Confronting Illiteracy with Scientific Communication

by T. R. Girill
East Bay Chapter, STC Fellow

What if the techniques and principles of effective scientific communication that we routinely apply at work also had an important outreach role in schools? Improving the literacy of underperforming students in urban high schools is one of today's great educational challenges. Language arts lessons grounded in research-based technical communication techniques offer an innovative, "authentic" way to improve how these students read and write.

This approach addresses literacy problems on four levels at once:

1. The professional model for "expanding the literacy" of high-school students.

Although many schools offer specialized, quasi-vocational work in journalism (or public relations), a broader approach based on technical writing concepts and practice would be more appropriate for more students. In the U.S. alone almost five times as many people work as technical writers than as journalists. More important, even entry-level jobs of all kinds now demand some ability to critically read and write technical text. And some state high-school exit exams confront students with this need before they can graduate.

2. The strategic contribution of technical writing to school literacy programs.

Most school literacy work assumes a background in literature (fiction, poetry, drama) and focuses on writing interpretations of literature. Technical writing offers a rich alternative focus, on crafting nonfiction prose that meets the demands of life (for clarity, safety, etc.) as well as career (for useful description, effective collaboration, etc.). Scientific communication is much more than vocational training: it develops cognitive maturity and critical awareness in students indifferent to or unprepared for literary studies. In many situations, it promotes the thoughtful integration of learning English and learning science as well.

3. The tactical relevance of technical writing to the school writing curriculum.

Fledgling writers (and readers) today need more than the usual language arts emphasis on grammar and stories. Equally valuable is active knowledge of the "science of effective prose," namely, the psychological, linguistic, and engineering principles of text usability. Just revealing to students that such empirical research exists about text design and audience analysis can give them an exciting, first-ever look at the practical value of literacy and at specific new ways to achieve it. Using working professionals as mentors and involving classroom teachers who lack science writing experience themselves are the big challenges in implementing these tactical benefits.

4. The specific benefits of technical writing techniques for micro-level high-school writing instruction.

Empirically validated, widely adopted text-design techniques (psychologist Richard E. Mayer's many ways to "increase problem-solving performance" of scientific prose, for example) can reshape and improve classroom writing exercises and other literacy-practice activities. Technical writing exercises can support struggling learners with scaffolding, can focus on specific student weaknesses (coherence signals, audience-appropriate detail), and can cultivate that invaluable sense of responsibility that every writer needs to help his or her readers succeed. Fine-grained practice building or analyzing nonfiction text also directly prepares students for state mandated proficiency tests.

Classroom applications

For these four reasons, the same technical writing techniques that we consider industry best practices now offer an urgently needed "second harvest" in high-school writing classrooms. The transfer from standard scientific communication to literacy development is not trivial, but it is rewarding.

Since 1999 the East Bay STC chapter (collaborating with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) has tried this approach in English classes at Oakland's Fremont High School (rated in the bottom 10% of all California schools in academic performance). The preliminary results are encouraging. The description-writing exercises we used are freely available (with commentary) at http://www.ebstc.org/TechLit/trgintro3.html.

Mary Sue Garay and Stephen A. Bernhardt's Expanding Literacies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) offers a book-length exploration of many of the same issues mentioned here.