Context for this case:
Introduce these guidelines by "touring" them with CDC's Sudden Unexplained
Infant Death reporting form.
Cognitive Apprenticeship Features:
A. The Tour.
One way to reveal the purpose of good descriptions is to tour the description-writing guidelines and give a brief, concrete example of each principle applied. Pointing out the different result of honoring or ignoring each principle, one by one with a simple case, shows just how well-designed descriptions are useful in ways that poor descriptions are not. See the "Giving a Guideline Tour" section below for an easy, systematic way to do this with a "crime scene" flavor that interests students.
B. The Trial Run.
A second approach may work better for younger students or those for whom discussing so many guidelines at once proves too abstract. Start instead with Exercise 0. Post the overt four-item "why write descriptions" list from the annotated version of that exercise and then have students try that simple description practice themselves. Afterwards, backtrack from the overt four-reasons list and from the writing problems that turn up during Exercise 0 to introduce each guideline as a solution to a common problem that all description writers face. With this list of potential solutions at hand, students can then apply them to the draft description in the paper clip case (Exercise 1) and to subsequent exercises.
An easy, focused way to introduce each of these guidelines to
students is to "tour" through them using some authentic
technical descriptions to illustrate how they work.
infant death (SUID) is a practical situation where
real-life reporting (description)
forms are not only available to the public but
eagerly shared to promote their wider use.
Hence, I have found that SUID
forms from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(freely posted at
provide a dramatic way to introduce the good-description guidelines to otherwise disinterested high-school students.
The six-page SUID "investigation report form" at the above URL contains many clever descriptive features. First, it includes a concrete example of virtually every technique listed on the basic guidelines for good descriptions above. Surveying the SUID form is a convenient, persuasive way to highlight those techniques.
Second, the SUID form is heavily scaffolded (with checklists, labeled tables to fill in, and prompted comparisons). Yet this exposure of often-hidden descriptive moves is very much "for life," not just for school. At the sometimes chaotic death scene, first responders who witness possibly crucial details (about temperature, ventilation, or clothing, for example) need clear, organized prompts to help them record diverse nutritional, medical, and environmental clues in reliable ways. Months later and thousands of miles away (at CDC in Atlanta), investigators need systematic, easily compared reports rich enough in detail to suggest possible causes. The scaffolding on the SUID form helps both groups meet their needs in complementary ways. This is also a keen lesson for students in the social value of good technical description, for writers and readers alike.
Third, CDC's SUID form includes front and side infant-body outlines on which paramedics can mark wounds or scars. Many technical descriptions blend words and pictures, so this offers a practical introduction to the general design challenges of effective text-graphics integration.
Finally, this real-life SUID form has its share of little imperfections that students can be asked to find and improve by using the guidelines (it needs a better way than a small empty box, for instance, to capture information about prescription and OTC medications that the infant was taking). So it affords a nice opportunity to explore the benefits of guideline-based text revision. The CSI flavor of this technical description case makes it appealing; the usability features make it a very helpful instructional tool.
Several items in the guidelines here overlap with those that Darlene Smith-Worthington includes in her Technical Communication: Writing Descriptions (Perfection Learning, 1997, 32 pp.), a short high-school technical writing text. Smith-Worthington approaches description writing quite broadly. She spends time on general audience analysis, on "observing things," and on literary terminology (simile contrasted with metaphor and analogy, for example). Her guidelines for writing and revising descriptions are helpful, but they appear only late in her text (pp. 16 and 24, the last half of the book). Several extended example descriptions treat familiar but mechanically complex objects (a rotary egg beater, a clothes hanger) and could support much more commentary than they receive. One strength of her book is her use of nutrition labels and similar tabular product specifications, which she cleverly contrasts with descriptions in sentence and paragraph format.
My approach to teaching technical description places greater stress than Smith-Worthington does on the psychological and linguistic techniques that make good descriptions good. I follow the same empirical, research-based approach to teaching technical writing that the American Federation of Teachers promotes for effectively teaching reading (summarized in Louisa C. Moats, Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science, Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers, 1999, 32 pp., available free online). The last 30 years have revealed much about the psychological grounds for nonfiction text usability; we should not ignore these discoveries when introducing students to effective drafting and revising techniques. The exercises here embody this work, and the guidelines (especially the "Signals for Your Reader" section at the end) make them explicit (since seeing them spelled out and naming them help new students recognize them in action).
I also introduce description-writing guidelines before, not after, the exercises to which they apply. And I suggest explicitly invoking them in every subsequent lesson. They tie the separate exercises together: an easy way to review at the start of each lesson, an overt focus for practice, and a shared evaluation standard. I have even hung these guidelines in the classroom as a 3-by-4-foot poster to provide visual continuity and a tangible resource for student writers.