TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION Jack Selzer This anthology1 of resources for teachers of technical writing has already been very favorably reviewed by some very capable authorities. The NCTE's Committee on Technical and Scientific Communication has named it "the best collection of essays" on technical writing published in 1981; and the same group has commended one of those essays-Paul Anderson's "Organizing Is Not Enough!"-as the "best article on teaching methods" that appeared in that same year. And the technical writing teachers who read the book will surely agree that the praise is justified. Dwight Stevenson has packed a remarkable range of useful ideas into an accessibly short format: among the twenty-one essays are suggestions for using readings, teaching graphics, orienting students to library research, assigning group projects, meeting the needs of foreign students-and much more. Yet somehow Stevenson arranges the contributions into a coherent whole. Partly that coherence arises from common assumptions; the selections typically ground their advice on rhetorical principles, not on prescriptive formulas or simple recipes. Moreover, the contents struck me as remarkably flexible. They offer as much to experienced teachers as to rank beginners; they serve a variety of teaching styles; and they recognize and adapt to a range of institutional variables that determine who enrolls in the course, when, and with what background. Finally, several of the essays are so good that teachers will return to them again and again. For example, Linda Flower's essay, "Communication Strategy in Professional Writing: Teaching a Rhetorical Case," reminded me to be sure that my students are including strategic planning activities in their writing processes. Gordon Cogshall's "Cut and Paste: Pre- paring for On-the-Job Writing" suggests some exercise that simulate the conditions under which engineers compose at work. Paul Anderson's essay on teaching students how to re- JOURNAL OF ADVANCED COMPOSITION, Volume N (1983). Copyright 1987. 222 Journal of Advanced Composition veal organization deserves its award on at least two counts. Not only does Anderson furnish a series of superbly conceived class- room activities that teachers will incorporate into their own undergraduate classrooms and industry presentations, but he also demonstrates how teachers can prepare their own class- room materials to teach a variety of particular rhetorical lessons. The rest of the contents, divided somewhat arbitrarily into three overlapping sections, are nearly as good. According to the Preface, section one ("Courses") outlines some "alternative approaches to the teaching of technical writing"i however, the seven essays do not really propose a series of different approaches, at least not in the sense of Donovan and McClelland's Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition. In- stead, the first four essays introduce coherent variations of one approach, the case method, which their authors feel is especially useful for giving undergraduate students experience in post- graduate writing situations: Flower's essay on "communication strategy," Lawrence Johnson's "A Professional Scenario for the Technical Writing Oassroom," Ben and Marthalee Barton's "The Case Method: Bridging the Gap between Engineering Stu- dent and Professional," and Colleen Aycock's "Simulation and In-Class Writing: A Student-Centered Approach." Anita Brostoff's "The Functional Writing Model in Technical Writing," a second approach to the course, it thoughtfully adapted from the work of A. D. Van Nostrand, C. H. Knoblauch, and their colleagues. David Carson's "A New Approach to Teaching a Course in Writing for Publication" offers not so much a different approach (though he does incorporate peer re- viewing and outside advisors into his classes) as a different course-on writing for scholarly, professional, and popular journals. Gerard Gross's "Group Projects in the Technical Writing Course" describes no "approach" to the course at all, but his possibilities for including group writing projects neverthe- less will be exploited by many teachers. In fact, Gross's essay perhaps more logically belongs in the second section of the book ("Components"), where ideas are suggested for various segments of a technical writing course. Two essays, for instance, explore ways of incorporating readings into the course. Stephen Gresham's "From Aristotle to Einstein: Scientific Literature and the Teaching of Technical Writing" in- cludes an especially enterprising list of historical readings from Faraday, Boyle, Curie, Darwin, Muir, and othersi Wayne Losano in "Scientific American in the Technical Writing Course" rec- Jack Selzer 223 ommends detailed rhetorical analyses of more contemporary essays. (It might also have been useful to include an essay explaining how teachers might obtain and employ samples of industry or government writing). The other contributions to this section confine themselves to particular aspects of technical writing courses: Gordon Cogshall's "cut and paste" exercises; Maurita Holland and Leslie Olsen's method for teaching would- be engineers and scientists how to find technical information in the library; a disappointingly arhetorical set of gUidelines for visual aids; some advice for teaching students to write instruc- tions; a prescriptive and strangely product-oriented account of oral reports; and Herman Estrin's recommendation for teaching prospective engineers how to adapt to audiences by having them write books on their specialties for elementary-school chil- dren. The final section of the book, "Exercises," suggests a series of particular exercises (like Anderson's "Organizing Is Not Enough!") that are calculated to reinforce specific points in technical communication. Dean Hall, for instance, shares the entertaining way that he introduces his course and its goals in "Technical Writing Class: Day One." Gretchen Schoff recommends an assignment that forces future environmental engineers to learn how to adapt to audiences outside their organizations. Thomas Huckin contributes a well informed, flexible, and resourceful way to overcome a particular but common and especially knotty problem: "Teaching the Use of English Articles to Nonnative Speakers in Technical Writing Classes." And Susan Dunkle and David Pahnos have developed a powerful strategy for teaching students how to consider social concerns as they investigate technical problems, how to integrate qualitative "value hierarchies" into quantitative decision-making processes. My only disappointment in this sec- tion was Peter R. Klaver's description of an instructional simula- tion game calculated to dramatize the difficulties of communicat- ing in complex organizations; the game itself seemed interest- ing, but the account of its rules and conduct was so incomplete that teachers will be unable to try it themselves. Perhaps this is also the place to list another disappOintment-the bibliography of Supplementary Readings appended to the book. It includes far too many redundant textbooks (and yet omits many of the most informative texts); it enters few items on basic topics like audience, revision, and graphics; and it fails to list some of the most crucial theoretical orientations to technical writing, by 224 Journal of Advanced Composition authorities like Kinneavy, Miller, Kuhn, Ziman, Toulmin, and others. There are other omissions as well. For one thing, the book understandably devotes itself to the area of greatest need, the introductory "service" course in technical writing. Only by reading David Carson's essay and by extending the suggestions of a few other contributors will teachers find ideas for other courses or industry programs in technical writing. Applications to writing in the scientific and technical disciplines themselves remain implicit, too. In fact, the book's obsession with "bridging the gap" between school-sponsored writing and writing at work seems a bit old-fashioned, now that many composition teachers assign papers that respond to real rhetorical exigencies and now that writing-across-the-curriculum programs are beginning to make writing in the disciplines less a matter of rehearsing what the professor already knows. Moreover, for all their emphasis on audience, the contributors are surprisingly vague about exact- ly how writers take audiences into account when they write; the profession still has not found reliable ways of reconciling Walter Ong's contention that "the writer's audience is always a fiction" with the fact that writers at work often compose for very real, specific, knowable people. Nor do any essays concede that writers and audiences can be as much makers of meaning as en- coders and receptors. In addition, certain elements of the writing process are treated only superficially. Revision, for instance, receives only modest attention; there are no essays on the teaching of style or on evaluation, and although the planning activities that often precede the composition of drafts are taken up in several essays, invention is still pretty much left to the subject disciplines or to library research. (Perhaps the case method, where "students are provided . . . basic information" [29] and where "the case should generate the facts [and] the writer's job is to generalize concepts and create a structure" (38], precludes substantial work on invention). Finally, the book fails to articulate a consensus about the relationship of technical writing to other writing courses. Is technical writing an advanced composition course? (After all, in most schools techni- cal writing follows freshman composition and serves advanced undergraduates). If so, just what is it that makes technical wri- ting advanced? Is it just the upperclass population? Is it the instruction in library research, graphics, and the kinds of writing done at work? Is that enough? Or is technical writing simply a different kind of writing course, more difficult perhaps but no Jack Selzer 225 more advanced than others? This list of questions and omissions, however, is meant to imply the contents of a future book rather than to be an objec- tion to this one. For the growth of technical writing courses and the professional growth of those who teach them suggest that there will soon be other books like this one. For now, though, we can be satisfied: teachers who keep this book on their shelf will find themselves and their courses constantly renewed; and whoever does that next book will have a good model to imitate. Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania NOTFS 1 Courses, Components, and Exercises in Techniazl Communiaztion, edited by Dwight W. Stevenson (Umana, lL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1981), x + 230 pages.
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