bridging, linking, and lenses

Harkness-Regli, Susan. “What is the Relationship Between Professional Writing and Rhetoric?” in Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Readings from the Field. Ed. Tim Peeples. Addison Wesley, 2003.
A quick re-reading of this essay because I needed a way to bridge Rhetorical Analysis (one of Clark’s 4 Categories of Rhetorical Technology) and the Rhetoric of Technology (one of Spilka’s 3 Areas of Knowledge for TC). Brooke provided a design link, but I recalled Harkness-Regli’s (HR) early essay as an attempt to recover big R Rhetoric from within TC practices.

Here HR is reclaiming invention, as an act of meaning making, as the TCer’s activity. Similar to Brooke’s move to cast the five cannons as performance, HR is arguing that the TCer’s expertise in invention lies in an ability to adapt rhetorical heuristics “to situations of interdisciplinary collaboration.” This aligns nicely with Alber’s later model of the TC interdisciplinary/practice hub: IA, ID, Human Factors, and Management; with TC in the hub position.

HR asks: “If we believe the technical writer is a professional rhetor and not simply a document technician, we have to ask ourselves where is the expertise the technical writer contributes to the invention process?” My marginalia indicates that HR should see Brooke for an answer. In the meantime, she provides a model in which the TCer is a rhetor who treats knowledge as an activity. “…the rhetor’s expertise lies in knowing how to perform knowledge in a communal, dialectical context…”

Specific to my purposes (and my initial reason for revisiting HR) is her treatment of information structure analysis as a TC meaning making activity. Before IA was the label de jure, HR was claiming that practicing TCers have a “deep understanding of how information is typically structured according to the principles of grammar, usage, and genre conventions…” This is the most succinct statement about the traditional relationship of TC to IA that I have found. It is perhaps so because HR does not identify IA as such, and perhaps because she writes of a place of practice from which I came.