Reading #6: Introductory Material

After reading all of the introductory material that the book prefaces each section with, I think I have a better understanding of the manner in which the editors hoped this book would be useful. That said, I do not believe that their approach to organization and content really works. Lots of technical language is routinely used over the course of the text, but the one word that keeps resurfacing is "heuristic." Indeed, it seems like an anthem that was blared over loudspeakers, or some sort of rallying point that the editors got behind. The definitions of the word as I found them include, "enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves," and "a hands on or interactive approach to learning." This is significant in that there is no hands on teaching presented in the book. All of this is dialectic in nature:  "knowledgeable" figures in the fields present their information based around a central theme for each chapter, and we as students are, presumably, expected to take all of this information as correct or the right way to do these things. Not only do I not think this is heuristic as I understand it, but I think that it is totally out of character with the nature of technical writing and communication. They do a wonderful job of expressing the ever changing state of the field, but really don't offer anything good in the way of instruction. What I came to realize is that I can't come up with a better approach than they did. Even if you were able to provide a course that was entirely based around going into an internship situation and leaning how tech writers do their job in that situation, the very moment that you moved to a different environment, you would have to throw out the entire rule book that you had assembled. There a number of very important topics that are broached by the text, for example the use of social media, the importance of working with the members of the work force, but the only sort of information given is usually an example of someone in the work place (again, an infinite number of this kind of examples are severely limited in their ability to teach anything) and then a series of questions that you should ask to make sure that you cover all bases and fit in appropriately and acceptably.