Adapting our language and style for each audience is a tech writer’s bread and butter. With the different outlets available today for your online writings (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, other social sites, even straight-laced email) I guess it’s not surprising that people are automatically tailoring their language for their audience, subject and purpose. People are using other communication forms too, such as online videos, hand-crafted Flash movies and other visual forms.

I totally agree that educational institutions should recognise the work done by students outside the formal curriculum, and give students the chance to integrate it into their studies and share it with other students. At my son’s school, luckily, this does happen. The teachers are interested and involved in work that students publish on the web or elsewhere, and give them the chance to demo it and merge it into their classwork too.

Moving beyond schools, it benefits employers to do the same. An individual employee and their team can get a lot of benefit from the ‘extra-curricular’ but related work that people do for fun and interest outside core working hours. The most forward-looking companies and managers are recognising this sort of contribution too.

Cheers
Sarah

One of the issues is that I don’t think high school students necessarily know the right things to look for in a college. I certainly didn’t. Nobody ever talked to me about my learning style. It was all about getting into the “best” school according to some publication.

That’s one thing I’ll always give New College credit for is that I could often find ways that my classes applied to my real life, and often they would interweave with each other. But perhaps that is rare is higher ed.

However, I thought this quote was key: “For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.” You see, I did high school debate, where you wrote for and spoke to an audience, and that class taught me more about writing than any language class ever did.

The key was to understand that good writing was about persuasion — to choose a line of argument and pursue it to its conclusion, to stake out some ground and defend it. Most high-school writers never learn this. Instead, they write endless five-paragraph book-reports rehearsing what they’ve read, or get lost in pointless introspection about how it makes them feel.

If growing up with online communication allows more kids to understand writing to persuade, they might find writing an essay for a professor a more interesting challenge. Or at the very least they might become better writers by the time they drop out to start a software company.

Maybe crowdsourcing can help here. But like anything that is given out to be taken back, it’s a huge undertaking assembling all the completed work.

Where I am now, we are facing a national (almost) problem where it’s difficult to find good candidates to fill technical positions. The number of graduates isn’t that great and it’s natural to only find a small percentage of that suitable for the positions… and then there are other companies.

I think it’s important for students to stay connected to the “working world”. Maybe the crowdsourcing pain is worth it. Afterall, they are the new generation that will drive the industry. Somewhat like logging, I don’t think we can just keep taking without giving something back.