Comments on: Week One Response: What Can Technical Writing Be and What is its Role in the University?

By: Rachel Henderson

Rachel Henderson — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:37:23 +0000

Eric, I was interested in your closing lines: “My hope…is that students will leave my class and enter their technical fields with both the ability to produce the reports their employers ask of them, but also with the awareness of audience and purpose that different kinds of complex rhetorical situations will demand of them. I tell my students on the first day that the course will both provide technical writing skills, but will also function partially as a career exploration class. This should allow them to better understand the job market, their choices to pursue different majors, and how communication functions within a multitude of different contexts and situations.” This is something I’ve hoped for in every class I’ve walked into in the two professional writing (and editing) programs I’ve been in, that time will be spent on illuminating the job market, particularly the various fields and industries in which someone with a professional writing degree can find themselves. Unfortunately, the balance Miller wrote of is something I feel I’ve had little of in my education, a balance between theory and practice, humanistic studies and practical research.

I agree with you, Christina, that one of the weakest links within this discourse of the binary between science and humanities is that it’s hard to define the terms we’re using within our conversations. How do you define rhetoric? Professional writing? Technical writing? The workplace, when there are so many workplaces? I start to confuse myself and lose track of any point I’m trying to articulate or thought I’m trying to formulate when I start looking at and thinking too closely about the definitions of these different elements.

By: AshleighP

AshleighP — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:08:07 +0000

Christina, I also appreciated how Miller brought in Aristotle’s concept of techne. In fact, I originally thought she proposed techne as the solution to both the list of binaries on page 67 and to the problem of practicality – until I read the section on practical rhetoric as conduct. Techne does seem to help us move beyond that list of oppositions; rhetoric as conduct goes a step further by calling our attention to the ethics of communication.

Techne is an elegant concept, right? Kind of makes me want to read the Nicomachean Ethics.

By: cseymour

cseymour — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:50:08 +0000

Hi Eric! And Aaron. I really appreciate Miller’s solution of techne, and her synonym for it: art. Techne is both thinking and doing at once, reflecting after doing, doing after reflecting, so that practice and theory are constantly in balance. The terms become a little unstable, though. Reading through Miller’s article, I begin to wonder what we all mean by humanism, by practicality, by utility, by rhetoric. Each of our authors this week seems to have a slightly different definition for each–Miller even shifts meanings a few times throughout her article. Maybe this inability to decide what we’re really talking about is the root cause of the engineering/English divide. The way of posing the problem (through binaries) is the problem. The solution to any binary usually is that one Miller reached, balance.

It’s nice that you, Eric, have applied the readings to your own teaching and arrived at your own term for this balance: rhetoric (which is often mine, too). I wonder about how you frame English 305 as an experience in career-exploration. How does that work? Do you have students define what career they want, research what kinds of writing they might do in that career, and focus them accordingly? Then enters the ethical question brought up by the reading: how much should we allow industry to influence academia? How practical should be be if being practical means being useful, and then we’re just producing students who can achieve the required task but add nothing new to it? How can we help our students become not just performers but innovators in their fields? Big questions, I know.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 17:42:32 +0000

For me, Miller’s thoughts on emphasizing rhetoric more than ‘practical learning’ (or vice versa) in the classroom really illustrate the kind of subversive divide between the humanities and sciences in the university. Looking back a little further to last century, Bob Connors elucidates this struggle too. After the Mann Report on Engineering Curricula encouraged engineers to spend more time studying up on English in 1918, Connors writes that, “It was during this period when the engineering-only hardliners threw up their hands and integrated English in the curriculum” (8) (Emphasis mine). Certainly surprising that even with a kind of olive branch from the humanities to schools of engineering that this is the kind of rhetoric used to describe tech writing’s escape from fists high and torches ablaze persecution (hyperbole, but you get it).