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| navigate: home: magazine: spring 2002: article | |
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Technical writing outreach program benefits students, instructors and clients By Deborah A. Benedetti | |||||||
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The vision of a Department of English doctoral student is continuing to reap benefits for students, graduate teaching assistants, members of the University community and local businesses. Since 1995, students enrolled in the Effective Writing: Technical Writing (English 202C) course have been assisting University units, businesses and nonprofit organizations with technical writing projects. They have tackled assignments ranging from creating health education brochures to developing instruction manuals for companies. The Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative makes these learning innovations possible. As Jodie Nicotra, director of the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative, explains, this initiative is an alliance of technical writing teachers from the Department of English. Its purpose is to enhance technical writing instruction by developing innovative teaching techniques, packaging these techniques as organized programs and offering these programs to all technical writing teachers. In addition to directing the initiative, she chairs the Commissioned Assignment Committee, which solicits technical writing assignments for classes. According to Andy Alexander, doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition, the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative evolved from Summer Smith’s dissertation project. Smith’s fellow graduate students in the Department of English have continued this student service-learning program since she graduated from Penn State and joined the faculty at Clemson University. She is establishing a similar program there. The Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative is administered by Department of English graduate students, with funding support from the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, directed by Dr. Thomas A. Litzinger. The alliance with the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, coupled with the scholarly resources of the Department of English’s nationally recognized programs in Rhetoric and Composition and Technical Writing, enables the graduate teaching assistants to develop unique interactive learning opportunities for their students. “It’s been really great to work with Penn State departments and local businesses to create technical documents,” Nicotra, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition, said. “Commissioners understand that student learning is key to the assignment, and they appreciate the results. And our students have an opportunity to do the kind of writing they are likely to be doing on the job someday.” Introducing Penn State juniors and seniors majoring in science and engineering disciplines to technical writing in the real world is one of the goals of the Technical Writing Initiative. The Technical Writing course is a required course for these students. Each semester, students work on commissioned assignments for University and external clients. These assignments complement the regular class writing assignments. “Working on assignments for someone outside the classroom gives students a chance to work with a real-world audience,” Jeremiah Dyehouse, doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition and instructor of Technical Writing, said. “These assignments give students, and me, a very thorny problem to work on. In addition to organizing the technical materials and writing the assignment, we have to deal with the vagaries of the collection of the data and the ethical issues that may be associated with using the information. The process illustrates for the students the kinds of real difficulties involved in writing something for someone else.” Dyehouse’s Technical Writing classes have worked with Dr. Susan Kennedy, associate director for educational services for the University Health Services, on a variety of assignments. One project involved using data from a survey of student health behaviors to create brochures on student health topics. Dyehouse’s students wrote the copy and designed the brochures. “It’s been wonderful working with the teachers and students,” said Kennedy, who works with a group of technical writing students each semester. “The teaching assistants are outstanding. The students are learning about the health behaviors of their peers.” Dyehouse added that working with Kennedy led to an opportunity for them to make a presentation about their technical writing collaborations at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. “Working with Susan has broadened my horizons and my students’,” he said. Alliance with Penn State Cooperative Extension
In 2001, the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative began collaborating with Penn State Cooperative Extension to increase technical writing opportunities available to students enrolled in the Technical Writing course, Nicotra said.
Dr. Theodore R. Alter, associate vice president for outreach, director of Cooperative Extension and associate dean, College of Agricultural Sciences, said, “We are excited to have these Technical Writing students working with our extension educators to produce materials for our clients in the community. This collaboration provides a wonderful opportunity for the students to gain the real-world experience of writing for a diverse audience on a variety of topics and issues. The educational products they produce are terrific!”
Lisa A. Davis, director of the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health, is working with a group of technical writing students to develop training modules, fact sheets, how-to guides and other materials on health-care issues that can be used by Penn State Cooperative Extension agents in Pennsylvania communities.
“We see this as an excellent opportunity to work with students to take some of our health-care information and rewrite it for a lay audience, translating technical terms and complex health-care terminology and concepts so the information is accessible to everyone,” Davis said. “We work closely with Penn State Cooperative Extension agents, who need materials written for consumers that address such areas as violence prevention, agricultural diseases, farmworker stress and injury prevention, cancer prevention, pesticide exposure, long-term care insurance, tobacco prevention and maternal/prenatal health.”
Another group of students is working with Ken Green, regional information technology specialist serving Penn State Cooperative Extension, based at Penn State Berks, on two projects for the College of Agricultural Sciences Information and Communication Technologies (AgICT) computer unit.
Technical writing students are creating a step-by-step guide outlining how to transfer documents; electronic mail settings, e-mail messages, mailboxes and address book entries; and Web bookmarks from a computer using the Macintosh operating system to a Windows-based computer.
“The College of Agricultural Sciences is planning to adopt a new enterprise computer system that will have everyone using a Windows computer and the same versions of software,” Green said. “Having student technical writers create the guide will be a benefit to us to, because they will ask the kinds of questions our end users would ask. We need a step-by-step guide that is thorough and clear.”
The conversion to Windows-based computers will result in productivity gains for faculty and staff, Green said. It is anticipated faculty and staff will be able to access their e-mail and files from any college and Cooperative Extension office computer. The new computer system will simplify computer training for faculty and staff, as well.
Technical writing students also are developing a set of answers to frequently asked questions by visitors to the annual Philadelphia Flower Show. More than 300,000 people from around the world visit the flower show each year, and Penn State faculty and staff talk with 70 to 100 people each hour at the University’s display booth.
“Having the answers to the 10 to 12 most-asked questions will increase our capacity to give advice to people,” said Green, who sets up computers and Internet access at the University’s booth.
He is working with Nancy Bosold, associate extension agent with Penn State Cooperative Extension in Berks County, to arrange for students to talk with Penn State content experts as they research and develop answers to the questions. The answers will be compiled on a CD-ROM and distributed to all 67 Cooperative Extension offices in Pennsylvania, as well as printed for distribution during the flower show.
“It’s a win-win situation for the students and the college,” Green noted. “We will give this information to the public and also use it to train the faculty and staff who work at the flower show.”
AgICT also is offering opportunities for technical writing students to use College of Agricultural Sciences technical documents, such as research reports and journal articles, to develop news releases and articles for college publications and the news media. Students involved in this project are working with Eston Martz, publications coordinator, and Chuck Gill, news coordinator, in AgICT News and Publications.
The Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative also has a guest speaker program. Instructors bring technical professionals into their classrooms to share their technical writing experiences with students and talk about the importance of writing in the workplace. At the same time, students have opportunities to interact with the professionals to learn more about this profession. Both the students and teachers benefit from the exchange of ideas with professionals, Nicotra said.
“Our guest speakers value writing and understand how essential technical writing is in the workplace,” Alexander said. “Students are often surprised to learn about the importance of writing in all sorts of jobs.”
For more information about the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative, contact Jodie Nicotra by e-mail at jan179@psu.edu. The Technical Writing instructors are always looking for new commissioned assignments for their students and for technical writing professionals to speak to classes. Contact Nicotra for information.
An outreach program of the College of Engineering, College of the Liberal Arts, College of Agricultural Sciences and Penn State Cooperative Extension | ||||||
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