Introduction

If you are about to teach your first course in technical writing, this instructor's manual accompanying Houp/Pearsall/Tebeaux's Reporting Technical Information, 9th ed. (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1997), is primarily for you. You've probably taught plenty of composition and literature courses, but technical writing may be something new. The following sections focus on general issues for technical writing instructors, syllabus-design ideas (including sample schedules, policies, and grading standards), and suggestions for connecting with other teachers of technical writing and with the technical communication profession:

What's in This Instructor's Manual

An instructor's manual ought to be as close to a complete teaching resource as possible: that perfect file drawer labeled Technical Writing, stocked with files nicely organized for every unit and every assignment, each containing an assortment of great in-class activities. All you do is reach in, grab the right file, do a bit of review, and head for class. Perhaps none of us will ever have such an idyllic file drawer—even the most experienced and organized veteran teachers of technical writing. But this instructor's manual does contain the following information and materials:

• Pointers for familiarizing yourself with the technical communication profession
• Syllabus-design ideas
• Objectives for the individual chapters of Reporting Technical Information
• Point summaries for the main contents of those chapters
• Ideas for classroom activities—called "workshops" in this manual
• Ideas for writing projects
• Example assignment handouts
• Chapter quizzes

Probably some of your first concerns as you start out teaching technical writing include: just what is technical writing and how to get that across to students? how to convince students of its importance? how to reassure students that it won't be too "technical"? how to position yourself as an authority even though you may have little or no "technical" background?

For the first two questions—what is technical writing and what about its importance—chapter 1 of Reporting Technical Information, in fact, the entire book, provides a wealth of ideas. See the workshop activities in chapter 1 of this instructor's manual for ideas on exploring the scope of technical writing. For some additional discussion of the field of technical writing, see the articles list.

You should know that a certain subset of your students will be a bit intimidated by the notion of a technical writing course. They may imagine that in it they will have to write about microprocessors, brain surgery, rocket science, and other scary things.

The best reassurance for these students might be to conduct a simple exploration of the term technical. It's not electronics or high-tech medicine, but any information about specialized processes or about specialized concepts that is not common knowledge. Most of your students do have specialized knowledge that they can draw upon for the course—and they need to understand its value.

Another form of reassurance is to let your students know that whatever they write must be understandable by a nonspecialist audience. You can require that whatever technical subject matter students choose, they must make it understandable for a nonspecialist audience.

And finally, students need to understand that, while accuracy is critical in technical documents, a technical writing course is a great place to explore exciting new technology and fascinating natural phenomena. Encourage students to take some risks and explore these new worlds—they don't have to defend a thesis at the end of your course!

Here's a very informal review of the sorts of students who may walk into your technical writing course:

• The clueless. Some of your student may have no clue as to what a course in technical writing involves. For some, it will be "just another English course," "just another writing course."

• The resistant. For others, technical writing will represent something that has nothing to do with their careers or professional focus. These students will see technical writing as something done only by a specialized few and as having little to do with their future work.

• The apprehensive. Other students will view technical writing as writing about electronics or computers. These students will be apprehensive about the term "technical writing" and will need some help in understanding that "technical" refers to any specialized knowledge area.

• The angry. There will also be those who've hated their past writing courses and will come in with a chip on their shoulder. Right or wrong, these students often end up loving technical writing courses because of the practicality and concreteness that they find in these courses.

• The healthy. Of course, some students walk in with a healthy attitude toward writing, enjoying the activity and appreciating its importance in the world and in their careers. Typically, they also have a genuine fascination for scientific and technical matters and write some of the most interesting technical reports you'll receive.

• The precious few. One other group of students—and a group that is growing—will be those who are interested in the field of technical communication as a profession, as a career. Some will be English majors looking for practical ways to apply their language skills. That's right! Not every last one of your students will be there because of degree requirements.

But what about your standing in the technical writing classroom? Depending on your college or university, you may be surrounded by engineering students, science majors, vocational-technology students, and the like—students with rapidly increasing skill sets and knowledge bases in advanced technologies. That can feel scary if, like most of us, you come to technical writing teaching with a background in literature and languages. It's natural and normal to think, "I have no technical background—I'm not the least bit technical—What am I doing in a room full of budding engineers?" A student or two may even challenge you on this issue, or at least question the extent of your technical background.

Remember the definition of "technical"—specialized knowledge. Your knowledge of writing skills, language, rhetoric, literature, teaching, and related subjects is certainly "technical" by that standard. However unwittingly, those querulous students are merely continuing that old "two cultures" problem that C. P. Snow wrote about years ago. But more importantly, this confrontation recreates what goes on in industry every day. Technical people often do not understand the skills that communication experts, like yourself, bring to a technical project. They often need some educating as to the specialization, training, skill, expertise that goes into producing effective technical documents. Communications experts often must struggle to enable their technical colleagues to appreciate the value of the communication skills that they bring to a project. In that sense, you the technical writing teacher, the communications expert, bring to the classroom expertise that is every bit the equal of any engineer, programmer, developer, scientist, or technician. You might be interested to know that technical communicators at IBM Corporation struggled a number of years for equal status with product developers. One of the victories in that struggle was for technical communicators to be called "information developers," a title that echoes "product developer."

This section provides some thoughts about scheduling a technical writing course, some example schedules, policy statements, and grading standards. While it's just not possible to provide you with a complete "course-in-a-box," the following should give you plenty of ideas and tools to design your own syllabus. To see a wide range of syllabus-design ideas, see technical writing syllabi on the World Wide Web.

Here are some issues that may influence how you design the schedule for your technical writing course.

Balance concept and practice. The problem with designing a syllabus for a technical writing course—and probably for any other writing course—is that everything seems like it must be done at once. How can you have students write anything if they haven't studied audience analysis, writing process, readable style, document design, graphics, tables, collaboration, organization, information-gathering strategies—in other words, the whole of Reporting Technical Information?

Obviously, this problem can't be solved—some units just have to wait until later in the semester, however pedagogically unsound it may seem. For example, you may have to save writing style (chapter 5) for later in the semester when students are hard at work on their technical reports. To prepare for the in-class workshop on sentence-style problems, all students have to do is read the chapter before coming to class; no homework assignments result from these meetings. But what about the writing projects that students have done earlier in the semester? It's just too bad—you just can't cover everything at once. (Of course, you must cover passive voice during your unit on instructions.)

Another problem with syllabus design for technical writing courses is the delay. It's tempting to load the beginning of a course with presentations on what technical writing is, how the writing process work, what writing in the workplace is like, how to analyze an audience, what are the common writing-style problems, how to apply good document-design principles—and before you know it, half the semester has passed before any real writing has happened. The long, slow windup does work, and plenty of teachers use it. If you want to design your course so that you lay plenty of groundwork, you can use the end-of-chapter exercises in Reporting Technical Information as well as the writing activities suggested in this instructor's guide. (And see syllabus 2 for an example of this course design.)

If you get restless with too much conceptual material and too little practical application at the beginning of a course, you can design a syllabus that has students doing writing projects from the beginning. You can then interlace conceptual material at regular intervals throughout the course. (See syllabus 1 for an example of this design.)

Start with something new. It's a good idea to confront students with something distinctly new in the early stages of a technical writing course. Some students may be quietly thinking to themselves that this technical writing is English composition by another name. For example, you might consider starting with the application letter and resume—writing applications that your students are keenly interested in but may not yet have created. This sets a practical, real-world, professional focus for your course from the very beginning.

To further accentuate the new, you may want to emphasize headings, lists, notices, graphics, or tables. Again, this will vividly demonstrate to students that this is not just another English composition course (even though the essential core concepts such as audience, process, organization, coherence, sentence clarity, and economy are certainly the same).

You may also want to emphasize that the writing projects students will do in your course will be similar to those done by working professionals. Otherwise, when they see that they are going to be writing descriptions, definitions, processes, comparisons, and the like, students may conclude that this is just another composition course. However, these structures (combinations of distinctive content, distinctive organization, or both) lie at the core of most professional applications of technical writing. For example, the recommendation, evaluation, or feasibility report has comparison at its base. Technical specifications for new products, site-inspection reports, and accident reports have description at their base. Instructions have process at their base. Technical information reports (background or "white paper" reports) often have extended definition at their base. You can shift the outward appearance of your syllabus to these real-world applications while continuing to pound home the fundamentals. And instead of cynically thinking they are trapped in another generic writing course, your students will welcome something familiar, some continuity with their past writing courses.

Decide on the pace and intensity of assignments. One concern you may have is the amount and intensity of writing assignments that you observe in other technical writing courses. For example, an aggressively scheduled technical writing course can consist of the following: application letter, resume, proposal, instructions, definition, description, recommendation report, complaint letter, progress report, abstracts, oral report, and final report. With some combining and consolidating, this works out to substantial assignments due every ten days to two weeks in a long semester. If you decide to keep a rigorous schedule like this, or if your program or department requires it, how can you justify such a schedule—both to yourself and to your students? One way is to look at the pace professionals maintain. Sure, anyone, given a month to write a three-page set of instructions, should be able to do just fine. But can that same person handle an aggressive two-week turnaround time? By scheduling a lot of writing assignments, we challenge our students to produce a higher quality of written work than they ever have before and to produce that work in a shorter amount of time than they ever thought they could. We challenge our students to work faster, smarter, and better. We mirror the fast-paced, contemporary workplace in our classrooms.

If you schedule numerous writing assignments, you'll need to think about pacing. Recommendation reports, resumes, proposals, and formal research reports are demanding. Consider interlacing less demanding writing projects between these heavier hitters—for example, the oral report, progress report, or complaint letter.

You can also vary the pace by interspersing classroom-only activities. Be ready with classroom activities for those times when students are working on a big assignment, for those times when you need something that does not spill out into additional out-of-class assignments. These are the right moments for workshops: have workshops ready on sentence-style problems, punctuation, outlining, documentation of borrowed information, library strategies, numbers, hyphens, headings, lists, warning notices, graphics, and tables.

Notice that in some of the example syllabi, the technical report, due at the end of the semester, is actually explored and assigned toward the beginning of the semester. You get your students thinking about the report early by having them write a proposal for it and then encourage them to work on it steadily by having them write a progress report.

Consider the overall logic of the assignments. There are several useful ways to think about the overall logic or progression or structure of a technical writing course. One approach is to recognize that every writing project that students do in your course in some way involves presentation of technical information:

• The application letter and resume present a certain amount and level of technical detail about the student's work experience or education.

• The proposal provides a technical look at a problem and the theory and procedures used to solve that problem, but to an executive audience that may not have the expertise (or the time or the need) to understand the full technical detail.

• The feasibility or recommendation report also provides a technical look at a problem and then technical comparisons of options for solving the problem, along with conclusions and recommendations. Again, the audience is likely to be nontechnical executives.

• Instructions provide technical information needed to build, operate, or repair something. The audience in this case is the technician or the lay person.

• The complaint letter provides a technical narrative or description of a problem as a basis for requesting compensation. The audience is quite likely to be nontechnical, but the purpose is persuasive in that the writer seeks compensation.

As you can see, every writing project in a technical writing course channels technical information in some different way—different audiences, different purposes, different types of reports, different contexts, and so on.

Another organizing principle you can use for your technical writing course is to view the early units of the course as practice, as a series of dress rehearsals for the formal report, which is usually due at the end of the semester. In fact, there are a lot of new things that students will need to practice:

• Headings
• Lists
• Special notices
• Tables
• Graphics
• Numbers
• Abbreviations and symbols
• Writing executive summaries (abstracts)
• Writing with technical content

You can structure the early portions of your course to give students ample practice in these and other concepts and techniques. By the time they get to the final report, they have had good exposure to the skills and concepts they need.

An ingenious approach to the design of technical writing courses is to make the writing projects interlocking pieces of one unified narrative. For example, students begin by writing an application letter and resume to get hired on at a technical research firm in their major. Next, as it so often happens, they have to sink or swim by writing a proposal bidding on a feasibility study. Along the way, they must write a progress report, an inquiry letter, a complaint letter, a site-inspection report, and anything else your imagination can work up.

Another approach to syllabus design for technical writing courses is to build in team projects (collaboration) as a structural part of the course. Students get into teams, develop a product idea, write a group proposal for that product idea addressed to management, and work together to develop specifications, installation and user guides, and other documentation to support their product. Along the way, students can write related documents such as progress reports. (You may recognize this as the famous, or infamous Lego method, but Legos are not necessary to make this course-design idea work.)

Cover the essentials. Whatever you include in your technical writing course and however you structure those contents, there are some musts:

• Instructions. Students must get some experience with this ultimate, bread-and-butter commodity of technical writing.

• Definition. Students must get some experience writing not just sentence-length definitions but extended definitions in which they explore the meaning of a term in depth.

• Description. Students must have some experience creating an objective technical description of a mechanism, providing excruciatingly precise measurement and construction details.

• Formal report. Students need the experience of researching a technical topic and then putting together a formal report with all its front and back matter and making the result as professional-looking as they can.

• Resume and application letter. The resume and letter are expected components of our technical writing courses. Sometimes, ours is the only course students take in which they are formally expected to create these important job-search documents.

In the following are example syllabi for technical writing courses, all based on a 15- to 16-week semester with assignments due on the first class meeting of the indicated week. Extra time is left in the final three weeks of class for students to focus on their report projects. You can use this time for sentence style work or critique of other technical reports, or you can reserve it for individual student conferences. Consider requiring a preliminary draft of the final report, which you and the individual students review in the end-of-semester conferences.

Syllabus 1 — Standard Technical Writing Course (Version A). This version gets off to a quicker start than version B. Right or wrong, it spends less time on the concepts and gets into writing projects earlier. If you want a more professional focus, substitute a short recommendation report for the definition and description projects in this syllabus.

Syllabus 2 — Standard Technical Writing Course (Version B). Compared to version A, this one takes plenty of time laying the foundations: definition of technical writing, audience, purpose, collaboration, writing process.

Syllabus 3 — Technical Writing Course: Fundamentals. If you are not keen on closely simulating workplace applications of technical writing or if you are concerned about the level of your students' writing abilities, you might prefer a syllabus like this one. Instead of recommendation reports, feasibility reports, and other workplace applications, this syllabus spotlights the basics of technical writing: short definitions, mechanism descriptions, process descriptions, analogy, classification, and so on. The applications that are featured in this syllabus do not attempt to mimic the trappings of a real workplace context: the proposal is addressed to the instructor as is the progress report.

Syllabus 4 — Technical Writing with Collaborative Projects. In this version, students do individual projects at the beginning of the semester then go into teams in which they develop a product idea, propose it to management, and then write various documents supporting that product. A component of this course is usability testing, in which the teams trade and test interim manuals.

Notes on Policies

Here are some ideas and alternatives for your policy statement:

• Prerequisites. The prerequisite for this course is a passing grade in freshman composition or equivalent workplace writing experience approved by the department head.

• Plagiarism. Plagiarism includes both using other people's writing as if it were your own and having other people proofread your papers. Maximum disciplinary action as defined by the college will be taken against people who plagiarize or collude on assignments for this course.

• Grading standards. Grades on individual assignments will be based on the criteria stated in the handout for the individual assignment and on the general evaluation standards for A, B, C, D, and F to be handed out separately.

• Grade calculation. Here are several ways to calculate grades:
  • All short assignments (including the speech and revisions), 60%; research report, 40%. (Because of their length and complexity, the proposal and progress report count twice among the short papers.)
  • Final report, 40%; initial hand-in grade on all other assignments, 30%; highest revision grade on all other assignments, 20%; in-class work and participation, 10%. (See the following for details on revision policies.)

• For the project-team course, individual writing assignments, 50%; individual quizzes and professionalism, 10%; group writing assignments, 30%; document testing and reviewing, 10%.

• Revisions. Here are two ways to encourage students to revise their work:
  • You may revise any short assignment with a grade of C or lower for a grade no lower than the original. Revision due dates will be marked on all assignments. The revision must reach the instructor no later than the date indicated and must be accompanied by the original assignment. Each revision will count as much as the original assignment grade in your final average.
  • You may revise any paper, as long as it reaches your instructor no later than a week after you received that paper back from your instructor. Highest revision grades are averaged and treated as 20% of the final grade. (There is no penalty for not revising; the original grades are used for unrevised assignments.) The revision must be accompanied by the original assignment.

• Due dates and late papers. Assignments are due on the dates listed in the course schedule. You may turn in an assignment as many as 3 days late, but the grade for that assignment will be dropped a full letter. Late assignments may not be revised. Assignments later than 3 days will receive an automatic F.

• Dropping the course. Here are two separate approaches for students who get too far behind:
  • Students who fall too far behind in the schedule of assignments will be dropped from the course on the grounds of "unsatisfactory progress."
  • It is your responsibility to drop this course if you fall too far behind. Your instructor will not drop students from the course.

• Incompletes. Incompletes will be awarded only on the basis of severe illness documented by a doctor's written note. Incompletes are available to students who have only the final two assignments left to finish.

• Format. All assignments for this course must be typed or word-processed. See your instructor for exceptions. Format for each assignment is defined in the handout for the assignment and in specified chapters in the textbook. You must use the required margins and binding specified by the instructor. You must use the format for titles, headings, lists, graphics, tables, and special notices specified by the instructor. You must use the report design (format and components) as specified by the instructor.

• Audience requirements. All assignments for this course must be understandable by a layperson (nonspecialist) or a nontechnical executive audience. This will enable your instructor to understand and evaluate the assignment and will be a better challenge to your skills as a technical writer.

• Team-project policies. Here are the requirements for the team-project syllabus:
  • Group members must demonstrate professionalism in all aspects of this course, and especially in relation to members of their project team. This means responsibility, integrity, good manners, appropriate language, and consideration for others.
  • Each group member must sign each group document to earn credit for completing that assignment.
  • Students will share photocopying expenses when providing test copies of manuals to classmates.
  • Group members must exchange telephone numbers with each member of their team to ensure effective group communication outside of class for regular assignments.
  • Any group member who must be absent must notify group members of that fact and make arrangements to get work to them by class time.

Here are some ideas for defining the grades for papers in a technical writing course:

As you begin teaching technical writing, consider exploring technical communication as a profession. It will help you discuss just what technical writing is (never an easy task). It will also give you some ideas for ingenious classroom activities and assignments, ways of finding guest speakers, and resources for helping students who want to pursue technical communication careers. And these explorations might also give you some professional alternatives as well.

The Internet has provided practitioners, teachers, and students of technical communication a wonderful means for coming together around their common interests. As a technical writing instructor, you have a rich and growing selection of resources on the Internet for teaching your courses and for exploring the technical communication profession. You can use these resources to learn more about the field of technical communication, to find out how others teach their technical writing courses, and to make useful contacts with teachers and practitioners.

If you can get to a computer wired to the Internet, you can tap into some terrific resources for both technical writing teachers and technical writers in general. The best resources in this regard are the World Wide Web and electronic mailing lists.

Increasingly available on the World Wide Web are the syllabi and other teaching materials used by technical writing teachers who teach their courses by distance or who use the web as supplement to on-site courses. These will give you plenty of ideas on how you can design your technical writing course.

And of course available also are the traditional resources including professional journals, societies and associations, conferences and seminars, and published books on technical communication.

Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) is a great place to start. Established in 1973 to encourage dialogue among teachers of technical communication and to develop technical communication as a discipline, it has an international membership that includes over a thousand teachers and professional communicators. The ATTW makes available:

• news about the profession
• announcements of faculty positions
• calls for papers
• an electronic discussion list
• information about programs in technical communication
• syllabi of individual technical communication courses
• information about technical communication books and journals
• related resources

Consider becoming a member of ATTW, receiving its journal Technical Communication Quarterly, and joining the electronic mailing list (ATTW-L).

The ATTW-L mailing list is particularly useful: it allows you to communicate through e-mail with other members of the association. You can post job vacancies at your school, announce professional meetings, issue calls for papers, ask for assistance in locating pertinent research on a topic, survey the membership, exchange ideas for teaching, and discuss academic and professional issues.

You'll find the Technical Communication Quarterly to be a useful professional journal devoted to the teaching, study, and practice of technical writing in academic, scientific, technical, governmental, and business/industrial fields. Articles are both theoretical and practical and cover a range of professional writing topics, including pedagogy, rhetoric, linguistics, organizational communication, business/industrial communication, intercultural communication, text design, graphics, audience analysis, and software and hardware issues as they pertain to technical communication.

The ATTW syllabi collection is particularly impressive, with categories including communication theory, online documentation courses, print-based documentation courses, Internet issues, journalism and public relations, oral communications, teaching technical writing, usability, video, visual design, web design, and research methods.

Society for Technical Communication. Another rich resource you'll want to explore is the website of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). On the Academic Programs and Research Grants page, you can get information about internships, academic courses and programs, dissertations in the field of technical communication, and career brochures.

You can get information about the location of the STC chapter in your area. Using the region or chapter STC web page, you can get the names of people from whom you can get information about the profession or bring to your class as guest speakers.

At http://heron.tc.clarkson.edu/~stc/notices/notice.html you can see the resumes of professional technical communicators and see examples of the jobs they apply for.

If you join STC, you get its journal Technical Communication, a quarterly journal that publishes thought-provoking articles on subjects of interest to all technical communicators, and Intercom, a magazine published ten times a year providing practical examples and applications of technical communication, serving to promote the efficiency and professional development of the readership.

Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. You may also be interested in the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), whose goal is to promote programs in technical and scientific communication, promote research in technical and scientific communication, develop opportunities for the exchange of ideas and information concerning programs, research, and career opportunities, and assist in the development and evaluation of new programs in technical and scientific communication. See http://www.hu.mtu.edu/cptsc/index.html.

IEEE Professional Communication Society. Another potentially useful resource is the website of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, located at http://www.ieee.org/pcs/pcsindex.html. The Professional Communication Society, one of the 37 technical groups of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), is committed to enhancing the core competency of communication in its membership by exploring the theory and application of all forms of communication technology. At this site, abstracts from IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication are available along with information about conferences, workshops, and courses.

TECHWR-L Mailing List. A useful electronic mailing list for the technical communication profession is TECHWR-L. This a list heavily used by technical communicators all over the world. Subscribers to this list are about two-thirds practitioners to one-third academics. This mailing list has an excellent FAQ from which you can learn much about the profession. Archives are also available, but remember that the mailing lists archives are arranged chronologically by postings and thus are not organized by topic. (Use keyword searches to find what you need.)

To pull all these ideas together, here are some things you can do:

1. Take a look at some sample syllabi for technical writing courses out on the web. Take a look at how these instructors set up their individual assignments, which you will also find on these websites. In particular, take a look at these technical writing courses:

   David McMurrey's course at Austin Community College:
   http://www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/tcmmain.html

   Jim Collier's course at Virginia Tech:
   http://www.cyber.vt.edu/jhc/

   Mary O-Sullivan's course at Western Wisconsin Technical College:
   http://www.western.tec.wi.us/mfo/techhome.htm

   Beth Woof's course at the University of Waterloo:
   http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~engl210e/

   Jennifer Jordan-Henley's course at Roane State Community College:
   http://fur.rscc.cc.tn.us/TechWrit/techhome.html

   Centralized listings of courses can be found at:

   http://english.ttu.edu/attw/syllabi/syl.html http://catalog.gnacademy.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/gnacademy/catalogview

2. Visit the ATTW website and explore its resources: http://english.ttu.edu/attw/attw.html

3. Subscribe to ATTW-L, watch the discussion for a while, post any questions you may have to the list, and try looking at the archives of past ATTW-L discussions. When you post a question, you'll get a lot of very helpful responses. You may find yourself in an ongoing e-mail correspondence with some of the good people who reply to your question; they may become informal mentors for you. (If you can't figure out to access the archives of past conversations, post a plea for help to the list.)

   http://english.ttu.edu/attw/subscribe.html

4. Take a look at the ATTW-L archives; you can get a lot of information about teaching technical writing by reading past postings:

   http://www.ttu.edu/lists/attw-l/

5. To get a feel for what goes on in professional technical communication, subscribe to TECHWR-L, and watch what people on that list discuss. You'll notice that the traffic on this list is heavy, sometimes over eighty messages a day. If you're uneasy about posting a message to TECHWR-L, you can always write private messages to individuals on the list.

   http://pw2.netcom.com/~kjolberg/faq.html

   This web address is to the FAQ for TECHWR-L, which includes instructions on subscribing to the list. At this address there are also instructions for accessing TECHWR-L archives, a good resource for learning about the profession.

6. Find out where the STC chapter nearest you is located. If possible, attend one of the regular meetings, which are usually held once a month. Get involved; get to know some of the members. You'll meet practicing professional technical writers, people trying to break into the profession, technical communication students, and technical writing teachers like yourself. To get chapter locations, use this web address:

   http://www.stc-va.org/

7. Become a member of ATTW, STC, or CPTSC, start reading their journals, and even attend their local, regional, and national meetings and conferences.

8. To find out how technical writing has been defined, see these articles:
   • Allen, Jo. "The Case Against Defining Technical Writing." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 4.2 (1990), 68-77.
   • Britton, W. Earl. "What Is Technical Writing? A Redefinition." The Teaching of Technical Writing. Ed. Donald H. Cunningham and Herman A. Estrin. Urbana: NCTE, 1975. 9-14.
   • Dandridge, Edmund P. "Notes toward a Definition of Technical Writing." The Teaching of Technical Writing. Ed. Donald H. Cunningham and Herman A. Estrin. Urbana: NCTE, 1975. 15-20.
   • Dobrin, David N. "What's Difficult about Teaching Technical Writing?" College English 44.2 (192): 135-140.
   • Dobrin, David N. "What's Technical about Technical Writing?" New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice. Ed. Paul V. Anderson, R. John Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller. Farmingdale: Baywood, 1983: 227-250.
   • Harris, John S. "On Expanding the Definition of Technical Writing." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 8.2 (1978): 133-138.
   • Hays, Robert. "What Is Technical Writing?" Word Study 36.4 (1961): 1-4.
   • Hogan, Harriet. "Distinguishing Characteristics of the Technical Writing Course." Technical and Business Communication in Two-Year Programs. Ed. W. Keats Sparrow and Nell Ann Pickett. Urbana: NCTE, 1983: 16-21.
   • Kelley, Patrick M., and Roger E. Masse. "A Definition of Technical Writing." The Technical Writing Teacher 4.3 (1977): 94-97.
   • Miller, Carolyn R. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English 40.6 (979): 610-617.
   • Stratton, Charles R. "Technical Writing: What It Is and What It Isn't." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 9.1 (1979): 9-16
   • Walter, John A. "Technical Writing: Species or Genus?" Technical Communication 24.1 (1977): 6-8.

9. Consider reading some of the important anthologies on technical communication and teaching technical writing:
   • Anderson, Paul V., R. John Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller, eds. New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice. New York: Baywood, 1983.
   • Dragga, Sam, and Gwendolyn Gong. Editing: The Design of Rhetoric. Alexandria, VA: Editorial Experts, 1989.
   • Fearing, Bertie E., and W. Keats Sparrow, eds. Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. New York: Modern Language Association, 1989.
   • Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1992.
   • Odell, Lee, and Dixie Goswami, eds. Writing in Nonacademic Settings. New York: Guilford, 1985.
   • Ornatowski, Cezar, and Katherine Staples, eds. Foundations for Teaching Technical Writing: Theory, Practice, and Programs. Ablex, 1997.
   • Spilka, Rachel, ed. Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

For their advice and help in preparing this instructor's manual, many thanks go to Katherine Staples of Austin Community College, Dan Lupo of Dell Computers, Kathryn Roosa of San Jacinto College, Jim Collier of Virginia Tech, Jennifer Jordan-Henley of Roane State Community College, Mary O-Sullivan of Western Wisconsin Technical College, Lynn Hanson at Pennsylvania College of Technology, and Beth Woof at University of Waterloo (Canada).