The problem
This was a curriculum development project for health professions students moving from academic writing into the documentation their jobs require. A nurse writes handoffs, incident reports and patient instructions. A pharmacist writes procedural documentation. None of those is an essay, and a course that treats technical writing as a school genre leaves students unprepared for the professional one.
The second problem shaped the structure. Workplace genres taught in isolation read to students as a series of unrelated formatting exercises, with nothing connecting one week to the next and nothing at stake beyond each individual grade.
The structural answer
The course was built so the term produces a single artifact. Students are told in week one that they are a finalist for a job in their field and have been asked to present their professional capability at a second interview. The weekly assignments then produce the components of that presentation.
Each assignment contributes to the final portfolio, so the work of week one is still in play in week seven.
The memo is a memo, assessed as a memo, and it is also an exhibit in the final portfolio. So is the résumé, the brochure, the instructional document. By week six the student is not starting a capstone. They are organizing five artifacts they already own into an argument about themselves.
One assignment beside the instrument that grades it
This pairing is the part of a portfolio that usually stays hidden. A prompt on its own tells you what was asked. A rubric on its own tells you what was valued. Only together do they show whether the design is coherent.
Week 1, assignment 2 · the prompt as students received it
Workplace Memo. Considering the audience is all your coworkers and colleagues, it is important to remember that, since memos are quite short, every word and every sentence should be pithy, concise and to the point with as few words as possible.
Write a memo considering tone, word choice, workplace appropriateness, and proper formatting. Your memo must be:
- between 90 and 110 words, in proper format
- written as a body paragraph, beginning with an introductory topic sentence, then delivering the bulk of the message, then a conclusion sentence
Topic. You work at West Coast Pharmaceuticals. Write the memo announcing a new job opening, Senior Pharmacist, in the pharmacy lab. The job pays $40 to $45 per hour based on experience.
Format the memo properly, including To, From, Date and Re. Decide how to close, whether to initial the From line or sign off, and whether to list credentials beneath your name.
The memo rubric · four levels, weighted criteria
| Criterion | Accomplished | Satisfactory | Approaches | Does not meet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Content 50% | Concise, yet expertly provides depth and detail. Well situated within 90–110 words. Language suitable for the workplace, professional tone. | Concise and to the point, with depth and detail. Within 90–110 words. Language appropriate for the workplace. | Not as concise as needed, may lack depth. Length not met or exceeded to a degree. Tone may be unprofessional. | Does not stay true to form. Length missed significantly or greatly exceeded. Language unprofessional. |
| Memo format 25% | Flawlessly follows the template. To, From, Date and subject line all present. Essentially no errors. | Follows the template. Most components present. Minimal errors. | Does not completely follow the template. Some components present. Moderate errors. | Does not follow the template. Many components missing. Significant errors. |
| APA style and mechanics 25% | APA cover page included. Free of spelling and grammar errors. Sophisticated clarity and organization. | Cover page mostly adheres to APA. Few errors. Generally organized. | No APA cover page or non-conforming. Significant grammar or spelling errors. | No cover page. Major errors throughout. |
The weighting carries the design decision. Format takes a quarter of the memo grade, which is high for a writing assignment and deliberate: memo conventions are part of what the genre is assessed on, and a reader scanning for the subject line expects to find one. Content stays dominant at half, so a correctly formatted memo that says nothing still scores poorly.
The assessment system
Eight rubrics, all four-level, all weighted. Read together they show a deliberate split between text genres and visual genres.
| Assignment | Criteria and weighting |
|---|---|
| Memo | Content 50 · Format 25 · APA and mechanics 25 |
| Résumé | Content 50 · Format 25 · APA and mechanics 25 |
| Cover letter | Content and organization 60 · Style and language 20 · Mechanics and APA 20 |
| Presentation | Content 40 · Organization 20 · Artistic appeal 20 · Mechanics 20 |
| Professional brochure | Content 40 · Organization 20 · Artistic appeal 20 · Mechanics 20 |
| Instructional document | Content 40 · Organization 20 · Artistic appeal 20 · Mechanics 20 |
| Outline | Content 50 · Organization 30 · Format, APA and mechanics 20 |
| Final presentation | Content 40 · Organization 20 · Artistic appeal 20 · Mechanics 20 |
Text-only genres run on three criteria with content dominant. Visual genres add a fourth criterion and content drops to 40 percent to make room for it. The weighting treats document design as part of whether a technical communication works, which is the position the course takes throughout. Learning objectives and assessment criteria were aligned genre by genre rather than applied uniformly.
The interactive components
Three Articulate Storyline modules were authored for the course, carrying the week one orientation and the instructions for the two most complex assignments. The two that survive are shown here as recordings of the original packages with their original narration, captioned from the modules’ own scripts. The interactive originals are linked under each.
Week 5 · Instructional document
Still runs · 1 min 52 s, narrated
Introduces the instructional document assignment: what the genre is for, how it differs from the brochure the week before, and the three things the student’s document has to do.
Open the original Storyline version Select Play once it loads.
Transcript
Welcome to English 250 week 5, Instructional Documents. In this lesson we’ll explore techniques for writing instructions for print and electronic media.
Does this look familiar? How about this? Or this?
Particularly for scientific and technical purposes, operation manuals and informational documentation are essential for end users. Instructional documents can be a bit tricky, because they not only combine text and images, but are also meant to direct and educate. You will often find instructional documents in professional and educational settings. Frequently, they describe how to perform a task, use something, such as a copier or computer program, or detail how to complete day-to-day tasks.
Unlike the professional brochures, instructional documents are more textual than visual, with the core of the content pertaining to sequential steps. Visual elements often have less emphasis on aesthetics; rather, they detail how to perform specific tasks.
As you create your instructional documents, you will blend and design helpful steps with relevant visuals and images. To accomplish this, you will: identify effective planning steps for an intended audience; create detailed instructions with clearly defined steps and sequence; and, insert complementary visuals designed to help the end user understand the written instructions.
That concludes the introduction to instructional documents. Move on to the next blocks and learn more about creating informational documents.
Week 6 · Preparing the presentation
Still runs · 1 min 45 s, narrated
Carries the guidance for assembling the capstone presentation from the artifacts the student has already built over the term.
Open the original Storyline version Select Play once it loads.
Transcript
Welcome to the module on “Planning a Presentation.” In this lesson, you will prepare ways to present documents and artifacts.
When compiling a portfolio or any compilation of materials that highlight your skills, qualifications, education, or training And experiences, you can preview your personality alongside your professional work ethic.
Preparing for such an endeavor you will need to collect your items, refine them, then organize and present them in an engaging and visually appealing manner.
To prepare for your presentation containing samples of your technical writing artifacts, begin with an outline and storyboard in PowerPoint. Suggestions for preparation: Revise your documents, incorporating feedback from your instructor or others. Draft a slide outline for sequence and content. Determine visual elements. Choose a presentation theme (layout and colors). Adhere to design conventions as much as possible. and, Allow time to revise and refine the presentation.
A best practice is to begin the process as early as possible. You have created several artifacts that will be included in your presentation, so you have a head start in terms of content.
The learning blocks ahead provide guidance to presenting your artifacts, incorporating screenshots of each, and making your presentation interactive. Continue on to the next block to begin this journey.
Week 1 · Course introduction
No longer runs
Published as Flash only. The format reached end of life in 2020 and the package has no HTML5 fallback, so the file survives but the module does not.
The week one casualty belongs on the page. Publishing to a proprietary runtime was the normal choice in 2019, and it cost that module its life while the two published with an HTML5 fallback still run. It is a concrete argument for choosing open output formats, learned by losing something.
What I would change now
Six years of hindsight on my own assessment instruments. The structure holds up. The rubrics are where the work is.
- Remove APA from the workplace genres The memo rubric awards a quarter of the grade partly for an APA cover page. No workplace memo has ever had one. This is an institutional formatting requirement colliding with the course's own premise, and it teaches students that the academic convention outranks the professional one in the exact course built to argue the opposite. I would carve APA out of the workplace documents entirely and keep it where it belongs, in the research-facing work.
- Rename "artistic appeal" The descriptors underneath it are reasonable, covering image placement, typeface, color and layout. The label is not. "Artistic" invites taste, and taste is not what is being assessed. "Document design" names the actual construct and would produce steadier scoring across graders.
- Replace the intensity adverbs with observable thresholds The top band asks a grader to distinguish work that "expertly provides depth" from work that provides depth, and "beyond competent" design from competent design. Those are not criteria, they are degrees of enthusiasm, and they are the main reason two graders would score the same memo differently. Each band needs a countable or checkable difference.
- Pull length compliance out of the content criterion The 90 to 110 word requirement is binary. It currently sits inside a qualitative scale, so a student who nails the word count and says nothing scores partway up a band they should not be in. It belongs in a submission check, not a judgment scale.
- Stop reusing the mechanics language verbatim The mechanics descriptors are identical across all eight rubrics. That buys consistency cheaply, and it means the criterion never adapts to genre, so mechanics in a brochure is assessed with language written for an essay.
What sustained offering shows
Continued offering establishes sustained institutional use. Courses are retired, rebuilt or replaced, and this one has been scheduled and taught since late 2019.
It does not establish effectiveness. Learning outcomes data was not available for this review: no completion rates, no pass rates, no comparison against the course it replaced, and no measure of whether graduates write better handoffs because of it. Sustained offering and demonstrated learning are different claims.
A program evaluation plan built today would capture three things. Rubric criterion scores stored separately instead of rolled into a single grade, so a lagging competency is visible across a cohort. A comparison of week one and week seven performance against the same criteria. And a graduate follow-up at six months asking which of the five genres they have written since. The third would provide evidence of graduates' reported use of the genres, which is not the same as evidence of writing quality, and it is the only one of the three that reaches past the end of the term.
ENGL 250 Technical Writing, 3 credits, West Coast University. Course content written 2019, launched and continuously offered since. Instructional components authored by Charles A. Hollenbeck; Blackboard implementation by West Coast University's instructional design team.
Materials referenced on this page are drawn from the original development files: the assignment instructions draft, the rubric set, and the published Storyline packages.