(C) Discover things.
If you haven't "toured" the CDC's 6-page reporting form (at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/rr/rr4510.pdf) for sudden unexplained infant death (SUID) when introducing students to the good-description guidelines, this is he place to explore its features. Discovering what causes SUID requires rich (detailed) descriptions of many infant deaths by many people in many places. But this much information would be useless to CDC epidemiologists trying to discover trends, causal patterns, and prevention strategies unless it was very carefully organized and labeled, presented in a way that allows easy comparison and invites thoughtful review. The SUID reporting form features (as mentioned in the annotation for the description guidelines) promote just such analysis and discovery.
(D) Understand things.(2) OFFER THE CHALLENGE:
Making, installing, and discovering things usually involve understanding them better, of course. But sometimes better understanding is itself the prime purpose of a detailed technical description.
(i) Every prescription drug comes with a "package insert," for example, a sheet of fine-print elaborate descriptions of its biological effects, side effects, and known interactions with other drugs. This legal document both promotes appropriate use of the drug and limits the liability of the drug maker if problems arise.
(ii) Understanding can have great practical value even with no theoretical basis. Garbage bills from the Waste Management trash service are quite complex. The bill's many fields can easily confuse ESL readers or anyone with weak reading skills. So Waste Management distributes (and posts online at http://www.wmorangecounty.com/images/HowToReadComm.pdf) a two-page explanatory descriptive chart keyed to each part of the bill, which attempts (with mixed results; you can critique them with your students) to reveal "What means what?" for those who do not understand.
(A) Prepare the target.
Get a package of 3-by-5-inch nonwhite index cards and a rubber stamp with a pointing index finger (called by printers a "fist"). Stamp each card with the pointing finger, identically. Alternatively, use the pointing finger image file displayed here
and a package of colored paper to print or copy bookmark-shaped paper strips each with the "fist" image on one end.
(B) Distribute.
Give each student a nonwhite card or paper strip with the very specific directional "fist" imprint on one end.
(C) Invite Description.(3) BUILD ON THE RESULTS:
Tell the students to imagine the entire contents of their classroom jumbled into a pile of debris by an earthquake or tornado. Suppose that recovering from the rubble that one specifically marked card (or strip) now in their hand was crucial (for solving a crime or rescuing missing people, for example). How could they describe in words that unique physical thing so that searchers could reliably find it (and distinguish it from all other debris) amid the jumbled classroom contents? Students can write their descriptive phrases or sentences directly on the card (or strip) itself to reinforce their focus on its relevant features. (For a more structured activity, see item (4) below.)
(A) Look (briefly) at what the students generally chose to write and to omit when trying to describe their card for recovery. Acknowledging their effort while noting descriptive trends that would hinder searchers makes everyone aware of the nontrivial nature of useful technical description. For example, I have found that many students describe the "fist" with
(i) a purely subjective direction ("points to the girl next to me" instead of "points to the right if held at the top of the card facing the viewer"), or
(ii) a spurious interpretation ("points accusatorily"), while others
(iii) omit highly relevant details (the card or paper is not white, a very helpful clue for finding it amid most classroom paper that is white).
(B) If time permits, have students exchange cards with a neighbor and comment on the differences between their own description and that of the other student. This shows that intuitions are seldom enough; one needs systematic techniques to describe something reliably for others.(4) CONTRAST CLASS--A SCAFFOLDED ALTERNATIVE:
If your students would benefit from a more structured, scaffolded approach to this exercise, introduce them to contrast classes as a technique for discovering what to include in a useful description.
(A) Definition.
A contrast class is a set of alternative things or reference items from which a case is drawn and to which it is then compared. For instance, a "jumbo shrimp" is large compared to other shrimp (contrast class A), but small compared to lobsters (class B) or marine mammals (class C). Contrast classes are important for computing conditional probabilities and in informal logic. They also reveal which details are relevant to making a proposed description useful for its audience.
(B) Comparison chart.
You can evaluate (or help students self-evaluate) the fist-on-the-card draft descriptions with the help of a simple chart that progressively discloses different possible (increasingly narrow) contrast classes (left column) and focuses student attention on which features of the card (hence, which descriptive details) distinguish this unusual object from each contrast class in turn:Contrast class Relevant distinguishing feature(s) [how is sought item Most class This sought different from...?] members item ------------------- ------- ----- furniture in room metal, wood paper classroom paper color white blue size 8.5-by-11 in. 3-by-5 in. other 3-by-5 cards plain "fist" image other marked cards other image shapes fist shape, orientation
(C) Usability connection.
Considering contrast classes is not only a descriptive technique that students can practice, but it also offers a concrete approach to audience analysis. Different audiences in different circumstances may expect a description to work "against" different contrast classes, so a responsible writer tries to anticipate such audience needs to make their text as usable as they can. (In this case, only an audience of rubble searchers that needed to distinguish the sought card from many others marked almost identically would need the most specific details in the right column of the chart above.)
This exercise has no draft text to focus student activity (that's why it is "Exercise 0"). Students generate the text based on the properties of the marked card before them. Everyone who writes such technical descriptions always faces these challenges in meeting the needs of their audience:
(1) The problem of relevant completeness.
Readers need ample detail (here, the specific color and shape of the card would greatly help retrieve it) without irrelevant distractions (what the fist "points to," which varies for everyone who holds it).
(2) The problem of meaningful detail.
One of the most revealing parts of most technical descriptions is the purpose of the item(s) described (as the guidelines point out), because this often explains or shows the importance of the other descriptive details. (Although the marked card does not really have a purpose, the subsequent exercises do illustrate this feature.)
(3) The problem of effective delivery.
Since no sequence of steps "naturally" organizes a description the way it organizes a set of instructions, extra signals within the text to guide the reader are especially important. Good description writers must carefully construct these signals, and a lack of them is a common omission in student descriptions of the marked card. (Exercise 1 pursues this point.)
Reading:
[no reading in this exercise]
Writing:
Grade 5--"...develop [a] topic with simple facts, details, examples, and explanations" (p. 31).
Grade 9/10--"Make distinctions between the relative value and significance of specific data, facts, and ideas" (p. 60).