Teaching Professional and Technical Communication

A Practicum in a Book

Tracy Bridgeford

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781607326809
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Teaching Professional and Technical Communication guides new instructors in teaching professional and technical communication (PTC). The essays in this volume provide theoretical and applied discussions about the teaching of this diverse subject, including relevant pedagogical approaches, how to apply practical aspects of PTC theory, and how to design assignments.This practicum features chapters by prominent PTC scholars and teachers on rhetoric, style, ethics, design, usability, genre, and other central concerns of PTC programs. Each chapter includes a scenario or personal narrative of teaching a particular topic, provides a theoretical basis for interpreting the narrative, illustrates the practical aspects of the approach, describes relevant assignments, and presents a list of questions to prompt pedagogical discussions. Teaching Professional and Technical Communication is not a compendium of best practices but instead offers a practical collection of rich, detailed narratives that show inexperienced PTC instructors how to work most effectively in the classroom.
Contributors: Pam Estes Brewer, Eva Brumberger, Dave Clark, Paul Dombrowski, James M. Dubinsky, Peter S. England, David K. Farkas, Brent Henze, Tharon W. Howard, Dan Jones, Karla Saari Kitalong, Traci Nathans-Kelly, Christine G. Nicometo, Kirk St.Amant

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Introduction to Teaching Professional and Technical Communication

A Practicum in a Book

Tracy Bridgeford

DOI: 10.7330/9781607326809.c001

Teaching Professional and Technical Communication: A Practicum in a Book grew out of my efforts to create a technical communication pedagogy course for local secondary education teachers, part-time teachers, and graduate students who knew little to nothing about the subject, let alone how to teach it. This book delivers what I didn’t have when I first taught technical communication—a practicum that enabled me to see pedagogical approaches in action before stepping into the classroom. This collection is intended to help inexperienced instructors understand the classroom experience of the PTC instructor and how to be professional and technical communication instructors in face-to-face classrooms. Inexperienced instructors refers to instructors from academia with no industry experience, industry professionals with no academic training, or graduate students with neither. To address this gap, I thought it was important to require readings of the landmark essays that provide a theoretical foundation informing pedagogical approaches (see Suggested Readings at the end of this introduction), but which also provide pragmatic knowledge about instruction. Because many of us in the field learned to teach Professional and Technical Communication (PTC) through trial and error, hallway conversations, conference presentations, and discussions with colleagues—all of which address important theoretical information about teaching professional and technical communication—many of the practical aspects of teaching the subject have not been available in print since the 1980s, and so much has changed since those early days.

Although it does not aim to be a compendium of best practices, this collection does provide plenty of practical advice and examples. To that end, I asked contributors to shape their chapters as if they were observers in a classroom recording classroom practice. They describe what teaching a particular PTC competency, such as information design, looks like in actual practice by establishing a scenario; providing a theoretical basis as a foundation for interpreting the scenario; illustrating the practical aspects of applying the approach, method, or practice; and describing assignments or activities that instructors can generalize to use in their own classrooms. Each chapter concludes with a list of questions for pedagogical discussions. It delivers a deeper level of training—a practicum that prepares instructors to walk into the professional and technical communication classroom with confidence. The term practicum can suggest a purely practical approach to teaching, or it can refer to the cumulative knowledge and skills acquired over the course of an education. For this collection, practicum signifies both the theoretical and practical aspects of preparing to teach PTC. This “practicum in a book” guides instructors through the teaching of topics normally covered in service or introductory courses in professional and technical communication.

I begin this practicum in a book by describing the problem-solving approach used most frequently in professional and technical communication classes followed by a description of the various competencies taught in these classes. Technical communication instructors must be aware of the role these competencies play in writing technical documents so they will be better able to guide student learning. These general competencies include audience analysis and purpose, information design, project and content management, style, and ethics. Although I discuss each competency separately, they are typically taught simultaneously. That is, it is difficult to teach ethics without also considering rhetorical devices such as audience and purpose or to teach genre without also addressing design and content strategy. Likewise, it is impossible to teach any of these competencies without also tending to style issues. And given the nature of globalization, it would be difficult to prepare technical documents for international contexts without also considering the impact of these competencies on those audiences. This problem-solving approach helps instructors situate these competencies within a context of social action.

Problem-Solving Approach

Sometime in the 1980s, we moved from a forms-based approach focused on the various parts of a form that students followed like a template with little consideration for the action involved to more socially based approaches that examine the contexts and influences on that document—what I’m calling a problem-solving approach. This approach is a critical thinking method that guides students through the various iterations of a technical document. It asks students to approach their writing from the standpoint of solving a communication problem. For example, while a memo as a form has identifiable, common parts (i.e., To, From, Date, and Subject), it is equally important to consider the various social aspects of that piece of communication and why, for example, this or that word, heading, or design was chosen. Documents grow out of a context and a situation, which affect all aspects of the writing. Social aspects refers to the various contexts in which PTC is involved, such as examining the power relations between the addressee and the writer, or the role of professional and technical communicators in an organization’s hierarchy, or how the creation and organization of content (seen as a product) can help define those relationships. These examples demonstrate the value of focusing on the social approaches of PTC in ways that engage students in their own learning and help them develop an awareness of audience, purpose, and situation. Lloyd Bitzer (1968) calls this the “rhetorical situation.”

The exigency of a rhetorical situation, Bitzer says, is what calls the writing “into existence” (its purpose or reason for existing) and what informs the writer’s choices about the appropriate style, tone, register, design, and graphics to be used given a particular situation (2). When students learn about writing in a context, or reacting to a situation, they begin to see how communication happens in the workplace. It’s not simply the creation of a genre; it is a form of social action that grows out of a particular situation. In the workplace, events often require a document of some sort (e.g., a trip report, an activity log, an instruction set, a user manual, a memo, a letter, and so on) that communicates various actions to a specific internal or an external audience (e.g., new policies are enacted, updates are communicated, marketing materials are made, and so on). Creating assignments that focus on a situation students can then use to direct their writing (e.g., writing a progress report for a group project) has become common pedagogical practice. Shaped by the nuances of the rhetorical situation, instruction has evolved into a pedagogy focused on problem solving, and this approach is what enables students to become agents writing in situ.

The various stages of this approach include preparatory work of such considerations of audience, purpose, research, genre, and situational analysis, that is, how the document will be used and in what context. For example, when I assign instruction sets, I often begin by showing students images from NASA that show an astronaut making repairs outside the International Space Station. In this image, an astronaut is consulting the pages of a book attached to his wrist; the book is a big picture book made out of plastic. In another image, an astronaut is consulting a portable tablet attached to her wrist. Both images are powerful reminders that documents (print or digital) created for space must address how they will be used by the intended audience. Given the confines of space travel, astronauts need large text and images that are easy to see despite the huge helmet and big buttons that are easy to push with large gloves on. This example illustrates the importance of social context and the kinds of knowledge writers need when drafting documents that will be used for a particular purpose.

Following this preparatory work, instructors can then instruct students to begin drafting the document, using what they learned from the preparatory work to craft sentences and organize the document’s content. Students then must think about how best to organize the content in ways that make it easy to find information because technical documents are not often read from beginning to end as one would read a novel. They are scanned by readers looking for specific information. For example, astronauts repairing a loose joint on the International Space Station may bypass some information about what the joint is and how it works in order to get to the repairs more quickly. Given their limited time outside the space station, astronauts must make repairs quickly and cannot spend time on information not useful to the specific task. Students must then think about the wording of each step, which requires using the imperative voice, providing feedback statements when necessary, shaping the content into manageable chunks. Following the drafting and organization stages, students would complete the writing process by copyediting and proofreading the content, paying close attention to sentence and paragraph structure and style.

Students would then ensure that the design of the document aids usability. By discussing this step as if it were a last part of the process, I do not mean to suggest that design instruction is saved for the end of the process as if it is an afterthought or purely decoration. Design issues are raised throughout the process and are certainly a part of all steps in the problem-solving approach. Design issues involve the presentation of content for a specific audience’s use. As mentioned earlier, astronauts working outside the space station need large pictures and text to work effectively. Instructions must be designed with one step per page/screen to accommodate a larger font or image size as well as huge gloves. In this way, writers must provide comprehensive information in each step, all while being succinct, so an astronaut would not have to continually page/move back and forth from step to step. The problem-solving pedagogical approach I just described is evident in each chapter of this book no matter what competency the PTC authors discuss in the pages to follow.

Audience Analysis and Purpose

Audience analysis is the primary competency PTC students must engage in if they are to become effective communicators on the job because it influences every other aspect of technical documentation, such as style, tone, organization, and design. In my own and many other instructors’ experiences, students tend to skip the necessary audience-analysis work, mostly because it involves changing from an “I” to a “you” attitude, as both Jim Dubinsky (chapter 2) and Dan Jones (chapter 3) describe in their respective chapters. Switching viewpoints is challenging for students because past experiences in composition, for example, have shown them that prewriting activities such as invention heuristics, critiquing both strong and weak writing, and instructor comments on drafts are the means for getting started on writing or on designing projects. Once students understand the value of the “exigency of audience awareness,” as Tharon Howard calls it in chapter 11, the more effective their documents or presentations will be. As a central tenet, audience analysis is the most important work of writing a technical document in that it is what lends credibility to the writing. When a document is well written, the work of the user can continue without interruption and without questions to a call center. The credibility of a well-written document is especially evident when translating documents for international audiences because understanding the culture of a communication problem, whether familiar or unfamiliar, is a necessary step toward writing and designing technical documents.

Information Design

Creating technical documents involves various aspects of the design process, including genre, visual cues, graphics, and information design. Part of solving the problem of the design of a document is conducting a genre analysis, choosing the appropriate genre, and shaping its design in ways that address the audience and situation. As a starting point, we might ask, What does the genre look like? How will it be used? What social action is it addressing? We might look at models, but we must be prepared to adjust the design as needed based on what we’ve learned from other analyses as well as the situational requirements. Fundamentally, genre is a social, rather than an individual, process, a process that can help instructors fight the ivory-tower conception of writing most students harbor.

Design also involves examining how people use text and images to provide visual cues about a document’s structure and organization, such as text, pictures, italics, boldface, type size, white space, and positioning of elements on a page—all of which should make it easier for the reader to find the needed information. These symbolic aspects of a document are important because technical documents are scanned, not read in their entirety. For example, when assigned a proposal or report on the effects of global warming, students must understand that different people will read the document in different ways. The executive will probably only read the executive summary, while a financial agent may only be interested in the budget. As such, the various areas of the report must use visual cues such as bolded headings or bulleted lists to designate different parts and use white space effectively in order to highlight important information such as facts and figures or graphics. Design is even more important when preparing documents for translation because credibility is an important factor: design expectations may differ depending on the culture. It is important to know, for example, what colors or images are appropriate to use. Design has become more centralized in PTC pedagogy because readers have become more visually oriented.

Design should not be separated from any other competencies when writing technical documents because it is as much a part of documentation as writing, so it’s important to emphasize its rhetorical nature. For students, this competency may seem largely minor at first, but it is every bit as rhetorical as writing. The design of a document is not merely applying decorative characteristics as a finishing touch. Design should provide instruction to the user in ways that demonstrate how to read the document. In this way, it compels the user to act in a certain way and, therefore, should be emphasized throughout the course, not just in a special chapter or unit. Design decisions can mean the difference between the text being taken seriously or ignored. For example, choosing a font indicates the type of information presented. When the Higgs boson particle discovery announcement was made, the most significant scientific advance in forty years, it was marred by the use of the font Comic Sans, a childlike font typically used in informal situations. Using it to announce a formal, major scientific advancement gave the impression of frivolity and not the seriousness the situation called for. Design competency is addressed in both service and major’s courses because technical documents are not just written; they are designed to ensure readability, legibility, and usability. Readability refers to how easy it is for users to find the information they need, while legibility refers to a font’s appearance and its ability to be deciphered. Usability refers to how well the document can be used to find what’s needed. Everything about a document, or information design, is about how content is presented to an audience.

Content and Project Management

Whether the task is content management, or project management, students most assuredly spend a significant time managing their tasks, which Dave Clark in chapter 4 calls content strategy. Content strategy is a “movement,” he says, that emphasizes single sourcing of content in ways that enable it to be used more than once and in more than one context. This management component then becomes a necessary part of work in the twenty-first century as workers connect large masses of information among various departments, all of which contribute to the overall content created for technical products. This information is “repeatable” in that it shapes information into repeatable blocks of content. Key to content strategy and its management is the use of “modular chunks” in topic areas that ensures they can be used in a variety of contexts, especially content written for translation. As a component of the problem-solving approach, content strategy involves completing a needs assessment, content inventory, and content audit—all of which involve situation, audience, and design analyses. Planning in these areas keeps students focused on writing as solving a problem.

Ethics and Style

Two competencies integral to the first three previously described—audience analysis, design, and management—are ethics and style. Ethics plays a role in all situations, including power relations, organizational structures, credibility issues, stylistic choices, content-management strategies, and genre choices. Sometimes ethical dilemmas can seem small and insignificant (e.g., stealing a pen from an employer) while other issues are major, affect...