Does technical writing really develop skills beyond those that students would learn anyway through the traditional study of literature and literary interpretation?
Yes. Grade-appropriate technical writing activities not only introduce students to real-world genres besides stories (such as user manuals and job aids, journal articles and white papers, reports and proposals). They also give students a family of specific, empirically validated usability techniques that most have not seen or tried before: practical ways to focus text to meet the information needs and linguistic abilities of real readers, to craft clear and concise nonfiction prose, to signal the content and structure of complex publications effectively and reliably. Outside of school, such usability techniques are often crucial for job success. “It is no longer good enough to engineer excellent technology; you must be able to communicate clearly across all of the disciplines on your [work] teams,” notes Andrea Ames of UCSC Extension in a 2004 course announcement aimed at engineers. Furthermore, usability is really just social responsibility reflected in empirically measured outcomes:
