760: on dias, et al. worlds apart, part ii

Chapter six begins with the claim: "... we have come to see that rhetorical purpose in workplace settings is in large part institutional rather than individual... and ideological rather than merely communicative" (114). This claim stuck with me as I worked through the case study of social workers’ writing activities at a large hospital. Particularly, how does that claim and the following statement jive with the net worked organization described by Spinuzzi: "The hierarchical structure of organizations creates economic and political semblances that work against shared goals and the continual growth of specialization" (114). In Spinuzzi we observer, I think, just the opposite—net workers constructing documents to fit organizational needs. While these documents (such as the spreadsheet that Fred maintained at Telecorp) could be classified under broad generic categories, they were constructed by individuals to meet specific organizational requirements. If Fred's spreadsheet was developed as a response "to what [was] perceived socially or collectively as sameness in situations," it was unique to his perception but designed to perform a specific organizational function.

Further into the chapter, I was more confused about what possible suggestions the authors could have in regard to teaching writing to undergraduates. In fact, they seem to complicate the problem of teaching writing by not directly addressing how or why we should engage students in genres that promotes particular ways of knowing and acting in complex socio-rhetorical environments. It seems the best we can do is generalize, which brings us back to extremely static and traditional treatments of workplace genres. While genres may be somewhat stable (120-122), I don't know that they're stable enough to teach even as simple documents through which to consider a standard set of requirements, environments, networks, etc. And yet, as I write this I'm thinking about the way I used generic documents to orient engineering students to design and development methodologies.

Dias et al. conclude, "So, although it might well be possible and even desirable to show students copies of workplace texts, and to have practitioners talk to students about the participation in those texts, the lived experience of texts is impossible out of their enactment" (134). Maybe this is why we feel we've done something particularly useful with WRT 407--embedding the writing instruction in such a way as to enact the design and development experience in the academic laboratory. Yes, the writing is shaped by the situatedness of the activity, but it is an activity that the engineers will perform time and again upon leaving the academy.

760: on dias, et al. worlds apart, part i

I like the way the authors present a range of different theories through which to consider two central questions: 1) what are the functions writing performs in the workplace, and 2) how do socio-cultural settings shape writing practices in the workplace?

Throughout the survey of theories and the descriptions/definitions of academic writing, I was asking myself, “If we don’t’ regard university education as preparation for the workplace, then what is university education for? Maybe it’s a definition of the “workplace” that complicates this for me. Yes, “…writing practices in the university do not translate into effective writing within the work setting” (5). Is it the practices or the genres in which these practices are exercised?

With those smaller nagging questions aside, I finished part one with a bigger question: When we teach writing in the university, what are we teaching? Can we address what the writer is doing in the workplace (26) without understanding (or perhaps predicting) the “subject’s orientation and motivation” in different contexts? When we teach writing, are we necessarily “tying the contextual to the social, by seeing texts as ways of doing things with words…” (43)?

“Because writing is acting, it is highly contextualized…” (3). Yes it is, and I think this is the most difficult aspect of teaching workplace writing in the academy – of establishing or creating appropriate contexts in which students write and communicate. “…a full understanding of writers’ processes and products cannot occur without close reference to their place and role in their particular contexts” (9). If what people need to learn is to engage in the activity (28), how do we replicate or create the environments in which those activities occur? Simulated work environments only go so far in the classroom. I’ve yet to see a classroom simulation that replicates the “density and complexity of the intertextual connections within which writers” operate in the workplace (37). It's the "close reference" were we seem to fail in the classroom.

I’m trying to jive this more focused concept of situatedness with the activities of the net worked worker. The socio-economic network is in constant flux, which implies shifting contexts in which net workers perform their activities. How then is it possible to teach contextualized writing when the contexts are always changing relative to the network and the net work? Writing in the workplace is “… regularized but not fixed; fluid, flexible, and dynamic; emerging and evolving in exigency and action; reflecting and incorporating social needs, demands, and structures; and responsive to social interpretation and reinterpretations of necessarily shifting, complex experiences” (23). As we noted in the study of net workers at Telecorp, “…writers rely on situation-specific knowledge in the preparation of texts” (8). The interconnected nature of net work – the cross-disciplinary, non-specialized activities—require “individuals to write as members of a group ... writers often work with others in preparation of texts within a wide variety of co-authoring arrangements…” (9).

One clue to teaching contextualized writing: teaching genre grounded in rhetorical analysis. “…it ties the textual to the social, sees texts as action and texts as in dialogue with each other…” (19). I’ve had this described in less formal ways by a number of writing teachers.

Regarding activity theory and the skills needed of the symbolic-analytic worker—the modern technical communicator: “… it is the subject or subjects who interpret what activity they are involved… the action of reading, depending on the goal, can realize the activity of play, or work, or learning (24-25). Can we substitute any net work activities for “reading” and make the same claim?

760: on spinuzzi chapter 6 and conclusion

Not having read chapters 1 through 4, I found myself making a lot of assumptions about the holes in Spinuzzi’s claims. It wasn’t’ until that back end of chapter 6 and the conclusion that I had a better understanding of his framework. This is a must-read text for any student of comp, rhet, or tech com.

The issues with training identified at Telecorp are, as Spinuzzi notes, typical of most organizations. The field work for the text was conducted in 2000. From my perspective, not much has changed since. Arguably, the same issues have been plaguing organizations for decades. As I noted in my previous post, I find it difficult to tie Spinuzzi’s and others’ work here directly to the “modern” socio-economic network of the information age. “…this was a function of the spliced organization, in which it became important not just to learn, but to identify who to ask…” (186). I had this same problem when I was slinging dough at Mario’s Pizzeria in 1982 – what did I need to know and how would I come to know it? Mario’s was a far cry from Telecorp, but the fundamental issue appears to be the same.

Disconnected learning (training) spread across multiple activities and domains is not unique to organizations that employ knowledge workers. One might argue, using the activity frameworks that Spinuzzi erects, that learning is simply another activity domain to which workers are connected. In fact, there has been a tremendous amount of research on how learning can be embedded into the daily activities of workers.
We would all agree (as Spinuzzi notes) that lifelong learning is a byproduct of a networked economy in which nomadic workers fill hybrid jobs that require them to collaborate across functional areas. Again, I have this sense that this phenomenon is not new – and realize that it being new isn’t really the point. However, it still feels like we’re trying to retrofit something here. Yes, that’s clunky, but I can’t quite but my finger on it. Was there ever a pre-information age production organization that didn’t struggle with “…how to retain and extend the insights of each as we continue to deal with rapidly changing work organizations” (197).

I do feel comfortable assigning Spinuzzi’s project, analysis, and claims to the “symbolic-analytic” worker theme I’m trying to string through the readings. “The vital rhetorical skills that were needed to support them [different functional groups] in a networked environment … were developed and supported informally through opportunistic volunteer mentoring” (194); “…rhetoric is a vital part of net work: net workers have to build turst and alliances, persuade others, negotiate, compromise, and haggle to build shared settlements” (206) and the implications for workers: they become rhetors, time managers, project managers, adaptable, liaisons – human APIs, information aggregators, strategic thinkers.

I also see Spinuzzi’s project fitting in nicely with research that considers documentation (technical, professional, training, etc.) as a built in activity to what workers (knowledge or otherwise) do every day. Through this perspective of the reading, I can see the groundwork to argue for structured information architectures and content management. This is certainly something that Telecorp would have benefited from. In the absence of these types of formal structures you get internal documentation that people develop out of necessity – just like at Telecorp. And yet, this “on the fly” documentation tends to be minimalist, practical, highly procedural, and not wrapped with a lot of unnecessary declarative information. It works, and maybe that’s just the point.

I did find interesting the emphasis on stories that contextualize workers learning within a company. I’ve long been interested in scenario-based instruction as a way to capture stories and narratives. What we’ve found in some of our work is that when a story (scenario) is not fixed and regularly reinforced, the stories morph as readily as textual genres do to be shaped for particular purposes. This, in turn, leads to misinformation and incorrect practices.

760: on spinuzzi chapter 5

Whoa!! That’s some serious field work. I like this text because Spinuzzi is accessible. Without over theorizing, he makes his analysis work because it is grounded in observed activity.

The concept of “net work” complicates some of the calls we worked through last week. For example, if the application of knowledge and information is what characterizes the technological revolution and information capitalism, what are we doing to prepare our students? Are we equipping them to understand, navigate and exploit the new distributed economy? "...negotiation becomes an essential skill" (143). Where are students getting exposed to these new life skills? Can we expect students to “skilled-up” in their humanities courses? I see in Spinuzzi’s analysis a case for rhetorical instruction. "It means making connections and circulating things: texts, money and its many representations, heterogeneous resources, and people. It means bringing different trades and activities into contact: massive influxes of social languages, genres, and chronotypes" (144).

Specific to technical communications, is there an argument to be made that all workers in the socio-technical network are performing the work of technical communication? Across the scenarios that Spinuzzi provides in chapter 5, we see workers in various roles performing the symbolic-analytic activities of trained technical communicators (activities we identified in last week’s readings).

The prominence of "texts" in the net worked organization (or, at the very least, in Telecorp) requires that all workers be symbolic-analytical workers. The net work enables socio-technical networks. Texts, in all of their various genres, function as sets of transformations, helping “to hold together and form dense interconnections” across the network (137). I don’t want to over-simply Spinuzzi’s claim here, but can we not use his argument to support a mandate to immerse writing and rhetorical analysis in the curriculum – any curriculum? “Texts are inscriptions that represent phenomena, belong to genres that construct relatively stable relationships, and function as boundary objects that bridge among different activities" (148). Does that statement not ooze big “R” and little “r” rhetoric with a good dose of Composition?

I realize it was necessary to link the field work and the analysis to broader concepts of economics, production, and the changing nature of work in an increasingly technology-enhanced world. However, in some ways I see the work in the scenarios as not that different from the work one would observe in, say, Thomas Edison’s laboratories during the early part of the 20th century (see Bazerman’s The Languages of Edison’s Light). The flow diagrams Spinuzzi includes in the chapter all seem to illustrate a modular approach to production rather than the net worked activities of sociotechnical network. In fact, the genre ecology diagram on 160 simply seems to illustrate how worker roles are connected through the circulation of common documents. Are we really seeing net work here? I’m certain it’s a perspective and I’ve missed something in the reading, but I’m struggling to see how different the processes and activities in the scenarios differ from the processes and activities of companies dating back well before the information age. What I do see in the scenarios is exactly the type of symbolic-analytic work we discussed last week. Spinuzzi identifies workers and roles with varying illiteracies, competencies, and access to tools and technologies.

760: on dicks’ the effects of digital literacy on the nature of technical communication work

I wish I’d had Dick’s perspectives when I was trying to work through Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory and how it might apply to the information products created by technical communicators.

As I worked through Dick’s narrative about factors that changed and continue to shape technical communication, I kept coming back to this theme of preparation – of what we should be doing to better prepare technical communicators (and others) to be effective and successful communicators. I very much agree with Dick’s introductory claim that we should remember, “when discussing current and coming trend in the discipline, that they largely have to do with the tools and technologies associated with the discipline, and not with the core competency skills that the discipline continues to require” (52).

It seems that if we are to prepare technical communicators to see themselves as “symbolic-analytic workers,” that we need to do more than teach “technologies and methodologies such as single-sourcing and information, content, and knowledge management” and how to optimize “information development for multiple formats and media” (55). It seems that we’re calling for a more tools-based approach to teaching, and yet at the same time requiring technical communicators to understand the rhetorical, linguistic, and social aspects of what they are doing and the information products they are producing.

How does teaching tools and technologies prepare a technical communicator to “move across disciplines, constantly learning and performing a variety of job tasks and doing the symbolic-analytic work” (57) Dick and others have described?

Another aspect of this “tools and technologies” theme is the cost (real and otherwise) of continuous retraining. In describing management and business principles that affect the role and purpose of technical communicators, Dick restates the growing trend to outsource symbolic-analytic work to contractors. While working as a contract technical communicator appeals to some, I have never met a single freelancer who didn’t bemoan the costs of staying ahead of the latest tools and technologies.

As Carliner noted and Dick reasserts, “Not only is what technical communicators write about more complex, but so are the tools and methods they use for doing their work” (77). It’s that “write about” piece that I worry about. A technologist is not necessarily a technical communicator, although as we’ve seen, they are regularly asked to do the symbolic-analytic work demanded by modern organizations, industries, customers, etc. Similarly, I’m concerned with this flattening or stretching of the technical communicator. The demand for specialization in tools and technologies competes with the demand for generalization in composition, rhetoric, language, communication, and culture. When the tool trumps the art and craft of technical communication, I think the discipline of technical communication loses something that will be difficult to recover.

760: on carliner’s computers and technical communication in the 21st century

Carliner highlights a principle problem facing technical communication (as a discipline and practice) in the 1970s. The problem would continue to persist well into the 1990s. “The main qualification for the job of a technical writer in this environment was experience supporting and servicing products that were the subject of documentation. These workers developed competency in writing through training and on-the job mentoring… during the 1970s, this employer typically emphasized technical knowledge over writing skills.” (22, 23). Subject-matter-experts writing in the style of their trainers and mentors, who themselves were subject-matter-experts. Adherence to house and industry style guides were essential, as formal education in writing, composition, or English were not the norm. These individuals were typically carrying forward what they had learned in freshman comp – and that’s assuming they had an undergraduate degree.

Much as Ceruzzi’s historical narrative alluded to, Carliner notes that through the 1970s, most technical documentation was written for technical audiences. The late 1980s saw the emergence of the technical communicator as author, content collector, synthesizer, and information product producer. Most significantly, however, was the shift away from information products for technical or highly trained audiences to audiences with specific information requirements and varying degree of technical competence.
In reasserting Mirel’s call to action from a decade earlier, Carliner notes the following in regard to distributed authorship: “Much information is published as individual topics; that is, as a series of one-screen discussions of a subject, rather than as complete manuals. Users typically find topics by searching the database, following well-identified links, or by being directed to a specific Web page by a cross-reference from another Web page or by a person” (28).

Carliner notes that during the fourth phase of technological developments (mid 1990s to mid 2000s), “Many technical communicators worked in a state of continuous production of information, rather than going through peaks and valleys…” (41). While the focus is, of course, on technical communicators, it should be noted that these technological developments were changing the way in which all knowledge workers produced and managed information. In many ways, the activity of producing information products was decentralized and moved out of documentation groups. Business analyst were writing and publishing use-case studies. Programmers were writing help statements as conditional code statements. Quality analysts were writing FAQs and user documentation. These individuals were not recognized as technical communicators, technical writers, editors, publishers, or any of the myriad of labels Carliner notes. Yet these individuals were, and continue to be in many organizations, producers of technical information products; hence the demand to infuse the curriculum of degree programs (particularly professional degree programs) with the type of instruction and skills development Spilka identifies in her introduction.

On a personal note, Carliner’s narrative about the phases of technological developments reminded me of how much fun and challenging it was to be working in tech com in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His second and third phases are especially poignant, in that I was reminded of the many talented and creative technical writers I had the opportunity to work with during those years. Their access to new technologies and their ability to quickly adapt it to their changing roles motivated me to apply to a graduate professional and technical communications program. Good times. Yeah, good times.

760: on spilka’s introduction

Rachel Spilka has always been good at bridging theory and practice. She’s constructed an anthology here that connects the academy to the field in a way that almost blurs the definition of “practice”. It’s likely to be clearer within the essays, but across her introduction, Spilka conflates the teaching of technical communication with the work of technical communicators. Maybe this is a necessary move – link a call for change in the way we prepare technical communicators to what technical communicators do (and they do it) in the field.

General thoughts:

“Now numerous other fields are claiming a stake in information and content design development and management, just as we are…” (4). Composition, Information Science, etc. Isn’t it the reflexive nature of disciplines to claim a stake in activities that involve applying the discipline’s theories?

In describing the “easing up of artificial ‘”fences”’ between disciplines” (5), Spilka is exposing a foundational question (one that we’re attempting to answer in 760): What is technical communication? By replacing the introspective question, “who are we” with a range of questions about how we adapt and contribute, Spilka is invoking the floundering toward legitimacy and purpose that seems pervasive in humanities-based disciplines. Replace “we” with “Composition” in her set of questions on page 6. How similar does this sound to Comp’s historical narratives?

During our first day of class, someone mentioned the anxiety of teaching a technical writing course without the benefit of having "done" technical writing. Consider Selfe and Hawisher’s definition of digital literacy, which Spilka includes in her introduction: “the practices involved in reading, writing, and exchanging information in online environments as well as the values associates with such practices – social, cultural, political, educational” (8). Based on that foundational definition, I would argue that any current student of the CCR program is both qualified and capable to teaching, at the very least, and introductory course in professional or technical writing.

validation and coincidence

So I'm sitting here this morning working through Spilka when I get the following email (extensively abbreviated to remove the soft-marketing) from Joann Hackos' company, Comtech:

Oh! The Changes We’ve Seen! Comtech celebrates our 30th anniversary!

As of February 2010, Comtech Services, Inc. will be officially 30 years old. We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the changes we have witnessed in technical communication over 30 years. Perhaps the technology changes have been the most dramatic.

After we incorporated, we did a lot of writing with pen and paper. The first major word processor was a DEC dedicated machine handled by our word-processing operator. She transferred handwriting to word processing. The results were printed on a line printer so that the text looked pretty much like a typewriter.

Today, we use more complex technology than ever before. We have more than one content management system installed. We use one to manage our websites and others to emulate customer environments so that we can help them solve problems and test new functionality. More of our authoring is now in XML and DITA, even though we have not written manuals since the mid-90s. We do produce electronic and print newsletters, proposals, reports, and marketing materials, all requiring good design and ease of authoring.

The basic concepts of information development have changed very little while the technology has marched on. Today we can produce much better documents more easily and less expensively than any time in the past. But the quality of the information is still dependent on our understanding of our customers and how they learn. Without that, we will continue simply to make the product specifications look nice.

Kristi Bullard
Kristi L. Bullard, Business Manager
Comtech Services, Inc.

How's that for an indirect book plug Professor Spilka?

760: on hackos’ foreword in spilka

Before looking at Spilka’s introduction, I want to take up a claim that Joann Hakos makes in the foreword. Hakos states, “Part of the resistance to computer-mediated structured authoring … appears to be based not so much on the technology but on a cultural change that the technology demands and fosters… The cultural change required of technical communicators is a product of cost-reduction strategies developed in a competitive business environment” (viii).

Let me just state that, from my humble perspective, it's not a resistance to the technology, it's the time and cost associated with keeping pace with the technology. Joann Hakos is an extremely successful industry consultant. She has lucrative contracts with fortune 500 companies around the globe. She is paid handsomely to speak at technical and scientific communication events. The seminars and workshops her company (Comtech) delivers here and in Europe start at just under $2,000.000 a pop per person. So to hear her tying resistance to cultural change to cost-reduction strategies comes off a bit hollow.

Not all organizations can afford to send their technical communicators to workshops in San Jose or Heidelberg so the communicators can better “adhere to standards and work in highly collaborative environments… [to] work collectively and to submit their work to constant review for compliance with standards” (viii) – stated as if compliance to standards is a bad thing! Why is constant review of one’s work a problem?

Joann Hakos has long practiced what she preaches. For at least the last 25 years (likely longer), she has been an active voice in tech comm – an advocate for professionalization and recognition of the discipline. Here, however, I think she makes a sloppy rhetorical move by setting issues of digital literacy into an “us vs. them” binary. That’s not fair to technology, progress, or the organizations and industries in which technical communicators work. Most importantly, it's not fair to technical communicators who actively seek change (cultural or otherwise) for the right reasons.

760: on mirel's writing and database technology

I like Barbara Mirel’s work because it always seems to focus on knowledge and meaning making in the workplace. With this essay she continues on a trajectory of how knowledge workers (she does not refer to them as such in the essay) navigate and communicate information; and how that information can both serve and hinder individual and organizational purposes.

Here, Mirel is making an explicit argument for exposing the rhetorical aspects of data reporting, focusing on understanding the users of reports as the key to serving a rhetorical aim or strategy. In some ways departing from the quasi-utopian themes of last week’s readings, Mirel touches upon the negative aspects of accessible yet poorly utilized technologies. “Thanks to distributed computing, nontechnical employees in every department can mange their own data and compose data reports for important business purposes” (382). This, she points out, is one of the principle reasons why all disciplines need to provide more than simplistic professional/business writing instruction to their majors. It’s not enough to expect that a single course (such as WRT 307) will provide students the appropriate knowledge and skills to create usable information products. As Mirel states: “… little attention is given in either business or in technical and professional writing classes to building people’s skill in writing effective data reports” (382). Within these technology-enhanced (digital?) environments, Mirel is calling for the type of authorial agency that Slack defined as the act of articulation.

Mirel is arguing for the communicator (technical or otherwise) to have a more holistic understanding of “meaning making” – of the how, where, and why to locate specific information, and of how best to package that information for specific audiences and purposes: “…writers, on the one hand, [need] to be adept at rhetorical strategies for invention, arrangement, and delivery, and on the other hand to understand the logic and capabilities that a program offers for designing, searching for, and retrieving data and for organizing it into printed reports” (384). This “integrated view of competencies” would be taken up later by other tech comm scholars, such as Johnson-Eilola, Hart-Davidson, and Selber.

I wonder about Mirel’s treatment of “rhetorical invention” and how she assigns the activity to the strategies and processes of search for retrieving data. She seems to be working from a narrow definition of invention by tying it to the classical basic categories (topoi) – of relationships among ideas and not something broader and less rigid. Is she associating the fixed structures of databases with the way in which topoi serve to guide the discovery of what to write and how to write it?

Mirel does make a somewhat broad assumption in her claim that data reports share a fundamental purpose “to answer a business concern…” (382). An unintended byproduct of access to data and the tools to author reports is that too often reports are written/produced that serve absolutely no purpose. The “report for reporting sake” is the activity that keeps content and knowledge management system vendors in business.

I’m curious to know what the rest of our group thinks about the relevancy of Mirel’s call to broaden the curriculum to “extend students’ rhetorical skills beyond linear prose paragraphs to graphic forms” (390). Would we agree that an increasing number of our students are entering the writing studios with more experience than their instructors in regard to non-linear prose and graphical communication? Would a more appropriate approach be simply to expose students to the rhetorical aspects and consequences of various forms of data reporting, and leave the tools and technologies to the work place?