PROBLEM/SOLUTION CASES IN TECHNICAL WRITINGJournal of Advanced Composition 1985, 6: 79-88.
Most of the "problem-solving" assignments that students undertake are designed mainly to test their mastery of the technical aspects of a subject. For example, an engineering student might be required to design a highway roadside mower that would meet various restrictions concerning size, weight, cost, and the like. In such an assignment, the student must solve the technical problem and describe his or her solution to the instructor, generally in some form of written report. Problem solving in this sense has been treated in Brian Lowe's "A Method of Teaching Problem-Solving to Under graduate Engineering Students"1 and in Engineering Fundamentals and Problem Soloing, by A. R. Eide et al? Such assignments have some value as training, because often an engineer's or a technician's responsibility is simply to convey technical details of all or part of a project to a person in charge of the project. By and large, however, assignments whose only purpose is to train students to report technical details have limitations. They ignore much of the real-world context of a problem,the context of economic and interpersonal problems of which the technical problem is only a small part, and also the context of a communication network in which many different kinds of readers with different kinds of uses for the report must be identified and addressed.
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