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.