Service Courses at the Center of the Universe

Service courses exist at the center of the academic universe, pulled by the event horizons of a dozen different institutional singularities without ever fully succumbing to the influence of one or the other. Their orbits are unstable, and yet for decades they have managed to balance on the pin head of academic gravitas.

Service courses exist because legislatures tell public institutions they have to have them; they exist because academic institutions feel that students need to “just know” some things; they exist because legions of students have taken them in past generations, thus making them a tradition; and, they exist because they are part of an honest effort at helping students become citizens.

Many academics take “service course” to mean any of the lower-level courses that all students at public colleges are required to take; thus, introductory classes in history, political science, and freshman composition are all service courses. However, service courses are actually any courses offered by one department to the students of other departments (non majors). Thus, there are far more service courses than one might think. Service courses that fall under this definition could be as varied as renaissance and reformation history, medieval philosophy, web design, or technical editing.

But whatever its most far-flung incarnations may be, for technical communication researchers the “service course” is most commonly the class taught to students from across the university who need initiation and practice in the workaday documents they will be required to produce upon graduating and securing a job. This course, designated ENGL 2311 by the Texas Common Course Numbering System (TCCNS), has a variety of definitions across the nation, but most fall pretty comfortably into the following description:

“Principles, techniques, and skills needed for college level scientific, technical, or business
writing.”


Texas A&M University refines that to the following:

"Processes of developing field-specific technical information related to the major, including researching, drafting, editing, revising, and designing technical reports, proposals, manuals, resumes and professional correspondence for specific audiences. Special topics, computer and distance sections available. Prerequisites: ENGL 104; junior classification."

A careful reader will note that while above I defined the goal of the service course as preparing students for workplace writing, the first definition—from the Texas Common Course Numbering System—mentions only “college level. . .writing” and that A&M refers to writing “related to the major.” The question that arises naturally from this juxtaposition is whether “college” writing is the same as “workplace” writing. My experience talking to people in business, politics (including members of the Texas State Board of Education), and education (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) indicates that at least for many people, college writing is in fact the same as workplace writing. In other words, many college graduates who have gone on to shape our families, communities, businesses, and schools think that the way we write in the classroom is the same way we write in the office. Therefore, there is no dissonance caused by the above contrast in definitions.

Researchers conversant with college writing and business writing will, or should, note that there are in fact pretty significant differences between college and business writing. For instance, there is a distinct difference in genre. College writing is often in the form of essays, but essays practically don’t exist at all in business. Furthermore, a good college-level producer of essays will write using terms and citation styles that often don’t apply to business. MLA citation style, by way of example, is practically unheard of off campus, and essays frequently deal with students’ personal opinions on politics, literature, and history, which, though important, do not often come up in workplace writing.

There is, of course, a significant amount of college writing which is not in essay form. Students routinely produce proposals, lab reports, and technical reports. They also make posters, slides, and handouts for technical presentations, and some students produce educational materials as well as websites and business plans and case studies. These document do in fact share a great deal in common with workplace writing: they are modeled on actual workplace documents (such as business plans) and are required so that students gain experience in generating these documents, becoming more comfortable with the genre and purpose of such texts. So far, so good.

But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is (or is supposed to be) for the direct benefit of the student. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.

In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the student (now graduated) works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual, though individual benefits of course come through in the form of paychecks, raises, and promotions. But the primary purpose of that document is to increase the value of the organization: paychecks are a secondary benefit, a consequence, of the increase in organizational value.

Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph page may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed directly to those authors; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the group. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes on an entirely different shape and meaning. Stealing words and ideas from other companies is bad; re-using text produced from a worker who may no longer work there is completely reasonable, even without attribution.

The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing.