Gian S. Pagnucci, Ph.D.

Teaching Technical Writing

I teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP for short). I've taught technical writing for awhile now, and before that I worked as a technical writer documenting computer software packages. To me writing, particularly technical writing, is very serious work. Do a poor job explaining how to program a VCR, and people end up having flashing clocks in their living rooms. Mess up the directions for a bank's savings program, and someone's hard earned money disappears. Incorrectly document how to dispose of a toxic cleaning agent, and people get injured.

My class is for advanced students who know a lot about their majors and will do a lot of writing in their future careers: safety science majors, nursing students, computer scientists. Tech writing is a hard class with a lot of work. My students have to prepare a real written product for real users. They have to write accurately and effectively. They have to desktop publish what they do and put it up on the World Wide Web. I like to think it's a course that will help my students later in life. Often it is.

So when a friend first asked me if I used journals in my technical writing class, I thought, "Of course not." I had the same concerns about using journals that I imagine many technical writing teachers have. I was worried that journals weren't serious enough writing, that students wouldn't work very hard on them, that the journals would take too much time to grade, and that I had too many other things to cover. I figured journals were fine for my beginning writing classes, but not for an upper level technical writing course.

A Philosophy for Using Journals

I've done a lot of thinking since then, and my technical writing students have done a lot of journal writing. Today I view journals as a great place for:

• brainstorming
• rough drafts and trial runs
• developing a writer's sense of audience
• encouraging collaboration
• helping make writing seem less intimidating

• Journals should be work oriented.
• Journals should be collaborative and audience centered.
• Journals should be electronic.

Technical writers are always working to deliver technical information to an audience very much in need of that information. Not only is there a lot of work, but most of it isn't too exciting. So when I considered adding journals to my classes, I didn't want to increase the writing workload without some direct benefits to the students. In fact, what I really wanted was a tool that would help my students do their writing better. I hoped journals would be a task that encouraged brainstorming, drafting, and revision.

Because technical writing is so heavily focused on real audiences, I also didn't want journal writing to be an activity that taught my students to write only for themselves or their teachers. I wanted, instead, for the journals to help my students improve their ability to write for other people. That's why I decided that any journals my students kept would need to be shared with their classmates.

Finally, I know from experience that in the workplace all writing gets done on computers. When you hand your boss a memo, it better be laser printed, spell checked, and easy to follow. And when a written product goes to a client, it needs to outshine the competition. I teach my students how to design effective page layouts, how to use word processors and desktop publishers, and how to put writing on the Internet. To me, good technical writing starts with knowing how to use writing technologies. So I cringed at the thought of spiral-bound stacks of handwritten scrawlings. Sure, I've got tons of old notebooks stuffed in the closet of my study, but these days I do almost all my writing at the computer and about half of that writing is on e-mail. When I planned out journal writing for my classes, I decided probably the best way to keep those journals would, in fact, be to use e-mail. I figured it was important for my students to be experts at using e-mail anyway, and I also hoped to save some trees. Even better, this would emphasize to my students the way most technical writers do their work, by using a computer. And so that's how the electronic journal, what I call a TechJournal, arrived in my classroom.

I hope by now that I've been fairly convincing about the merits of using journals in technical writing classes. It's my belief that journals can be work driven, collaborative, electronic, and a wonderful learning tool for students. I'll move, then, to showing some specific examples of the journal-writing assignments I use in my classes and the types of writing they elicit. By examining the journal entries of my students, other teachers may not only be encouraged to adopt this approach in their classrooms, but also to modify it for the needs and abilities of their own students. The TechJournals I'm writing about here are just the beginning.

Getting Started

Most of the work I have my students do in technical writing is project-based. I ask each student to identify a potential client who needs to have some writing done. The work is performed for free, and the projects are limited to about twenty pages. Students have carried out projects like writing handbooks for student organizations, designing guides to workplace safety, and creating instruction manuals for fitness training and computer programs.

The students usually work on projects for their departments or the places where they're employed. The project gives them knowledge about the topic and the needs of the readers. It also keeps the students focused on writing for someone who will actually use the manual, not just a teacher who will grade it.

I start the course by introducing these projects and showing samples from previous classes. Once students have a general idea of what they want to work on, I get them started keeping their TechJournals to help them with the writing process. I like to introduce the journals early so students learn to view them as an integral part of their technical writing work.

The initial electronic journal assignment I hand out looks like this:

The journal entry from Donald, with which I began this chapter, follows the general guidelines of my first assignment. Here's another example:

Jenny's journal entry is low-key and easy to write. I give the students credit for writing the entries and tell them they don't have to be overly concerned with grammar and spelling as long as they are clear. This freedom enables Jenny to use a friendly, casual style full of exclamation points. She even has a couple of minor errors, like her word "senoir." (Of course, this was partly because we hadn't yet learned how to use the e-mail spell checker.) Like Jenny, Donald also uses a congenial tone as he talks about his favorite rock bands and says that his résumé "is in bad shape." The journal exercises are intended to be for a student audience, and these relaxed comments show that the students really do understand this goal. The students are not adopting an overly serious and formal tone in the hopes of impressing a teacher. Instead, they are writing to their classmates to get a little help, just as they would be likely to do with a colleague at a workplace office.

One of the real benefits, in fact, of this approach to keeping a journal is how it emphasizes for my students the idea that writing doesn't have to be a solitary experience. Many of my students come into technical writing class thinking that writing is a hard, lonely battle. E-mail journals are valuable in my teaching because they ensure that my students do their work together. Because students write their journal entries as e-mail messages, those entries automatically get sent to at least one other student reader, someone who is likely to respond.

As the teacher, I also get the messages, keeping me aware of what my students are working on and how their projects are progressing. I often quickly scan my e-mail before class, and then I'm prepared to touch base with the students and can respond to their individual needs. I can also directly write them a reply in e-mail. However, I generally avoid inserting myself into the journal-writing process because I don't want the students to become intimidated and feel like they're being watched. A few comments in class let the students know I'm reading their entries. If I reply to every message they send, though, I run the risk that my students will freeze up with writer's block because they're petrified I'll jump in and correct every grammatical error they make. Writing supportive, noncritical comments to respond to student work can address this concern, but students generally view English teachers as correct usage guardians no matter how we act.

Accurate grammar usage is important, of course, but what I'm mainly after is for my students to believe they have some power over writing, to have confidence that they really do know how to use writing for effective communication. Unfortunately, many of them don't believe they control their writing when they begin my course. I can't always get them to believe they do even by the end of the course. But the journal entries help since they emphasize the communicative nature of writing.

In many ways there's not actually much need for me to reply to the journal entries or for the students to even know I'm reading them. The entries themselves elicit responses from real readers, and that's usually all that's needed to make them valuable enough for the students to continue the process:

Of course, a class discussion might have achieved the same result, but this time there is a permanent record available for the students to consult. As a teacher, this feature of the electronic journal writing is especially helpful. When my students review each others' writing orally in class, I rarely can get them to take any notes about the discussions, no matter how many times I suggest it. I'm sure there are some students out there who actually like to take notes, but I don't seem to get a lot of them. What I do get, however, are students who love to receive e-mail and normally don't get much of it. By taking advantage of a technology my students already enjoy, my TechJournal assignments have a built-in advantage. Most teachers will take any advantage they can get to promote student learning.

Finally, many of the teachers I know who use journals in their classes say they do so because journals encourage students to get lots of practice writing. If practice is the goal, then e-mail accomplishes the same thing, and most students actually think it's fun.

Work in Progress

As the semester moves along, I encourage students to make active use of their TechJournals to record their progress, share drafts, and look for help. To emphasize that the journal writing is directly related to the work they're doing, I give my students the following assignment a couple of weeks into the semester:

My second TechJournal assignment gives students a range of options about which to write. The assignment also asks the students to send their TechJournal entries to their project advisor(s). Each student in my technical writing course serves as a project advisor for one or two (depending on the class size) of their classmates' projects. Project advisors edit and proof drafts and, more importantly, become an audience for the TechJournal entries. As the semester progresses, students often use their journals to ask their project advisors for specific kinds of help:

The wonderful thing that happens here is that Donald not only convinces Steve to revise the handbook, he also suggests to Steve how to do that revising. Steve is happy to get the advice. Donald, meanwhile, comes away realizing he actually knew how to help Steve with writing the project, which encourages Donald to have confidence when doing his own writing. Of course, I could have helped Steve revise his project during a teacher/student writing conference, assuming I was smart enough to think of the same idea Donald did. Instead, Steve has gotten the help he needed, and Donald has earned the praise. Both students have learned something valuable without a teacher getting in the way. Along with making journal entries that give advice, students also constantly use their TechJournals to provide their project advisors with progress reports:

Additionally, like Donald and Steve's journals, Jenny's entry shows that she is thinking more and more about her audience. Jenny stops working on the web page so that she can consult with her readers to get help with her writing. I believe Jenny is honing her instinct for knowing when and where readers will get lost. As she identifies such problems, she decides to seek real response. Jenny no longer views her writing in isolation. Instead, she is focused on the writer/reader relationship.

Finally, by concentrating on reporting their progress in regular TechJournal entries, students are also preparing for the type of constant accountability demanded at many companies. Writing journal entries helps my students get used to describing what they've accomplished. In my own experience, that's a skill bosses look for.

Wrapping Things Up

As the semester draws to a close and students come under the pressure of final exams and projects, their journal entries get pretty short, which seems reasonable to me. By then, hopefully, the journals have served their purpose. In fact, most of the final entries are filled with comments like "Everything's almost done" or "How will I ever get this finished?" or "Hey, I think this has turned out pretty darn good."

I considered finishing my chapter with one of these triumphant little messages. However, it is probably more effective to include the cover letter from one of my students' final projects. The things I hoped journal writing would do for my students were to foster their orientation toward work, encourage collaboration and their development of audience awareness, and promote their use of technology. The electronic journal entries already included should provide some evidence that the last two goals were achieved. But what about the first goal? Did the TechJournals help my students gain a better sense of how to write as professionals? Showing exact proof is difficult to do, but one final piece of quality student writing makes the case:

I realize, of course, that the TechJournals were not the only things contributing to the success of Steve's final letter. I imagine his natural abilities, the other class activities he worked on, and the writing he had generated in prior courses all helped him create a strong letter. One specific class activity is never the secret key to learning. Instead, as teachers we have to give our students lots of tools and skills for approaching the work and challenges they'll face in the future. TechJournals are one such tool, so I'll keep asking students to write them.