Technical Writing: ENG 3091
As the semester comes to a close, I want to take a moment to reflect not only at the end of an academic year teaching at an entirely new university, but the journey students I and have taken together this semester.
Unlike traditional iterations of technical writing courses that might focus strictly on manuals, memos, documents, instructional guides, and other business correspondence, this semester I asked students to think with me about the ethical, emotional, and rhetorical dimensions of technical writing through the lens of addiction recovery community literacy.
It was important for me to position the heart of our course around this theme: how we write about *and for* communities affected by substance use disorder. We began the semester by learning foundational genres of technical writing, but we quickly shifted into applying those forms to real-world addiction recovery contexts.
Technical writing, yes, is grounded, but it can also be expressive and narrative-centered. Technical writing should carefully consider how each word, structure, and visual element helps readers act, decide, or understand something accurately – especially in addiction/recovery and/or substance use contexts.
Writers must deliberately choose lexicon, tone, and level of detail based on whether the reader is an expert, colleague, or stakeholder, or not. Yes, technical writing is functional, it often appears in fields like healthcare, social sciences, law, and public policy, so deliberation is ethical, it involves safety, inclusivity, liability, and precision. But technical writers are always asked to make constant rhetorical choices, and in the process of doing so, those choices and writing acts become embodied.
While the technical writer is responsible to communicate information to an audience in mind, they also have to consider the weight of their own voice in the process. Therefore, I believe technical writing can only be truly deliberative if writers see themselves as part of the audiences to which they are writing, who are also being impacted by the information.
Students spent the semester thinking and writing, creating infographics, recovery resource guides for college students, constructing informative pamphlets for local recovery centers, building proposals for collegiate recovery programs, crafting and participating in informational interviews with CRPs (collegiate recovery programs) across the U.S. and other college alcohol and drug services, as well as working together in groups to analyze and create dialogue around historical and contemporary institutional documentation related to public health, access to treatment, and harm reduction.
One of the most meaningful aspects of the course was our exploration of how writing can both support and stigmatize. Students engaged in thoughtful discussions about language use and lexicon – terms like “addict” versus “person with a substance use disorder” – and we examined the politics and ethics of how technical language and syntax circulates in public spaces.
These conversations were not just academic. To me, these conversations were urgent and real. As someone who could have benefitted myself from this type of class, as a college student in the grips of alcoholism and addiction, I still reflect on the need of this as an educator and researcher in the field, as well as someone with longterm sobriety.
While society has become somewhat more sober curious and mental health and wellness oriented, college students are still situated in the alcogenic context of college campus culture. Not to mention, they are also very much awake to larger society still grappling with the far-reaching impacts of the opioid crisis, fentanyl contamination, and mental health stigma, especially today in 2025, in the wake of dangerous politics and capitalistic structures.
With all of this in mind, I can confidently say that students’ end of semester group projects were powerful and evident to their commitment to technical writing and creative writing strategies in this course from the start. For their final projects, students were tasked with designing an addiction recovery awareness event specifically targeting their campus community, which was a scaffolded assignment.
Even though this project was slated for submission at the end of the semester, all the other assignments in this technical writing course supported the development of their audience-aware and purpose-driven communication skills.
Groups also met at the beginning of every class for about 10 minutes prior to the lesson, to brainstorm, draft, and create a clear path for the vision of their projects. This was also a way for me to motivate students to get excited about group work by making it interactive over the course of the semester, and not conducted during finals week.
Instead of writing in isolation, students learned how to write in communities. Not only did they develop an understanding of how technical and professional communication works in real-world situations, but they learned how to embrace peer review, feedback, and embodied writing practices, centering that writing is a practice, and much like recovery, success doesn’t always happen on the first try.
Aside, the students’ mock addiction recovery awareness events ranged from co-facilitated panels with local recovery advocates to visual campaigns around harm reduction, mental health support, sober-positive games, and creating sober social spaces on campus. And because students spent the entire semester practicing different components of technical writing (e.g. purpose, audience, structure, style, tone, content accessibility, ethical responsibility, collaboration, etc.), they started to recognize patterns across technical documents – which made them more prepared to transfer those skills to their final project development; I hope these skills go even further into their own communities.
I really loved all of the students’ activities. One in particular was one student group’s Jenga activity, where students were asked to write alcohol/drug/addiction/recovery related buzzwords on the blocks, and while playing the game of Jenga, they were asked to share on the word that they got from the block they picked.
This activity was especially clever, not to mention it was a low-stakes way to invite event attendees (students/faculty) into deeper conversations about recovery literacy. In giving this group feedback, I mentioned that it showed their awareness of how to make recovery discourse both accessible and participatory, as well as enlightening and fun.
Additionally, students incorporated the Kahoot game as an organizing device in the Q&A section of their events. I was new to Kahoot, but a quick learner! Student groups created QR codes and myself and their peers joined in on the fun. It was definitely engaging, and absolutely competitive (though I did come in 2nd place once).
I could really see how the students worked together to construct thought-provoking questions as a way to evaluate their knowledge from the ideas shared in this course.
When thinking back to each group’s presentation, I can honestly say that each group demonstrated an impressive ability to translate complex research into accessible materials – flyers, posters, infographics, public service announcements – crafted with rhetorical sensitivity and a clear sense of audience. I felt that their group-led activities helped drive home key concepts of both technical writing and addiction recovery contexts.
What moved me the most was seeing students engage with this work not just as a technical writing exercise, but as a form of community activism. Many students shared personal stories during group presentations, even during class writing activities and discussions, which brought a level of empathy and urgency to the writing work that surpassed what any technical writing textbook could teach.
I appreciated the way students researched other campus events and strategies that fit addiction recovery context while tailoring their assignments specifically to their current college life and their experience of “the story of the university.”
Here are my final thoughts about their progress over the entire semester: it is clear that students wrote beyond the expectations and standards of a technical writing course. Students wrote to do more than simply inform or complete an assignment.
I could see students working to challenge, to disrupt – to ask important questions, some of those questions still remain unanswered, others were rhetorical.
I could see how their interest to understand and hear each other increased, how they motivated each other to think deeply and speak out, and how they found both individual and collaborative ways to create space for discourse in campus drinking (and drugging) culture through a technical writing course. As we know, university culture still often avoids these uncomfortable truths and painstaking realities.
As a professor, I’ve learned just as much from this course mostly from students and their writing. It has reaffirmed my belief that writing can – and should – be socially engaged, ethically aware, and grounded in everyday communities and lived experiences.
Thank you to every student who showed up, who thought critically, who collaborated enthusiastically, who questioned, and who wrote and wrote this semester.
I honor your hard work. Your writing has made a real impact, and I am deeply proud of what you’ve (we’ve) created together.
Thank you for leaving me with lasting memories and so much to think about. Write on!
More to come,
Dr. Bacibianco
