I used to have undergraduate students read this essay. After coming back to it these years later, I’m left wondering how painful it must have been for them.
In Dobrin’s opening claim I find serious application to what we’ve been trying to do in WRT 407: The reports, specs, guides and manuals “appear when there is a technology, a writer, and readers who want to use the technology. When the pieces succeed, they act as a kind of membrane that lets understanding leak through at a controlled rate. Once the understanding gets through, the membrane disappears [audience invoked?]. This is not great literature; once the readers get the technology, they drop the documentation” (107).
Dobrin is extending the definition of technical writing beyond the mundane “technology writers write about technology” mantra echoed by old-school practicing tech writers. Dobrin is really trying to drill down to the essence of the activities performed by practitioners (technical writing or writing technically, re: Connors’ binary). For Dobrin “technical writing” is all about the text; “writing technically” is all about the encounter which produces the text. It is the social-constructivist nature of writing technically that moves the definition into any number of transactional pedagogies – process and collaborative pedagogies being the most obvious.
Ultimately, Dobrin is making a case against the current-traditional remnants that continue to surface in the technical writing classroom. Specifically, he is pushing back against reliance on the scientific method and its associated documentation processes. “Scientific writing makes a truth claim; technical writing does not. In technical writing… the individual statement can be certain because the whole is unconcerned with the truth” (110).
While I’m not sure I fully agree with Dobrin’s position, I agree with assessment that we need to treat knowledge and language as a whole (“there is no way of knowing without language”), and not separate the two through positivist/objectivist instruction in the tech writing classroom. “I’m suggesting that the injunction of clarity, precision, logic, and objectivity … are not absolutes but axiomatic functions of a particular group. What is technical about technical writing is technology, to the extent that technology defines certain human behaviors among certain human beings…“ (118).
Thus, technical writing is writing that accommodates technology to the user. “People come to technical writing from two directions; either they are technicians who are asked to write [WRT 407 pre-professional engineers] or writers asked to gain technical skills [Spinuzzi’s symbolic-analytic worker].
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