Using Technical Writing in English 101

As I see it, there are two main ways that technical writing can be taught. We can teach it as a subject separate from composition or we can teach it as part of composition. Aside from helping my peers with technical communication (resumes, business letters, computer problems, etc.), the only experience I have is through incorporating some aspects of technical writing into my 101 courses. So why would I want to do this?

All writing, technical or not, works on the same basic principles. You have an idea that needs to elicit the desired effect (your purpose) from a reader (your audience). The method you choose to convey that idea is your style. This is where technical communication comes in. The style becomes something that the students aren’t familiar with. A business letter, for example, is a form of communication that most students have little or no experience with. By exposing them to this new format, I force them to consider their writing technique rather than repeating what they’ve done for the last 4 years in high school.

Technical communication takes writing out of the creative realm by focusing on purpose, audience, and style. While in high school, many students were asked by their English teachers to write about their personal opinions. The problem begins here. By engaging students in writing that revolves around their impressions, their opinions, and their ideas, students mistakenly begin to believe that they themselves are the audience for their own writing. In reality, very little writing in the world is done for oneself. No one cares what you think. Readers want you to tell them something. Why take the time to write something that isn’t intended for reading? These students bring their incorrect perceptions about writing to college and wonder why their professors aren’t satisfied with what they’ve written. It’s up to me as their 101 teacher to try to explain to them what college writing is all about.

Technical/Business writing allows me to start with a clean slate. I think of my students’ previous writing experience as practice for college writing. Then I set out to teach them the primary elements of college writing that they overlook: audience, purpose, and style. By placing them in the new arena of technical communications, I take from them their personal narratives, their descriptive papers, and their personal journals. It’s not that I don’t see value in these genres; I merely teach them these concepts separately. There is a time and place for everything, but not all styles of writing are appropriate at all times. A descriptive paper that should persuade does very little to elicit the correct response from the reader. What remains constant in all writing is audience, purpose, and style.

My main focus is on getting them to recognize that their writing is intended to have an effect on an audience. If I can get them to recognize this, I think I’ve accomplished something. By recognizing your intent as the writer and the expectations of the reader, you can evoke the desired response through altering your writing technique. Technical Writing just allows me to begin from scratch. I guess if you get down to it, I confuse them by making them write in an unfamiliar genre in order to get them to realize how and why they write. By examining their writing styles, I hope that they can improve their effectiveness as writers.

Book Review: Strategies for Technical Communication: A Collection of Teaching Tips

This book comes at teaching technical writing from the other perspective. It doesn’t really exclude the 101 classroom as an outlet for teaching technical writing, but the focus is much more centered on teaching technical communications as a subject separate from basic composition. As such, it does a decent job of giving some tips for the basic English 306/307 course but does little for the more advanced instructor.

The book is divided into 7 Chapters dealing with Introducing Technical Communications, Invention, Use of Computers with Writing and Technical Communication (which demonstrates the age of this book…1994), Collaboration/ Group Activities, Technical Writing Assignments, Editing Exercises, and Graphics. The Computer chapter (Chapter 3) is useless in today’s classroom. It involves basic computer skills like email and spell check that our students understand better than we do. Some of the other chapters are more helpful.

Skills necessary to the effective communicator are stressed: organization, audience awareness, formats, etc. Chapter 4 concerning collaborative learning is helpful. Most students don’t work well in groups, yet most students will have to work with and depend on others upon getting their first job. No one is expected to do everything in the business world. This chapter does a good job of justifying the need for collaborative learning instruction. Deborah S. Bosley’s article in particular offers some good advice on using individual evaluations as a means of encouraging participation in group assignments.

The one shortcoming of this book is its lack of depth. The book offers very little to the college-level technical writing professor. Some of the exercises (describing a mousetrap, for example) are interesting, but I would hope that an instructor of technical communication wouldn’t need hints as basic as the ones presented in this book in order to effectively teach a technical writing course. If they do, I seriously question their ability to teach the subject at all.

There is an audience for this text, however. The high school teachers I spoke of earlier (who teach high school students to write about their feelings) could benefit from the ideas presented here. Technical communication is often seen as a different type of writing than what the “average” student does. Although technical communication is different than more creative styles, it teaches student to express their ideas in a way that recognizes their audience, organization, and their overall purpose while incorporating things like visuals and technological resources into their writing. Maybe the public school teacher who is tired of hearing about what students think could benefit from teaching writing through the lens of technical communication.