Product-Imitation Approach

Instructional Approach

This text uses a Product-Imitation approach that is distinct from the Process-Expression approach. To make sense of this, consider the difference between two sets of terms.

Product Versus Process

The instructional approached used in this text emphasizes the quality of students' final products and not the creative process students use to create technical assignments. Since the mid-1990's, writing pedagogy in the US has emphasized the process of writing: brainstorming, outlines, drafts, peer-review, and revisions. The writing process is clearly important. No serious writer and certainly no serious technical writer prepares a single draft and then stops. And, the writing process is critical as a means to clear thinking and learning. This text does include process-oriented expectations and assignments. However, to meet the learning outcomes, students cannot merely or mechanically follow a particular writing process. Instead, this text and its prescribed argument and language emphasize final product quality as the greatest priority.

One purported advantage of a process-oriented pedagogy is that, having learned how to write, students will appreciate and value writing more for its own sake. The expectation is that students who are rewarded early for mastery of the writing process will want to build on these initial successes and will want to write more and through additional practice over time eventually better. The author of this text does not disagree with this approach.

However, satisfaction and confidence in writing comes not only from understanding and even appreciating the value of the writing process. It also comes from creating high-quality final products. It is very rewarding to create a thoughtful, complete, technically accurate, well-reasoned, and highly-polished analysis. This text references the writing process mostly as a means to improving students' final products. The goal here is that students create high-quality final products that students find personally significant and worthwhile by a set deadline. In the typical time allotted for a course like this, there simply is not enough time for every student to develop and propose a unique argumentative structure for analyzing a unique economic question. Instead, this text gives students a head-start by asking everyone to adapt the same flexible argumentative structure.

We sometimes tell children that "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." That is fine for children. And, it is true that winning is not everything, but in most professional situations winning is important. Strong technical communication is important. An illogical argument, an ill-defined term, or an unreasonable assumption in a technical proposal will result in less than zero credit; the author will lose credit, credibility, and maybe the job. Professionally, no one cares what process you use to create the final product (short of stealing; don't do that). Instead, people care about the quality of the final product, including its on-time delivery.

This text shows students what high-quality final products look like, how they sound, and how they are organized. This text is designed to show students how to create final products that they will be proud to keep and share with others, not because of what their work represents (i.e., a process followed) but because of what their work is (i.e., a high-quality product).

PRODUCT VERSUS PROCESS APPROACH VIDEO (6:22)

Imitation Versus Expression

When students are learning about the process of writing, teachers often encourage students to "free write" or "brainstorm" initially about what they want to write. The emphasis is on the individual student's ideas and especially the expression of those ideas. Again, individual expression is important and often very rewarding, but in the professional world we rarely have such latitude. Instead, we typically have much more specific communication assignments (e.g., write a resume, prepare a cover letter, conduct a market analysis, write a business plan, or present a new product proposal). And these tasks often have specific forms that we are expected to reproduce, more or less, through imitation. In other words, professional communication assignments tend to constrain open-ended personal expression and instead favor imitation of established forms.

This author of this text believes that imitation of a given form is a useful way for students to understand what a high-quality final product looks and sounds like and, paradoxically, it also liberates students to think about how to fill the given organizational structure creatively with compelling evidence. While free writing, journal keeping, conferencing, and other "process" techniques are helpful for what they do (i.e., help student discover what they want to say), these techniques do not especially help students write strong sentences, improve the organization of their arguments, or arrange their essays to appeal rhetorically to the demands of specific audiences or specific circumstances.

Imitation of a given form also forces students to be creative. An empty form begs students to fill it. Far from encouraging conformity, imitation helps student discover their own voices. Imitation and attention to form provide a discovery pathway that starts with students wrestling to understand the given organizational structure and then how to fill it. Freed from the logical demands of organizing an argument, students are able to focus on interpreting model's structure and then filling its empty form with meaningful and appropriate content.

It is possible, however, to provide too explicit instructions. It is useful to give students an empty form and ask them to wrestle with how to fill it. It is not useful to give students a completed example and ask them merely or simply to copy it. An empty form creates anxiety for students because they desire to fill it. Most people want to avoid anxiety. But some discomfort of this sort is essential for learning to take place. When imitation involves mere replication there is no anxiety, discomfort, or learning. For this reason, the text does not provide--and students are strongly advised to avoid consulting--completed examples of the written assignments described in this text.

IMITATION VERSUS EXPRESSION VIDEO (3:29)

You might wonder how a text can be so highly prescriptive--including a prescribed outline and even prescribed language--without raising issues about plagiarism. Good question. The standard or default expectation about originality is that any work that the author presents (e.g., ideas, organization, wording, images, etc.) that the author does not clearly attribute to others is that author's own original work. Students using this text will articulate for their readers an alternate expectation, namely that you will make no effort to distinguish your work from the work in this text but that in all other instances the standard originality expectations will apply. More details and a rationale are given in the assignment descriptions.