TL - FAQ

Are technical writing activities authentic? Do they develop literacy skills with any real-world value?

(1) Formal Studies.

Typical of relevant official studies is a two-year collaboration between American business leaders and the U.S. Department of Labor called the "Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills" (popularly knows as the SCANS project). Many feared this effort would be pompous and pointless, but "much to everyone's surprise, it was a solid performance" (Johnson and Taylor, 1998, p. 225). The SCANS conclusions and advice are summarized and analyzed at length by several contributors to Expanding Literacies (Garay and Bernhardt, 1998), and the published results remain freely available today (even though the project ended in 1992) on a Department of Labor Internet site (http://wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS).

The SCANS studies clearly reveal the direct relevance of technical writing competency for many jobs (including craft and service jobs for noncollege workers) in many ways:

"Significant percentages of workers in nearly every job category reported writing regularly as part of their jobs" (Mikulecky, 1998, p. 201).
This on-the-job writing is nonfiction (unlike literature) and focused on performing tasks (unlike telling a story) (Johnson and Taylor, 1998, p. 235).
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 "metacognitive awareness" of one's writing goals and techniques (Johnson and Taylor, 1998, p. 235).

In other words, overt technical writing practice in school directly promotes demanding and specific workplace literacy skills, even though it is seldom part of traditional English classroom activities.

A dozen years after SCANS, the nonprofit private American Diploma Project (ADP, 2004) reconfirmed both the need for stronger workplace literacy and the appropriateness of technical writing as an authentic way to meet that need in high school. This project brought together 29 industry representatives (across the spectrum from John Ascuaga's Nugget to Hewlett-Packard) and a similar number of academic literacy researchers to spell out benchmark abilities that high-school students well prepared for life should develop before they graduate.

One ADP benchmark concerns writing. Here Part C10 reads like an itemized list of just the techniques fostered by overt, careful practice with nonfiction instructions and descriptions. Students should be able to

...produce work-related texts...that [1] address audience needs, stated purpose, and context; [2] translate technical language into nontechnical English; [3] include relevant information and exclude extraneous information;... [4] anticipate potential problems, mistakes and misunderstandings that might arise for the reader; [and 5] create predictable structures through the use of headings, white space, and graphics, as appropriate... (ADP, 2004, pp. 33-34).

Also noteworthy is that technical writing helps students meet other ADP benchmarks besides writing. Technical writing exercises also help students meet

the "language" benchmark to "comprehend and communicate quantitative, technical, and mathematical information" (ADP, 2004, p. 31),
the "logic" benchmark to "anticipate and address the reader's concerns and counterclaims" (ADP, 2004, p. 35), and
the "informational text" benchmark to "analyze the ways in which a text's organizational structure supports or confounds its meaning or purpose" (ADP, 2004, p. 36).

ADP sees these benchmark literacy abilities as equally vital for success at work, at college, or anywhere that students "exercise their rights as citizens" (ADP, 2004, p. 29).

(2) Informal Reviews.

Other chapters in Garay and Bernhardt's Expanding Literacies express the views toward technical writing of teachers who, working independently of major projects such as those mentioned above, have personally explored how well classroom literacy practice meshes with beyond-school writing demands.

Some teachers looked primarily at the work world: Sally Robinson (Ch. 5) reviewed manufacturing (where "all writing needs to be reader friendly" now, p. 112), Carolyn Boiarsky and Sarah Liggett (Ch. 6) reviewed nuclear power, while Paul Meyer and Patricia Bates (Ch. 7) reviewed healthcare services. Others worked in the reverse direction, examining the work-relevance of current classroom activities (here the findings reinforce the results of the formal studies already cited: classroom writing is usually literature oriented, focusing on a narrow range of genres seldom found outside school).

All of this independent assessment supported technical writing's authentic contribution to building literacy. The writing abilities needed on many real jobs today (not just on jobs called "writer" but on those cited in the last paragraph too) 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). 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 in high school classes responds directly to this need, in motivating and practical ways.

(3) Literacy for Citizenship.

Finally, technical writing is authentic because it helps students succeed in the civic world as well as in the work world. Today almost everyone needs to be comfortably able to

interpret and explain food labels, package inserts, zoning-change proposals, and ballot-measure analyses,
share first aid, personal safety, disaster preparedness, crime watch, and regional planning information with family members, friends, and neighbors, and
assess and describe the impact of new developments in science and technology (medical treatments, appliance use, communication and transportation alternatives, conservation techniques) on oneself and on others for whom they are responsible.

Technical writing prepares students not just for college or a job, but for life, where increasingly the duties (and opportunities) of citizenship and parenthood call for the ability to read and write technical nonfiction prose.

Isn't technical writing a detour to narrow vocationalism and a stunted intellectual life for students?

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 their liberal education in the most profound sense.

(1) What Comprises Liberal Education.

In a widely read and highly regarded (Churchill, 2003) 1998 essay in The American Scholar, William Cronin (Cronin, 1998) defines a liberal education by listing the ten personal qualities that most embody it:

Liberally educated people...

  1. Listen and hear.
  2. Read and understand.
  3. Can talk with anyone.
  4. Can write clearly, persuasively, movingly.
  5. Can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.
  6. Respect rigor as a way of seeking truth.
  7. Practice humility, tolerance, self-criticism.
  8. Understand how to get things done in the world.
  9. Nurture and empower the people around them.
10. Connect with others and with the world.
Adapted from (Cronin, 1998).

Five of these traits (1-4, 10) involve effective communication; two (2 and 4) involve written communication. Two other traits (5 and 6) in Cronin's list reflect the quality of thought behind those important communications. Cronin's further three admired traits (7-9) place this thought and its communication in the context of human communities, an insight that goes back to classical Greece. Cronin's list of liberal-education outcomes makes explicit a vague but valued goal in a way that reveals just how studying technical writing promotes this goal.

(2) What Technical Writing Contributes.

Students who study technical writing in high school clearly and vigorously encounter at an early age the principles and techniques of effective listening and talking, reading and writing. They not only discover that they should "connect," but they confront and practice specific, proven ways to grow better and better at connecting, especially through their nonfiction nonnarrative writing (which is, after all, one prime way they will connect outside of school). They are not just exhorted to read and write better but shown how to iteratively achieve those skills. And even as novices they quickly meet (and later explore) the open intellectual issues that effective human communication poses (how much data density? how to help readers find things in text?).

Furthermore, technical writing does not promote such "effective literacy" just for the students who were likely to develop it anyway by following traditional school subjects. It expands the circle of those who can learn to read critically and write effectively beyond students with strong literary backgrounds to include other who need a different path with alternative motivation. For those formerly left behind, technical writing offers their first close look at how text "works" to share information with others. They discover how text details (comparisons, proleptics, list features) affect its helpfulness, and they learn how different versions of instructions or descriptions can differently meet or miss audience needs. Empirical studies confirm classroom intuitions (Hirsch, 2003) that this is a reliable second path toward reading and writing adequacy for students unable to gain effective literacy from studying literature alone.

(3) Liberal Education Beyond Communication.

As students, especially underperforming students, analyze, revise, and draft cogent instructions and descriptions their intellectual breadth grows. The more aware they become of the features that make text effective, the more they expand their problem-solving repertoire. Technical writing, even at the basic level, soon exposes those who carefully try it to linguistics, psychology, sociology, and all of the other empirical windows on how people and text interact. Translation and cross-cultural issues and data visualization challenges (Tufte, 1997), quickly follow.

Nor is this breadth the thoughtless collection of mechanical tools and tricks. Effectively revising and refining technical text (one's own or drafts from others) demands critical awareness--of word meaning, of one's own intentions, of reader needs. Often in spite of themselves, technical writing students must cultivate their philosophical abilities (Girill, 1984, pp. 91-92) to:

(4) Embracing Community.

Literary and self-confessional writing (stories, journals) can lead students inward, away from colleagues, politics, and the grand challenges of social life. Technical writing, on the other hand, usually leads outward, to the social responsibilities that every nonfiction writer must confront. Technical writing demands audience analysis, which begins with the simple but often stunning realization that one is writing for other people, whose welfare may depend on what one says and how well one says it. Technical writing introduces students to the sobering yet deeply rewarding goal of helping others succeed by means of what they write. Clarity, relevance, even risk management (through text organization and warnings) become practical community commitments rather than annoying scholastic complaints once students see that others will depend on their text, and sometimes on their subtle rhetorical choices or omissions. Even the apparently vocational or engineering issue of measuring text usability (see the next question) invites community awareness.

Thus in these three ways technical writing develops, especially among students unlikely to develop them otherwise, just the ten traits that define a liberally educated person.

Does technical writing really develop skills beyond those that students would learn anyway through the traditional study of literature and literary interpretation?

Yes. Grade-appropriate technical writing activities not only introduce students to real-world genres besides stories (such as user manuals and job aids, journal articles and white papers, reports and proposals). They also give students a family of specific, empirically validated usability techniques that most have not seen or tried before: practical ways to focus text to meet the information needs and linguistic abilities of real readers, to craft clear and concise nonfiction prose, to signal the content and structure of complex publications effectively and reliably.

Outside of school, such usability techniques are often crucial for job success. "It is no longer good enough to engineer excellent technology; you must be able to communicate clearly across all of the disciplines on your [work] teams," notes Andrea Ames of UCSC Extension in a 2004 course announcement aimed at engineers. Furthermore, usability is really just social responsibility reflected in empirically measured outcomes: how well can other human beings (colleagues, clients, children, nonnative readers anywhere on the Internet) find what you said, understand what you meant, and use what you offered to help solve problems of their own?

Is there a gender-neutral way to teach technical writing, so that all students are motivated to try it?

Yes. Technical writing is not limited to descriptions of engines or instructions for auto repair. Analyzing kitchen recipes, for example, is an excellent gender-neutral way to explore all the features that instructions should have or avoid, and to practice all the techniques for designing effective instructions on the job. Boys and girls both find this engaging: everyone eats. Public health messages (e.g., about E. coli transmission in fast food and at day-care centers) and the technology found in every home or classroom (CDs, fluorescent lights, paper clips, sticky notes) offer similar, broadly interesting ways to practice genuine technical writing techniques without intimidation.

Does technical writing help underperforming students build their basic literacy skills, so that they can better handle real-life writing demands?

Can technical writing help developmentally disabled students appreciate and develop text-based coping skills that support independent living?

Yes. Many technical writing skills directly transfer to coping with textual challenges in daily life: designing truly usable instructions, for example, links tightly to handling travel directions and following medical procedures at home, while analyzing descriptions for effectiveness links closely with understanding bills, tax forms, and nutritional labels on packaged food. Concrete examples of all these cases are readily available to focus student attention. And rewriting recipes amid the actual fruits and vegetables that they mention reminds students that technical writing techniques apply to regular adult life, not just to school.

Does technical writing help college bound students improve their future intellectual, academic prose?

Yes. While technical writing's most obvious and immediate benefits are for students entering the workforce after high school, it is by no means a scholarly detour for those college bound. Academic prose needs to be effective prose too. Remember the contributions of technical writing to liberal education noted above. College professors and journal editors often complain about the confusing, ineffectual, time-wasting prose that their students and colleagues draft--in both the humanities and the sciences (Bennett and Gorowitz, 1997; Gopen and Swan, 1990). The very same techniques that improve instructions and descriptions on the job also increase the influence and cogency of term papers, journal articles, research reports, and scholarly critiques in all undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional fields. Clear, concise, reader-focused papers are more likely to win acceptance for publication and more likely to be cited once published than their hard-to-understand competitors. In academia, being ignored is any text's worst fate.

Yes. Current California English-Language Arts Content Standards for public schools (1998, available for online review at http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/engmain.asp) clearly expect students to develop basic skills for reading and writing nonnarrative nonfiction prose during middle school. By high school, the standards call for students to be able to draft useful instructions and descriptions, and then to cultivate more complex and sophisticated skills for critically revising and assessing technical writing (their own and that of others) during their high-school years.

The free high-school exercises cited below make this relevance explicit: each exercise is annotated with the specific California Language Arts content standard(s) that it supports, and a separate index reveals for each applicable content standard the exercise(s) most relevant to it.

Does technical writing prepare students for the California High-School Exit Examination (CAHSEE)?

Yes. Reviewing the publicly posted questions (answers) from the English-Language Arts section of CAHSEE reveals that at least three quarters of the Language Arts questions involve (and sometimes exclusively focus on) carefully analyzing, thoughtfully repairing, or even drafting from scratch nonfiction descriptions or effective instructions. Classroom practice with and overt discussion of technical writing techniques thus directly transfer not just to some but to most Language Arts questions that students must handle successfully to pass CAHSEE.

Does technical writing build general cognitive maturity along with specific technical skills?

Yes. A growing body of psychological experiments and analysis (Chi, 1989; Girill, 2001; Stark, 2002; for example) shows that many students cannot learn well from worked examples even when the supply of examples is abundant. Example study techniques are not created equal. Cognitively immature students gain little far-transfer knowledge from examples because they fail to infer each example step from a general principle, infer the goal or role of a step from its content, or infer next steps from seen steps. Technical writing practice in general, and the shared exercises of this project in particular, focus student attention on just these sophistication-building example-elaboration moves. Students therefore gain the ability to learn more from every example that they encounter as they gradually work through well-designed and scaffolded examples of good and bad instructions and descriptions. These cases teach general example elaboration along with specific text analysis.

Parallel comments apply to the impact of technical writing practice on general reflectiveness (critical self-awareness of what one has drafted) and general responsibility (personal appreciation of the social influence of one's words), both already noted in response to earlier questions. Like example elaboration, these traits contribute to a broad cognitive maturity that benefits students far beyond the mechanics of technical writing.

How can I justify time spent on technical writing, when every hour that goes to it comes from mainstream language-arts topics?

One must distinguish literacy from literature. Previous answers have explained how technical writing in high school (a) addresses specific language-arts content standards, (b) prepares students for the California exit examination, (c) develops authentic verbal skills in high demand across a broad spectrum of current jobs, (d) improves the academic prose of those college bound, and (e) promotes general cognitive maturity and social awareness. This means that technical writing is mainstream; it is simply not literary. Some literature time sacrificed for it repays students in these many ways. For students with weak literature backgrounds, technical writing is the best alternative way, perhaps the only way, that they will ever enjoy these important benefits.

As an English teacher, must I "let science into my classroom" to include technical writing?

Yes. Without technically informed, science-based cases you will cheat your technical writing students. But remember that such cases expand rather than shrink the repertoire of literacy skills that your students will then bring to all of life's writing tasks, whether analyzing fiction or coping with their own nonfiction world.

As a science teacher, why should I spend any scarce lesson time on writing at all?

Good scientists today, whether working at the basic level of technologists or the advanced level of researchers, need to communicate effectively in writing. Remember the discussion above of why technical writing is mainstream. Recall also the comment by Andrea Ames that engineering success now demands good communication among all members of a project team.

Can I teach technical writing as a separate unit? Can I instead tightly integrate it with my regular lessons?

Yes to both. You can punctuate your regular lessons with a (weekly, for example) break to focus exclusively on technical writing, or you can carefully associate each technical writing topic with an ongoing strand of your regular work (such as writing abstracts or book reviews). What works best depends mostly on your own writing background and on your patience for finding common threads. Class scheduling (length of periods) may also make one approach more practical than the other.

Where can I get appropriate teaching materials (suitable for high school) inexpensively?

While some commercially published technical writing textbooks for high school exist, they are quite expensive. If your budget is limited or if you want to experiment without investing heavily first, try the free instruction-writing and description-writing exercises publicly shared on the Technical Literacy Project branch of the East Bay Chapter Society for Technical Information web site at

The East Bay Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication and the Computation Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory jointly sponsor a Technical Literacy Project. This pro bono service project aims to improve the writing skills of underperforming (San Francisco Bay Area) middle and high school students by working directly with interested teachers to plan and present grade-appropriate technical writing lessons for their classes. The project freely shares prepared lessons (see previous question) as well as customizing exercises and activities to meet the specific needs and concerns of every participating teacher. To discuss how this project can work for your students, sent e-mail to

References Cited

American Diploma Project. (2004).: Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts. Washington, D.C.: Achieve, Inc. 117 pages. URL: http://www.achieve.org/dstore.nsf/Lookup/ADPreport/$file/ADPreport.pdf
Bennett, Jonathan and Gorovitz, Samuel. (1997).: Improving academic writing. Teaching Philosophy, (June) 20(2), 105-120.
Boiarsky, Carolyn and Liggett, Sarah. (1998).: Technical and political literacy: training and communicating in the nuclear power industry. In Garay and Bernhardt (1998), Ch. 6, pp. .119-132.
Chi, M. T. H. and others. (1989).: Self-explanations: how students study and use examples in learning to solve problems. Cognitive Science (March), 13(2), 145-182.
Churchill, John. (2003).: The conversations in focus: a symposium. The Key Reporter, (February) 68(3), 2.
Cronin, William. (1998).: Only connect: the goals of a liberal education. American Scholar, (Autumn) 67(4), 73-80.
Garay, Mary Sue and Bernhardt, Stephen (Eds.) (1998).: Expanding Literacies: English Teaching and the New Work Place. Albany: SUNY Press.
Girill, T. R. (1984).: Philosophy's relevance to technical writing. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, (Fall) 2(2), 89-95.
Girill, T. R. (2001).: Example elaboration as a neglected instructional strategy. In Scott Tilley (Ed.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Systems Documentation SIGDOC01 (pp. 39-46). Santa Fe, NM: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: http://www.ebstc.org/TechLit/TL_ExElab.htm
Gopen, George and Swan, Judith. (1990).: The science of scientific writing. American Scientist, (November-December) 78, 550-558. URL: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/23947
Hirsch, E. D. Jr. (2003).: Reading comprehension requires knowledge--of words and the world. American Educator (Spring), 27(1), 10-13, 16-22, 28-29, 44-45. URL: http://www.aft.org/american_educator/spring2003/AE_SPRNG.pdf
Johnson, Gregory and Talyor, Robert. (1998).: Tech-prep concepts and the English classroom: all students must be work-ready. In Garay and Bernhardt (1998), Ch. 11, pp. 225-246.
Meyer, Paul and Bates, Patricia. (1998).: Literacy practices in the healthcare industry: the challenge for teachers. In Garay and Bernhardt (1998), Ch. 7, pp. 133-152.
Mikulecky, Larry. (1998).: Adjusting school writing curricula to reflect expanded workplace writing. In Garay and Bernhardt (1998), Ch. 10, pp. 201-224.
Robinson, Sally (1998).: Beyond basics: workplace skills in the new manufacturing environment. In Garay and Bernhardt (1998), Ch. 5, pp. 99-118.
Stark, Robin; Heinz, Mandl; Gruber, Hans; Renkl, Alexander. (2002).: Conditions and effects of example elaboration. Learning and Instruction, (February) 12(1), 39-60.
Tufte, Edward. (1997).: Visual Explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
U.S. Department of Labor. (1992).: Report of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. [SCANS] URL: http://wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS
Wright, Patricia. (1985).: Editing: policies and processes. In Duffy, T. M. and Waller, R. (Eds.), Designing Usable Texts (pp. 63-96). Orlando, FL: Academic Press, Inc.

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Last updated: Thursday, August 23, 2007 5:43 AM

Technical Literacy FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions
About the Benefits of Technical Writing in High School

(1) Formal Studies.

(2) Informal Reviews.

(3) Literacy for Citizenship.

(1) What Comprises Liberal Education.

(2) What Technical Writing Contributes.

(3) Liberal Education Beyond Communication.

(4) Embracing Community.

References Cited

Technical Literacy FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions About the Benefits of Technical Writing in High School

(1) Formal Studies.

(2) Informal Reviews.

(3) Literacy for Citizenship.

(1) What Comprises Liberal Education.

(2) What Technical Writing Contributes.

(3) Liberal Education Beyond Communication.

(4) Embracing Community.

References Cited

Frequently Asked Questions
About the Benefits of Technical Writing in High School