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As a teacher and board member of the local college's Technical Writing
Certificate Program, I can tell you that writing skills MUST be a different
class than the Intro to Tech Writing class. Our program has a 10 week class
and simply do not have the time to teach writing as well as an overview of
what tech writing is/does.
We make it VERY clear on the handouts the first day, in the course write up,
and the teacher states that Intro is NOT a writing class (especially a
composition course). If you do not know how to write, this class will not
help you. Yet, we still see comments on our evals that we "should spend more
time teaching us to write, focussing on grammar, etc. " The students are all
adults who generally are or want to be tech writers.
And many of the students need to take a composition course. We are not it.
And then they get upset when we tell them that. We are considering a pretest
but the overhead work seems to be a lot - remember, we get paid when the
teaching starts, not when scoring tests starts. If we tell you over and over
that we are not a composition course, and you persist in taking the class,
expecting a composition course, is this our fault? I think not.
sharon
Sharon Burton-Hardin
Anthrobytes Consulting
909-369-8590
www.anthrobytes.com
Vice-president, Programs of the Inland Empire chapter of the STC
www.iestc.org
|
| If the school wants to "fast track" students because of a limited number
of
| credit hours, perhaps a "pretest" would identify those students who are
| ready for the fast-paced technical writing course and those who need a
more
| basic writing course like first-year comp.? Life experience can make a big
| difference on whether a student can write well-students who have been
| working may have learned a lot about writing on the job and can do well in
a
| demanding course.
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