Does technical writing help college bound students improve their future intellectual, academic prose?
Yes. While technical writing’s most obvious and immediate benefits are for students entering the workforce after high school, it is by no means a scholarly detour for those college bound. Academic prose needs to be effective prose too. Remember the contributions of technical writing to liberal education noted above. College professors and journal editors often complain about the confusing, ineffectual, time-wasting prose that their students and colleagues draft–in both the humanities and the sciences (Bennett and Gorowitz, 1997; Gopen and Swan, 1990). The very same techniques that improve instructions and descriptions on the job also increase the influence and cogency of term papers, journal articles, research reports, and scholarly critiques in all undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional fields. Clear, concise, reader-focused papers are more likely to win acceptance for publication and more likely to be cited once published than their hard-to-understand competitors. In academia
