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.