Using U.S. Government Documents in the Technical-Writing Classroom

Technical-writing instructors are often hindered by their lack of understand ing about U.S. government documents. However, U.S. documents are particularly valuable to technical-writing instructors because of the docu ments'ready availability and tremendous diversity. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to explain how to use U.S. documents as models in the classroom, to guide instructors to various indices in documents so that they may better help their students get started on research reports, and to show how one may obtain documents to keep. A good working knowledge of documents is an im portant asset, especially for technical-writing instructors.