A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing

Abstract

A question arose, during a committee discussion in our English department last year, whether students in our large technological university should be permitted to take a technical writing course to satisfy humanities requirements of their own schools and departments (1). There were two opinions among those in my department with whom I talked. Those who teach literature believed that students should not satisfy a humanities, or English, requirement with a technical writing course. And our department should prevent them from doing so by instituting a literature prerequisite for the technical writing course. Those of us who teach technical writing responded differently. Mostly, we were baffled. Obviously we did not welcome what we considered an irrelevant prerequisite for our course, and we did not like the idea of our course being held hostage for the overstaffed literature courses. But were we willing to argue, indeed, could we argue that technical writing has humanistic value?

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