Teaching Critical Thinking in The Technical Writing Class

G. Douglas Meyers

Learning theorists are currently exploring the enormous po­tential for cognitive growth that may be experienced by young adults in college. Recent research by learning theorists indicates that critical thinking skills are not necessarily naturally used by older adolescents, but that such complex abilities must be developed in the maturing young adult (Kurfiss 2 ff.). It should not be assumed that college students habitually operate at the formal operational level (to borrow from Piaget, for instance), for on a developmental spectrum of cogni­tive performance, young adults may often fixate on modes of thinking that lag far behind abstract critical reasoning. Given the intricate and intimate connections between thought and language, I believe that technical writing teachers have a special responsibility to use their subject matter to advance the critical reasoning processes that make up the problem-solving strategies that spiral throughout the composing process, the disciplines, and the professions. Critical thinking is a goal central to higher education, as indeed is the achievement of full literacy: these two should be developed together in our classrooms. Much as the mastery of the alphabet heralds a critical turning point in the cultural development of the young elementary school child, the mastery of technical writing should herald a critical turning point in advanced composition students’ professional and cognitive develop­ment, particularly since learning the language of a field is a principal way of learning its concepts, much as learning its formats teaches its conventions.

It is probable that the Technical Writing course provides for upperclassmen the most intensive and extensive experience with written English that they will have during their undergraduate edu­cation. Traditionally, the course has bridged the world of work and the world of school. We instructors try to prepare our students for on-the-job professional writing, and it would seem that this objective is met through the special goals of the course: writing to particular audiences, using precise language, mastering formats, and using graphics. Such observable skills are valuable: indeed, Green and Nolan indicate, in their piece in the recent “Education” issue of Technical Communication, that the fundamental requirements of an entering technical communicator’s job are writing, editing, and re­searching (11). Yet, what are we to make of the prediction that Paul V. Anderson cites in that very same issue, that the advent of more highly sophisticated computer software will eliminate up to 75 percent of the present jobs in technical communication, rendering entire categories of jobs obsolete (6)? We must teach, then, in addition to these surface writing abilities the deep structure reasoning skills that nourish them, those skills that are highly esteemed by business, industry, and academia, those same skills which are said to qualify liberal arts students—indeed, it is the English Department which traditionally houses courses in advanced composition—for satisfying professional futures. Technical writing must be regarded as a means of learning and teaching, helping to facilitate those personal transactions with knowledge through which readers and writers create meaning.

The question in this: when we “do” Technical Writing, are we simply turning out well-engineered students, or are we producing graduates who can engineer the language, that is, who can form and transform knowledge through language? All advanced composition courses, I believe, need to reflect the broad range of cognitive proc­esses performed by professionals who must write on the job. There is pragmatic justification for making the technical writing course not just a service course in advanced vocational training but one that engages students in intellectually rigorous cognitive activity. Storm’s recent research has reported a complex array of tasks performed by technical communicators, tasks relating to planning, coordinating, gathering, selecting, evaluating and arranging (18-19). If the composing process that Hayes and FLower hypothesize is correct (3 ff.), that in writing we plan, generate ideas into words, and construct for an audience, then the process of technical writing is synechdochic for what our students will do as professionals.

In technical writing, new perspectives and paradigms are being developed; our “traditional wisdom” sometimes seems less wise in this technological era. As Goldstein has summarized, we are on the verge of a revolution (25); teaching technical writing is no longer just “doing grease-monkey work on physics papers for spelling errors,” as Connors reports its being construed in the early sixties (346). Since modern rhetoricians tell us that all functional writing is rhetorical, we know that technical reports do not “mean” by themselves, but that their meanings are jointly constructed by writers and readers. Such new perspectives have helped technical writing to come of age, to be accepted as an important part of the English discipline. Given the polymorphous (and, possibly, perverse) precedents in Advanced Composition which Miller has studied, Technical Writing may in fact help us to codify and consolidate the goals of all advanced composi­tion.

To use the technical writing classroom as a context to teach critical thinking, we must first sweep away the debris of positivistic assumptions about language that have cluttered our profession. Our students need to understand that language is not a set of molds into which they pour their incandescent thoughts, that form and content are not separable, and that they are not simply trying to yoke writing to technology. The old paradigm has the teaching of technical writing as the teaching of invisibility, as if writing were a skill whereby language is subdued to most “accurately” transmit reality, coercing accord with a world that is presumably “objectively” communicated. As Miller has argued, such a self-deprecating stance is wrong and self-defeating, forcing us into preoccupations with the superficial (Miller, “Humanistic” 613). Teaching technical writing, I believe—indeed, teaching all writing—involves teaching visibility.

To teach technical writing as a context for developing critical thinking skills requires a suitable definition for “technical writing.” Dobrin offers one such elegantly economical definition: “Technical writing is writing that accommodates technology to the user” (242). The idea of accommodation may be used as a springboard into the kinds of critical thinking skills that need to be taught. If the dominant metaphor for what we do in our classes is coaching, then what we coach are the critical thinking processes that facilitate different kinds of accommodation. How can we offer our students, then, invitations to write and think complexly? How can we look at our curriculum as an accumulating repertory of skills that apply recursively?

To answer these questions we must unpack the term “critical thinking” to discover the essential processes which we can rightfully claim as our own, as we develop students’ critical thinking through writing. A complete list of such processes would be endless, but here are ten critical thinking skills that are “naturals” for technical writing advanced composition:

First, advanced concept formation: we should teach students how to develop heuristics for processing and manipulating invention, disposition, and style. Writing is a process of generating and editing texts within the spheres of three constraints—formal (from the word level on up), ideational (what ideas are to be expressed), and inten­tional (relating ideas to purposes of readers and writers). Advanced concept formation engages students in grappling with these variables that concern all advanced writers.

Second, hypothetical reasoning: technical writing is highly situa­tional, for it releases students from the here-and-now as they consider specific audiences, purposes, and objectives in their writing problems. In teaching hypothetical thinking, we teach two kinds of knowledge—propositional knowledge, about what people know about things, and algorithmic knowledge, about what the procedures are for doing things (Yinger 15). We also teach two kinds of rules—constitutive ones, which tell how actions are interpreted, and regulative, which specify which choices are best in specific situations (Miller, “Rules” 154). William Perry, in his study of the intellectual growth of college students, notes that intellectually under-developed students tend to fixate at the stage of dualism, which is characterized by the construing of absolutes: situations are seen as either/or, or right or wrong, where there is one “correct” solution which the teacher supplies (Bizzell 447). Hypothetical reasoning activities can help lead students to the more advanced stage which Perry calls “commitment to relativism,” where it is acknowledged that the world is without absolutes, but that it still does have its order and its values. (In our case, the values of each rhetorical situation order our writing worlds.)

Third, translation: technical writing naturally requires a great deal of translation, demanding that students inhabit at least two worlds simultaneously—the worlds of the specialist and non-special­ist. Writing to a lay audience, for instance, is not just a substitution exercise in which general words replace specific ones; it is, instead, an enterprise that requires the sensitive manipulation of language to accommodate ideas and information.

Fourth, empathic thinking: audience analysis is the sine qua non of technical writing and it is a concept that has demonstrated much fertility (Caernarven-Smith 5-10). Through audience analysis, stu­dents develop that underestimated critical thinking skill, empathic thinking. This skill may also be strengthened by having students work collaboratively in a workshop format, for peer-review groups not only help students to see the multiplicity (and potential validity) of their classmates’ points of view, but they also, I suspect, help to reduce egocentrism and enable students to imagine themselves in others’ shoes—the author’s and the intended audience’s, just to name two.

Fifth, critical comprehension: understanding the rhetoric of tech­nical discourse and the contexts in which it is produced is fundamen­tal to our writing courses. Critical comprehension relates to critical reading, as students assess the success of others’ documents in accom­modating their sets of readers. Critical comprehension is thus closely allied with performing critical analysis.

Sixth, interpretation: interpretation involves reading and writ­ing with a sensitivity for the subtle and the implied. It is an important critical thinking skill, given the number of interpretive communities that interact in processing technical writing.

Seventh, evaluation: the most complex of skills, perhaps, evalu­ation can be developed by teaching technical writing as a process, having students work through multiple drafts and revisions, evaluat­ing their linguistics, logical, and rhetorical choices. By reformulating and dismantling their prose and putting it back together again, students strengthen their evaluative abilities, from the smallest micro­scopic word-level concerns to the more global macroscopic format­ting concerns.

Eighth, meta-analysis: students should not only evaluate their own writing, but they should distance themselves to explain it, in written self-critiques. Such meta-analysis enables students to look critically and closely at their own work, to consciously watch them­selves doing it. By articulating these observations, students learn about their idiosyncratic composing processes and begin to develop executive schemes for writing. As their teachers, we learn how they see their own writing—identifying their own strengths and weak­nesses—important information that might otherwise elude us.

Ninth, movement toward multiplicity: this is an omnibus term intended to include all of the accommodation processes that help students to move beyond simplistic dichotomies of so-called “good” or “bad” writing, to generate many kinds of rhetorically effective dis­course.

Tenth, synthesis: the snythesizing of new information is neces­sary for the development of judgment and for the application of academic learning to “real life” situations. We should teach synthesis (and analysis) every time we teach revision, for instance: it is a process (like the nine that have preceded it) that applies recursively through­out teaching writing.

The problem-solving model of teaching writing—be it ad­vanced composition in general or technical writing in particular—is capturing the attention of many teachers. We can do ourselves and our students a genuine service by “deconstructing” our curriculum into the critical thinking processes that it invites students to develop, drawing connections to what is done by our colleagues in literature and in other departments. These ten processes lay the foundation for such deconstruction, and others may discover in them new territory for grounding their own investigations.

University of Texas
El Paso, Texas

Works Cited

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