format, it would teach them how to interact with SMEs and how to learn to use new programs.  It would also give them a small bit of "real world" experience and a piece for their portfolios.

This assignment might seem a bit harsh to some, but if the students are properly prepared beforehand they will have the skills they need.  One of the most useful classes I had to take as an undergraduate was a news writing class, taught by the journalism department.  This class taught us interviewing skills and how to evaluate the quality of our research.

Perhaps, those specific skills could be taught in the first half of a course with the actual project at the end.  That way you could get the benefits of the transferable skills without having to be confused by the AP style issues that are often so different from technical style and would not have to waste so much time learning how to write obituaries.


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