Learning to Think Critically through Technical Writing
An interesting study by Ian J. Quitadamo and Martha J. Kurtz, demonstrates that learning to write is an effective method for learning to think critically (2007, Learning to Improve: Using Writing to Increase Critical Thinking Performance in General Education Biology) .
Thinking skills acquired include analysis (ability to break down information into separate components for greater understanding), inference (the ability to draw conclusions from available evidence), and evaluation (the ability to make reasoned judgments). The writing skills were acquired through having students write short essays on thought questions related to lab experiments in biology.
i have never conducted a formal study of the benefits of learning how to write about technology, but anecdotal material from following a large number of graduates over some 15 years of teaching technical communications indicates that technical writing can be used to acquire a wide range of thinking skills. Let’s look at some of them:
Ability to Read Closely and Interpret Texts
One of the first things that technical writing teaches is the ability to read and interpret primary technical material. Students learn that material submitted to them for editing or rewriting is filled with ambiguities, contradictions, and inconsistencies - students soon learn to identify these and to take the initiative to solve them. Skills acquired include learning to read closely, learning to question material, and learning to draw inferences the material.
Ability to Organize information Logically
Another skill that technical writers learn early is the ability organize diverse material into some kind of logical scheme. This usually entails learning how to construct a hierarchy of titles, then acquiring the skill to identify which material belongs under the relevant title.
Ability to Critically Review One’s Work
The ability to critically review one’s work is not the first thing that students learn to do - it is usually learned as the result of repeated criticism from the instructor. Eventually, students learn to read through their work and revise it before sending it out - they learn to apply the accepted standards of technical writing including direct, simple language, user friendly style, and appropriately brief, relevant paragraphs.
Ability to Evaluate Audience Expectations
Becoming a writer really involves learning to think of your audience before you write, while you’re writing, and when your reviewing. Keeping the audience in mind is really the central skill in the art of writing - no less for technical writing, than any other kind of writing. But the structured nature of technical writing - operating procedures, various types of explanations and overview material, makes it easy to teach the skill of writing for an audience - the instructor can quickly point out where the student’s writing has failed to take into account what the reader knows or expects to know - and this process is much less ambiguous and than say writing a novel or a poem.
Ability to Evaluate Relevance
The ability to evaluate the relevance of information is actually part of understanding audience expectations. Writers learn to evaluate information for its relevance for performing an operation, understanding a process, deepening the reader’s appreciation of a feature and its uses, etc.
Ability to Summarize
The ability to summarize technical information is a central skill for technical writers and students should learn to do this fairly well in any thorough technical communication training. This expresses itself mainly in the ability to sift through a collection of facts and “raw” technical material, and to be able to boil it down to a brief, informative, and relevant summary.
Why “Technical” Writing?
Although any writing, when taught correctly, will improve a student’s ability to think critically, comparatively speaking, technical writing is a “fast track” to acquiring these skills. What makes technical writing different? For one thing, the student’s writing is much easier to check and errors are often black and white - it is easier to show the student what is lacking. Missing lines in an instruction, sloppy recording of machine responses, leaving out critical information in an explanation before an instruction - all can be quickly pointed out and there cannot be much disagreement - the instructor can very quickly show the student why the writing is flawed by simply having the writer, or another student, “try out” the explanations and instructions to see if they supply the required information, and in a format that can be easily read and understood. This is much easier than to trying to point out flaws in an essay on politics, history, or literature where the student may find it difficult to understand what is lacking in the writing.
Another thing that makes technical writing an ideal form of learning to write and think critically, is that assignments can be given on very specific topics and a simulated set of primitive source materials can be provided to the student, along with the actual system, normally software, to be documented. This method enables the instructor to more accurately evaluate student performance and point out flaws and problems in the student’s writing.