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Don't Be Misled By the Term "Technical" in Technical Writing
Teaching technical writing, especially teaching its basic principles and techniques to high school students, furthers the students' liberal education in the most profound sense.
The writing abilities needed on many real jobs today (not just on jobs called "writer") are often complex. They call for underlying cognitive maturity (well-honed audience awareness is one example, and the separate need for planning to write before drafting is another). Significant percentages of workers in nearly every job category reported writing regularly as part of their jobs.
- This on-the-job writing is nonfiction (unlike literature) and focused on performing tasks (unlike telling a story)
- Other workers, team members, and customers often depend for their safety or
success on the adequacy of these instructions and descriptions.
- Writing adequately at work requires planning and revising drafts with skillful attention to text features as well as goals and techniques
- Technical writing practice in school directly promotes demanding and specific workplace literacy skills even though it is seldom part of traditional English classroom activities.
Such skills will not develop spontaneously, and irrelevant classroom practice on essays or stories seldom refines them. Most students can certainly learn this extra literacy, but only if it is overtly cultivated with lessons, exercises, and comparisons that involve the techniques and genres actually used at work.
Technical writing can be incorporated into the classroom in a wide variety of ways, ranging from perhaps just one technical writing assignment to a technical writing module resulting in several grouped documents to a full semester or academic year of technical writing instruction. However the teacher decides to make technical writing a part of the instruction, the students will benefit. They will learn of a type of writing that will help them get jobs and succeed in the workplace.
Source: Frequently Asked Questions About the Benefits of Technical Writing in High School, by T.R. Girill, Literacy Outreach Project, East Bay Chapter, Society for Technical Communication http://www.ebstc.org/TechLit/TL_FAQ.html
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