No more peanut butter sandwich exercises, please

It seems as though any time I meet someone and the conversation turns to what each of us does for a living, as soon as I say "I'm a technical writer," my partner in conversation is seized with a desire to tell me about some technical writing exercise in high school or college. "The prof showed us a cheese slicer, the kind with a wire and an adjusting knob, and told us to write instructions for using it. We were supposed to write it for someone who had never seen one - like a Martian or something."

My daughter told me about the peanut butter sandwich "technical writing" exercise, made livelier when the teacher dipped her hand into the peanut butter because nobody had specified that a butter knife be used. My own brush with this kind of exercise involved describing an everyday object in exacting detail, as if making a mechanical drawing with words, and explaining what each part of it does.

All these "technical writing" exercises seem to bear that same requirement: Write it for an audience that has no idea what you're talking about. They are all entertaining exercises - if you are fond of useless precision and work for work's sake - but they have almost nothing to do with technical writing. Can we please stop inflicting this silliness on students?

Never in my career have I written instructions for installing and using a frabbetizer, and expected that the people reading those instructions would be completely ignorant of the appearance and purpose of a frabbetizer. The instructions are in the box with the frabbetizer, or the frabbetizer help is part of the frabbetizer download. One way or another, they've got the silly thing in front of them; nobody ever reads a manual on the bus. So I don't have to describe the frabbetizer, beyond pointing out where to connect things or find non-obvious controls. In most cases, they know what it's for already, or they wouldn't have bought it. To address the case of the guy who's mystified by the box that the receiving department just left on his desk, I'll write a paragraph at the beginning of the manual that briefly describes what the frabbetizer is for, and includes some magic feel-good words: "The Model 2500 frabbetizer is a powerful, compact, and cost-effective reputation-polishing device for small organizations. Its small footprint, attractive walnut case, and unsurpassed ease of use make the Model 2500 a popular choice in home offices and start-up businesses." OK, now you know what a frabbetizer is, if you didn't before.

Having ensured that the reader knows what a frabbetizer is, our next step is to talk about all its parts and explain what each of them does, right? Wrong. Nobody cares what the parts do. So we're not going to do that.

Our next step is to talk about what the reader can do, and how to do it. Here's how to switch on the power; here's how to log on; here's how to set up your account; here's how to polish your reputation using the frabbetizer. We are not ever going to get into the nuts-and-bolts details of exactly how the frabbetizer polishes reputations, because nobody cares. Correction: no customer cares. That's all that matters.

Of all the sins a technical writer can commit, there is no sin so great as boring the reader with useless information - and that's exactly what those classroom "technical writing" exercises do. So let's put a stop to it. Students would be better served if the exercise involved identifying the audience for whom they are writing, and writing to the appropriate level.