Technical Writing

By Robert Balcomb ©2005

At times, one has to wonder what's worth what. Take for instance shoes. We finally find shoes that fit, wear them out, only to learn that those shoes are no longer made and nothing else fits the same way, if at all. The same experience seems to plague us with practically everything we buy nowadays. If it has been so all along, then it has grown worse as time goes by. "They don't make 'em the way they used to," has been the word through the ages, I admit, but now they really don't make 'em . . .—at least not the way they should make 'em. The only lasting excuse I've heard is based on economics: "If they made 'em the way you're talking, they would cost too much!" We've grown so used to it that we just shrug and go on.

But our public school system is a good example of what we should not shrug off. The way we run our schools not only is becoming a national disgrace, but is eroding our strength and could possibly degrade us from world leader to a second-rate nation, if not less. I taught technical writing at college level from 1968 to 1980, and I had to spend the first quarter teaching nothing but grammar and spelling in order for the students to understand that what they wrote had to be structured on the rules of grammatical structure in order that readers could understand precisely what was being said—that one misplaced or omitted comma could warp the meaning of a statement, if not destroy it; and that the infamous "dangling participle" causes chances of misreading, to cite two examples. (This is no place to offer samples—one needs only to go through a McGraw-Hill or Warriner grammar book to find countless examples of things that can go wrong when the rules are violated or ignored. I stress here that I'm talking about technical writing—descriptions, reports, how-to's. Imagine poorly written or incomplete directions to surgeons or to space-walkers repairing space vehicles or to mechanics of high-speed engines.)

Most of my students had graduated from high school or passed the GED; some had graduated from a community college or higher; some were second-career people, usually retired from the armed forces. But almost all lacked enough writing skills to warrant going through "bone-head" grammar again, which they hated for the most part—although most of them admitted that they needed it and were glad for the experience. And most declared that English grammar courses were their most hated courses in public school. They said that their English classes were dull, negating enthusiasm to study and pay attention. And diagramming? Forget it! I at least covered diagramming but did not insist on it, explaining that it is not only as good a tool for structuring sentences as exists, but is surprisingly easy to learn and apply—it will prove whether a sentence can be written that way or not. And that following the relatively simple rules of grammatical structure will guarantee that the reader will understand exactly what has been written—as long as the message is complete and the correct language and facts are there. We cannot afford to stumble along without rules, or to make up our own rules.

The local college offers "technical writing," but breaks it down to one course for one discipline like, for example, engineers, and other courses for other disciplines, explaining that it's different from one to the next. I maintained that all disciplines must follow the same grammatical rules, that only the technical terms and words are different. One good course would cover them all; the engineering courses or whatever would fill in the correct vernacular. I got nowhere with that argument.

Anyway, I have proof of my methods by the results of my students' trade-related theses done in their final quarter, as compared with their struggles during their first quarters. Too many former students tell me of their satisfaction of having gone through my classes, when I run into them now, for me to have any doubts. I estimate I had around three thousand students in my twelve-year tech writing career. That should be enough to satisfy anyone.

Grade-school English teachers used to teach the fundamental rules of grammar, including that invaluable tool known as diagramming. This relatively simple device gives the students a means of “drawing a ‘picturegram’" of a sentence to teach them the various parts and the relationships from one to another, to help them word the parts in their proper forms, and to put those parts in the best place in the sentence so that the sentence reads with the intended message.

But there are people who need to show somehow that their jobs are necessary, so they dream up ideas to "improve" things. Their jobs are in the world of Psychology. Unfortunately they too often pick on the processes of Education: They decided that the teaching of arithmetic was all wrong, so they gave us "new math," a disaster that set a whole generation behind in their ability to add figures and to make proper change at a store—they decided that writing was too bound by rules and eliminated such aids as diagramming and let students write in any way they pleased. As a result we have two generations of " Why Johnny can't write" and "Why Johnny can't read" and Why Johnny can't add." Those "Why's" are answered by the loss of structure and discipline. No wonder television is so popular with the youth of today—they don't have to know or do anything but sit, absorb drivel, and eat potato chips. Do yard work? No way! Read a good book? Forget it! Hang out? Cool!

What's all the above got to do with technical writing? This lack of structure and discipline is at the very core of the problem. Remove them and incentive goes, too. Without them, children have lost the drive necessary to make them want to learn and to apply what they have learned to meaningful goals. If they are not taught the basic demands of proper writing structures, good communications suffer—if they know the ways of technical writing, then they can write anything they desire. For example, novels ignore many rules; if people want to write a novel, something that allows ignoring certain rules for effect or flavor, how can they purposely ignore rules for those effects if they don't know them in the first place? Without that knowledge, they don't have full control of what they are writing. And without that control, how do they know that the reader will receive the intended message? Structure is a guarantee.

As for the shoes, I have finally resorted to wearing only sneakers. For dress-up occasions several coats of shoe polish make 'em shine—well enough.

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