{"id":20530,"date":"2026-08-14T17:46:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T21:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/?p=20530"},"modified":"2026-08-14T17:46:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T21:46:50","slug":"academic-v-technical-writing-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/14\/academic-v-technical-writing-activity\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic v. Technical Writing Activity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&rsquo;ve taught technical writing, you know that students are endlessly confused by the differences between academic writing expectations and technical writing expectations. It&rsquo;s not especially surprising. Teachers pound margins and labeling and long paragraphs and essay standards into their brains for years, and then all of a sudden, none of that is the priority. They are supposed to write in completely new (and uncomfortable, as a result) ways.<\/p>\n<p>I plan to create a visual infographic to help with the differences, but I already have an activity in mind that I want to try. Whenever I look at the official course objectives for technical writing, my heart sinks. They are the height of academic writing. They feel completely wrong for a course that asks students NOT to write in jargon-filled, long sentences of prosey prose.<\/p>\n<p>Here are the current objectives for Virginia Tech&rsquo;s Technical Writing service course:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Having successfully completed this course, students will be able to perform the technical writing tasks defined by the learning objectives for the course:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Analyze the rhetorical situation and determine the appropriate audience or users of written communication, considering the needs of global audiences and people with disabilities.<\/li>\n<li>Conduct research appropriate to workplace problem solving, such as literature review, evaluation of online resources, interview, and site inspection.<\/li>\n<li>Interpret research findings with understanding of ethical and human implications.<\/li>\n<li>Use conventions of various workplace genres, such as proposals, instructions, correspondence, reports, and slide decks, with understanding of how the genre conventions can be used as heuristics and as principles of arrangement.<\/li>\n<li>Collaborate with classmates in planning, researching, writing, revising, and presenting information.<\/li>\n<li>Apply principles of effective visual design for print and electronic presentation, including hierarchical, chronological, and spatial arrangements.<\/li>\n<li>Identify and apply the principles of effective style in the composing of usable, reader-centered written communications.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The activity is plain and simple: translate that mess into plain language that are clear and concise. I want to open the course with this idea. It feels like a great way to (1) introduce the academic v. technical writing differences, and (2) examine what this course focuses on in more depth and detail than just reading that list will ever do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&rsquo;ve taught technical writing, you know that students are endlessly confused by the differences between academic writing expectations and technical writing expectations. It&rsquo;s not especially surprising. Teachers pound margins and labeling and long paragraphs and essay standards into their brains for years, and then all of a sudden, none of that is the priority. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[560],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqzI8-5l8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20531,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530\/revisions\/20531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}