Gough and Price clearly state that good ethics should prelude the situational context:

If we were to suggest (mistakenly) that all ethical decisions could vary from one individual to another and from one circumstance to another, then consistent ethical advice would be difficult if not impossible. The mistake here is confusing propriety (which may change by circumstance) with sound ethical decisions (which are invariant to circumstances). (p. 324)

Gough and Price make several points here. Firstly, there is a difference between propriety and sound ethical decisions. While propriety may vary from individual to individual or circumstance to circumstance, ethics may not. These pre-existing ethics may be applied to different situations, certainly, but their existence always precludes the situation.

Dombrowski’s paper, on the other hand, presents several examples which suggest that ethics are situated in the personal and contextual. Dombrowski discusses two examples of situations that were based on following procedural ethics: the Challenger disaster and Sophist teaching. Dombrowksi argues that ethical systems like these are fallacious because they do not take the personal into account. Dombrowski then suggests that Socrates’ view on ethics is more correct. Dombrowski writes that Socrates held that good ethical conduct was impossible to teach and differed depending on the situation:

Socrates also held that virtue—ethical conduct—could not be taught because it too could not be reduced to a set of rules. Ethics could not be reduced to technai because of the uniqueness of every situation. Instead, the right thing to do had to be determined in each particular situation, a determination that required the engagement of real individuals earnestly arguing according to their own enlightenment. (p. 335)

Socrates’ view on ethics is significantly different from Gough and Price’s view on ethics: for Gough and Price, ethics preclude the situation; for Socrates, ethics had to be based on the unique situation.

Dombrowski concludes that: “[Ethics] is not a fixed set of rules but an ongoing human activity that must continually be thrashed out for particular circumstances and people. This is not to say that nothing can be said about ethics in general, only that the difficult business of arguing between competing values cannot entirely be circumvented” (p. 337).

I believe that it is possible to merge both the ideas from Gough and Price’s paper and the ideas from Dombrowksi’s paper. Ethical guidelines that preclude situational context (be truthful, be compassionate, have a concern for human rights, advocate justice, etc.) can be applied uniquely in different situations. But the overarching values should not change. Otherwise, as Gough and Price point out, people will be implicated in perpetrating hypocrisy and inconsistency (p. 324).

Dombrowski, P. M. “Can ethics be technologized? Lessons from Challenger, philosophy, and rhetoric.”

Gough, J. and Price, A. “Developing ethical decision-making skills: How textbooks fail students.”

In this blog post, I will examine what each text has to say about what collaborative writing is, and what values are attached to it.

What Is Collaborative Writing?
Allen et. al (2004) identify a range of activities that can be described as collaborative writing. Works can be:

• Planned and drafted individually but edited by a supervisor or peers
• Planned and drafted individually but revised collaboratively
• Planned collaboratively but drafted and revised individually
• Co-authored (p. 353)

However, while Allen et. al acknowledge that many variations of collaboration may exist, they specifically focus on Wiener’s conception of collaboration as an activity which must involve consensus. Allen et. al (2004) clarify the parameters within which their study will operate: “We wanted to investigate collaboration as it existed in the activities of experienced collaborators on the job – professional people who had worked together throughout the planning, drafting, and revising activities of a single document” (p. 354). In other words, Allen et. al focus on co-authored documents, documents that have been created collaboratively from beginning to finish.

Technical Communication does not focus specifically on any of the different types of collaborative writing that Allen et. al listed. Instead, the textbook stresses that any of these approaches may be used in the workplace. In fact, in the text’s “Guidelines for Managing a Collaborative Project,” step number four addresses group organization. The textbook suggests two different collaborative approaches that may be used in the workplace, involving differing individual and group roles in planning, researching, drafting, and revising the single document (Lannon, 2003, p. 98).

Values Associated with Collaborative Work
In her introduction to “What Experienced Collaborators Say about Collaborative Writing,” Allen (2004) identifies some of the important values associated with collaborative work:

Today’s employers apparently still see collaborative projects as ones in which group members divide a large workload or contribute particular expertise. These are good reasons for collaboration, but they overlook what I find to be the greatest values of working with a group: the deeper understanding of a rhetorical situation that comes from batting ideas back and forth with co-authors, or the sense of common purposes and respect that can result from shared interests and discussions (p. 351, emphasis mine).

Allen clearly delineates two of the greatest values of working with a group: the exchange of ideas, and the sense of common purpose and respect that can develop between teammates. Are these values shared by Technical Communication? The chapter opens up with a description of successful collaboration: “Successful collaboration combines the best that each team member has to offer. It enhances creative thinking by providing new and different perspectives, innovative ideas, and solutions. It enhances critical thinking by providing feedback, group support, and the chance to test ideas in group support, and the chance to test ideas in group discussion” (Lannon, 2003, p. 97). The textbook’s description emphasizes three aspects of collaboration, in this order:

• Combines the best that each team member has to offer (roughly analogous to “contribut[ing] particular expertise,” as Allen expresses it)
• Enhances creative thinking by providing new and different perspectives (similar to Allen’s “batting ideas back and forth”)
• Enhances critical thinking by providing feedback, group support, and the chance to test ideas (similar to a combination of Allen’s “batting ideas back and forth” and increasing “sense of common purpose”)

The textbook does not discuss collaboration in terms of dividing a workload up to make it more manageable; neither does it specifically mention fostering a sense of respect among teammates.

Allen, N., Atkinson, D., Morgan, M., Moore, T., and Snow, C. (2004). What experienced collaborators say about collaborative writing. In J. Johndan-Eilola and S.A. Selber (Eds.) Central Works in Technical Communication. pp. 351-364. New York and Oxford:    University Press.

Lannon, J.M. (Ed.). (2003). Technical communication (9th ed.). New York, NY: Longman.

In an attempt to fight against the effects of naturalization, Barton and Barton (1993) offer examples of ways to avoid presenting reality as a unified whole. These examples include presenting spatial information in a collage format and temporal information as palimpsest (p. 245).

One example of “denaturalize[ing] the natural” (p. 235) that Barton and Barton (1993) give is “the lighted board map in several Parisian Metro stations, whereby the viewer can override the totalizing effect of the map by registering her destination and receiving an individualized, highlighted itinerary” (p. 248). This particular technique seems to be well-fitted for the digital sphere, where space is much more abundant than print space.

In fact, Google offers a mapping overlay service, which allows users the chance to individualize their Google maps. Google specifically offers:

• Google Picasa (used to place personal photos on Google maps)
• My Places (used to draw personalized maps)
• Data in Tables (used to draw maps based on data imported into Google Fusion Tables)
• GPS Tracks (used to convert and store GPS files onto your computer)

Google also allows users to upload their own versions of maps and to overlay information on these maps with its Map Maker service.

This service is certainly similar to the highlighted itinerary offered by the Parisian Metro stations mentioned in Barton and Barton’s paper. Map Builder also offers similar services. The digital medium, then, seems to offer rich potential for postmodern explorations of representation.

What the paper did not discuss as thoroughly, however, was how postmodern concepts of design could be applied to print texts. (To be fair, the paper claims to address visual design, not print-based text design. I found the topic interesting, nevertheless.)

The paper does offer a few simple guidelines for writing centered on denaturalizing the natural. For instance, according to Barton and Barton, authors should not mask the fact that their writing is an act of production. Writers should also include long block quotes, rather than simply summarizing important information, in order to include the Other (in this case, the other author). Finally, writers should include as many footnotes and marginalia as are needed, and avoid representing reality as a fixed entity (Barton and Barton, 1993, p. 239).

Yet it seems more difficult to implement postmodern concepts into writing than it does to implement postmodern concepts into visual design. This stems from the fact that writing is primarily linear, and linear entities are, by their nature, ordered.

As Barton and Barton (1993) remind us, “Privileging is also effected in a series through ordering, where the first, and to a lesser extent, the last, elements gain distinction” (p. 237). In writing, then, certain things topics are going to be highlighted just because they appear before others. For instance, even in Barton and Barton’s paper, which employs some of the postmodern techniques that the authors list, information is presented in a hierarchal order. The section on “rules of inclusion,” for example, is privileged over the section on “rules of exclusion” because the former appears before the latter.

Barton B.B. & Barton M.S. (1993). Ideology and the map: Toward a postmodern visual design practice. In J. Johnson-Eilola and S.A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 232-252). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.

The cover of Technical Communication (9th Ed.) by John M. Lannon

Introduction

The ninth edition of John M. Lannon’s Technical Communication particularly focuses on the social aspects of technical communication, and emphasizes the importance of audience awareness, ethical considerations, and understanding the contexts of workplaces. The textbook’s preface lists several changes from the eighth edition, including:

• Updated chapters on Web design, document design, and usability that “reflect changes in the technology”
• Added exercises focused on service-learning
• Expanded chapter on collaboration
• Increased coverage of information literacy and critical thinking throughout Part II
• More comprehensive look at ethical and legal issues, and an increased attention to international and global workplace issues (p. xix-xx).

The textbook is divided into six different parts:

1. Communicating in the Workplace
2. The Research Process
3. Structural and Style Elements
4. Visual, Design, and Usability Elements
5. Specific Documents and Applications
6. A Brief Handbook with Additional Sample Documents (p. v-vi).

The percentage of page space that each part uses in Lannon’s Technical Communication. Part IV, “Visual, Design, and Usability Elements,” was the longest section of the textbook.

Writing process

Writing is very much defined as a process in Technical Communication. Lannon breaks down writing into five stages: “gather[ing] and evaluat[ing] ideas and information, plan[ning] the document, draft[ing] the document, and revis[ing] the document” (p. 18). Lannon writes that, “Each of these stages are enriched by creative and critical thinking,” and insists that these stages aren’t completely linear: “No one stage of the writing process is complete until all stages are complete” (p. 19). Thus writing, in Lannon’s view, is a recursive process.

Rhetoric and persuasion

Technical Communication places a great deal of emphasis on audience awareness and the power of persuasion. Chapters 3 and 4, in particular, focus on audience awareness and persuasion.

Chapter 3 lists several types of audiences that technical communicators may encounter, and how to address each audience type effectively. Chapter 3 also offers four pages on topics to consider when writing for a specific audience, including the:

• Purpose of the document
• Audience’s technical background
• Audience’s cultural background
• Audience’s knowledge of the subject
• Appropriate details, format, and design
• Due date and timing (p. 32-35)

Chapter 4, titled “Making a Persuasive Case,” focuses on defining persuasion, outlining the different persuasive goals people may have, and addressing how to write persuasively (p. 39-68).

Style and tone

The entirety of Part III is covers style and tone. Chapter 12, “Organizing for Users,” is concerned with structuring paragraphs and sequencing. Chapter 13, “Revising for Readable Style,” identifies several goals related to tone and style for the ideal document. According to this section, readable documents should be:

• Clear
• Concise
• Fluent
• Focused on using exact word choice

Readable documents should also use an active tone and avoid personal bias.

Lannon points out in Chapter 1 that: “Technical communication does not seek to entertain, create suspense, or invite differing interpretation . . . it leaves little room for ambiguity . . . Technical communication . . . doesn’t address your feelings, hopes, dreams, and feelings” (p. 3).

Document design

Chapters 15 through 17 cover document design. Chapter 15 specifically addresses page and document design, while Chapter 16 addresses document supplements, and Chapter 17 addresses designing and testing documents for usability. Chapter 15 treats document design as a process that occurs after “tailoring the material for the audience, building a persuasive case, organizing for users’ understanding, honing sentences and word choice, and using visuals. According to the chapter, it is only after these decisions have been made that document design occurs: “Finally, you decide how to present your communication on the page itself, to achieve a specific effect.” Page design is described as “determin[ing] the look of a page (whether hard copy or electronic), the arrangement of words and visuals” (p. 344, emphasis mine).

Document genres and types of writing

Although document genres and types of writing are not specifically addressed until Part V of the textbook, the topic is covered extensively. Seven of the nine chapters in Part V specifically address different document genres. These chapters cover:

• Memo reports and electronic mail
• Letters and employment correspondence
• Web pages and other electronic documents
• Instructional documents
• Proposals
• Analytical reports
• Oral presentations

Visuals and oral communication

Visual Design, Chapter 14: Brumberger (2007) posits that visual and verbal thinking should be treated as complementary (p. 389). Like Brumberger, Lannon makes the argument that verbal and visual messages should ideally work together to create meaning: “This doesn’t mean that verbal messages have become obsolete. Instead, words integrate with shapes and images to create what design expert Robert Horn calls visual language” (Lannon, 2003, p. 291).

Technical Communication addresses a wide variety of visual genres, including:

• Tables (numerical and prose tables)
• Graphs (bar and line graphs)
• Charts (pie charts, organization charts, flowcharts, Gantt charts, tree charts, and pictograms)
• Graphic Illustrations (representational, exploded, cutaway, and schematic diagrams, and maps and photographs)

Oral Communication, Chapter 26: This section opens with a section titled, “Avoiding Presentation Pitfalls,” and offers a table to describe things that may go wrong in a presentation, because of the speaker, poor visuals, or the presentation setting. After discussing how to avoid these negatives, the text goes on to describe how to plan a presentation effectively. The textbook approaches this topic through a focus on rhetorical context; the first three sub-sections are titled, “Work from an Explicit Purpose Statement,” “Analyze Your Listeners,” and “Analyze Your Speaking Situation” (p. 639-640).

Research and writing technologies

The textbook emphasizes research methods, devoting Part II (15% of its page space) to the topic. Research is described as “a deliberate form of inquiry, a process of problem solving in which certain procedures follow a recognizable sequence.”

Both the procedural and inquiry stages of the research project are depicted in flowchart form (p. 119).

The textbook does not stress writing technologies nearly as often as it stresses the research process; Chapter 20 is the only chapter to specifically address the topic.

Citations

Brumberger, E.R. (2007). Making the strange familiar: A pedagogical exploration of visual thinking. Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 21(4 ). Retrieved from http://courses.johnmjones.org/ENGL605/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Brumberger-2007.pdf

Lannon, J.M. (Ed.). (2003). Technical communication (9th ed.). New York, NY: Longman.

This is an interesting and increasingly relevant question, as more and more writing takes place within a digital space. Brumberger points out that it has been a popular claim that writing in the digital medium is inherently more influenced by the visual than writing in the print medium: “Two important changes (among others) have marked professional writing practice over the past decades: First, design, which was previously not the responsibility of the tech writer, now often falls squarely into that writer’s domain; second, of course, is the growth of hypertexts, online help systems, and other forms of electronic documents, which, many have argued, are inherently more visual than their print predecessors” (377, emphasis mine).

If this is true: if digital media is more visual than the print medium, and digital media is also becoming more and more utilized as a writing space, then the question of whether or not the visual will eventually supersede the verbal is a significant one. There are certainly an abundance of visual-based social media, including Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, infographic sites like this one, and Flipboard. There are quite a few blog posts devoted to the growing popularity of social media, including: The Dawn of Social Media, Trend Alert: The Next Big Thing in Social Media is Visual, and Visual Leads the Way. And it is certainly true that even social media sites like Facebook and Twitter integrate the visual through the usage of videos (primarily Facebook), customizable backgrounds (Twitter), and photographs (both). Even blog posts frequently rely on photographs or memes to relay important information.

Could visual communication supersede verbal communication? It’s certainly possible: the verbal components of social media are often shortened forms of earlier social media. Facebook status updates are shorter than 1,000 word blog posts, and Twitter updates can only include up to 140 characters. The advantages of visual communication in digital media are significant: visuals are often universal in a way that languages are not, and convey more information using less space and time. Yet it would be a mistake, I think, to predict that verbal communication will be completely replaced by visual communication, because some things are too complicated to depict in illustrations/drawings. For example, describing how car engines work would be difficult to depict entirely in visuals.

Brumberger, Eva R. “Making the Strange Familiar:A Pedagogical Exploration of Visual Thinking.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication . Journal 21.4(2007): 376-401. PDF.

One of the most salient points that the article made was that “cultural studies approaches to technical communication research, practice, and pedagogy can guide and support us in creating more culturally responsive and responsible texts that accommodate their users” (281). In other words, cultural studies address one of the most central features of rhetoric: audience awareness. Technical communicators will be better equipped to connect effectively with their intended audience if they are well-grounded in their audience’s cultural background(s). But I wondered: what would this process look like on a practical level? Would technical communicators begin to create multiple versions of instruction manuals for different cultural backgrounds? And if so, which cultural backgrounds would be included, and which would be omitted? Or would technical communicators try to create documents that emphasize “universal” cultural values? Finally, would technical communicators attempt to synthesize seemingly paradoxical cultural values into one document?

Although Haas does not attempt to answer these particular questions in her article, she does make the point that technical communication has been “saturated in white male culture” and that whiteness has been privileged in the field. She discusses Johnson et. al’s work on early technical communication in New Mexico, which reveals whiteness “vis- à –vis ‘color blindness’ (refusal to see color), selective attribution (specific application of race), whitewashing (the removal of race for whites), and privileged language (the valuation of one knowledge or ideology over another’ (Johnson et al 215).”

One of the interesting points that Haas makes in connection to the field’s (technical communication’s) alignment with whiteness is that “whiteness often goes underexamined, as many in U.S. society think that only people of color have racial identity” (284) and that “critiquing racism often proves to be limited and shallow without integrating a deep critique of whiteness” (285).  In other words, in order to more fully understand the framework within which technical communication operates, Haas argues that whiteness as a cultural construct must be critically examined, and that whiteness as the absence of culture is a type of a “lie.” Haas cites Roediger in Racial Classification and History, who specifically makes that very point: “But such specific ethnic cultures [Irish American, Italian, Slavic American, and German American] always stand in danger of being swallowed by the lie of whiteness. Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture” (13).

If technical communication is grounded in the lie of whiteness as “the absence of culture,” what does this mean for the field as a whole? Haas suggests that critically examining whiteness will be an important first step in understanding on what assumptions technical communication currently operates, and how to expand considerations to include audience awareness of minority groups.

Haas, Angela M. “Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: A Case Study of Decolonial Technical Communication Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 26.3 (2012): 277-309. PDF.

Johnson, J. R., Pimentel, O., & Pimentel, C. “Writing New Mexico White: A Critical Analysis of Early Representations of New Mexico in Technical Writing.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 22 (2008): 211–236. PDF.

Roediger, D. R. Introduction. Racial Classification and History. By E. N. Gates (Ed.) New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. 345–363. Print.

But the term modernism is used so often in art and literature, and carries such rich connotations, that it seems risky to apply it in such a broad sense in an academic paper. Modernist literature (and art) is significantly different from Enlightenment literature. Whereas the Enlightenment embraced science and technological progress as a solution to the world’s problems, Modernist writers and artists often depicted the industrial world in negative terms. They emphasized the alienation, isolation, and fragmentation of the mechanized, modern world. (Click here for my source). So it seemed like a bit of a stretch to portray Modernism as an extension of the Enlightenment metanarrative.

With that being said, I thought that Wilson’s argument was an interesting refashioning of a recurring debate in the technical communication field: the debate between viewing technical communication as the objective transfer of facts (the transmission view) versus viewing it as a more problematic enterprise.

One of the claims that Wilson makes is that technical communication, at least in 2001, was too bound up in the scientific and engineering epistemologies: “Despite the inertia and potential of these valuable efforts [the efforts to observe workplaces and to forge professionally relevant composition courses], we still find ourselves and our students relying mostly on scientific and engineering epistemologies that suggest that language can reflect concrete facts unproblematically – epistemologies and pedagogies that, I fear, fate technical communicators as scribes and not as agents in the representation of technology.” Wilson goes on to link the field’s reliance on the myth of scientific objectivity explicitly to modernist epistemologies: “Because of these modernist epistemologies and assumptions about how to write and think about technology, technical communication pedagogy has focused for the most part on a limited set of skills. Too many corporate seminars focus on checklists such as 10 things you can do today to improve your technical writing” (75).

In other words, Wilson critiques several views of technical communication at once: he questions the existence of total scientific objectivity, contests the view that technical communication is merely the work of a scribe, and distrusts practical approaches which are grounded in mechanistic, prescribed steps. Wilson’s piece explores several of the binaries that our class has covered so far: scientific objectivity versus social constructionism, the transmission and translation views versus the articulation view, and practical-based approaches versus humanities-based approaches. Ultimately, Wilson critiques scientific objectivity, the transmission and translation views of communication, and practical-based approaches to technical communication.

Wilson, Greg. “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.1 (2001): 72-99. PDF.

As Flower and Hayes contend in “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing,” and Faigley argues in “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal,” writing is not a linear process. At least, mine certainly isn’t. (My writing process goes something like this: write the word “TITLE” in all capital letters at the top of the page, stare at the page for a little while, type some ideas that I may or may not use later, loosely organize those ideas, type a sentence, erase it, type it again, erase it again, decide I need to start in the middle, write a sentence, erase it, decide to change my focus). After this exhausting exercise, I realize I still have nothing to show for it on the page. I think of the man mentioned in Flower and Hayes’ article, who had to write an article about his job as an English teacher for the magazine Seventeen and feel a kinship with him, because he also had trouble coming up with an opening sentence. Then I think of how I quietly defied my English teachers as a high school student, and wrote my rough drafts before my prewrites because I thought it was easier that way, and wonder if this has some kind of pedagogical significance. And then I eat some more Kit-Kats because that does not require much thinking at all.

Truthfully, I see writing as either a mechanical process or a vastly organic activity, much as Coleridge did: “Coleridge contrasted two kinds of form – one mechanical, when we impress upon any material a predetermined form, the other organic, when the material shapes itself from within. Coleridge also realized that the plant metaphor implied a kind of organic determinism. (Tulip bulbs cannot grow into daffodils). He avoided this consequence by insisting upon the free will of the artist, that the artist has foresight and the power of choice” (Faigley 530).

There are certainly writers who attempt to shape their material to rigidly-defined forms. These writers might begin with a standardized example of a business letter, for example, or a resume, and then strip that document of all of its details. Eventually, the writer adds in relevant details to flesh out the skeletal form. The problem with this kind of writing is that it underestimates the power of the form itself. Truly talented writers realize that the form is a flexible entity, and that altering certain aspects of the structure of a document is a powerful rhetorical tool. Changing the rhyming scheme of a poem, for instance, can entirely alter a reader’s interpretation of the poem. Various structures within a novel, too, can add to or detract meaning from the novel’s main themes. Changes in form are also important in business writing: it is significant if a writer chooses to add a “purpose” section to his or her resume, and it is equally significant if he or she does not.

In contrast, writers who conceive of writing as an organic activity are likely to view text as a living entity that “grows” in different directions but which can be “pruned.” This model accounts for the fact that writers often describe their text as “going in unplanned directions” (it doesn’t follow a linear path from the writer’s original goal to the end product), but which also allows the writers some control over the final product (the writer ultimately gets to choose which “branches” of thought get pruned away, which are given more attention: “cultivated,” and how they are organized).

Ultimately, my own writing process is organic – perhaps too organic, if such a thing is possible. My writing usually begins with an idea that I later discard completely. For example, originally this blog post was going to address how Slattery, Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, and Mark Zachry chose to focus on a sub-topic of the writing process, writing as a distributed activity. Two paragraphs in, I changed my mind, and ended up with this post instead. Perhaps that’s because I don’t prewrite properly?

Faigley, Lester. “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal.” College English 48.6. (1986): 527-542.  PDF.

Flower, Linda and John R. Hayes. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 32.4. (1981): 365-387. PDF.

Hart-Davidson, William, Clay Spinuzzi, and Mark Zachry. “Visualizing Writing Activity as Knowledge Work: Challenges & Opportunities.” ACM SIGDOC. (2006): 70-77. PDF.

Slattery, Shaun. “Undistributing Work Through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Information Environments.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16.3. (2007): 311-325. PDF.

Koerber and McMichael work off the assumption that it is possible to develop a systematic vocabulary (and teaching method) for understanding and transferring knowledge about qualitative methods to students. Koerber and McMichael state: “Our field has not yet developed a systematic, transferable vocabulary for discussing and evaluating the traits of appropriate qualitative samples that can help us to compare such studies to each other and, most important, to teach students how to select their own samples for qualitative research” (458). The underlying assumption here is that such a systematic vocabulary can be developed, but hasn’t been yet.

Although this assumption seems fairly straight-forward, it is worth deconstructing. How does this underlying assumption align with, or diverge from, arguments we have read from other technical communicator researchers in this course? On the whole, the underlying assumption in “Qualitative Sampling Methods: A Primer for Technical Communications” seems to be incompatible with the conclusions that other technical communicators have reached about the nature of language and, in a narrower sense, technical communication as a discipline.

For instance, the assumption that a systematic vocabulary can be created and then taught is actively opposed to Kent’s conclusion in “Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of  Rhetoric.” Kent concluded that teaching language in any systematic way is impossible because language is ultimately intuitive guesswork, an attempt between communicators to align hermeneutic strategies.

I suspect that other technical communicators would be uncomfortable with the assertion that a systematic vocabulary can be developed, and transferred whole-cloth, to all technical communication classes, as well. Koerber and McMichael specifically include the phrase “transferable vocabulary” in the development of their argument, which is problematic precisely because it makes the claim that vocabulary can be objectively and accurately transferred from one to location to another. This is similar to the transmission view of communication that Slack, Miller, and Doak actively challenge in their article, “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.”

Koeber and McMichael’s conclusion is also problematic, in that it promotes the blending of quantitative and qualitative research methods through the application of more “rigor” to qualitative research. In other words, in order to bridge the gap between the more specific, subjective nature of qualitative research and the more generalized, “objective” nature of quantitative research, Koeber and McMichael suggest that qualitative research become more like quantitative research, more based on systematic processes and “rigor,” shifting its definition ever so slightly.

Kent, Thomas. “Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 8.1 (1989): 24-42. JSTOR. Web. 1 Sept. 2012.

Koerber, Amy and Lonie McMichael. “Qualitative Sampling Methods: A Primer for Technical Communicators.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Oct 2008; vol. 22: pp. 454-473. Web. 15 Sept. 2012.\

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 160-174. Print.

Although each of these pieces focuses on challenging the definition of technical communication as simple information transfer, they use different terms and different frameworks to address the issue. Lay emphasizes the connections between feminist studies and technical writing, working to demonstrate that women may have a unique skill set especially suitable for collaborative technical writing. Lay recognizes that technical communication should be dialogic in nature; that technical communicators should seek to identify with their audiences, and “must seek the many voices of those who witness and experience the culture they investigate.” Lay points out that Ede and Lunsford found that women technical writers use this dialogic model the most often, and suggests that this skill should be adopted in a widespread manner by both men and women collaborators.

In “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority,” the authors also contest the view that technical communication is merely the accurate transfer of information from sender to receiver. The authors give this view a label: they call it the transmission view. In the transmission view, knowledge is encoded by the sender and is decoded by the receiver. The power rests with the sender, who can influence the receiver to act in a certain, predictable way, so long as his or her instructions are clear. Slack, Miller, and Doak offer two alternative views of communication in place of the transmission view, ultimately advocating what they call the articulation view of communication. The articulation view of communication holds that “technical communicators are theoretically situated in the process of articulating meaning just as prominently as are the sender and the receiver” (172). In other words, the technical communication process is dialogic: meanings are negotiated between engineer, technical writer, and receiver. The power of the receiver (audience) is elevated, because they can interpret a message in various ways from within the arena of meaning that the technical communicator has created. In a similar way, the power of the technical communicator is also extended.

Johnson-Eilola’s essay is also concerned with the power that the technical communicator possesses (or more accurately, lacks). Johnson-Eilola claims that as long as technical communicators are seen in a supporting role, their work will be disregarded as secondary to the product being sold. Johnson-Eilola offers a solution, however. He suggests that technical communicators get involved in the actual design of products, and consider the broad, often complicated ways that customers use the products while designing instruction manuals. Although I do believe that this model will help elevate the role of technical writers, the practical implications are extensive. Technical communicators would have to have a relatively extensive background in the technical field that they were planning to work with, and would perhaps have to take additional courses to learn more about engineering processes.

Works Cited

1. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 175-192. Print.

2. Lay, Mary M. “Feminist Theory and the Redefinition of Technical Communication.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 146-159. Print.

3. Slack, Jennifer Daryl, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 160-174. Print.