I
always use this lesson plan in the first class, right after the introductions.
I wrote it during my second semester teaching and never needed to change
it.
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Sample Tetra Paks™ |
The goal is to shock the students into realizing that they have to
think about their audiences when they write a paper. Nearly every class
reinforces the same message, which seems to get through based
on their final exams.
However, you will probably have to use a different item because the
original Tetra Pak™ materials are
no longer available. In 1995, I contacted Tetra Pak's™ public
relations director, who sent me a booklet on how to design a package
correctly, a printed but unfolded and unglued blank, and a paper blueline
on which art directors could lay out the elements of the package (this
is all done on computers now). When I tried to get more up-to-date materials
a few years ago, the company wouldn't send anything and I haven't been
able to find technical information online for Tetra Pak™ or
the other juice-box manufacturers.
However, I originally got the idea from someone who had his students
go out into the parking lot and change a tire following the students'
instructions. So it's certainly adaptable.
Note that one of the appeals of the lesson, especially for night classes,
is the unexpected jolt of sugar. I'd pick up 20 different juice boxes
at the grocery store--YooHoo chocolate milk drink, certain iced teas,
and JuicyJuice all come in Tetra Paks™ (look
on the bottom of the packages)--and in summertime, I froze the boxes
so they defrosted in the hour's drive to school but were still cool
when we started the lesson.
Lesson plan
Major concept
The audience for a piece of technical writing changes the writing.
Generalizations
Technical (or any) communication is 1/4 research, 1/4 design, 1/4
writing, and 1/4 editing.
However, the starting point is always the audience. Everything else,
all the other decisions, comes from what you find out about the audience.
Objectives
Cognitive
Students will learn that the same information can be presented many
ways, and all ways are valid depending on the audience.
Behavioral
In learning to appreciate differences in audiences, the students
will begin to consciously choose an appropriate method for each type
of audience.
Materials
- Fruit juices in Tetra Paks™, paper towels, scissors, paper
and pencil.
- Bluelines, etc., from TetraPak, Inc.
Procedures
Exercise #1: Writing for yourself
Hand out Tetra Paks™ and ask class members to write explanations
of how to open and drink from the boxes. They can do anything they need
to do to figure out how the containers work, including drinking the
contents. 5 minutes.
Exercise #2: Writing for an audience
Pair off class members.
“One of you is a writer who has written instructions for drinking
from these juice containers. Your partner, on the other hand, is a harried
kindergarten teacher who has just been handed two dozen of these juices
for the morning break. Many of her students may have never opened one
of these boxes before, so she is going to have to use your instructions
to show her students what to do. She is hoping for a dry experience.
“The teacher follows the writer's instructions. The teacher
can say anything, the more the better, but the writer says nothing.
Instead, the writer just takes notes about what works and what doesn't.
“If the teacher opens the juice box and there are any spills
or drips at all, the instructions didn’t work.
“NO HINTS!"
After 5-10 minutes, stop and have the students switch roles. After
another 5-10 minutes, stop again and ask the pairs to discuss how they
would change the instructions. 20 minutes.
Class discussion:
“How successful were these instructions? What made them successful?
How did you decide to change the instructions to make them more successful?
What difference does it make to know your audience?"
Sample problems noticed: The instructions are too obvious, they're
not obvious enough, the tone is wrong ("suck the juice"),
the language level is wrong ("puncture").
Exercise #3: Writing for a technical audience
“You now have a different audience. You’ve been hired
part-time by a printing plant, where you do everything that anyone asks.
Your boss wants you to solve a problem for her. Graphic artists are
handing in artwork that doesn't meet specs—the artwork sometimes
doesn't contain the right information and it doesn’t fit on the
boxes. For example, somebody recently sent in artwork that had the nutrition
information bent around a corner of the box.
"Take 5 minutes to come with some ideas about how you're going
to FIGURE OUT what to say to the graphic artists. In other words, how
will YOU find out what exactly the dimensions of the box are? How will
YOU find out what has to be on the boxes and where it goes? And how
will YOU figure out what to say to graphic artists in their own language
so that they understand what they’re supposed to do?
"For 10 minutes, share ideas with your partner and see if you
can come up with more ideas.” 15 minutes
Class discussion:
“What did you come up with?”
To find out more about the boxes themselves, look at the bottom of
the box to find the manufacturer of the box (the juice company is irrelevant,
except maybe to ask them how to contact the box manufacturer). The box
manufacturer can send you information about the dimensions and design
hints. All that you have to do is find out how to contact the manufacturer.
To find out how to communicate with the artists, some answers are:
Use printed materials like the ones from TetraPak; interview and usability
test your instructions with some friendly graphic artists (both expert
and novice); get a graphic-arts dictionary….
Pass around the materials from Tetra Pak™. 15 minutes.
Reinforcement and assessment
Reinforcement
In later classes, the students will learn additional audience analysis
techniques.
Assessment
At the end of the lesson or at the beginning of the next lesson,
ask each student for his or her reaction to the lesson (students can
pass). "What did you discover about writing for different audiences?"
Sample
student responses
Student 1: We were asked to write the instructions
to take out a juice box from its pack, open it and insert the straw
into it (initially for myself and later for an imagined audience or
reader of kindergarten students.) I had to do a similar exercise
for my English Composition I class; nevertheless, I learned the difference
between writing for myself and writing for a group whose level of understanding
will be different from mine. When I write for myself, I only note what
I do not know or what I need to remember. When I write for someone else,
I have to [choose] the terminology to use and the amount of background
information to give. It was interesting to find out that a peer understood
a couple of instructions that I wrote for the kids; the rest of the
instructions did not make much sense to him. The exercise was an application
of the material learnt from Chapter 1.
When I wrote my first technical log, I discovered that I liked the
class discussion on how to write directions for the graphics and art
director of the juice box/packet. My peers came up with points that
I did not think of. It was a better exercise than writing the instructions
on paper and getting it evaluated by only person.
Student 2: In this class session I learned that when
writing direction you must state all the steps. For example when I was
writing direction to putting the straw in a box juice, I was leaving
out a lot of steps. I was assuming that since I knew how to do it they
did too.
Student 3: The topic of the first class was to try
different techniques for kids to learn how to get juice out of a juice
box. We started this assignment by writing instructions like 1. Look
for the straw, 2. Push the straw through the silver hole, 3. Drink the
juice, etc. The one thing that I learned from this task is everyone
learns differently, one technique might work for one kid and might not
work for another. The reason why we did this assignment is for us to
understand that one has to carefully choose the words used in creating
instructions for people and explain them clearly so that everyone understands
exactly whats going on. A good example of this is the Haiti project;
we had to carefully explain each person’s role so that everyone
in the group knew what they had to do in the project. We also had to
take an intelligence test and from this one could see that some people
learn visually, logically, and others have a linguistic intelligence,
so this test proves that everyone learns differently.
Student 4: In this class, we learned how to write
instructions for a particular task. Although my first impression of
this exercise was that what is this? Come on we are in a university
u cant teach us how write instructions on how to put a straw in the
juice box, but after the whole exercise I learnt how a simple thing,
which everyone would practically do the same way, the only way actually,
when asked to put down in words can be done is so many different ways.
This was just to show how to tackle situations accordingly. I also learned
the severity of the situations when things are taken differently than
what they are supposed to mean. I guess this might be a very good test
for multiple intelligence with unique answer in the end.
Student 5: During the first class period, students
were directed to prepare a list of detailed instructions on how to open
a juice container. At the end of the exercise, comparisons were made
between different sets of instructions throughout the class. These comparisons
lead to a discussion on what techniques of writing instructions may
work or may not work.
Some things that were considered were: (a) the terminology used must
be appropriate, (b) too much detail may not always be good, (c) visual
demonstration is a good way to instruct an audience, (d) the use of
pictures and visual aids are good when a demonstration is not possible,
(e) it is always a good idea to provide some sort of error recovery
instructions, and (f) it is always important to be consistent with the
terms and vocabulary used.
This exercise has made me aware of the importance of recognizing
an audience and assessing their subject knowledge level before writing
or presenting a subject. I think that this general awareness has helped
me develop into a better writer, in both, school and at work.
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