The rapid growth of the computer industry has created an increasing demand for technical writers who can address the specialized problems of computer documentation. Since information science is still a very young discipline, university and college writing programs have only begun to identify the needs of this new industry and develop courses that satisfy those needs. Two interrelated factors have severely aggravated the problem. First, writing for computer systems places the writer in a rigorously specialized context as different from writing for business, law, or medicine as those disciplines are from each other. Since most computer documentation instructs readers on how to use a specific system or set of procedures to perform a specialized task, writing instruction manuals and other supporting documentation for computers must be sharply distinguished from the more traditional forms of business writing, technical report writing, and scholarly journal articles written for publication. The second factor hindering the development of new courses in this area involves the rapid advance of computer technology itself: a bewildering array of new devices and systems appear every week, training documents and reference manuals are often outdated before they are even completed, and the increased complexity of the new technology frequently requires addressing several different audiences, each possessing a widely varying level of technical knowledge. These problems require specialized teaching approaches to create a situational context resembling that of the working world. Students need large conceptual guidelines for addressing different groups of readers, yet the learning environment must remain flexible enought to adapt to rapid technological change and multiple levels of specific information needs. This article describes a course developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz which addresses these problems.
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Teaching technical writing
Pelt, D. Van
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 8 (4)
Association for Computing Machinery – Sep 1, 1982
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