Our panel attempts to discuss the crucial intersection of various exigencies in rhetoric and technical writing, intersections which concern technical communicators as they engage with their work as symbolic analysts. Each of us begins by questioning a current assumption of technical writing practice as it manifests itself in the classroom, the workplace, or both. Our papers deal specifically with the treatment of ethics in technical writing pedagogy and textbooks that provide frameworks for those pedagogies, the relationship between scientific literacy and technical communication, the theoretical framework of systems mapping in technical writing pedagogy, and the function of the author in collaborative technical documents in the workplace. While these papers vary in topic, they all share the common thread that not challenging the current assumptions that permeate the technical writing field and classroom does a disservice to students, readers, and writers of technical communication. In addition to simply questioning these assumptions, we also attempt to offer fresh perspectives aimed at disrupting current beliefs, practices, and habits; In doing so, we are able to provide innovative strategies that technical communicators in the classroom and the workplace can put to practical use and effectively accommodate the unique audience, purpose, exigence, etc, of each communication situation. We offer new frameworks, ideologies, and theories to revise current classroom and workplace issues in a way that better meets the needs of the multiple and complex audiences of technical writing.

Use the hashtag #GTJD while following our presentation.

ERIC’S DESCRIPTION
The purpose of this essay is to discuss the situational and applied ethics discussed in Paul V. Anderson’s Technical Communication: A reader centered approach. In this paper I attempt to suggest that adding a theoretical lens may open the possibility for a logic of ethics which both informs and expands upon the current discussion of ethics in these books. The specific theoretical lens I suggest is John Stuart Mill’s sense of Utilitarianism through the greatest happiness principle which neatly fits the need to make audience centered communication and documents and helps define why writing for multiple audiences is crucial.

ASHLEIGH’S DESCRIPTION
This essay aims to provide an overview of how novice technical communication teachers can promote scientific literacy in the classroom through classroom activities analyzing scientific discourse. I argue that written scientific discourse includes discourse about science, often authored by nonscientists, as well as discourse by scientists, and that the two cannot be separated. I offer a popular media article written in response to “Climategate” as an example of scientific discourse to share with students. I then propose two interrelated approaches to understanding scientific discourse: a theoretical lenses drawn from the rhetoric of science and practical guidelines for identifying “junk science.”

JILLIAN’S DESCRIPTION:
In this paper, I will argue that applying the terminology and framework of actor-network theory to the description of a complex process or system can afford technical writing students a unique opportunity to reimagine strategies for effective communication within that system.  By allowing students to describe and critique all actors within a system’s network using abstraction and systems thinking, a system description guided by actor-network theory can encourage their role as symbolic analysts in having power to shift information structures.  This type of powerful interpretation and synthesis can be initiated in the classroom through system descriptions guided by actor-network theory.

CHRISTINE’S DESCRIPTION
This paper seeks to answer the question: How does the idea of collage challenge/extend/amplify what we know about authors and authorship, as well as collaboration and plagiarism?  In this paper, I look at how the author is defined and how authorship is negotiated in the workplace in regards to collaboration both with other writers and collaboration with the text. By evaluating the ambiguous roles that professional communicators now have in the workplace, I discuss pedagogical strategies already in place and how they can be improved while also implementing other strategies for a more practical application in the classroom.
Throughout the paper, it becomes evident that authorship and documents are a collage of personal experience and how we collaborate with text and other writers to assimilate all of these pieces into writing.

They state: “Anyone making an ethical decision or giving ethical advice should be aware of the necessity to employ some acceptable standard or other in the judgement to arrive at the decision” (322). Gough and Price believe this decision must be made void of personal feeling or subjectivity: “This standard must be decided independently from the subjective interests of the individual making the decision and independent of the situation in which the decision is made” (322).

Gough and Price’s notion that ethical decisions can/should be made without subjectivity is problematic for one basic reason: it’s completely unrealistic. In fact, this is a point where their entire article starts to tear at the seams from the implicit irony in criticizing the inadequate approach towards ethics in technical writing textbooks since these books apparently “are often sufficiently wrong, vague, misleading, or confusing as to make the problem of effective ethical decision-making more difficult (321).

In the wake of this conjecture, Gough and Price leave us with a long and complicated list of things to remember when judging a situation for its ethics so circuitous and rambling, it’s difficult to say what the takeaway is. Gough and Price’s framing of ethical and non-ethical situations are another unproductive addition that do little to clear up the confusion. They point out there is a difference between legal and ethical situations and that purely individual actions that have no effect on the community are not imbued or affected by ethics. Although this is an interesting claim, it is difficult to point out any individual action that does not either influence the community or stem from the community and the ethics within that given group. Gough and Price’s example of a situation that’s so individual it doesn’t affect ethics is the classic abandoned-on-the-island scenario, but even then one’s arrival on such an island would have been affected by an ethical system.

I would propose that it is more useful for the technical writing classroom to acknowledge that other divisions and fields already heavily address ethics and ethical theory; the technical writing classroom would benefit from adopting those models. Med students are almost always required to take a medical ethics course where they are introduced to theorists, theorists who lend themselves nicely to debates over how to best address any sitatuion. Two such theorists are often John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, who, respectively, propose the ideas of the Greatest Happiness Principle within Utilitarianism and the ideas of maxims and duty in Deontology. A basic summation of their claims emphasizes that Mill says people should do what is best for the group in a quality way where Kant says people should act according to their duty to do what is right.

Technical writing in many ways already adheres to these principles; we as teachers have the opportunity to introduce our students to these ideas in order to give them a model they can apply in any situation instead of thinking that ethics is situational or the result of a long list of intertwined and difficult rules. Within this system we can also show what Gough and Price overlook: ethics is entirely subjective so our students should not expect to ever fully please all audience at once, though they should try to be as respectful as they can.

One such assignment I give involves dividing up the class into groups of four and giving them a specific scenario for a feasibility report and then having them create that document and presentation over Google Docs. Students have to decide who writes what part of the document and whether or not they’ll create an additional presentation (likely through some form of slide ware) or if they’ll present straight off the finished report. I have all of my students pretend that they are employees for a small and locally owned orchard in Pennsylvania, which I base on my parents’ orchard in Minnesota. Using a mock-up of a real world scenario instead of a completely made up example allows me to better define the set of constraints for the students including the nature of the audience.

My students pursue a number of different tasks or new systems for the Orchard including buying a new pickup truck, erecting a deer fence, building a new shed, and investigating different forms of clean energy. The groups set up Google Docs accounts with one another and create and collaborate on the document in real-time. Students can see what other members of the group contribute to the document immediately while also verbally commenting on the material and negotiating a plan. Despite these technologies, however, the experience is not without conflict. Allen et al. comment on the experiences of group conflict they’ve noticed: “Group conflict, which many people fear may occur, did occur in all our respondents groups, ranging from a relatively minor conflict over the use of a particular term to major conflicts over research conclusions” (358).

The conflict as part of the work that stems from collaboration that Allen et al. noticed is not all unlike what happens in my classroom. In one group this summer, one of the students who was sitting on the far end of her group kept asking a particular group member for help understanding particular terms she was encountering like “torque” and “payload.” The other student’s responses were largely dismissive which lead to the first student becoming frustrated, feeling that she didn’t have an equal voice. I eventually intervened, but only lightly since I wanted the group to manage the conflict independent of my authority. Largely the group did create a clean and thorough document, but since the second student never became receptive to the other student’s questions or concerns with the project, his participation grade in the class was lowered.

In some ways, my decision to give a lowered grade stemmed out of Allen et al’s notion that “All members of a shared-document collaborative group have power within the group’s decision-making process and share responsibility for the resulting document . . . individual members are not free to make final decisions affecting the document without consulting the group but instead must go through the group process” (361). Since the outcome was largely affected by one member making decisions and not listening to the others (or at least one specific member of the group), I was not able to acknowledge his role as equal to others.

This is my own pedagogical decision and isn’t necessarily universal to all situations. I still question how to manage situations like these since, as Allen et al. notes, conflict does sometimes serve a purpose: “The statements from our respondents that conflict contributed to their creativity and to the quality of their final document are supported by other work done on group decision making and creativity” (360). This sometimes places us as teachers of technical writing in a strange situation: would it have been better to let my students fight it out and waited to see what happened or was I in the right place as a teacher in a classroom to stand up for my student whose opinions were being squashed by a student who refused to listen?

Perhaps the pedagogical answer is in collaboration itself. Even if technical writing in the workplace may lead to more creative documents after a good cathartic shouting match, as a teacher I am woven into the collaborative process and can’t ever step completely outside of what’s happening in my classroom. By intervening, I also offer a model to the students in the group to see how to resolve conflict and make each voice heard equally, allowing them to later be more functional collaborators in the shared documents they’ll work on outside of my classroom and outside of academia.

Barton and Barton smartly identify the ways in which maps serve political purposes and function to shape reality through Barthe’s sense of myth. With the particular attention they give to the power in ideology, Barton and Barton note in reference to Roland Barthes ideas of signification and myth, “Barthes (1970) term, naturalizes and universalizes a set of practices so that the phenomenon represented appears to be described rather than constructed (235). It is easy to believe that maps still somehow lie within a more purely objective realm and simply copy or record what is actually there instead of constructing something different than the ways territory is actually divided or the way objects are actually centered.

In preparation for Christmas one year, I found a map at my aunt’s house that showed Earth via the perspective of Australia. Australia was neatly perched on the front and center of the map, which placed the USA in the bottom left corner. It’s only natural for Americans to look at this map and immediately declare the map a joke in which the planet has been flipped upside down, yet this seems to ignore both the actual shape of the planet and some basic laws of physics. If we were to start printing maps this way in the US, we would, as Kuhn would claim, essentially create a paradigm shift in our ideology, not unlike the way Galileo and Copernicus both denaturalized and demystified current notions of centrality.

Barton and Barton don’t believe that there is a simple way to avoid biases in maps and think that maps help further propagate Barthe’s ideas of “Myth.” They reference Barthe’s discussion of the Blue Guide that demonstrates bourgeois ideals emphasizing a certain kind of moral discourse (236). Barton and Barton believe the solution to this approach is to be honest about the level of bias in maps instead of trying to ignore or pretend certain political ideals don’t exist. Barton and Barton believe only then will we edge towards any sense of unity in the presentation of maps: “Unity may still be achieved, but it will be a hard-won unity—a unity eschewing the reassuring grand synthesis in favor of the uneasy collocation of competing and rival claims” (249).

One application of this kind of thinking in the tech-writing classroom can address the use of maps overtly like in the example of the Australia worldview above, but this is also relevant to tasks that have map-like writing qualities like PowerPoint presentations. As Tufte rightfully points out, PowerPoint offers its own illogical and frustrating forms of mapping and fragmentation leading to masking “lousy” information (31), though I’m not convinced that Word Processors offer a better solution. Instead, it may help to combine some of the points from Barton and Barton and simultaneously address presentation methods and the need to convey dense information as two separate and equally necessary things. This would result in teaching students how to create a presentation with many slides that integrate images in favor of data accompanied by data-dense handouts that aren’t just a conglomeration of confusing printed slides. Following this method may better meet the goal of Unity in a way which is both better addressing ethics and audience awareness.

Introduction and Overview:

Technical Communication: A Reader Centered Approach purports the ability to take technical writing scenarios and give them an augmented sense of audience awareness by always focusing on creating a reader-centered approach. The book attempts to address a multitude of different documents, document parts (like graphics, headers, tables, etc.), and situations in which a tech writer may be producing documents and then discuss what potential obstacles the reader/audience member may bring to that writing situation. As Anderson (2011) states in his introduction: “When writing think constantly about your readers. Think about what they want from you—and why” (p. 11). 

Writing Process:

Process is emphasized in the book both by demonstrating steps needed to write any number of documents or parts of documents (like front or back matter) alongside the arrangement of chapters that guide the user, reader, or instructor to address documents in a particular order. In Anderson’s case, the book begins with resumes and moves towards more official reports like feasibility reports and empirical research reports near the end.

Anderson shows the process for documents and document components in “writer’s tutorials,” which are purple highlighted sections throughout the book that guide students in a step-by-step process. He does this with a resume, showing where to add borders, tables and how to organize the information; editing graphics and pictures for the sake of web-based documents is another area Anderson focuses on for a tutorial.

Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Theory:

Rhetoric does not have an official representation in Anderson’s book (there’s not even an entry in the index for rhetoric and the word only appears in article names cited in the bibliography), but some key rhetorical concepts, ethos, logos, and pathos, terms that hardly come up again throughout the book are addressed briefly in the chapter regarding persuasion. Indirectly, however, the concepts of Rhetoric are emphasized throughout the book with the constant focus towards potential readers. Anderson does talk about logical fallacies in his discussion of writing documents that utilize cause and effect, but only mentions “post hoc” and “overgeneralization” as two of many other fallacies (p. 254).

Anderson gives the same treatment to other theoretical issues like ethics and mostly isolates discussions of ethics to chapter-end exercises and doesn’t dedicate a full chapter to either ethics or rhetoric. For instance, Anderson addresses ethics briefly in the introduction claiming, “a basic challenge facing anyone addressing ethical issues in workplace settings is that different people have different views of the right actions to take in various situations” (p. 21). Those “situations” however are only really ever addressed in Anderson’s made-up situations instead of in real problems that actually happened or have been studied. Additionally, the situational approach to ethics doesn’t necessarily help students understand the broad theoretical presence of ethics in technical documents.

Document Design:

Anderson emphasizes design in several chapters of his book. He discusses the integration of graphics, coloring, and structuring of a document. This often involves showing examples that Anderson dissects with arrows and commentary in the margins about what kinds of strategies are employed in each kind of document. A basic example of this is the difference between what Anderson calls an experiential resume versus a skill-based resume found scattered throughout chapter 2.

(p. 39)

Anderson also has several chapters near the end of the book where he discusses what he calls the “super structures.” In these final chapters, he takes time to break down the elements and give more specific examples of technical documents including memos, proposals, and reports. Unfortunately, this appears inconveniently at the end of the book while ironically being the most useful part of the book.

Visuals:

Visuals permeate the book with examples of documents and pictures of finished products. Anderson, however, does a poor job following his own advice to “use bright colors to focus your reader’s attention” (advice linked the image below) and overdoes and over-colors the textbook to the point it’s impossible to look at any given page and understand what is most important to understand.

(p. 345)

Pages 368 and 374 are perfect examples of the confusion that occurs as a result of over-styling or over-marking the page. This kind of problem can also be observed on the opening page of any particular chapter (374 Shown below).

Technology:

Anderson has sections where he discusses writing in digital mediums and his book comes with an online component that offers both an interactive version of the textbook (which it turns out, basically means it’s searchable, but not much else) and there are additional quizzes and case scenarios online. The problem is that these scenarios and online components add almost nothing to the book or the course since the electronic book, aside from the ability to use electronic search functions, offers an experience almost identical to the paperback copy. Additionally, the case scenarios, instead of referencing real problems, are often Anderson’s own wonky creations that often emphasize his inelegant sense of dialogue instead of investigating real technical issues that would hold more utility and practicality to students of technical writing. A prime example of Anderson’s approach to case studies is his example of addressing ethical issues in a scientific workplace work place: the scenario consists largely of a long, droll conversation between two colleagues about how to address their superiors about misgivings regarding animal testing, full of detail irrelevant to the actual writing task at hand.

Conclusions:

Anderson’s book, especially with the Instructor Companion book, is a fine resource for first time technical writing teachers, but its inability to focus on actual real-life scenarios or theory, and its ad nauseam focus towards reader-centered approaches (which are often obvious and droll) will inevitably lead teachers to supplement the text with a great deal of other readings both technical and scholarly. In short, this book makes for a great starting point for those not fully familiar or comfortable with technical writing, but you will owe it to yourself and your students to find something better suited to technical writing in subsequent semesters.

Works Cited:

Anderson, P. V. (2010). Technical Communication (7th ed.). Wadsworth Publishing.

Hocks notes, “writers now engage in what Porter calls ‘internetworked writing’—writing that involves the intertwining of production, interaction, and publication in the online classroom or professional workplace as advocating for one’s online audiences” (631). I don’t disagree that our writing is “internetworked” or that we now have a more advanced and faster way to share data and information (including images and other visual elements) than we ever have before, but I think these ideas need to go one step deeper and recognize that our students, and perhaps we too, have identities determined and embedded in these technologies. The Internet here is the material that affects our representations of ourselves; therefore, it more than likely affects our approach to teaching these technologies and how we choose to negotiate visual elements within documents and online environments.

There are a number of theoretical ways to deal with this issue, but one of the most prevalent and grounded examples occurs in composition classrooms through the practice of plagiarism (as suggested by Kenny Goldsmith) particularly as a result of the easy access to information, including visual elements, over the Internet. Showing students how to copy and paste, download, or take screen shots of images and then integrate those images into documents, allows us as teachers to address both the ways in which visual elements have rhetorical value, but also show that these images, like chunks of text, need both in-text and works-cited citations.

In many ways, this also shows that it would be of great value to teach students an ontological epistemological feminist approach to identity and then ask them to apply these theories to the visual texts they encounter in the academic and professional workplace. Students would benefit from examining the relationship between their ideological ideas of themselves and the material aspects of their existence and identity as shaped by the Internet. This kind of analysis would offer value that would extend beyond just examining “audience stance,” “transparency,” and “hybridity” (632). Additionally, an ontological-epistemological approach seems substantially more important than arbitrarily rating our students’ understanding of making good visual texts or admitting that they write within a different domain and environment than previous writers have as Lauer and Sanchez note.

By asking our students to dissect digital rhetoric, we are in part asking them to dissect a material element of who they are. Hocks claims, “Audiences can experience the pleasures of agency and an awareness of themselves as constructed identities in a heterogeneous medium. How that agency gets played out, however, depends on the purpose and situation for the text in relation to the audience’s need for linearity and other familiar forms” (633). In technical writing, we do always want to focus on the way that audience sees and interacts with the documents we create, but it is important not to overlook the fact that our students likely represent an expert audience already, where interaction with digital media is extremely commonplace in their lives.

The approach I’m suggesting allows us as teachers of technical writing to observe the value in Hock’s notion that “If we can teach students to critique the rhetorical and visual features of professional hypertexts-the audience stance …we can also teach them to design their own technological artifacts that use these strategies but are more speculative or activist in nature” (645) and offer an extension to this thought: by teaching students to analyze digital rhetorics and artifacts and their usage and borrowing thereof, we can encourage them to better understand their own roles and formation of their own identities in these mediums as well as their multiple audiences’.

Audience awareness is still important on the web as ever since the structure, design, and created environment all relay a certain rhetorical message to the user. Additionally, it’s more difficult with online documents or sites to guess and better understand who the users are and what beliefs they may bring with them as they encounter and interact with the site. As Selfe and Selfe note, “given this information, it is important to identify the cultural information passed along in the maps of computer interfaces—especially since this information can serve to reproduce…the asymmetrical power relations that, in part, have shaped the educational system we labor within and that students are exposed to” (432). As Anglea Hass would note, these systems would more than likely be patriarchal and framed around the ideals of a white, American male.

Obviously not all users of the Internet or other kinds of technology will relate to an ideal structured for or by a white American male, so the writing and presentation of these interfaces may benefit from being a little more sensitive to the audience. As Selfe and Selfe believe, “In general, computer interfaces present reality as framed in the perspective of modern capitalism, thus orienting technology along an existing axis of class privilege” (433). On the other end, however, tech writers and designers should not realistically think that there is a way to construct a document, interface, or site, that will address every possible audience member, and attempting to do so may be unproductive.

What tech writers should do in online environments, the same as they should with paper-based documents, is consult SME’s and ask many questions of their audience, especially when those two groups overlap. Subject Matter Experts who are experts because they are situated as expert audience members can be very useful guides to tech writers as those writers attempt to create culturally cognizant copy. Asking questions of the audience members also allows for better usability of the design; potential audience members or users should often be questioned at several parts of the process, not just prior to the creation of the document or thing.

Tech writers should not expect to satisfy every potential reader, but it is in the tech writer’s job to ask questions and try to best shape the document or site in a way which his not imposing the writer’s culture on other cultures or assuming that readers from other cultures do not have important views worth addressing. Since many of us are not out producing technical documents for mass audiences but are instead working as teachers with those who will go on to create these documents later, it is our responsibility to promote an inquisitive approach among our students with specific class activities that allow students to actually interact and question people who would use their documents or products and adjust to those cultural values as they find appropriate.

Greg Wilson believes that tech writing has been too bogged down by modernist structures and can be freed by post-modernist beliefs that allow the writers to approach the subject matter in a different way that involves more analysis and less robotic regurgitation of SME data. Wilson states,

Postmodernism has developed as a potent commentary on modernist thought, and our discipline can benefit from examining what it has to offer. In my own teaching, I have drawn on Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping and Reich’s concept of symbolic analysis to encourage students to think differently about the relationships between technical concepts and to critique their relationships as communicators and social actors to technology and authority (74).

Part of Wilson’s argument is that a symbolic analytical approach leads to more security for people working in the tech writing industries and allows for a more fulfilling approach to the work. Certainly it is important to find a way to approach tech writing in a role that isn’t defined by subservience to a company or staff, but stripping the writing of its structure could be a potential danger. Considering Charney’s approach to objective texts (in that they are both not objective and that the writers of such texts don’t pretend that they are creating absolute truths) we can also see that moving away from the objective doesn’t necessarily create the benefit we may think it does.

Part of what’s going on in Wilson’s article and in the Brasseur article is to bring into question what kind of writing tech writing really is. Is it just editing and punctuating sentences as Wilson once worried, or is it something more profound and more relevant that shed light on ideas about culture otherwise not discovered? The answer is that tech writing more than likely does not need to be objective or subjective, creative or uncreative, but rather a practice of writing within “technical fields” more invested in the needs and interests of the audience than other kinds of writing while also employing a more heightened awareness of the scientific methods and approaches to analyzing and using empirical data. If it gets there using ethnography or deconstructing the map, great, but these shouldn’t be positioned as choosing one approach or the other. In this regard, having a structure both to technical writing pedagogy and technical writing itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just looking at the new instructor packets for ENGL 304 and 305 for WVU’s Professional Writing and Editing Undergraduate classes, we can see that both rely heavily on following certain principles and sets of beliefs regarding what kind of writing is right for what kind of situation, neither which outwardly privilege ethnography or a postmodern ideal. The most marked difference between the two classes is the level of persuasion—304 emphasizes persuasion in documents while 305 does so significantly less (the difference between a business proposal and a feasibility report for example). This results in changes of actual assignments (resume in 305 but not a cover letter; that’s 304) and theories applied to discussions.

Certainly we can employ theories and theorists like Jacques Derrida and we can really pick apart how technical writing and creative writing and reflective writing are all really wound together and circling each other, but that’s not necessarily productive. The positive good that comes from differance and deconstructionist theory is one that limits cultural differences and motivations for alienation. Technical writing, however, needs to have some level of structure because it needs to address certain kinds of specific needs for specific kinds of audiences who need to be able to quickly and efficiently use documents to achieve or understand something usually about a specific task. The readers expect structure, and denying them such wouldn’t necessarily be a freeing experience for reader or writer. The postmodern idea that deconstructs structure, then, is fine to apply to the technical writing when addressing ethical or intercultural issues as to open the writer up to a number of possible interpretations by a number of different audience members; it doesn’t necessarily help when trying to understand why to include an introduction, lit review, or methods section in a feasibility report.

I say probably and not definitely since I believe there is always value in self reflection and value in scholarship focused on the examination of writing process, but that value is likely more readily applied to reflective forms of writing that occur within other kinds of English courses like creative non-fiction or English 101 than in the tech writing classroom or the tech writing workplace. Linda Flower and John Hayes endorse a cognitive model of writing process that claims “Obviously, the best way to model the writing process is to study a writer in action” (365), a method that asserts that we can learn from observing what writers do to determine how exactly the writing process occurs. Flower and Hayes conclude, “if one studies the process by which a writer uses a goal to generate ideas, then consolidates those ideas and uses them to revise or regenerate new, more complex goals, one can see this learning process in action” (386). The value of this is “By placing emphasis on the inventive power of the writer, who is able to explore ideas, to develop, act on, test, and regenerate his or her own goals, we are putting an important part of creativity where it belongs-in the hands of the working, thinking writer” (386).

Certainly the act of creating technical documents is one of creativity through a set of specific choices tailored towards an intended audience, but the likelihood that an employer will be interested in the process through which writers get to this outcome is low. I can see how laying the process bare, a rhetorical step Ian Bogost and Kenny Goldsmith would acknowledge, opens the opportunity for instilling corrective procedures to the writing process, but that’s not necessarily Flower’s interest. Flower is interested in studying the process itself, and certainly the pedagogical aspects of this understanding, but not the workplace application, an application that is important to technical writers and the use of their skill.

Ultimately, Flower and Hayes’ study and others like it that focus on the “dynamics of discovery” (381) are interesting, but don’t seem to easily lend themselves to developing specific and applicable writing techniques the same way consulting SME’s, focusing on the Rhetorical situation, or having a smart sense of audience demonstrated through writing technique and form can. If understanding how one comes to any particular conclusion or how that same person stores or manages files could lead to greater work efficiency or better constructed technical documents, I’m sure employers who depend on technical writers would take notice; but until then, the produced product will continue to matter more than the product’s production, a value worth emphasizing in the workplace and classroom.

]]> http://courses.johnmjones.org/ENGL605/2012/09/23/examining-the-writing-process-in-a-technical-environment-does-it-matter/feed/ 4 http://courses.johnmjones.org/ENGL605/2012/09/16/reshaping-the-technical-writer-for-the-scientific-field/ http://courses.johnmjones.org/ENGL605/2012/09/16/reshaping-the-technical-writer-for-the-scientific-field/#comments Sun, 16 Sep 2012 17:10:43 +0000 ewardell http://courses.johnmjones.org/ENGL605/?p=444  When I stand before my technical writing class, I can’t help but feel uneasy about the fact that most of my students are in my classroom because their science disciplines require they take technical writing, though no part of my degree requires that I take any science classes before I dive into these scientific fields and begin writing about them. It’s easy to see how my potential lack of understanding of medical practices could greatly annoy SME’s within medical workplaces as I try to help write documents for them. Our willingness in English departments to analyze and interrogate quantitative practices in other disciplines on the basis that they lack fundamental objectivity creates tensions and places qualitative and ethnographic research in a privileged place: “In the world view that critics offer, intellectual authority becomes a commodity that the academic elite buys into at will . . . empirical researchers in composition are portrayed as petty sycophants, imitating scientific merchandizing to attract a better market share” (Charney 283).

Charney smartly problematizes this way of thinking and highlights “that the very qualities that the critics most object to in scientific work are those that afford the most productive communal discussion” (283) and in a brilliant turn of the argument upon its critics, she claims, “scientific disciplines work hard at active social construction, harder in many respects than disciplines like English” (289). Charney labels this problematic engagement with scientific discourse as the result of “ethnocentrism,” (297) a term she defines as the view that one has the right to claim authority over a certain area or way of thinking. Charney sees this conflict often springing out of placing literary theorists in a privileged place, theorists who sometimes reject the notion of any real societal advancement/change or believe that all things are subjective and cannot be called truths. Charney responds to this division and the charge that statistics can so easily be (and often are) warped: “Certainly some social scientists who use objective methods are uncaring and arrogant, but so are some ethnographers and critical theorists” (291).

Charney’s views don’t mean that there is no good in ethnography, critical theory, or qualitative research, but rather function to emphasize that “authority does not devolve automatically on anyone who uses an objective, quantitative method” (290). The response to this may be to point out that the human involvement in any study diminishes the objectivity, and although there may be truth in this, certainly this doesn’t mean that scientific inquiry should be curtailed or that there is no societal benefit to these changes and advancements. Adopting an apathetic or untrusting view of the scientific process could be detrimental to medical and environmental research in particular. These thoughts against scientific methods and inquiry seem to spring from a fundamental misunderstanding of the work that goes on within scientific fields.

I mentioned earlier that there seems to be an odd privileged binary in my classroom where I attempt to educate students from various scientific fields about writing while never having to learn anything about any of their fields before getting my own degree. My Professional Writing and Editing Degree does allow me to take a computer programing class or a statistics course as part of my language requirement, but I do not have the opportunity to diversify my knowledge in the sciences as part of my core curricula—I only have that opportunity with literature and creative writing classes, classes that may not have much to do with a technical writing job.

Certainly writing is a specialized skill and people within the scientific community benefit from knowing more about writing from technical writing teachers, but what duty do technical writers have to learn something from about scientific discourse beyond just the writing process? If students pursuing technical writing degrees were required to take more science-y classes (and likely in place of literature or creative writing) perhaps technical writers and researchers would be better prepared for the work they pursue; the larger value may be a better understanding and trust of the use of quantitative data and the great degree of testing and collaboration that already go into these studies and forms of research. As Charney notes, “Our over-reliance on qualitative studies and repeated disparagement of objective methods is creating a serious imbalance in studies of technical and professional writing—and the same may be true in composition studies as a whole” (296). Through adding the proper classes (and this deserves more lengthy unpacking discussing the possible program structure changes) students may have the opportunity to achieve the balance Charney advocates for and then understand the value of quantitative studies and how such studies can help inform ethnographic or qualitative studies and support claims drawn out of more personal data.

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