How Detached is Technical Writing? Teaching Interpersonality with NTSB Aircraft-accident Dockets Online

Aircraft-accident dockets are collaboratively written and summarise the circumstances and outcome of aviation mishaps. Those issued online by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are addressed to a broad mixed readership that may be emotionally affected by the facts reported if death tolls and serious injuries are involved. Therefore, interpersonality plays a crucial role in this type of texts, which I use to reflect on how we ESP teachers can raise polytechnical students’ sensitivity towards their audiences. With that purpose I draw on an electronic corpus of 1,673 samples reporting fatal accidents between 2005 and 2012.