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>> Are there any efforts to set up a certification of
>> technical writers?
>> [...]
>? I received a mailing in September from the Educational Testing Service
> asking my involvement (and my students') in the testing of a new
> examination called Technical Writing. Sections included (1) theory and
> practice, (2) purpose, content, and organizational patterns, (3) elements
> of technical reports and (4) technical editing.
I'm rather curious as to what sorts of questions they asked.
It's difficult to quantitatively measure good writing, but you can
test/measure a writer's familiarity with a set of jargon, if you're
willing to make some assumptions that familiarity with the jargon
equates to familiarity with the concepts, which equates to the skill
and discipline to USE the concepts...
A lot of ifs there, but it's the first step... maybe we need
to first quantify the jargon (hey, the techwr-l JARGON file!) and then
when we know what terms we're using we can discuss them more clearly?
