Technical Writing Extensions and Applications

Extensions and Applications

T. R. Girill
trgirill@acm.org
Technical Literacy Project
March, 2009 (ver. 2)

Scope

The cases and activities discussed in this section differ importantly from those in all other parts of this technical writing handbook:

They apply what students (should) have already learned from working with the basic instruction and description cases to more complex and more specialized science communication challenges, such as talks and posters. The extra complexity of these applications comes from the extra constraints that they impose on those trying to share technical information here, as explained below.
They extend the basic principles of usable technical communication (as embodied in the instruction and description guidelines) to handle the extra constraints encountered here. The psychological fundamentals remain the same, of course. But students will see those guideline principles used more broadly, with greater flexibility, and in richer psychological depth.

For these reasons, the extended cases in this section are topically more diverse than are the focused instruction and description exercises. The cases here are also much coarser in grain size; they are less often specific lessons than general frameworks within which, as a teacher, you can develop your own thematically integrated specific lessons to suit your classroom needs. The rest of this introduction explores the implications of these extensions and applications for teaching and learning, their connection to life beyond school, and the significance of the extra constraints that they present.

Implications for Learning

No Substitute for Basic Skill Building

Experience teaching technical writing in high school has shown that jumping into these extended cases is seldom the most effective way for underperforming students to improve their communication skills. This is because learning to write effective nonfiction prose, especially from complex practice situations like these "extended cases," presupposes that students already have strong underlying cognitive skills, such as

how to make inferences reliably,
how to generalize from specific instances of a rule,
how to recognize applications of a general rule, and hence
how to learn from examples.

Too often, students do not bring these skills to their study of science or their writing about scientific things. Instead, structured practice with simplified but authentic technical writing exercises develops these cognitive skills as a side benefit. Cognitive sophistication then becomes increasingly available to assist and accelerate learning in other areas. To build basic writing skills in the absence of this cognitive background, there is no substitute for direct instruction and guided practice with carefully scaffolded exercises. Working first with complex extended cases seldom enables such reliable cognitive apprenticeship.

Motivational Role

The extensions and applications in this section best play a different pedagogical role than basic skill building, namely, motivation. Some students can't imagine why they should bother with the basic instruction and description cases. Project abstracts, technical talks, or science posters, however, give those students a reason within the context of better school performance. The "extensions" here all reveal several ways to reapply basic technical-writing skills, with just minor refinements, to get an immediate return on their time investment. Those "little" underlying writing skills really do enable success on numerous complex school communication projects.

These extensions and applications can be motivating for students in a much more general way as well. Many students have already had negative experience with school talks, reports, or posters. Sometimes this involves their own inept past results; sometimes it arises from time wasted watching others perform badly too. A poor track record on earlier nonfiction communication projects leads many students to believe that their writing success is fixed and that they are doomed to failure.

Actually, however, effective technical writing is largely a matter of learned and learnable techniques. In a recent short survey article (Mendoza-Denton, 2008), UC Berkeley psychologist Rudolfo Mendoza-Denton summarized several studies that showed how pronouncements about student technical-skill malleability are actually self-fulfilling. For example, middle school students told (by researcher Lisa Blackwell) that with active practice "you can grow your intelligence" subsequently did perform better using math skills than a control group told that their intelligence was fixed.

Integrating the "extended cases" treated in this section with the guideline-anchored, skill-building exercises elsewhere in this handbook shows frustrated students how they can "grow their literacy intelligence." Seeing talks, posters, abstracts, etc., as extensions and applications of basic techniques that they have already tried on a smaller scale can encourage their persistence here. And the scaffolding suggestions offered in this section help "reveal the magic" in play in these more complex challenges. In these ways an integrated approach seeds student confidence that improvement is possible and discloses a gentle, iterative path to better personal performance.

Implications for Life

The technical writing extensions and applications discussed here pertain not only to other communication projects in school but also to the nonfiction communication challenges that students will face in the world beyond school.

Real Techniques

All of the basic guidelines and structured cases in the instruction and description sections already stress the authenticity of the text-design principles that they promote. The coarse-grained, extended cases here reinforce this real-life heritage for the communication techniques that they exercise:

Empirical research on real people facing real information-sharing problems (often in high-stakes engineering or public-health contexts quite like those featured in the extended cases) has revealed the threefold character of text usability and the design techniques for achieving it.
Psychologists and linguists sponsored by real companies (such as Microsoft and IBM), real government agencies (such as the U.S. Department of Energy and the Centers for Disease Control), and real professional organizations (such as the Human Factors Society and the Association for Computing Machinery) have published and promoted these techniques since the 1980s.

Their continued use in the larger-scale, more-complex cases here can help convince reluctant students that these good-communication principles arise from the world, not from the pedantic demands of grammar class, and that they address the world's problems.

Real Roles

Each one of the complex applications treated here has real-life parallels. (Those parallels don't occur with equal frequency, of course: technical talks are fairly common, while poster sessions are relatively rare, as the detailed analysis of each case explains.) So this section exposes students to those parallels, more visibly and on a grander scale than hinted at by focused practice exercises:

Jobs.
Students can easily recognize these applications in play in many technical jobs across the skill spectrum, from the glamorous (crime scene investigator) to the more mundane (nursing, computer documentation). As they mature and encounter more and more career choices, students will find similar communication needs met by applying the same basic usability principles to more and more diverse situations. The applications here embody an approach that students will not outgrow.
Roles.
These applications also directly prepare students for many noncareer roles (parent, citizen, neighbor, conflict negotiator) where effective nonfiction communication is crucial. Sharing technical information reliably with nonenglish speakers offers one dramatic example, starting with ESL schoolmates and continuing into each student's community and, for some, into economic or political collaborations with international science colleagues.

Role of Constraints

The scope subsection above points out what the extension and application cases have in common. Here, however, we look at what distinguishes them from one another: constraints.

This chart summarizes the situation. Across the top are the three kinds of communication principles that all these extended cases share. The organization, content, and signal guidelines apply globally here as they do in the specific exercises of the good-description section. The left side of the chart, however, separates the constraints that cause reports (or abstracts or articles), technical talks, and science posters to each pose rather different communication problems (as illustrated in the body of the chart).

Shared Communication Principles(*)

Organization:
Create and relate parts Content:
Supply and manage details Signals:
Reveal framework, integrate graphics

Constraints(+)
for
articles/reports Example: readers can easily study and annotate text here
[You can give systematic, explanatory analysis]

Constraints(+)
for
technical talks Example: listeners cannot reread or review anything
[You must provide order cues and repeats for them]

Constraints(+)
for
science posters Example: viewers only see your work (1) quickly and (2) from a distance
[You must replace most text with simple, thematic graphics]

(*)See the good-description guidelines for the full text of these shared communication-design principles.

(+)See "Technical Writing Explained" for background on nonfiction writing as "text engineering," shaped by empirical constraints and research-grounded design principles.

Text design is engineering, and this way of distinguishing the extended cases borrows an important insight from engineering practice. When engineers design something (perhaps a bridge between two sides of a river or software to perform a special task, such as sorting) they apply general scientific principles and lots of background knowledge. But they also focus on the specific constraints of the problem at hand (just what shape the opposite river banks have, perhaps, or whether they need to sort a few big items or thousands of small ones).

Such constraints may at first seem to make an engineering problem harder to solve (they add extra requirements). However, they actually transform a problem too vague to solve well into a more thoroughly defined and limited problem whose specific features can be, and usually need to be, exploited to come up with a practical solution. Designers of railroad bridges, for example, have failed (with literal train-wreck results) when they considered only the local geography and ignored the weight, speed, and vibration of the passing trains (Petroski, 1982, p. 58). Engineers don't succeed by ignoring a problem's unique constraints but rather by using them, taking advantage of them to better design a solution that actually works well in each specific situation. The "power of constraints" is so great that it merits its own section in psychologist Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (Norman, 1988, p. 60).

Hence, the detailed treatment of each application here mines out its special constraints (sequence issues for talks, distance issues for posters, etc.). More than anything else, these different constraints call for using or elaborating the basic text-usability principles somewhat differently in each case. And the divergent constraints offer you, as the teacher, another opportunity for cognitive apprenticeship. By

making the unique constraints of each application here explicit for students, and
modeling good responses to each differently constrained science communication problem,

you can help students iteratively expand their literacy skill set. The guidelines here let (in fact, require that) students experiment beyond the basic techniques adequate for the (more) isolated instruction and description exercises where they first explored effective nonfiction communication.

Application Cases Available

Listed (and linked) here are clusters of teaching materials to help you introduce several "extended cases" of technical communication into your science classes. These materials differ in format from the basic instruction and description activities also shared on this website: these are not themselves packaged lessons or spelled-out exercises. Instead, each one offers a general framework within which you can build many lessons tailored to your specific classes and students. The annotations shared with each "extended case" suggest some possible ways to develop them in your classroom; there are many others.

Also, these application cases are still work in progress. Some include layered examples and multiple versions for students with different abilities. Others are much less elaborate. More teaching tips and refinements will collect here as these cases evolve with further use.

Plain
(for
students) Annotated
(teacher
notes)

Giving technical talks

Taking notes effectively

(basic)

plain6d1 annotated6d

(illustrated)

plain6d2

(FS/CSI illustrated version)

plain6dfs

Comparing web sites (by audience)

general annotated8d

technical

Spanish

Preparing a report (FS/CSI version)

reportfs

References

Mendoza-Denton, Rudolfo. (2008).: Framed, Greater Good, 5(1), 22-24, Summer 2008. URL: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/ 2008summer/Mendoza-Denton651.html
Norman, Donald. (1988, 2002).: The Design of Everyday Things (previously, The Psychology of Everyday Things). New York: Doubleday (Basic Books). URL: http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/0385267746
Petroski, Henry. (1982).: To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. New York: Vintage Books. URL: http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/0312806809

	*Shared Communication Principles()**
	Organization: Create and relate parts	Content: Supply and manage details	Signals: Reveal framework, integrate graphics
Constraints(+) for articles/reports	Example: readers can easily study and annotate text here [You can give systematic, explanatory analysis]
Constraints(+) for technical talks		Example: listeners cannot reread or review anything [You must provide order cues and repeats for them]
Constraints(+) for science posters			Example: viewers only see your work (1) quickly and (2) from a distance [You must replace most text with simple, thematic graphics]

	Plain (for students)	Annotated (teacher notes)

Giving technical talks
Taking notes effectively
(basic)	plain6d1	annotated6d
(illustrated)	plain6d2
(FS/CSI illustrated version)	plain6dfs
Comparing web sites (by audience)	general	annotated8d
	technical
	Spanish
Preparing a report (FS/CSI version)	reportfs