Tate 1

Nick Tate
Dr. Roggenbuck
Theory and Practice of Writing
28 September 2015
Writing for the Future: Four Necessary Technicalities
Technical writers cut to the chase. The tendency to cut out extraneous information is the
driving force behind my minor in technical writing. This force has stuck with me through all of
my college classes and jobs that involve writing. Technical writing has taught me that we have
entered an age where technology dominates the time or motivation people used to spend on
reading. If they read at all, they now prefer text that is arranged in easy-to-read paragraphs that
hold their attention. Current college students must learn how to take this change into account in
their writing. With at least a technical foundation, they will be able to write more effectively for
the future than ever before.
There are four facets to writing that I want to pass on to future instructors. Each comes
with a set of recommendations so that instructors may teach these facets to their students: a focus
on rhetorical writing, development of "persona" or "identity", flexibility, and conciseness
through revision. I believe these facets are beginning to shape modern writing as we know it, and
they can be used as guidelines to craft effective writing for the days ahead.
I have worked for a Search Engine Optimization firm, WebPageFX, since last October.
My job is to write blog posts that appear on various blogs across the web. The audiences of these

Tate 2
posts vary greatly from site to site, so in order to write effective and appealing posts, I need to
tailor them to the specific blog audience.
The work I do for WebPageFX could be classified as a rhetorical philosophy, one that
Richard Fulkerson touches on in his essay Four Philosophies of Composition. Rhetorical writing
"is writing adapted to achieve the desired effect on the desired audience" (346). I believe that the
ability to write rhetorically is the most important aspect of writing, whether the audience is
yourself or anyone else. Writing, especially on the Internet, is becoming less information-centric
and more geared towards niche readers. More and more students are beginning to write this way,
and I think this is a continuing trend.
Just how students should go about rhetorical writing, however, has been a subject of
debate for years. David Bartholomae brought up a great point in his essay Inventing the
University: the fact that writing for a reader means writing from a "position of privilege". He
argues that students lack knowledge of "discourse communities" that is, the language of
scholars and researchers. This struggle to understand the theories and ideas of different
communities shows through in student writing.
Bartholomae offers two suggestions in his piece: he says "I think that all writers, in order
to write, must imagine for themselves the priveleges of being insiders" (10). He later proposes to
"...determine what the community's conventions are, so that these conventions can be written out,
'demystified', and taught in our classrooms" (12). Instructors can take these suggestions with
them to the classroom.
A future instructor can first take this simple step: create assignments that list potential
audiences for which the students should tailor their writing. This would get students' minds

Tate 3
jogging around who they should write for, rather than what. Getting the students as close to the
privilege of being "insiders" is key.
Taking a step further, the instructor can have the students conduct an audience analysis
first, which is extensive research on the audience rather than the topic. Audience analysis creates
a framework that students can weave their topic around. Students are encouraged to become as
immersed in their audience as possible determining the "community's conventions". That
means both text-based research and fieldwork is implemented. The students go out on their own
time and observe the actions, behaviors, and duties of their audience. A brief shadowing session
is an excellent example of an audience analysis.
Although audience should be truly important to all student writers, their own writing style
should not be ignored. In Linda Flower and John R. Hayes' study The Cognition of Discovery:
Defining A Rhetorical Problem, they propose a model that all writers must "solve" in order to
write effectively. The model revolves around this rhetorical "problem", where the writer
considers both their own "persona" (their relationship to the reader) and the audience at hand.
Flower and Hayes show that "good" writers treat their writing as a "complex speech act"
that is, they spend a hefty chunk of time considering how they can affect their reader (161).
When writing for WebPageFX, I often treated my assignments in a similar light, considering the
persona I should take on in order to be on par with my readers.
This "persona" can also be equated with the term "identity". For many students, learning
to write well means finding their writing "identity" and knowing when to shift into it. Fan Shen,
in his essay The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English
Composition, explains this transition: "...the process of learning to write in English is in fact a

Tate 4
process of creating and defining a new identity and balancing it with the old identity" (466). It is
important to know that sometimes it is hard for students to find their "writing identities", and
instructors can play a part in helping their students find an "identity" both through Flower and
Hayes and Shen.
Both pieces present solid cases for a proper transition into college writing. An instructor
can present the Flower and Hayes model to the class at the beginning of the semester as a sort of
loose contract. Students can set goals as to how they will solve their own rhetorical problem and
formulate their personas. Then, the instructor can introduce Shen's narrative example, which
illustrates the struggle of "just being yourself" when writing, which students can dissect. Shen
recommends, "It would be helpful if he or she pointed out the different cultural/ideological
connotations of the word "I", the connotations of a group-centered culture and an individualcentered culture" (466). His work sets the stage for student writers to begin thinking about their
writing identity in an individual-centric culture.
While audience and identity play pivotal roles in student writing, the ability to be flexible
puts those two skills in practice. I quickly found that since my WebPageFX assignments can be
about any topic, I have to adapt my way of thinking and my writing to the topic. That means if I
know little about 3-D printing, business strategies, or skimboarding, I have to do my research
and decide how I deliver my writing, which is a prime example of flexibility.
The collaborative Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing lists flexibility as
one of its eight essential "habits of mind" a student should adopt. It says that writers should
tackle assignments from different angles that depend on the task at hand and the audience. Once
they have written, they should reflect on the choices made while writing (Council of Writing

Tate 5
Program Administrators et al. 5). When students are flexible, they can work in a variety of
different areas and voices, a skill that is desired in the workplace.
Flexibility is something that transfers from assignment to assignment. I interned in
Philadelphia this past summer at WXPN, a member-supported radio station that operates from
the University of Pennsylvania. I was a social media intern, managing the station's online
profiles and writing for their blog, "The Key". While this was still blog-centric writing, it taught
me valuable things about flexibility in a different setting.
My main task was to blog about bands, albums, and shows in the Philadelphia area. This
wasn't an easy task, however, as I would sometimes be assigned to write about bands and albums
of which I had no prior knowledge. Adapting to these situations involved listening to the music
carefully so as to give an accurate description and doing so in less than a few hours.
Deadlines were a major factor at both my internship and WebPageFX.
An instructor can emulate the demand for flexibility in the classroom by creating mock
workplace situations. They can assign hard deadlines due in the same class period or week and
encourage students to look at an assignment from multiple perspectives. I highly suggest a
common flexibility exercise: handing out topics with which students have little familiarity. This
technique has been implemented in public speaking classes to acquaint students with speaking in
front of crowds. I think it could have the same effect when assigned as a writing exercise.
Through exploring unfamiliar territory, students adapt different personas for different situations,
and they hone their ability to be flexible.
Audience, persona, and flexibility are traits that experienced writers of all kinds share,
but there is a single aspect that technical writing revolves around conciseness. I have learned

Tate 6
in my technical writing classes that many people no longer enjoy reading copious amounts of
words that dance around a subject. Readers' patience is getting thin, so future writers will need to
make their writing more concise. A large part of being concise rests on the process of revision.
Nancy Sommers, in her essay Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Adult Writers,
claims that revision is the act of resolving "dissonance". She explains that experienced writers
"... seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity, the differences of meaning, the dissonance,
that writing as opposed to speech allows in the possibility of revision" (386).When she studied
these experienced writers, she found that they created meaning by continuously seeking out and
editing noticeable imperfections in their work.
I had my own experience resolving the dissonance in my work when I took a technical
manuals class. My conciseness skills improved dramatically, simply because I pared down my
documents to their essentials. In one group project, we had to draft a set of instructions for a
specific set of users. We chose our users (female college sophomores) and a task ("how to wire a
light switch"). To communicate this task to the users, we drafted three sets of instructions: one
with just words, one with just pictures, and one with pictures and words.
Our users had an easier time wiring the switch using the latter two instructions because
they contained both pictures and words. In the written instructions, however, it was hard for them
to wire the switch simply by reading words. That is when our group realized our instructions
were "dissonant", and the revision process began. We condensed each step to one action only.
Any further action required a sub-bullet. We simplified our wording and made sure to describe
the parts as accurately as possible. We created a better vision for wiring the switch by revising
our ideas.

Tate 7
I understand that most English classes are not technical writing classes, but I think the
instructions assignment carries over into English classrooms. It helped my group and I realize
that it does not matter if a writer knows information by heart what matters is how effectively
that information is communicated. If a writer just lists steps off the top of their head, it is bound
to look messy and read poorly. That is why great writers are in a constant state of revision: as
Sommers puts it, "As their ideas change, revision becomes an attempt to make their writing
consonant with that changing vision" (386).
An instructor can use the instructions assignment to demonstrate this need to keep up
with a "changing vision". The assignment also communicates the notion that rewriting is
necessary throughout the whole of composing a document, not just when they put down the pen.
Instructions are a great way to wrap the facets I have discussed into one, all-inclusive
assignment. Students address the concepts of rhetorical writing, persona, flexibility, and
conciseness through revision when drafting instructions.
No matter how these facets will be taught, I believe they will be integral to student
success in their later years of college and beyond. While not all students will agree with the key
policies of technical writing, I think it is necessary to at least have a foundation. This foundation
can be carried through their lives, as it did and will continue through mine. The future of writing
is consistently changing now is the time for students to adapt accordingly.

Tate 8
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." When A Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's
Block and Other Composing Problems. New York: Guilford, 1985. 4-21. Print.
Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and
National Writing Project. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. CWPA,
NCTE, and NWP, 2011. PDF file.
Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. "The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical
Problem." The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring. Ed. Toni Lee Caposella.
Fortworth: Harcourt Brace, 1998. 155-66.
Fulkerson, Richard. Four Philosophies of Composition. National Council of Teachers of English,
1979. PDF file.
Shen, Fan. "The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English
Composition." College Composition and Communication 40.4 (1989): 459-66. Print.
Sommers, Nancy. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.
College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec 1980): 378-88. Available through
JSTOR.