So I am finally getting around to prepping my classes for Fall 2011. I wish I’d started sooner–indeed, I’ve been thinking about posting this for quite a while–but such is the nature of things that I am only getting to it now. Every semester, I teach a technical writing class mostly to engineering students, for whom it is a requirement in their major, and a handful of students from other majors. In general, these students are not going to become professional technical writers, nor are they particularly interested in–and they don’t really need–a whole lot of technical communication theory. So I try to design assignments that have a clear connection to the kind of writing they will have to do in the real world and that ask them to think originally and creatively in ways that are analogous to things they might be asked to do on the job. I’ve written before, though more in the context of talking about grading, about the first assignment I give to every technical writing class I teach, which is for students to pretend it is the previous semester and write a letter of application to the class. The assignment I am looking for help on has several parts and culminates in the final paper that students hand me, a modified proposal.
The basic outline of the assignment is this: I ask the students to imagine that they work for a big home appliance/electronics company and that they have been asked to devise an improvement to any home appliance they want, the idea being that the CEO of the company will choose the best one as the top of the company’s product line for next year. (Or something like that. I vary the story slightly from semester to semester.) I tell the students not to worry about whether the improvement they would like to make is actually possible either financially or technologically; they just have to come up with a plausible explanation for how the improvement would work. So, for example, one semester, a group of students decided to make a self-cleaning refrigerator. They figured out how to run the tubes that would carry the cleaning fluid, water to rinse, etc. through the refrigerator’s framework and they decided what kind of material the shelves would have to be made in order for their idea to work, but neither they nor I had a clue as to whether such a thing is even feasible.
In the first part of the assignment, students write a brief, no-more-than-a-page memo to the CEO explaining which appliance they want to improve, how they want to improve it and, most importantly, why they think their improvement would appeal to consumers. They also have to produce what I call an “extended definition,” which is basically a research paper about the history of their appliance, its development, its place in society and culture, how their improvement is either in keeping with the way the appliance has developed until now or a break with that development. They have to produce a process description which lays out how their improved appliance will work; and they have to produce, as their final assignment, a proposal–well, a modified version of a proposal–that pulls everything they have done together into a persuasive document. Sometimes, I also ask them to give a PowerPoint presentation on their proposal. (Almost all the work for this assignment, except for the writing, is done in groups.)
The assignment has worked relatively well in the past, in that I know from the quality of the proposals students hand in that they have definitely learned something, but every time I sit down to plan the assignment out for a new semester, I end up with a very unsettled feeling:
- With the exception of the first and last part of the assignment, I am not sure of the order in which the pieces should go;
- I always feel like something is missing, like there should be another part of this proposal, and I can’t figure out what it is. (The only thing I definitely don’t want to include is anything having to do with budget; it’s just not that kind of a class. We are only concerned with the writing.)
So I’d be grateful if you’d share any thoughts about those two points, or anything else concerning the assignment that you think is worth commenting on. Thanks.
Hmm.
Are you teaching writing? Or are you teaching creative design?
I know that in much creative writing, the idea and execution are of near-equal importance. But in technical writing, that’s not really true: idea people are paid for ideas, and writers are paid to put those ideas into language.
Your assignment seems to miss the really crucial part of doing technical writing: Most of the time, you need to (a) figure out what the end reader needs; (b) find that somewhere in the dreck that someone else gives you; and (c) present it legibly.
When you do a combination “ideas” and “writing” assignment, it’s a strange mix. On the one hand, you have skipped one of the more difficult parts of the process, because the students can fill in all the blanks with conveniently invented answers. On the other hand, you’ve otherwise made it extraordinarily complex, what with all of those different layers and Powerpoints, etc. Most technical writers won’t do that type of multilevel presentation.
What would perhaps be a better assignment would be this:
1) Get the ideas from someone ELSE. Pick a design from the Design 101 class or some other class at school. Pick a recently filed patent or three. Pick a complex machine or process.
2) Write about it in a descriptive sense: manuals, process, etc. IMO, if they can write a good textual work then they can do Powerpoint, but since the reverse isn’t true there’s no time to waste on powerpoints. If they’re like most engineering students then they’ll have a hard enough time with this task.
3) after you get and grade those, then swap them around within the class. Take the new thing–someone else’s work, as is common–and have them write either a proposal for it (if you want to teach more creativity) or an analysis of it (if you want to teach them to identify key points and present them objectively.) Or both. This would still be possible with their own work, of course, but perhaps not as good of a learning experience. Can they write in a way that a third party can understand? Can they take a third party’s language and make it their own? Here’s their chance to find out.
What about the end-user/consumer part? What if you made them make an ad and/or user manual for their product? Weebly is free and easy. And it would be more fun and more useful for the students than a Powerpoint, an application that somehow seems to encourage awfulness.
Also, sort of riffing on the suggestion above, you could have the groups swap projects for this part, so Group B has to write the consumer oriented copy or instructions for Group A’s microwave-cum-anti-S.A.D.D.-device.
Duck-Billed:
That’s a great idea. Thanks!
I’ve spent some time in the communications end of Israeli hi-tech.
I agree whole-heartedly with the first poster – sales or marketing finds the ideas, engineering/development makes them work – and usually only then is a writer called in to document the product/feature.
In better companies the writer can advocate for ease of use – but typically s/he is explaining the conceptual structure of a finished product to end users. (This also explains why many products are so difficult to use… call it the Dilbert factor.)
A more real-world scenario would be to have students research and explain an existing product.
Also – many products (especially those with screens or software interfaces) are moving to on-screen assistance that feeds users just enough information to complete tasks. Technical writers are all about “information onions” and “drill down” and “navigable hypertext trees” – the tech writing units of your course can be a great opportunity to discuss these new options in structuring written information.
You might also want them to include financial and time data even though it’s not going to be real data.
How long it will take to build the prototype, how much it would cost for development, how much for retooling and what needs to be wrapped into the supply chain, how that cost will be included in the cost of the device.
And (made-up) statistical reasoning such as studies show that 90 percent of people hate cleaning the refrigerator, 83 percent of refrigerators are dangerously dirty, 75 percent say there is spoiled food in it right now, etcetera.
I agree with the “document something that already exists” idea.
If you want to start simpler than a patent, tell them to write a user manual:
a) for pivot tables in Excel
i) why
ii) how
b) How to use iMovie
i) how to save projects
ii) how to share projects with different users on the same machine, and different machines
iii) how to include .wav files in your movies
or alternatively, find something you, or your grandmother wants to use, but can’t use successfully, and have them write a manual for that.