Producing Brochures in the Technical Writing Classroom  

Producing brochures for real clients teaches college-level technical writing students about constraints of cost, time, and the availability of materials. Brochure writing also provides opportunities for learning more about editing, collaborative work, document design, and the problems which may occur during the production of real documents. Brochures of good quality can be produced by a class in approximately three weeks, or nine classroom hours. Grading brochures is expedited through the use of a simple heuristic.

Ryan, Charlton. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Education>Document Design>Technical Writing

Read It Or Skip It? The Textbook's Preface  

An informal survey of 18 modern technical writing textbook prefaces finds 75 to 100 percent of them tell readers the books meet students’ needs, contain special topics, have unique philosophies, emphasize the practical, contain sample documents, teach specific types of writing, and contain sections on computers and/or document design. Also, 50 to 75 percent of the prefaces state the books address ethical/legal issues, oral presentations, resumes/ job applications, corporate culture, and punctuation and/or grammar. Such repetitious content in textbook prefaces reduces their usefulness during the textbook selection process.

Ryan, Charlton. STC Proceedings (1994). Academic>Course Materials>Textbooks