T. R. Girill Society for Technical Comm./Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (retired) [email protected]
Technical Writing: Text-Design Checklists Share Expertise
Checklists are a well-known, experience-backed tool for capturing and sharing professional expertise. They have even earned a book-length laudatory treatment in Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto (Picador, 2011), which pointed out their benefits for experts as well as for novice practitioners. Classroom-tested student-support checklists for drafting both technical descriptions (writeprofessionally.org/ techlit/analysisgd) and instructions (writeprofessionally.org/techlit/ instructions) are freely available online as part of LLNL's technical literacy outreach project.
Five Checklist Benefits
Checklists provide surrogate experience packaged in an easy-to-borrow format. Text-design checklists help student writers in five related ways:
1. They help AVOID COGNITIVE OVERLOAD by overtly itemizing important tasks that even busy experts might overlook when drafting text under pressure. That's how checklists help master surgeons as well as novices perform better in the operating room. (For descriptions for example, 'divide complex objects into parts and order the parts').
2. They DECOMPOSE COMPLEX PROCESSES into more simple steps for more reliable execution. For example, 'visibly organize the text with headings and lists.'
3. They help STEER USERS AWAY from tempting but bad shortcuts and toward better, experience-based text-design alternatives. For example, 'include--do not carelessly omit--key verbal signals such as 'also' or 'however'.'
4. They overtly RAISE TEXT-USABILITY ISSUES that struggling student writers might not recognize on their own, hence broadening and enriching student expertise as they practice. For example, 'introduce comparisons and contrasts to reveal feature significance.'
5. They ENABLE ACTION--and hence skill-building exploratory practice --in text-drafting situations where student writers might otherwise stall and write nothing in frustrated confusion (thus, for instructions, 'make each step a visibly distinct overt command').
Self-Designed Checklist Pitfalls
College-level software engineering students are often asked to construct their own checklists as they prepare for teamwork sessions in which they review draft computer programs searching for flaws and quality improvements. A recent study of 1700 student-drafted code-review checklist questions explored just how helpful and reliable such student-designed checklists are (Chun Y. Cong and others, 'Assessing students' understanding and their mistakes in code review checklists,' arXiv.org/2101.04837v1, Jan. 13. 2021).
Participants here were older students already well into a professional college program in software quality. Nevertheless, a careful analysis of the checklist questions that they proposed showed that about 25% were seriously inappropriate or misguided for detecting or correcting program weaknesses:
1. Unclear--some student-proposed checklist questions were 'too generic or ambiguous' to actually help detect flaws within draft code. For example, 'is the code maintainable?' does not lead to any specific improvements in the program (like asking if a draft text 'is revisable').
2. Irrelevant--some student-proposed questions only pertained to run-time problems undetectable just by inspecting the program text (like asking if a draft text is amusing or insulting).
3. Misplaced focus (inappropriate technique)--typing or spelling errors in code are best caught with software filters, just as such mistakes in a draft text are best caught with standard spell-check tools.
So having students construct their own good-description or good- instruction checklists clearly calls for another layer of metacognitive awareness--about linguistics and learning generally as well as about text usability specifically--that few inexperienced young writers will possess. On the other hand, having students draft and revise text while armed with reliable, experience-based checklists already confirmed in other contexts shares with them the expertise of others, which guided practice lets them gradually add to their own skill set. And in this they follow the authentic path of successful professionals in diverse skill-rich fields.
[For a text-design framework that places good-description and good-instruction student checklists in context, see http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/usability ]
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