English 421: Technical Writing

  The reason that building the ship will help us in this class is because it is a great example of why technical writing is so important, especially for models and anything else that the user may not fully understand when putting it together.  The directions must be written so well that a totally ignorant person can understand them.  Without good technical writing those instructions for the ship would have been impossible to put together, but the directions were written well enough that we could still put them in order and get the parts put together that we had the directions for.  This was also a good experential activity that showed how our ideas are formed even in writing a paper.  First you look at the big picture and begin brainstorming and puting ideas together after that.  Then you slowly begin putting the paper together but not necissarily in the right order yet though, just kind of getting the ideas on paper. (The part of the ship that we got together, but it's all seperated and hasn't quite come together yet.)  Also, of course there is also the aspect of having us work as a team.  This project has helped show how we can dicvide this white paper project up so that everyone will have something to do.