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).

ccr 760: on kennedy

OK, so now I want to read the whole thing. The historical aspects of Kennedy’s work (I’m assuming the rest of the dis follows the same methodology) makes for interesting reading.

As with all of our readings these past weeks, I’ve made a conscious effort to keep what I understand to be technical communication practices on the fringe while I’m working through a text. I note this readerly move to explain why I found the descriptions of textual curation familiar and creative.

Like the textual curators Kennedy describes (Chambers and the Wikipedians), the technical communicator also wrestles with two rhetorical elements: “[1] the exigence of information overload and [2] the unique agency demonstrated by the [tech writer] who labors to evaluate and re-compose huge amounts of information into a coherent and easily-accessible format for a broad audience" (113). This is, arguably, a more appropriate and concise description (than those offered by Slattery and Jones) of the modern technical communicator’s activities.

Specific to the activities of textual curation, Kennedy comfortably introduces the concept of craft ,and for me creates a clear progression from the readings we did in Spilka a few weeks ago. Like the craft of textual curation, the craft of technical communication (of the symbolic-analytic work) regularly involves "filtering prior texts and re-composing that information into a new text that fits the goals of the project at hand" (120, and “knowing where to collect information; developing ways to manage it; filtering … for relevance and quality; composing concise, clear articles; and attending to or outsourcing the myriad small tasks of publishing” (123).

Like the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia, modern tech comm information products are aggregated “synthetic compositions”. The individual who builds (authors?) these products is, quite literally, a “textual harvester” performing a continuous technology-mediated act of re-composition. And I’m thinking Textual Harvester would look pretty cool on a business card.

As a complete aside, everyone who has engaged in “perverse performances of agency in the form of vandalism” (160) please raise your hand.

760: on carliner

Not to belabor the inability to define information design (ID), but Carliner refers to ID first as a notion -- IDers "look at the bigger picture: What problem is the client trying to solve, what can I bring to address the problem, and how does this solution support the larger business situation" (43). A page later he defines ID as a discipline: "Design as problem solving ... designers focus on the solution ... design is a problem-solving discipline" (44).

Knowing that I need to move on and not make this definition-deficiency an issue, I really like Carliner's three-part goal-oriented framework for ID (the notion, practice, field, discipline, whatever).

• Physical - the ability to find information
• Cognitive - the ability to understand information
• Affective - the ability to feel comfortable with the presentation of the information

In many ways, the framework represents my understanding of heuristics and something I'm pretty sure that most composition scholars are/should be familiar with.

I also like what Carliner is attempting to do with the framework (as he qualifies it in his conclusion) because I can locate my own practices within it. I seem most comfortable with the physical and cognitive levels of the framework. The affective level seems like "point of failure" motivation to me, although I know that's incomplete and inconsistent with what Carliner is describing here. It’s just that things like behavioral change, change management, and performance improvement are always the moving targets of the project. It is, quite honestly, often easier and sometimes necessary to avoid the affective level just to get the project done.

As a complete aside: I could probably have gone without Carliner's clarification of what he meant by "pre-digested information" on page 51. Dude, really? A description of how LactAid works?

760: on spinuzzi chapter 6 and conclusion

Not having read chapters 1 through 4, I found myself making a lot of assumptions about the holes in Spinuzzi’s claims. It wasn’t’ until that back end of chapter 6 and the conclusion that I had a better understanding of his framework. This is a must-read text for any student of comp, rhet, or tech com.

The issues with training identified at Telecorp are, as Spinuzzi notes, typical of most organizations. The field work for the text was conducted in 2000. From my perspective, not much has changed since. Arguably, the same issues have been plaguing organizations for decades. As I noted in my previous post, I find it difficult to tie Spinuzzi’s and others’ work here directly to the “modern” socio-economic network of the information age. “…this was a function of the spliced organization, in which it became important not just to learn, but to identify who to ask…” (186). I had this same problem when I was slinging dough at Mario’s Pizzeria in 1982 – what did I need to know and how would I come to know it? Mario’s was a far cry from Telecorp, but the fundamental issue appears to be the same.

Disconnected learning (training) spread across multiple activities and domains is not unique to organizations that employ knowledge workers. One might argue, using the activity frameworks that Spinuzzi erects, that learning is simply another activity domain to which workers are connected. In fact, there has been a tremendous amount of research on how learning can be embedded into the daily activities of workers.
We would all agree (as Spinuzzi notes) that lifelong learning is a byproduct of a networked economy in which nomadic workers fill hybrid jobs that require them to collaborate across functional areas. Again, I have this sense that this phenomenon is not new – and realize that it being new isn’t really the point. However, it still feels like we’re trying to retrofit something here. Yes, that’s clunky, but I can’t quite but my finger on it. Was there ever a pre-information age production organization that didn’t struggle with “…how to retain and extend the insights of each as we continue to deal with rapidly changing work organizations” (197).

I do feel comfortable assigning Spinuzzi’s project, analysis, and claims to the “symbolic-analytic” worker theme I’m trying to string through the readings. “The vital rhetorical skills that were needed to support them [different functional groups] in a networked environment … were developed and supported informally through opportunistic volunteer mentoring” (194); “…rhetoric is a vital part of net work: net workers have to build turst and alliances, persuade others, negotiate, compromise, and haggle to build shared settlements” (206) and the implications for workers: they become rhetors, time managers, project managers, adaptable, liaisons – human APIs, information aggregators, strategic thinkers.

I also see Spinuzzi’s project fitting in nicely with research that considers documentation (technical, professional, training, etc.) as a built in activity to what workers (knowledge or otherwise) do every day. Through this perspective of the reading, I can see the groundwork to argue for structured information architectures and content management. This is certainly something that Telecorp would have benefited from. In the absence of these types of formal structures you get internal documentation that people develop out of necessity – just like at Telecorp. And yet, this “on the fly” documentation tends to be minimalist, practical, highly procedural, and not wrapped with a lot of unnecessary declarative information. It works, and maybe that’s just the point.

I did find interesting the emphasis on stories that contextualize workers learning within a company. I’ve long been interested in scenario-based instruction as a way to capture stories and narratives. What we’ve found in some of our work is that when a story (scenario) is not fixed and regularly reinforced, the stories morph as readily as textual genres do to be shaped for particular purposes. This, in turn, leads to misinformation and incorrect practices.

more old smart old guys

Continuing with my reading of the Rickard classic... I came across this quote of Huxley: "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of the same thing."

This is the essence of what we've attempted to do with WRT 407. We've "attached" (although I still like the term embedded) the writing -- the literate activities -- to the engineering activities -- the science of the practicing engineer.

One hundred plus years later, and we're still arguing the same case. Something to be said in that, I think.

learning components

While reading for a course we're building to prepare instructors to teach online, I came across a reference to a four-component instructional design system. While there might be a tad too much theory infused in the system, the component approach to design is intriguing.

I'm particularly interested in the Learning Task and the Supportive Information components. At first blush, it seems that both components would require the instructional designer to have a good understanding of the compositional requirements for writing useful and effective task-oriented information and supportive information. Essentially, it's the procedural/declarative discussion that Tech Com has been involved in for quite some time. The most popular (relevant?) research to consider procedural/declarative information has looked at software user manuals and instructional texts. In some ways, I see this research as a top-level look at the form and purpose of procedural and declarative information.

A second-level look would have us consider the compositional requirements of the procedural information (learning tasks) and declarative information (supportive information). I'm not quite sure what these requirements would expose. I do think that instructional designers would be well served by better understanding how procedural information relates to declarative information. Rather than approaching these information types as discrete chunks of information, the designer could imagine, through a writer's lens, the many interactions and reader/user support processes that reside between the two information types.

the smell of flowers

I've been thinking about process a lot lately. My current attraction is, no doubt, due to our ongoing work (read: frustration) with part-time student enrollment management. I'm finding all sorts of analogies among our business process and the basic processes teachers of writing (technical and otherwise) have come to know, love, and loath.

Start with the traditional four-step writing process. I like to use this model as an introductory framework with groups new to process mapping and analysis.

• Step 1: Generating Ideas -- a universal activity found within all processes that have a "generative" opening activity.
• Step 2: Mapping the Argument -- essentially the same activity as structuring the iterative phases of the process (actions, decisions, terminal events, etc.).
• Step 3: Composing a Draft -- the build out phase and the fun/creative part where team members begin to "see" the relationships, bottle-necks, and outcomes among discrete activities.
  
• Step 4: Revising -- the point at which we revisit the entire process to refine, improve, tweak, and modify.

So maybe Flowers and Hayes had it right. Buried beneath all the blather about cognitive, expressivists, and social constructionist theory is a timeless, simple, and useful model. That's good design.