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).
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