"What Technical Communicators Can Learn from Comics"

This was a cool article. It is very interesting to think about the rhetorical potential of comics, especially their ability to relay a lot of information in fairly short order. The visual aspect of comics helps too, as author Opsteegh writes, by getting people to remember information.

But in thinking about the article's central point -- that comics can be used to help technical writers, especially in creating how-to manuals like that of the army's M16A rifle or Google's new Chrome internet browser -- I believe a larger issue becomes revealed.

In the last line of the article, Opsteegh ends with what was perhaps meant to be an uplifting comment on the future of comic-technical partnership: "as the functional literacy of Americans falls lower and lower, technical communicators will see more and more use for comic-book-style manuals."

I find it interesting that the author uses the ever-diminishing literacy rate of Americans as a send-off point for his readers. It paints a picture of technical writing, especially with the help of comics, as a way to profit off an uneducated population. Seems to me that before we write technical manuals attempting to help people, maybe we should first help them learn how to read.

"Ten Rules for New Technical Communication Graduates"

As I read through Angela Petit's article, one comment immediately stopped me on the page:

"new graduates may discover that the biggest adjustment they make as they begin their careers is to unlearn the rules that helped them excel in the classroom, and learn the sometimes contradictory rules that govern their new workplace."

Maybe it's because this idea of unlearning relates to a current thesis paper I am writing, or maybe the general concept just intrigues me, but I think it's fascinating that the lessons we learn in school are so disconnected to the world we actually enter. The consequences of this, as Petit points out, usually require that we act and work completely opposite to the rules we spent so much time memorizing in school. But what does this say about our education system? What does it mean that we have to "abandon" what we learn, especially from higher institutions, to actually succeed in the careers we entered college to prepare for in the first place? It seems like an awful lot of learning, with not much to show for it. Makes me wonder if we should all revert back to the guild system, where students learned the craft they wanted to pursue by becoming an apprentice, shadowing someone who actually knows what they're doing instead of "going to school" for it first.