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?

760: silly perspectives

Did you ever notice how, after you start a set of readings, you begin to see things through a particular lens? Maybe it's just me.

Melissa and Justin led a wonderfully engaging discussion on Tuesday. They showed a couple of clips from three "futuristic" movies (Thias, Metropolis, and Things to Come), which illustrated some of the more social and cultural aspects of the week's readings. It was a great way to bridge the essays. When I got home and opened up a recent issue of Information Week, the following ad looked a little too familiar:

How similar does the space in the ad look to the technology-enhanced worlds imagined during the early decades of the 20th century? Do we still aspire to create such high-tech, white-glove, production environments? Have we already reached that place? I'm thinking specifically about the environments in which processor chips and other fine-tolerance micro-electronics are produced.

A few pages into the same issue, I had to laugh when I found this two-page ad:

We continue to assign human characteristics to technology... this ongoing theme of the "computer as brain." Somehow I think Wells imagined something physically bigger than a server, but the essence of his interconnected knowledge base is still there.

760: on berners-lee’s information management proposal

I read Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web while I was working on Polaris. We had been using the old WinHelp spec, but it’s .rtf format was proving restrictive as Polaris matured and more functionality was added. I’d used hypertext before for help systems (there was that clunky HyperCard system for Seagull Press in ’94), but I felt like I needed to understand hypertext in a broader context. That’s why I picked up the book. I read it in a few days and went on an evangelizing kick, trying to get all of the writers and testers in our little group to bone up on hypertext theory. I argued that the morphing HTML specification and more scalable help systems (such as Compressed HTML Help and JavaHelp) would require us to understand what we were creating. The old practice of committing text and images to the ether and wishing for the best wasn't going to cut it any longer.

Looking back, it’s obvious I really didn’t get it myself. It seems we would have been better off by simply immersing ourselves in a hypertext environment, as Berners-Lee described in his CERN proposal, and let the system take a shapes that reflected our changing needs, skills sets, knowledge, etc.

There are two aspects of Berner-Lee’s original proposal that are only now beginning to fully emerge on the web. The first is the ability to modify (edit) information directly through the browser. The WorldWideWeb browser (and later Opera and Amaya) would provide this feature. And in fact, a number of knowledge management systems, such as Canterbury, would ship with propriety viewer/editors. But I think it was the distributed nature of the connectedness of the Internet (and later the web) that made (and continue to make) this feature impractical outside of dedicated communal knowledge systems, such as wikis.

The second aspect of the proposal that took a while to take shape is what we identify today as Web 2.0 technologies. Before mash-ups, RSS, XML, and new media, technical communicators were struggling to adapt the first HTML specifications to create interactive help systems. The closest we came was context-sensitive help (and later embedded help), which allowed us to push specific topics to the end-user at specific points within a workflow. It was clunky, but it worked.

Reading the CERN proposal brings a lot of that work into focus in a good way – a fun way.

More specific to how we’re being asked to consider the proposal against the rest of this week’s readings, Berners-Lee is imagining a system dramatically different from the one-dimensional “fetch-retrieve” system envisioned by Wells and manifest in the early computing systems of the late 1940s and early 1950s: “For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”

In specifically addressing the problem with “tree” hierarchies of data, Berners-Lee is re-articulating Bush’s vision of non-linear, dynamic relationships among information objects. Perhaps more important to the progress narrative among the readings, Berners-Lee is refining Licklider and Taylor’s imagining of a communication system with the capabilities to capture communicative models: “When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything” (Berners-Lee).

Berners-Lee’s vision is impressive when it’s considered against the modern web. Here’s a guy who was responding to the age-old problem of retaining organizational knowledge in a way that would be useful to those who stayed on and those who came in. His simple proposal, coupled with enabling technologies, has quite literally changed the way the world communicates.

760: on licklider and taylor’s the computer as a communication device

This is an interesting essay in that it was written by one of the architects (Licklider) of the network that would become the Internet.

Licklider and Taylor (L &T) outline a simple interaction between computers and users. However, they do not seem to be claiming that this "communication system" would assume a role more than facilitating and fostering communication and ideas: “… the computer alone can make no contribution that will help us, and that the computer with the programs and the data it has today can do little more than suggest a direction and provide a few germinal example” (28).

To pick up on one of the themes I found in the earlier readings, L & T seem to move well beyond the positivism that Wells expressed in imagining a system of interconnected information. In fact, L & T seem to directly bridge the void that Wells left in his description of the universal encyclopedia: “Society rightly distrusts the modeling done by a single mind. Society demands consensus, agreement, at least majority… The requirement is for communication, which we now define concisely as ‘cooperative modeling’—cooperation in the construction, maintenance, and use of a model” (22).

L & T are imaging fully integrated information systems in which knowledge could be created – not the singular and stand-alone computers as processors or repositories of existing information. Like the Internet we know today, their distributed system relies on complete computers connected to a network by a conventional network interface. This is in direct contrast to the computing systems Ceruzzi’s described. Most importantly, L & T are imagining a distributed computing environment that is managed through economies of scale – the production of commodity hardware, compared to the lower efficiency of designing and constructing a small number of custom, self-contained computing environments.

A nice brief essay that illustrates the vision of the people behind our modern technology-enhanced interconnected world.

760: on ceruzzi's the advent of commercial computing

Ceruzzi’s chapter [Ceruzzi, P.E. (2003.) The advent of commercial computing, 1945-1956. In A History of Modern Computing, 2nd Ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. 13-46] is curiously situated among the more futuristic claims of Wells and Bush.

In the chapter, which documents the evolution of computing from roughly 1945 to the late 1950s, we do find hints about society benefiting from computers – about the computer as "a device that one interacted with, a tool with which to augment one's intellectual efforts" (14).

More interesting, perhaps, is that Ceruzzi identifies a point in time at which the computer becomes something nearer to what Wells and Bush imagined, "regarding the UNIVAC as an information processing system, not a calculator” (30). And while not directly addressing the social implications of the paradigm shift, Ceruzzi notes, “[UNIVACs] replaced not only existing calculating machines, but also the people who tended them... Indeed, the analysis of the UNIVAC’s benefits was almost entirely case in terms of its ability to replace salaried clerks..." (30, 33).

To add context to the chapter, I went back through some old notes and discovered the following time line, which seems more interesting to me now when placed against Ceruzzi’s narrative:
1953 -- Society of Technical Writers (STW) founded.
1953 -- Association of Technical Writers and Editors (ATWE) founded.
1954 -- Technical Publishing Society (TPS) founded.
1954 -- Gordon Mill’s Technical Writing is published.
1957 -- STW and ATWE merge to form the Society of Technical Writers and Editors (STWE).
1960 -- STWE and TPS merge to form the Society of Technical Writers and Publishers (STWP).
1968 -- Houp and Pearsall’s Reporting Technical Information is published.

I’ve read histories of technical writing which argue that the proliferation of commercial and non-military computing products during the 1950s is a critical event in the history of technical writing. The claim is that these products (and the consumer-oriented products they spawned) required user documentation. This requirement led to opportunities writing user manuals, hardware installation manuals, quick sheets, etc. In turn, the commercialization of computing (information?) technology required technical writers to have different knowledge and capabilities as new job categories were created. The economic conditions, coupled with increased access to computing technology, placed increased demands on the skill levels of technical writers, in turn affecting the types and forms of writing taught in technical and professional writing programs.

It all sounds reasonable – more so after reading Ceruzzi’s chapter. An interesting snapshot of an interesting time.

760: on bush's as we may think

I've always wondered what Vannevar Bush would think of the Internet and all its ancillary technologies as they exist today. He lived long enough to see the deployment of ARPANET, but I've never come across any commentary on his reflections of it.

After reading the Wells essay, Bush appears to address the short-comings of Wells' reactive system: "... every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine .... The machines for higher analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and rather advanced logic" (4, 5).

Beyond the futurist examples of applied information technologies Bush provides in the essay, the section I've seen most cited is his description of the "memex" (6). I've seen the description referred to as an early imagining of the personal computer, relational databases, and the Internet. What I like most about the memex is the way in which Bush addresses the problem of "selection" and "the artificiality of systems of indexing" (6). This is where he moves beyond the elementary descriptions of vast accessible repositories of data and the textual and numerical taxonomies constructed by early information scientists.

With the memex, Bush is proposing something akin to a neural network. "When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions" (7). Bush's "trails" are the hyperlinks of today and the associative relationships being imagined for the semantic web. "Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage" (6).

Bush's intelligent system argument seems to take something of an anti-positivist perspective (or at least less positivistic than Wells): "If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world ... A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs" (4, 5). And yet, how much of this argument, like Wells', is in reaction to global war and unprecedented man-made destruction. There is this theme of "information as all-empowering" -- that an intelligent information system will keep the mistakes of the past accessible and present in such a way as to not be repeated by future generations. "The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house... They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good" (8).

In regard to its relationship to technical communication, I've always liked this essay because of when it was written. Casual historians of technical communication like to point to World War II as the birth of the discipline of technical communication (technical writing). These historians argue that, similar to the business and societal demands of the Industrial Revolution, World War II placed unfair demands on schools to graduate technical writers who could write military procedures, technical descriptions, and weapons instructions for readers with below-average language skills. However anecdotally appropriate these casual conclusions may be, the true effects of World War II on technical writing had more to do with socio-economic factors than with demand for effective technical communicators. Like all of society, post-war American colleges found the world a different place. From 1940 to 1945, the top research schools (and a good number of teaching schools) had become part of an interdependent economic complex, one that tied together government, industry, and higher education. This relationship was most apparent at the engineering schools, were it was recognized and capitalized on by many teachers of technical and science writing courses.

760: on wells' contribution to the new encyclopédie française

I always find these historical perspectives fascinating. Like early 20th century essays about how Babbage's difference engine would eliminate human toil, Wells' essay falls somewhere in the long line of arguments for the humane application of technology to solve the world's ills.

With the exception of scale, the conditions Wells describes in 1937 are apparent and relevant today: "... gigantic increase in recorded knowledge and of a still more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information" (83). He could be describing the knowledge management challenges of any modern-day organization, regardless of size. Yet, throughout the essay I had to resist the urge to compare Wells' system to the web or modern knowledge management systems, which I think is an easy move to make. Wells seems to be envisioning a reactive system that attempts to catalog existing facts -- what is currently known and understood. "There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge ... a complete planetary memory of all mankind" (85). His system is not necessarily a vision of the modern web in that it does not seem to account for the active creation of knowledge -- of the artifact being created, synthesized, coordinated, and applied as new knowledge is created.

From a systems perspective, Wells seems quite ingenious. "It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully... It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba" (87). In this simple metaphor, Wells describes a distributed physical topography with fail-over redundancy. That's geekily impressive. The difficulty of implementing his system -- I think -- would be creating and maintaining a centralized logical topography using the technologies of the day available to Wells. But practical implementation doesn't seem necessarily important to the essay. Wells is predicting the capabilities of future technologies that will make the encyclopedia possible.

I do wonder about Wells denouncement of the university system of his day. Was he calling on universities to be the drivers and shapers of the new encyclopedic enterprise? Was he commenting on the state of higher education at the time -- against a backdrop of world wars, despotism, rampant nationalism, etc.? I do understand that universities of the time were the repositories and distributors of knowledge -- accessible, controlled and coordinated by an elite few. Was it this structure that Wells was addressing? His denouncement, however, doesn't seem to jive with his overall claim that world peace could be achieved through a common human knowledge system (88). This claim aligns Wells with 19th century positivism -- the careful study of the scientific method by a small group of elite intellectuals leading to an objective and therefore universal view of the world. Was Wells arguing to shift control of knowledge from the universities to the "competent editors, educational directors and teachers..." (88)? How would Wells' system self-correct when incompetence or intentional mis-information was introduced into the encyclopedia? How does Wells make accommodations for human nature?

I like the way Wells writes. I like his eclectic nature and admire the way he expressed meaningful ideas in times that demanded clarity. I'll remember this little essay.

760: on rutter’s history, rhetoric and humanism

I first read Russell Rutter’s “History, Rhetoric and Humanism: Toward a More Comprehensive Definition of Technical Communication” in Becky’s CCR 690 as part of a small project titled A Rage to Sub-Discipline: A Brief History of Technical Communication.

I discovered in this recent reading that Rutter was making a call for disciplinary independence. Using recognizable tropes, he focuses on people (students of technical communication) to better understand the disciplinary work of creating a body of content. He focuses on the professional practices of technical communications to better understand the pedagogical work of shaping and preparing technical communicators. And he focuses on working conditions (the practice of technical communication) to better understand the cultural and social aspects of the discipline. Looking back on Rutter’s essay, I can see how he fits into a line of scholars who were laying out a framework for the discipline.

During our 760 class discussion earlier this week, the group seemed to agree that Rutter’s most prescient claim was that technical writing is, at its core, a rhetorical practice:

“If technical communicators actively create versions of reality instead of serving merely as windows through which reality in all of its pre-existent configurations may be seen, then technical communication must be fundamentally rhetorical: it builds a case that reality is one way and not some other way” (Rutter, 28).

In some ways Rutter’s claim seems moot today. Transformations occur in a society's rhetoric. This we know and understand. So when did the transformation occur in regard to technical communication? That’s a clunky question. What I’m trying to get at is something like this: In the context of technical communication, changes in rhetorical theory and practice have been related to changes in popular and scholarly notions of literacy, as indicated by changes in technical communication curriculum. The curriculum, in turn, is always (OK, maybe not always) responsive to the changing economic, social, and political conditions in society. So how does Rutter’s claim sound today? Why is it so readily understood in technical communication programs that a practicing technical communicator is a practicing rhetorician?

Maybe Rutter’s purging and scouring has paid off. Maybe the discipline has shed Dobrin’s “narrowness and excessive commitment to pragmatism.” Or maybe the discipline has matured to a point where it understands the balance between scholarship and practice. Unlike Miller, Rutter wasn’t making a call to action as much as he was asking us to simply recognize and wait for change. I think that change has come, to a certain degree, but not necessarily to the extent that Rutter imagined.

760: on miller's humanistic rationale

Holy disciplinary comfort zone Batman! We kicked off CCR 760: Tech Comm in the Digital Age this week. Yes, this IS a CCR course about technical communication! Within minutes I realized how much I missed course work.

The first set of readings included Carolyn Miller’s “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.” It was like a warm slice of banana bread. I hadn’t read the essay since at least 1995. What struck me most about this reading was Miller’s attention to the presence of positivism within technical writing textbooks and the emerging disciplinary literature. I found my own reaction to her claim interesting because twenty years ago, the presence of positivist rationale in my practice didn’t bother me. I’d been taught to be an objective, mechanistic, impersonal minimalist at all costs.

For at least the last ten years, I've found myself resisting positivist tendencies – they’re still present and easily adapted by busy practicing technical writers – that hasn't changed. What has changed since the publication of the essay is the way in which pre-professional technical writers are educated. I think we would be hard pressed to find a tech comm program anywhere in the country that doesn’t provide a generous portion of humanistic exposure in the curriculum – particularly in regard to language, linguistics, and rhetoric – regardless of where the program resides organizationally within the academy.

Miller’s focus on four distinct features of technical writing pedagogy (varying definitions of tech writing, emphasis on style/organization, focus on specific tenses/tones, and vague notions of audience analysis) are, however, as relevant today as they were in the early 1980s.

In regard to varying definitions of the field, consider the ways in which technical writers have tried to define themselves over the years. In 1996 I attended a series of seminars on information mapping. At the first session, I was sitting next to a woman who introduced herself as an “Information Architect.” I was impressed and confused. I asked her what an information architect does. She said, “I write instructional guides for a hardware integration company.” I said, “Oh, so you’re a technical writer.” She said, “No, I’m an information architect.” We didn’t talk much after that. A few years later I took a job as a technologist with an instructional design and development group. I looked up one day and found that my title had been changed to Information Architect. It felt a little creepy, but it did look good on a business card.

Maybe it’s a movement toward simplification, but I find fewer practicing technical writers referring to themselves with pretentious titles and labels. It could very well be a recognition of the maturing the discipline, which gets paid forward into the field by practitioners.

Issues of style/organization, unrefined focus on tense and tone, and struggles with concepts of audience analysis are still present in both the instruction and the practice of technical writing. I do think the current broader humanistic curriculum makes pre-professionals more aware of the implications of these moves and issues. And that awareness is sometimes all they have as they use what they know to negotiate the demands, expectations, and requirements of the job.

I’ve always like Miller’s writing and perspectives. She’s accessible and thoughtful. And as this essay continues to show she was and is a technical communication scholar who can recognize and articulate a disciplinary concern in such a way as to make it a call to action. That’s just good scholarship.