ADE Bulletin

Bringing Literature Teachers and Writing Teachers Closer Together

Many traditional college English departments now find themselves in an unpalatable predicament. Pressure from the marketplace and from other college disciplines has made clear that students need more than basic composition skills. They need skills to communicate effectively in business, research, and industrial environments. While enrollments in traditional literature courses have continued to decline, English departments are asked to staff and teach an increasing number of courses in various types of technical writing. These two trends have produced a less than harmonious climate within many English departments. Technical writing courses are often viewed by literature teachers as alien intruders unrelated both to the established goals of an English department and to the attempt to encourage and preserve the study of humanities and aesthetics. Many teachers see technical writing as intellectually arid, controlled only by format and mechanical approaches to clarity. Many more consider it antiliterature, unsympathetic to the methods used to teach literary analysis and appreciation.

Building a Technical Communication Program

I address myself briefly to two questions that will likely confront anyone who considers increasing the number of technical writing programs. First, what is the market for technical communicators? Second, how does one go about setting up a program?

Careers For English Majors: Where Are They And How Can Departments Help?

The market for English majors is poor; yet with concentration, awareness of skills, strong support, and sufficient information, recent graduates and career changers can find excellent positions. In 1980, after performing two surveys of the career paths of 550 humanities majors and publishing a guide to career options, I resigned my academic post and began a full year of part-time teaching, medical and technical editing, and several other jobs, including career counseling. As a career counselor I collaborated with another former academic to develop a variation on the familiar career seminar for humanities majors.

A Collegiate Writing Program for the 1980s

The two growth areas right now are the English as a second language (ESL) courses and the business and technical writing courses. The ESL courses fall outside the province of this paper, but the business and technical writing courses are very pertinent.

Composition Teachers: No Experience Necessary?

It's Monday, September 8, your first day in law school. Tonight you'll start your classes. You'll be taking Criminal Law and Procedure on Mondays, Basic Contract Law on Tuesdays, and Property and Law on Wednesdays. But before going to any of those classes, you are, at eight o'clock this morning, given your first task as a law student. You'll be trying a case in superior court. It doesn't matter what the case is; the defendant's future is on the line, and you are responsible for it. The fact that you've never taken a law course before and basically have no idea what to do in court also doesn't matter. After all, the way to learn to do something is by doing it. And if this defendant gets cheated out of the right to the best lawyer possible, and if the next several defendants also get cheated, does that really matter? Someday, chances are, you'll be a great lawyer. The above scenario is nothing less than ridiculous, yet in English departments across the country a similar scenario takes place at the start of every semester.

English Department Service Courses

The service curricula in this survey include institution-wide general education courses, English courses required in addition to institution-wide general education courses for preprofessional students (those pursuing four-year or longer non-arts and sciences degrees), and other specialized preprofessional English courses, such as technical writing.

English Professors as Technical Writers: Experience is The Best Teacher

The future of the English curriculum is being argued and discussed in academic settings across the country. Students, more and more, seek courses of study that will lead directly to jobs. The buzzword is 'relevance.' The bottom line is 'big bucks.'

How To Find a Career Adviser for Your Undergraduate Majors

If your faculty thinks it is not the place of a liberal arts school to get involved in anything 'vocational,' not the role of an English department to counsel students about job seeking, and not the job of a faculty member to learn about career planning, then the student probably cannot get an answer to the question. Chances are you and your department do not really comprehend the significant practical impact of this discipline even though it is your life's work.

Out of the Trenches and into the Field: Leaves of Absence for Writing Teachers

Those who teach mainly writing have a particular need for avenues of career growth because their tasks are especially repetitive and personally draining. One such avenue can be a year's leave of absence in industry.

Planning and Running a Computer Lab for Writing: A Survival Manual

Increasingly, English teachers, their departments, and their administrations have been investigating the use of word processing and computer aids in writing. For those who integrate computer use into instruction, the question of access becomes crucial. Although some schools—like Carnegie Mellon and Drexel—solve this question by requiring their students to purchase computers, most colleges and universities are providing access, at least in part, through on-campus computer labs. On some campuses, the English department or writing center plays a significant role in establishing and running a computer lab for writing and may even have primary responsibility for doing so. Many of us, however, have had no training that prepares us for the technical and administrative problems involved in such an undertaking.

Remarks on Composition to the Yale English Department

What can I say about composition that will be useful to the Yale English department in setting up a good writing program? It's clear to me that I won't need to say anything about special teaching methods that are tailor-made for the Yale scene. Yale's admissions policy guarantees that entering freshmen are going to be very diverse in their backgrounds and in their writing skills, and Yale will want to adapt to this diversity by using methods that are flexible and eclectic. Even if Yale did try to create a novel program that could serve as a model for the rest of the nation, it's doubtful that the elements of the program could be new or that the human mind could devise more methods and programs than have already been tried out. The problem will be to choose methods intelligently and to apply them well; and in order to do this, the one thing needful is not machinery but motivation—professorial motivation.

Report on the 1984–85 Survey of the English Sample: General Education Requirements in English and the English Major

The 1984–85 survey of the English sample represents the second phase of the survey series the MLA launched in 1983–84. Using a stratified random Sample of institutions, these surveys attempt to provide the profession with statistical information useful for assessing trends and planning for change. 1 The 1984–85 survey sought information about three topics: faculty salaries, institutional general education requirements in English, and the English major. The findings on salaries were published in the Fall 1987 ADE Bulletin (Huber, “English Salaries”). The results of the inquiries into general education requirements and the English major are presented here.

Reviewing the Graduate Curriculum: Opportunities and Obligations

Increasingly, graduate programs are reflecting new critical approaches and making provision for their students to acquire skills in areas outside of literature. A number of departments offer alternate tracks, especially at the Master's level, for students interested in high school and community college teaching, in English as a second language, in creative writing, and so on. There are currently about 150 Ph.D. programs in English in this country; and, while it would be a gross exaggeration to say that each is unique, the differences among them are remarkable.

Shifting Models of the University: Academia Slouches toward the Millennium

Lack of faculty consensus has combined with a multiplication of university programs to convince the public that universities serve secular needs and that their priorities should be established by the marketplace. This view threatens to disenfranchise the faculty.

Some Speculations About Writing Programs in the Eighties

This decade is a very good time to be a writing teacher. Those of us who were foresighted or brash or lucky enough to have chosen this career five or ten years ago now find ourselves in the midst of a ferment of professional activity.

Technical Writing in the Computer Industry: Job Opportunities for Ph.D.'s

This essay answers some of the more commonly asked questions about the field of technical writing. It explains what software and software documentation are, what the software documentation specialist (hereafter referred to as the technical writer) does, and how to go about preparing and looking for such employment. It also attempts to assuage the anxieties and calm the fears of those humanists who are upset by the mention of anything remotely associated with computers.

Technical Writing in the English Department: An Outside Perspective

During the last few years the growth of technical communication courses and programs in departments of English has been unprecedented. While this development has generally been viewed as healthy, not only for technical writing but for English departments themselves, the success of these courses and degree programs will depend on how well the administrations and faculties of the departments face up to a number of problems. What follows is an effort to identify these problems and suggest possible solutions.

Technical Writing Textbooks: Current Alternatives In Teaching

The textbook one chooses for a technical writing course will contribute a definition of the subject, whether implicit or explicit, but the definition and scope of what is loosely called technical writing are by no means agreed

The Tower and the Web: Emigrés from English Lit Can Find Work in the Field of Online Information Architecture

For starters, many people working on large Web sites hold more than one of these identities or have held more than one of these roles in their career to date, so it makes little sense to limit one's goals to one of these titles.

What Every Department Chair Should Know About Scholarship in Technical Communication

What should every department chair know about scholarship in technical communication? Probably a good deal more than I can tell you in this short paper, since many of you will probably be hiring faculty members for whom technical communication is a major area of interest. To evaluate the scholarly work of those people, you'll have to know something about the tradition within which they are working.

Writing Across the Curriculum

The phrase 'writing across the curriculum' is relatively new, as far as I am aware. I want to examine its underlying meaning, its various administrative forms, and its implications for the faculties of colleges and of high schools to look at the theory, the practice, and occasionally the history of the notion.

Writing Programs and the English Department

A couple of years ago John Gerber, in an article in the ADE Bulletin, urged a broadened definition of 'literacy,' one that would encompass all study relating to linguistic artifacts, from the most elementary reading and writing to the most differentiated scholarship and composing. Nearly all college English departments do include much of this broad range, but the inclusion is rarely an integration. Instead, there's the English major and the freshman composition program and the creative-writing courses and, sometimes, the courses for nonmajors: film, popular culture, folklore; business and technical writing; and so forth. In large departments different faculty members may specialize in one or another of these units, and the chairman, who is supposed to be running the whole six-ring circus, can scarcely get the different sorts to talk to one another. What integration occurs begins and ends with the yearly departmental cocktail party.

The Year of Living Dangerously; or, Not Just an Adventure, but a Job

Mentored teaching experience helps, especially in composition, business and technical writing, and introductory courses of the kind junior faculty members at small schools are typically required to teach.

Current Status Of Business And Technical Writing Courses In English Departments

We have heard a great deal of talk in recent years about the growth of business and technical writing courses in English departments. But very little, if any, factual information exists on how much enrollments have grown and whether they are expected to grow in the near future. Furthermore, no study has attempted to assess the impact these relatively new, rapidly expanding courses are having and will continue to have on English departments and their faculty members.

An Instructor Internship In Technical Writing

We cause ourselves problems by not knowing what our counterparts in industry are doing. In my case, I taught the textbook in my first business and technical writing courses at Indiana University East, Richmond.

Notes from the Other Side: The Strange Profession of Technical Writing

With writing as my 'marketable skill,' I crossed over the Rubicon from literature to technology. I became a technical writer for a data communications company. My job entailed creating software documentation—a category of discourse that I had not known existed.