How important is technical writing skills to STEM Education?

Somewhere in a country far far away a STEM education teacher is crying. Not out of laughter, but embarrassment. As STEM and STEAM Educators, we are always emphasizing communication skills with our students. It is just what we do. Every once and a while you see something that reminds you just how important good written communication skills are. A friend who runs a cloud services company shared this with me and we did have a chuckle (thanks Craig). But it made me think about communications.

Now we can blame what happened below on a translator.

However, it speaks to a core problem. Somebody just did not care about their customer communications.

We need our students to think about it this way. The instructions you create for your project (or product) may be the first experience your customer has with your work. How do you think the customer felt about their purchase as they began to read these instructions? What impression did they get before they even plugged in the DVD player?

It is probably worth a bit of a conversation with your students about customer experiences and communications. Good communications is part of every STEM career.

At the very least, this may be the only time they will see a “Poop” reference made in a technical document on a DVD player.

And as Mike Rowe from the hit show Dirty Jobs will attest, there is always something about “Poo.”

Have fun – Steve

STEM Education and Technical Writing – Somewhere in a country….

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