A method-oriented, dramatic technical and professional writing course

To help students learn a process orientation to technical writing, the author and a colleague teach a method-oriented, dramatic technical and professional writing course. Their major concern is to discourage the mechanistic notion of technical writing as a sort of fill-in-the-blanks activity. First, they make a distinction between technical writing classes and English composition classes; they insist that a noncompositional approach is most appropriate even with lower-division students. The method orientation subsumes document types under a problem-solving organization that is approached as a single, coherent process. The focus is on the problem-solving process that professional and technical writing. The teachers also want students to practice investing their principles and ethical stances in their work, so they will see political and ethical concerns as essential parts of the problem-solving approach. To adequately represent the human concerns of technical writing, they use scenarios of some detail so that ethical, political, and professional issues get in-depth coverage