ccr 760: on slattery

Yes, it’s about the technology. Even way back in the dark ages of 2005, that wasn’t a risky statement to make about technical communication. Slattery states that “information technologies appear to be the primary medium through which [the technical communicator’s] competencies are enacted” (355), but I’m thinking the statement applies to all knowledge workers. When we consider the list of technology-mediated activities – most importantly “the ability to coordinate, to structure workable ecologies of texts and then layer them into the target document" (355), I'm reminded that anyone with a hammer, some wood, and a box of nails can attempt to build a house.

I guess I’m responding to Slattery’s description of “writing” as an act concerned more with “deciding what to put where as it was deciding what to say and how to say it” (357). Rather than making a case for higher-level literacies, we’re reducing textual coordination to an act of content aggregation. That’s something we hire high school kids to do for us in the summer. And, interestingly enough, those high school kids typically have a larger “"technological repertoire" than the knowledge workers they’re assisting.

Slattery’s most important point, I think, is that a technical writer’s skills are experienced through and enacted with technologies. What gets lost are the skills necessary to do good writing in the first place. Slattery states that skill in writing is the “uber IT” (358), but diminishes that uberness by quickly tacking on the process of textual coordination as a necessary or equally important skill “necessary for building the genre ecologies that enable [higher order] thinking” (359).

For me, the activities identified as IT-mediated textual coordination are part of the job – and yes, a very important part of the job. But technical communication is and must continue to be about the writing; the place at which we must start when we teach aspiring TCers.