connors' history

Connors, Robert. “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 12.4 (1982): 329-352.

I didn’t think that I would, necessarily, come back to Connors' seminal essay for a close reading. I’ve covered this historical ground already, but as I got back into it I was again drawn into the progress narrative. His reliance on written records and textbooks was what first attracted me to the piece. This time around, that reliance is helping me flesh out my taxonomy and map, specifically in the way Connors frames two disciplinary binary debates that continue within Tech Comm: 1) Being a writer of technical material or being a technician (or SME?) who writes; and 2) Being a technical writing teacher or being a teacher of writing in a technical discipline (WAC?) -- one debate addressing the practice of technical communication, the other addressing the teaching of technical communication.

I don’t want to revisit Connors' history lesson here. I have always like how he cleanly identifies the early 1920s as the point at which “technical writing was becoming more self-aware” (18). Then noting how it would be another 20 years before the discipline of Technical Writing (not necessarily Technical Communication) would begin a forty-year emergence (1940-1980) from English.

Some 30+ years later, Connors’ optimism speaks to the very essence of my exams: “… technical writing is not without problems… There are still arguments being made that the technical writing course should be taken out of the hands of English teachers, but these arguments are as old as technical writing instruction itself and will likely prove no more effectual now than they were in 1920” (17).

more on the humanist tradition

Rutter, Russell. "History, Rhetoric, and Humanism: Toward a More Comprehensive Definition of Technical Communication." Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 20-34.

I want to follow up Miller with Rutter simply because they are making the same call to professionalization, if only at different times of Tech Comm’s maturity as a discipline. Where Miller focused on the teacher, the classroom, and the discipline, Rutter focuses on the practicing technical writer as a well-prepared pre-professional (a call taken up later and more completely by Spinuzzi and Johnson-Eilola).

It’s interesting to note that Miller, writing 12 years prior, nowhere refers to technical communication; she refers to technical writing and the technical writer. This small referential difference is the foundation of Rutter’s claim. Writing is a singular activity. Communication is multi-modal and multi-dimensional – an amalgamated activity of which writing is one element. From this broader definition of the field and the discipline, Rutter is arguing for – or more importantly, he is concerned with what practicing technical communicators need to know, of “how the practice of technical communication might be affected for the better by contextualization of the discipline… [by] the tradition of humanistic rhetoric and the oratorical ideal to which it rightfully belongs” (22).

Rutter uses the historical progress narrative trope to argue against Tech Comm’s association with positivist and current-traditional practices and pedagogies, noting specifically that, “Formulaic rigidity and undue preoccupation with day-to-day procedures have not alone ensured technical and scientific advancement, and it is hard to see why they should ensure the advancement of technical and scientific communication either” (26).

Yet most important for my purposes here (those of the major exam area), Rutter is locating himself in a camp of Tech Comm scholars who see practicing technical communicators as a community of rhetoricians. “If technical communicators actively create versions of reality instead of serving merely as windows through which reality … may be seen, then technical communication must be fundamentally rhetorical; it builds a case that reality is one way and not some other” (28). (Note Rutter’s reference to Miller’s description of positivism’s “window pane theory” of rhetoric).

Ultimately, Rutter is calling for a more liberal education of technical communicators. This means a curriculum infused with humanities courses and pedagogies that are open and involve regular and necessary interactions with people. If Rutter is not squarely in the social constructivist camp, he is most certainly erring on the side of a more humanist and less positivist curriculum. Rutter concludes by recognizing that the limitations of pragmatism and the positivist/objectivist pedagogies have, “… enabled us to simplify styles, discover what managers want in the reports they request, know what makes a discourse community in the workplace different from the classroom … But it hasn’t addressed the development of these people as people” (31).

tech comm's humanistic value

Miller, Carolyn. “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.” College English 40 (1979): 610-617.
Miller’s essay is a seminal work in Tech Comm’s disciplinary progress narrative, and a noted point of departure from current-traditionalism. “I wish to argue that the common opinion that the undergraduate technical writing course is a skills course with little or no humanistic value is the result of a lingering but pervasive positivist view of science” (610). This positivist lens reduces technical and scientific discourse to “the skills of subduing language so that it most accurately and directly transmits reality” (610).

The issue Miller wrestled with in 1979 was complicated by the fact that Tech Comm was (and still is) a rhetorical discipline founded on positivist theory; hence the narrow view of rhetoric having only to do with symbols and emotion, and the narrower view of science as having only to do with observation and logic. Miller was attempting to distance Tech Comm from its (and Comp’s) history of emergence from current-traditionalism and the foundational humanist curriculum of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

As I’ve stated before, I have a bias toward Tech Comm pedagogies that privilege the objective, impartial, and unemotional. This is the positivist tradition I came up through as a practitioner, and it has clearly shaped my teaching. “Objectivity on the part of the [technical writer] minimizes personal and social interference, reducing observation to the accurate recording of the self-evident…” (612). I have stated as much in class, particularly in regard to laboratory notebooks and system testing documentation.

Having recognized my own biases, I do see that Miller’s call thirty-plus years ago has been embraced by the social constructionist camp within Tech Comm, and clearly lead to a more reflective and reflexive discipline. Of the four primary disciplinary problems Miller identified, only the first – a lack of a coherent definition of what technical writing is – is still hotly debated. The emphasis on style and form, characteristics of tone, and audience analysis in terms of levels have been dismissed and recast through an infusion of WAC, expressivist, rhetorical, process, and collaborative pedagogies in the Tech Comm classroom.

Miller wrote of a new disciplinary epistemology that held, “whatever we know of reality is created by individual action and by communal assent … we bring to the world a set of innate and learned concepts which help us select, organize, and understand what we encounter” (615). This is clearly a transactional perspective, which complicates my placement of humanism (or more precisely, the humanist curriculum) within the region of Berlin’s subjectivism. Does technical writing have humanistic value? Absolutely, although this was not so obvious in 1979.

technology and writing

Charles Moran – Technology and Teaching Writing
I wanted to revisit this essay to make sure I hadn’t forgotten something essential to my mapping efforts. What I didn’t realize before is that teaching writing with technology is not pedagogically bound, therefore there is no clear association with Berlin’s taxonomy.

There is, of course, a relationship to computers and writing and the systematization of writing instruction – as if each activity (invention, writing, revising) and sub-activities could be departmentalized as discrete programmable functions. Similarly, teaching with technology has something of a tenuous relationship with “skill-and-drill” instructional activities associated with current-traditionalism; software simply replaced the workbook. Today, teaching writing with technology has hints of social constructionism, particularly in regard to the social aspects of web and technology-mediated writing.

This is primarily how I remember using Moran’s essay in the past. It is an interesting historical reflection, particularly in regard to Comp’s early struggles to integrate computers (technology) into the writing classroom. I don’t know of such struggles in Tech Comm’s history. Perhaps it is close association of practice to technology, or the emphasis on pre-professional preparation. What I do find within Tech Comm is that the teaching writing with technology issue has degenerated into a “tools vs. writing” debate. I don’t want to take up that debate here, but I’m certain it will play out when I map out the Tech Comm and Information Architecture landscapes.

mcleod's WAC

Susan McLeod - WAC pedagogies
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) has always interested me because of its focus on teaching the content of a discipline and the discourse features used in writing about that content. This instructional strategy has afforded Tech Comm a long history with various Engineering disciplines, as well as the social sciences (as C. Miller has addressed in her seminal essay). McLeod illustrates this focus when she discusses WAC as a transformative pedagogy aimed at, “moving away from the lecture model of teaching to a model of active student engagement with the material and with the genres of the disciplines through writing” (150). Nothing is more common to the Tech Comm than this.

WAC is really about writing to communicate. Again, this is essential to the practicing technical writing (it is her livelihood) and the central emphasis of most Tech Comm instruction. “… it focuses on writing to an audience outside the self in order to inform that audience, and the writing therefore is revised, crafted, and polished. Writing to communicate is reader based rather than writer based, and uses to the formal language of a particular discourse community to communicate information” (153).

I have a high comfort level with this type of teaching (not to be construed as boasting), which is why I think we’ve been so successful with WRT 407. “Writing as writing to communicate… focusing on helping students to learn the discourse of the discipline; the relationship is … not the composition teacher, but the teacher who is already grounded in the content of the field and who is fluent in the disciplinary discourse” (154).

I see WAC pedagogies situated somewhere in the area of rhetorical and process pedagogies –- aligned with other transactional theories and perhaps an off-shoot of social constructionism because of the way students objectify their knowledge in ungraded papers to help them discover both what they know and what they need to know. This is writing to learn. This is Tech Comm instruction. Consider an engineering student’s design document – “an expressive document that helps her explore and assimilate new ideas, create links between the unfamiliar and familiar, mull over possibilities, explain things to the self before explaining them to others” (152). More illustrative, consider the engineering student’s laboratory notebook. “It is not a polished work intended for an outside audience; sometimes it is comprehensible only to the writer” (152).

howard and collaborative writing

Rebecca Moore Howard – Collaborative Pedagogies
Becky Howard is an accessible scholar. That’s why I like her research and her teaching. When she discusses collaboration as a pedagogical activity, she notes how collaborative exercises are common in the composition classroom, but collaborative writing less so. This absence is clearly frustrating to social constructivists, but it highlights a fundamental divergence in Comp/Tech Comm pedagogical relationships.

Collaborative writing is a central activity of the practicing technical communicator and perhaps the most valued instructional activity in the Tech Comm classroom. For Howard, the debate about collaborative writing is clear: “… the very notion of collaboration contradicts a long cultured tradition [within Comp] that privileges the individual agent and especially the solitary author” (55). In Tech Comm, we do not find the solitary author. Rather, we find the author in opposition to the humanist tradition of the “sanctity of the literary ownership” and solitary writing. In Tech Comm, “collaborative pedagogy is not so much an alternate pedagogy as it is a true mirroring of the true nature of writing” (55).

More critical to its association to Tech Comm, collaborative pedagogy offers students practice in common forms of work-place writing. Practice is the critical term here; too often associated with the model-and-drill exercises common to current-traditionalism. In the context of collaborative writing, practice has a currency in the Tech Comm classroom not always valued in the Comp classroom. “When collaborative pedagogy aims to prepare students for work-place tasks, it [is] designed not just on general precepts but also with a well-developed conception of work-place writing” (57). Arguably, this conceptualization is what makes highly contextualized writing instruction to occur. And there is no more common a place for such contextualization than the Tech Comm classroom.“… collaborative writing dominates the work place and many academic disciplines, and critical theory increasingly insists that all writing collaborative” (62).

I do like how Howard places collaborative pedagogies clearly within the social constructionism, as it exposes other pathways for Tech Comm into transactional rhetorics and related pedagogical traditions. “Knowledge conceived as socially constructed or generated validates the learning part of collaborative learning because it assumes that the interactions of collaboration can lead to new knowledge or learning” (56).

more on tate, et al - rhetorical pedagogy

William Covino - Rhetorical Pedagogy
I find some comfort in Convino’s discussion of rhetorical pedagogy, primarily because this is the pedagogy I was exposed to in my graduate program. I’m now assuming this is why I have such an affinity for objectivism and prescriptive instruction in my technology writing classes. I’m developing a better appreciation for the alternatives, but I am now more comfortable in my teaching skin.

Convino claims that, “… rhetorical pedagogy consists in encouraging writing that is not restricted to self-expression or the acontextual generation of syntactic structures or the formulaic obedience to rules, but instead keep in view the skills and contingencies that attend a variety of situations and circumstances” (37). This, it seems, is exactly why Tech Comm would take up rhetorical pedagogy as a valid instructional lens and approach.

To generalize as I often do, the need for self-expression (or a sense of writer presence) is not often found in technical communication activities and information products. I’m not surprised then to see that rhetorical pedagogy was taken up in reaction to expressivism at a time (the 1970s-1980s) when Tech Comm was maturing as a discipline separate from English and Composition. As Convino notes, rhetorical pedagogy was a response to what some saw as self-expressive writing’s constraint upon the range of discourses available to student writers.

I also appreciate and identify with modern rhetorical pedagogy as an effort to restore the 5 cannons – invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery – but most importantly, invention (which had been lost in current-traditional objectivity). I note this appreciation having long dismissed invention in the technical writing process as something external and arbitrary to the writer. Modern rhetorical pedagogy exposes Tech Comm instruction to classical rhetoric by confronting “post-modern theory that calls into question the possibility of stabilizing a set of values without enacting cultural oppression” (46) Tech Comm instruction thrives on stability and structure. Oppression (cultural or otherwise) that may occur as a result of those structures can and has occurred. But teaching technical communication as a post-modern activity obliterates any sense of structure and stability, returning the writing activity to some more akin to self-expressive free writing.

The historical trajectory from current-traditionalism is reassuring, as it clarifies Tech Comm’s progress narrative as I understand it. “… we have returned from the current-traditional compression of rhetoric to an expansive sense of its scope and a more fully inclusive appreciation for the range of backgrounds, needs, and desires that inform the teaching of reading and writing” (49).

more on tate - expressive pedagogy

Christopher Burnham – Expressive Pedagogy
Burnham starts with Berlin, which fits nicely into the topography I’m creating. Berlin claims that all pedagogy is ideological, using his rhetorical “triangle” to illustrate his four elements of the rhetorical act: writer, audience, message, and language. According to Berlin, placing one of the four items in the middle of the triangle illustrates it’s prominence to and mediation by the remaining three elements.

Expressivism and the pedagogies based on it place the writer in the middle of Berlin’s triangle – the writer and her ideology assume the greatest value in the rhetorical act. “Expressivist pedagogy encourages, even insists upon, a send of writer presence even in research-based writing. This presence – voice or ethos – whether explicit, implicit, or absent, functions as a key evaluation criterion when expressivists examine writing” (19). And it’s here that I immediately recognized a conflict for Tech Comm pedagogies shaped by other social constructionist theories; Tech Comm (I believe) almost always places the “writing” rather than the “writer” at the center of the triangle. Because of this placement, I see expressivism falling somewhere between subjective and transactional rhetorics, as per Berlin’s framework, moving away from current-traditionalism. “[Expressivism] originated in the 1960s and 1970s as a set of values and practices opposing current-traditional rhetoric” (21).

Only after considering Burnham’s description of the theoretical background of expressivism could I begin to see some fit – some application – the Tech Comm classroom. Burnham points to Britton’s expressive function of language and Kinneavy’s expressive discourse as the major theories that shape expressive pedagogies. Upon breaking down Britton’s description of expressivist theory, I identified a clear association to Tech Comm activities inside and, more importantly, outside the classroom.

“In the participant role, writers produce transactional writing, in which language is used to accomplish the business of the world. Transactional writing is divided further into informative [exposition], regulative and conative writing persuasion]… Informative writing makes information available, regulative writing impels or commands action, and conative writing moves readers from inaction or ambivalence to specific action” (26).

The application to Tech Comm pedagogy and practice are obvious here. I also see Britton’s influence on process-based pedagogies – again due to the clear association of these rhetorical and pedagogical strategies to the activities of the profession technical communicator.

My mapping continues, but I’m again left questioning my own affinity (or afflication?) to current-traditionalist approaches to teching Tech Comm. Perhaps it’s more or a starting point – a position from which to move toward more transactional pedagogies, such as those based on theories of expressivism.

tate et al. and process pedagogy

Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick (Eds.) A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Lad Tobin – Progress Pedagogy
I’m starting to develop a map of disciplinary arguments, positions, and claims. What I’m rediscovering is that there are a lot of dichotomies that cloud the central issue, which is our understanding or writing. Lad Tobin details one such dichotomy in his progress narrative about process pedagogy.

To oversimplify Tobin’s narrative, process pedagogy (as defined by Elbow, Murray, and others) was, and perhaps still is, seen as a response to the “rules, conventions, standards, quality, and rigor” located within current-traditional approaches to writing instruction (4). And yet within this oversimplification I find myself in a cloud of self-assessment.

I tend to associate what I’ll call “traditional” Tech Comm pedagogies with Berlin’s objectivist rhetorics – those based on positivism and the resulting current-traditional approaches to writing instruction. I attribute this to my personal emphasis on the role of objectivity in effective technical communication. (I do tend to teach technical communication from a position of prescriptive rules and standards). But I also recognize aspects of my own teaching in Tobin’s narrative of his adoption of process pedagogies. For example, “… students are writers when they come to the classroom and the writing classroom should be a workshop in which they are encouraged through supportive response of teachers and peers to writing as a way to figure out what they think and fee…” (7). I like to believe that my technical communication class room provides this type of freedom and encouragement. What I do know for sure is that I’ve undervalued the active role of process in my approach to teaching writing.

The self-assessment aside, I want to continue to relationship mapping exercise. There is a clear association of process pedagogy (and the process movement) to Berlin’s transactional rhetorics – specifically those based on social constructionism (the creation of knowledge through social interaction). This places instructional activities, such as Breuch’s virtual peer review, within an overall instructional approach that values process, student-constructed knowledge, and practice-centered learning.

There is a linage here that I’m still teasing out. I’m finding that the dichotomies and binaries I create are complicating the relationships through and among the arguments. It’s never as clear and clean as you want it to be.

More on Tate, et al to come.

tebeaux, back to breuch and words of caution

Tebeaux, Elizabeth. “Technical Writing by Distance: Refocusing the Pedagogy of Technical Communication.” Technical Communication Quarterly (1995).

I’m going to start with Tebeaux but finish with a loop back to Breuch. In Tebeaux’s definition of distance education theory, we find a clear association with social constructionism, technology-mediated instruction, and a further extension of Breuch’s virtual peer review, specifically in regard to pedagogies based on computer-based writing and network theories.

“We now realize that students, instead of being passive recipients of knowledge, are and must be capable of constructing their own knowledge with guidance from the teacher. Technology enables teachers to offer part of this tutorial guidance by setting up an environment that will provide student with the resources necessary for independent exploration” (369).

Tebeaux's claim here lies on the same social constructionist --> student-constructed knowledge --> practice-centered learning trajectory laid out in Breuch’s definition of virtual peer review and the relationship to the sub-field of computers in writing. When Breuch refers to computer pedagogy -- computer-based writing – she is suggesting that virtual peer review actualizes the guidelines that pedagogy must drive technology (Breuch 20).

Tebeaux makes a similar suggestion when she discusses the independence offered to the writing student and teacher by technology. “The system should free students and teachers from the need to inhabit the same physical space, allow students choices in learning formats, incorporate use of proven teaching methods… to provide for dialog between student and teacher” (368).

Breuch showed how traditional and virtual peer review have long histories in Composition and important pedagogical assumptions, such as writing as a process, writing as a social act, and student-centered approaches (Breuch 22). Tebeaux makes a similar claim of historical association when wrapping technical writing instruction with distance theory, writing as a social act, theories of practice-centered learning, and “guided didactic conversation."

Both Breuch and Tebeaux are basing their claims on assumptions that writing is a social act. I’m not disagreeing, but I am left wondering how other constructions of knowledge making would or could complicate both claims. Breuch, for example: "Writing instructors have a responsibility to integrate computer technology into their writing courses... virtual peer review can play a transitional role: it can help instructors transition to computer-based classrooms, especially since it has grounding in peer review and pedagogical assumptions important to writing pedagogy" (Breuch 130). And yet regardless of the theoretical lens, I find Breuch and Tebeaux both identifying areas of pedagogical intersection between Tech Comm and Comp. In booth virtual peer review and teaching writing online, I find Tech Comm’s logical predisposition toward technology-enhanced instruction (Comp has relied on computers in writing to make this extension).

There is a caution, however, to slide toward a conclusion that Tech Comm is about the technology. This caution traces back to Cynthia Selfe's argument that computer-based writing instruction (technology mediated writing) often places the technology before the teaching. To avoid the slide, we need to draw from Breuch and Tebeaux their emphasis on pedagogy and the distinctions between collaboration and technology in the writing classroom.