{"id":14047,"date":"2011-08-26T13:19:40","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T20:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14047"},"modified":"2011-08-26T13:19:45","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T20:19:45","slug":"i-need-some-help-designing-a-technical-writing-assignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14047","title":{"rendered":"I Need Some Help Designing a Technical Writing Assignment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n