Great question. I’ll tackle the job part first. As far as that goes, I feel like we’ll be able to educate ourselves about the specific discipline we’re working in (e.g., engineering or medicine), perhaps through a combination of on-the-job training, working with content experts, and outside reading.

The teaching aspect is more difficult for me. Although I feel like I have a pretty solid background in the sciences, I also recognize that I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned. I earned by BA five years ago, and I’m no longer called upon to design experiments involving, for instance, pea plants. :)

I try to have a general awareness of what it is my students actually do, but I’m far from knowledgeable when it comes to some fields – engineering, especially. I’m trying to make up for that by asking students about their own experiences and what kind of writing they do. How do you approach teaching students from STEM fields? Most of the students in my class are not English majors, and I assume that’s the case for you as well.

I understand that sometimes the tendency is to avoid studies like this because they are inconvenient and simply take up too much time, but I’m not convinced that’s responsible. I wrote a paper on a language feature of a single speaker (which was very ethnographic) and asked if we could apply differance to the gendered patterns and discovered that although Derrida’s are great for breaking down bigoted stereotypes, they don’t lend themselves so well to scientific inquiry, cataloguing features, and discussing the results in a way that either makes some sort of discovery or leads to new research.

So based on your own inclination towards science and these two articles, what responsibility do you think we have as both tech writers and as teachers of tech writing to better educate ourselves and engage with the scientific process before we pursue a career?