Does technical writing address any California state content standards?
Yes. Current California English-Language Arts Content Standards for public schools (1998, available for online review at http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/engmain.asp) clearly expect students to develop basic skills for reading and writing nonnarrative nonfiction prose during middle school. By high school, the standards call for students to be able to draft useful instructions and descriptions, and then to cultivate more complex and sophisticated skills for critically revising and assessing technical writing (their own and that of others) during their high-school years. The free high-school exercises cited below make this relevance explicit: each exercise is annotated with the specific California Language Arts content standard(s) that it supports, and a separate index reveals for each applicable content standard the exercise(s) most relevant to it.
