English 421: Technical Writing

When we were first told that we were building a pirate ship in class, I belted an embarrassing “What!?” I couldn’t believe that we were building this in an English class. Once the trick came, the analogy between writing, teamwork and documentation all slowly came together. One of the most important things to understand is the complexity of working on a project (no matter how large or small) with a team. We had to first understand the tools/supplies/resources that were at hand, and then we had to divide up the group to work on smaller, more manageable pieces. Another important element is to contiuously, or at least periodically, cross communicate between groups so that everyone has a picture of the entire puzzle, not just their isolated pieces.   These and other elements are not only important to building a model pirate ship, but to technical writing and more specifically our white paper project. The group must collaborate and work together in order to achieve positive results, and if there is a breakdown in communication, that could lead to disaster (or a poor grade).