http://tc.eserver.org/authors/Jobst,_Jack_W. A bibliography of works by Jobst, Jack W. in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Jobst,_Jack_W. http://tc.eserver.org/20085.html http://tc.eserver.org/20085.html Technical communicators and academics share an interest in higher education program assessment because the quality offiture employees is at stake. If universities fail to adequately educate, on-the-job training must pick up the slack. This paper describes Michigan Tech's efforts to learn what skills their recent graduates use, and where they learned these skills. http://tc.eserver.org/19086.html http://tc.eserver.org/19086.html My focus will be on Resistance to theory as expressed by advanced tech writing students. My experience has been that the majority of these students do not enjoy reading nor discussing an assigned theoretical article, such as Carolyn Miller’s 'What’s Practical about Technical Writing?' http://tc.eserver.org/13974.html http://tc.eserver.org/13974.html While most technical writing teachers assign the oral report and insist on visuals, very few offer their students good classroom examples of technical report visual aids. However, a set of 35 mm slides on one teaching topic could be easily produced with neither expensive equipment nor much ability in graphic design. http://tc.eserver.org/10562.html http://tc.eserver.org/10562.html Someday computers may grade our students' essays and reports, but until then they can assist human graders in this onerous task. I wrote a program composed of three major sections: the first is a simple test editor for writing original comments; the second section consists of pre-written commentaries on common writing errors, principally in mechanics and organization; section three keeps track of bookkeeping. Questionnaire results show that students prefer this type of grading over traditional hand-written methods because it doesn't involve marks on their papers, and it produces more extensively detailed comments.