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A dozen students are on their hands and knees in a space cleared by pushing the classroom furniture to the walls. With their thumbs and middle fingers they are flicking beer-bottle tops across the linoleum, which has been divided into numerous boxes by strips of masking tape. They are playing Skelly, a game I learned as a child on the streets of Brooklyn, the instructions for which I have recently exhumed from a book called Street Games (1976) by Alan Milberg.
What conceivable connection could there be between these undignified proceedings and technical writing? (I saw the janitor's expressions at the end of the day as he confronted the maze of tape strips marring the meticulously waxed floor, and I'm sure his questions ran even deeper than that.)
This regressed group of high-school students was, in fact, my technical-writing class field-testing Milberg's instructions for clarity and accuracy. Could they play their way through a round of Skelly using only the written directions without any intercession from the one veteran player in their midst?
Nine months earlier, the coordinator of my magnet program in a Houston high school, anxious to expand our offerings in writing beyond the ubiquitous creative writing and journalism options, invited me to offer the course. Although technical writing appeared on the list of state-approved electives, it had never been taught at our school. In fact only one other high school in the city offered technical writing as part of its engineering specialization.
My coordinator's invitation coincided with a cry for help from a colleague in the biology department. Together we puzzled over how to help her students translate their lab observations and their readings into simple, accurate prose that was not lifeless. I invited her to join me in planning a technical writing course that would address her students' needs, and she, in turn, suggested we ask two retired technical writers from Shell Oil in as consultants.
Dick Young and Bob Matthews were both engineers by training, and they were also literate men with a love of the English language and a commitment to transmitting their accumulated wisdom, won in the corporate trenches, to a new generation of students. Throughout my years of teaching writing, I had been unwillingly classified as a...