on questions of relevance

As is typical for his blog, Tom Johnson has a great post that is asking us to consider a number of tech comm issues within a single question. It's one of the things that makes Tom's stuff interesting.

I want to respond to what I perceive as an anti-academic tone in Don Bush’s statements. In many of his early articles (raise your hand if you loved reading the “Friendly Editor” articles in Technical Communication), and particularly in his co-authored text, Bush takes an extremely pragmatic approach to the practice of technical communication. That’s what makes his writing so accessible. So why have I been so bothered since I (re)read Bush’s quotes on Tom’s site?

I’m not an academic. I tell myself that every time I step in front of pre-professional engineers and intend to impart some bit of practical knowledge about technical communication – some iota of skill that they can carry forward into their practice; making them exceptional designers, developers and communicators. I have, however, developed a deep appreciation for the way quality academic work serves and shapes the practice of technical communication. Tom’s simple question (Is rhetoric relevant?) exposes how so much of this work gets lost somewhere between the scholarly journals and field-level implementation.

I realize my perspective is skewed. I’ve had the advantage of continuing to practice tech comm while studying with some truly amazing scholars in Composition, Rhetoric and Technical Communication (Lipson, Phelps, Brooke, and Kennedy to name a select few). My intellectual development within these three incestuously related academic disciplines has nurtured my growth as a practicing technical communicator and editor. Through the hundreds (thousands?) of readings and my (notably weak) research projects, I couldn't help but recognize how much of my previous practice lacked the theoretical rationale that frames the problems technical communicators face and the methods we use to solve those problems. I've since realized the importance of including scholarly attention to a variety of theoretical and practical issues in my professional work, as well as using a broad range of methods and concepts. This understanding helps me bridge the gap between theory and practice; to simultaneously grow as a scholar and as a practitioner. And what’s wrong with that?

Scholarship is not a four-letter word, and the ivory tower is not as impenetrable as many practitioners would have us believe.

i wanna easter egg

Problem statements are not easy to develop. I know this, which is why I try to instill in engineering students the importance of writing an effective and meaningful problem statement. And yet, there I was yesterday, in an initial project meeting, buying into a “client’s” list of wants, not needs. I walked out of the meeting convincing myself that we had to retrofit an existing workflow and series of business processes – and migrate 11 web sites to a new platform – to accommodate the client.

As TCers know, it’s needs on which we build our functional requirements; it’s needs that we vet, organize and rank to determine how we’re going to solve a client’s problem with an information product. It’s needs from which we create alignment (stasis) throughout the product.

By this morning I’d diffused the wants (and other extraneous commentary) down to a single, actual need. It’s a need that does not warrant anything close to what the client imagined, proposed, or expects. In fact, it’s a need – a real life business requirement – that is being met with existing workflows and information products. It’s just that the client is too clueless to understand this.

I’ll likely spend more time than I should documenting the actual problem and detailing the existing solution to politely convince the client he's missing the point. But that’s part of what we do, right?

the greatness of anology

This has to be the funniest thing I've read in a long time.

"... mobile manufacturers who go the Android route are doing no better than Finnish boys who pee in their pants for warmth in the winter."

For context, see engadget.

Stuff like this makes me miss freelance work. Oh the fun you could have with a quote like that.

do what now?

I think I'll start collecting these to use in WRT 407 and WRT 307. I'll call the collection, Guess What They Really Mean To Say. Kind of catchy, right?

Egregious statement: "... support cross-campus generation of knowledge, enhancing the value of local research by exploring its trans-local ramifications."

Holy academic blather Batman! It's not really important to note who made the statement. It is, however, important to note that the statement is part of a call to action document. I'm still trying to decipher what that call is, but I'm getting closer.

Long live Bill Lutz.

ee humor (barely)

I just ran across this at xkcd. I thought the EEs in WRT 407 would get a kick out of it. I barely get the joke, which is only a little pathetic on a few levels.

spoon full of sugar

I do this every year. I tell students that I’m not going to spend an inordinate amount of time on grammar because, goddammit, it’s an upper-division writing course and they should know this stuff by now. I then find myself including blather like this in my comments to a student’s submission:

... My only comment is in regard to the use of "and/or" in the last sentence. "And/or" means that either both circumstances are possible or only one of two circumstances is possible; however, it tends to be clumsy and awkward because it makes the reader stop and puzzle over your distinction. The more of these “stop signs” we have in our documents, the less effective the documents become as the reader’s frustration with the content increases. Another problem is that too many writers use "and/or" inexactly, so you may have a reader looking at your usage and thinking, “Well, that’s incorrect because I use and/or differently.” Again, this is a pause that pulls the reader out of the text to reconsider not what you’ve written, but how you’ve written it. The best thing to do is recast the sentence to be more precise and avoid confusing your reader with the awkward “and/or” construction.

I couldn’t leave it alone. It’s like a pin in my neck. The funny thing is, it’s completely naïve of me to tell students they should know this stuff by now. The fact is, the majority of people hacking out technical and business documents don’t know this stuff by now, so why should college seniors? Hell, I barely know this stuff and I'm pretending to teach it.

What I should be helping these students do is recognize when something is amiss in their writing and then rely on the handbook or style guide to confirm the hunch. I don’t want to teach grammar and I don’t want pre-professional engineers to hate writing because they hate grammar. The trick is sliding it in without them knowing it – like when you have to mash up your dog’s pill and sprinkle it into his bowl of Chick-O-Beef parts.

The nasty little grammar pill. Bad medicine that, once taken, tastes oh so good.

coming back: what's new

There's always plenty to say, just never enough time to say it. That's not entirely true, but it's an easy colloquial excuse.

WRT 407 started last week. I love teaching this course. This year, the College of Engineering is up for ABET re-accreditation. The last time we went through the process, the ABET reviewers were thoroughly impressed with the embedded nature of the writing instruction in WRT 407. Yet as I review the list of materials I need to provide to the reviewers this time, I'm struck by the request for an assessment summary. I don't recall how I handled this the last go around -- or if it was even requested.

Writing assessment, and the range of emotional responses it generates, continues to be an interesting topic. To meet the ABET requirement, I'm considering focusing specifically on the prevalence of genre in WRT 407 instruction. When I peel away the onion skin, assessment in WRT 407 is conducted exclusively through a review of each student’s work with a range of engineering and technical genres. Students work with different genres in highly contextualized instructional spaces to expose the differences among document types, while reinforcing the many types of associated writing requirements and activities they will encounter as practicing professionals.

I've blathered about this before, but I'm coming back to it now as another means of validating the design and pedagogical strategy we've adopted for WRT 407.

There will certainly be more on this later. It's preoccupying too much of my time for it not to be a series of boring blog posts. But not that there's anything wrong with that.

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.

ccr 760: on jones

The way Jones uses the term “information coordinator” seems more appropriate than Slattery’s “textual coordinator” (see below). Maybe it’s because Jones addresses the importance of “writing” in his broader description of how shifts in technology “create new types of writing and writer” (455). “I found that the writing process had changed and that the writers focused less on producing text and more on developing, coordinating, and structuring the newly adopted corporate intranet” (456). I realize this is essentially the same claim Slattery made, but within Jones ethnographic study, the claim seems more valid because Jones comes back to the writing: “Rather than transferring past information, the writers I studied created items as needed, often in response to a change. When something changed, a writer would be tasked with writing an announcement of the change that would appear on the corporate intranet welcoming screen with a link to a document—usually created by the division making the change but sometimes by the writers—detailing the change” (459).

Ahhhhhh… technical writing as I know it.

The following comment from the corporate communications supervisor synthesizes our earlier readings regarding information design: “She noted that this process “’requires a lot more up-front analysis. You have to know your audiences … and the differences between them’” (458). Similarly, Jones states “because the corporate intranet was still new, the writers needed to create an overall intranet structure that worked for all users" (462). The importance of information design and similar activities illustrate the more telling ways writers’ activities are shaped by certain technologies.

Incidentially, I found in the essay the primary reason why there are so many essays extolling the value of and need for technical writers who do more than write… “The writers at times needed to create content for other divisions of the company. But that was seen as a transitory situation: The goal was for each division to create its own reference content” (460). Going back to Slattery for a moment, the “problem” with technology is that it empowers anyone with access to be a writer. This means there is more crappily written content, which professional technical communicators are left to collect, aggregate, edit, mend, and mash-up. Which is the point Slattery and Jones are both attempting to make.

Oh so cyclical is my thinking.

ccr 760: on slattery

Yes, it’s about the technology. Even way back in the dark ages of 2005, that wasn’t a risky statement to make about technical communication. Slattery states that “information technologies appear to be the primary medium through which [the technical communicator’s] competencies are enacted” (355), but I’m thinking the statement applies to all knowledge workers. When we consider the list of technology-mediated activities – most importantly “the ability to coordinate, to structure workable ecologies of texts and then layer them into the target document" (355), I'm reminded that anyone with a hammer, some wood, and a box of nails can attempt to build a house.

I guess I’m responding to Slattery’s description of “writing” as an act concerned more with “deciding what to put where as it was deciding what to say and how to say it” (357). Rather than making a case for higher-level literacies, we’re reducing textual coordination to an act of content aggregation. That’s something we hire high school kids to do for us in the summer. And, interestingly enough, those high school kids typically have a larger “"technological repertoire" than the knowledge workers they’re assisting.

Slattery’s most important point, I think, is that a technical writer’s skills are experienced through and enacted with technologies. What gets lost are the skills necessary to do good writing in the first place. Slattery states that skill in writing is the “uber IT” (358), but diminishes that uberness by quickly tacking on the process of textual coordination as a necessary or equally important skill “necessary for building the genre ecologies that enable [higher order] thinking” (359).

For me, the activities identified as IT-mediated textual coordination are part of the job – and yes, a very important part of the job. But technical communication is and must continue to be about the writing; the place at which we must start when we teach aspiring TCers.