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.