Nelson, from Selzers “The Composing Process of an Engineer”, writes his papers so that he can persuade his audience (180). He does this by organizing his papers in ways that appeal most to his audience: He writes his papers in short sentences that he believes are palatable for his readers (Selzer 183), and he “analyzes his audience’s needs carefully” while coming up with the content of those sentences (180). While Nelson does not revise his paper much, he outlines for his papers extensively (Selzer 182), developing a purpose before jumping into writing (179).

In “Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering”, Dorothy Winsor claims that there is rhetoric inherent in all work writing by stating that:

The textual construction of knowledge is social in nature because each document must convince other people of its validity in order to be accepted as knowledge. Only documents that do convince others are used. 60

By also mentioning how Phillips, the focus of her study, prefers to look for material in certain kinds of documents because of their visual natures (Winsor 62), and employs logic in his papers to write himself as an engineer (66), Winsor gives more particular examples of the ways that rhetoric is incorporated into workplace writing, specifically that of engineers.

This isn’t to say that writing with effective rhetorical strategies is easy. As I read Selzer’s paper, I noticed that Nelson, the subject of the study, was good at writing with his process partly because of his familiarity with that process. Selzer writes that Nelson’s “consideration of purpose [had] become ingrained, almost second nature” (180). Nelson learned how to quickly determine the purpose of his papers, or that he may have multiple purposes in a paper, “from experience” (Selzer 180).

I don’t know, though, how long it might take for someone to become familiar enough with something other than writing, like data and tables, so that they’re proficient enough to rhetorically use that stuff to persuade an audience. Writing is something that everyone does fairly often, so it’s understandable that students can learn how to employ rhetoric well not only by writing in their freshman and sophomore college composition courses, but by reading and composing texts at home. On the other hand (and I’m going to use myself as an example for the average person) I may encounter tons of data in the texts I read at home, but I don’t think I toy with data enough there to think that I’m learning much about using it to meet an audience’s needs  or desires.

School, then, is probably where I’d best learn about data (duh). I’ll probably learn more about data by taking part in an internship, too, like the one required with the PWE program. At one point in “Writing and Database Technology” Barbara Mirel gives readers the idea that the workplace can help:

Data-report writers have to experiment with single and combined organizing logics for tabular data displays and multiple drafts. They need to know, as in a case from my consulting experiences, that data reports for marketing purposes may take as many as five drafts of a table…. 388.

Mirel learned from “a case from [her] consulting experiences” what kind of effort went into revising a table – much more revising work, it seems, than someone like Norman would put into a document (184). It doesn’t look like experience with data in the workplace is the best way for everyone to learn about data, or revision, or rhetoric, as the subjects of Mirel’s paper struggled with knowing how to rhetorically adapt data for a situation (387) – but I doubt it hurts.

Then again, the need to present numerical and tabular data in order to best persuade might depend on the particular workplace. I’ve found out by reading each of these papers that rhetoric is essential no matter whether one is an engineer, one of “twenty-five project administrators in a national research laboratory” (Mirel 385), or a businessperson – but does the need to rhetorically present numbers and whatnot vary between jobs? Does a technical writer need to know more about data than an editor, or a grant/proposal writer, or someone else who writes for a living?

Paul V. Anderson’s 2007 installment of Technical Communication: A Reader-Centered Approach is the sixth edition of his textbook. It is split into eight parts and an appendix that guide readers on the process of writing for work-related purposes (5). Chapters not only instruct on writing practices and products but also discuss important workplace topics like ethics and appealing to international and multicultural audiences. Each chapter concludes with exercises, as well as directions to online exercises, that build upon the material in the main text. The primary theme for the textbook is that a writer must “think constantly about [their] readers” (10).

Writing Process

Anderson arranges the textbook so that its parts and chapters represent different steps, in order, of the writing process. The parts include:

1. Defining Your Communication’s Objectives (63)
2. Planning (97)
3. Drafting Prose Elements (197)
4. Drafting Visual Elements (323)
5. Revising (399).

Rhetoric and persuasion

Like later editions of this textbook, Anderson’s sixth edition does not include the term “rhetoric” within its text (although it is used on the book’s back cover). However, Chapter Five, titled “Planning Your Persuasive Strategies”, does mention Aristotle, a seminal rhetorician, as the “source of [that] chapter’s advice” (121). The terms ethos, logos, and pathos are also defined and clarified in this chapter (121). The textbook stresses logos through sections titled “Reason Soundly” (127), “Present Sufficient and Reliable Evidence” (131), and “Choose Carefully between Direct and Indirect Organizational Patterns” (132), but using emotional strategies (137) and asserting credibility (135) are also recommended.

As previously stated, the idea of audience is the key to the textbook. Anderson perpetually reminds writers to consider their readers as while planning, writing, designing, and revising their texts.

Style and tone

The textbook’s chapter on “Developing an Effective Style” most explicitly addresses the issues of style and tone for its readers. The chapter is divided into three sections: “Guidelines for Creating Your Voice”, “Guidelines for Constructing Sentences”, and “Guidelines for Selecting Words” (257). While a reader can rightly guess that Anderson will advise writers to consider audiences, they should note that he recommends that authors write in ways that make them feel comfortable. He also covers the style behind business and professional writing (avoiding “to-be” verbs [265], placing modifiers next to nouns [264]), and offers lists and diagrams that can help writers with their diction.

This chapter is not the only one that addresses style and tone, as the chapters on particular document genres also discuss these items. For example, the section on correspondence begins by advising that readers take a “you-attitude” to the language in those documents; through this you-attitude writers are supposed to emphasize the recipients of their letters, memos, and emails as the subjects of their sentences.

Document design

Chapter 13, situated within Part V on Visual Elements, provides instruction on document design. In it Anderson advises that readers consider making grids for their documents (375) while also paying attention to how they group items in the document to establish focus. Contrast and repetition are mentioned as beneficial for designing a document for attractiveness and usability.

More specific information on the designs of particular technical documents can be found in the “Superstructures” part of the textbook (523).

Document genres and types of writing

Part VIII of the textbook contains a four chapters and a Writer’s Reference Guide on various document genres. These genres are referred to as “superstructures” (523). The superstructures that Anderson explains are:

• Letters
• Memos
• E-mails
• Reports
• Proposals

There is no uniform approach Anderson takes to covering the different genres. The formats for each genre are generally discussed in Writer’s Tutorials, which have diagrams of example documents and short outlines (the superstructures) that list the different parts necessary to each document. There is a lot of material on reports, like a page on reports that offers a short outline (541), eight additional pages of sample outlines and reports for readers to look at, and a sixty-page Writer’s Reference Guide that goes into detail about the ways to write three specific kinds of reports: Empirical reports, feasibility reports, and progress reports (557).

Visuals and oral communication

Anderson places the textbook’s chapters on visual elements after its chapters on textual elements. He also states that, when writing technically, one is supposed to be “replacing, supplementing, or reinforcing [their] words with visual presentations” (327). Such chapter ordering and quotes seem to imply that visuals are not quite as essential to technical documents as text.

There are Writer’s Tutorials on designing slideshows (464), employing graphics, creating graphs (thankfully using Microsoft Excel and not Word [344]), and designing grids for formatting documents. There is also a handy Writer’s Reference Guide on “creating”:

• Tables
• Graphs
• Images
• Charts.

Not every guide offers much information on “creating” these visuals, however; the guides are more useful for writers who need assistance with formatting tables, and not necessarily making visuals from scratch.

Oral communication is covered in detail in Part VII, “Applications of the Reader-Centered Approach” (437). Its chapter on teamwork covers strategies for listening well, promoting discussion and debate, and using social technologies for communication (451); it also includes a segment that discusses potential ways to handle cultural and gender issues while working in a team (454). A chapter on oral presentations discusses preferred speaking styles, keeping organization for a spoken presentation simple, coping with questions and interruptions, and dealing with presentation anxiety.

Research and writing technologies

Chapter 6, “Conducting Reader-Centered Research” (151), extensively covers research. In it are sections on planning research, information literacy, and ways to consider the legal ramifications of citing certain sources.

The book lacks a chapter straightforwardly dedicated to writing with technology. However, many of the tutorials and guides scattered throughout the book mention how certain programs can help writers create visuals and format texts, and there is a chapter on creating web pages (437).

One thing I’d like to stress about metadata (as librarians understand it) is that metadata is not only helpful for organizing “information for readers” (I’m conflating readers with end users here) (Salvo & Rosinki 110), or for making any readers’ search experience more pleasant – that’s a huge piece of the pie, but metadata can also serve other functions. The metadata Salvo and Rosinki are primarily interested in is descriptive metadata, which describes the characteristics/attributes of a document that’s in a database. Descriptive metadata is the kind that readers generally search for. Metadata created to express the different useful entity levels, or constituent parts, of a resource, is referred to as structural metadata; it can help a database user know, for example, how many parts there are to a journal or book. The last kind of metadata librarians occupy themselves with is administrative metadata – the metadata that isn’t much fun. This metadata lets those running the database know about the rights information of a document (will Copyright Law let someone download this?) and its preservation details (when was a document created, how long should we keep it around, and what special care is required for this document?). It’s important to note that some administrative metadata, likes rights metadata, is helpful for users, too.

The Salvo and Rosinki reading also brought some memories of this class’s earlier discussions of the meaning of language to mind. At some points in their paper, Salvo and Rosinki refer to documents and databases as “containers for information” (112) or “as written information conveyance systems” (114). As the members of this class know, these are problematic ways to view texts. Then again, much of the rest of the Salvo and Rosinki paper covers information design while viewing it through a rhetorical lense, at one point claiming that databases are organized according to a rhetorical context (109), so I’m not sure what to make of their inconsistent “containers” contentions.

Firstly, Lauer and Sanchez say that the “participants in both groups [they studied – one group of students with low spatial abilities, and one with high spatial abilities] were well matched in their previous course work and relevant computer skills” (191). Lauer and Sanchez base this judgment off of some statistics they present in the paper through a table (191). Low spatial ability students had, on average, taken 2.75 design classes prior to the study, and high spatial ability students averaged 1.67 design classes (191). I am now a graduate student, was once an undergraduate and I must say: Taking 1.08 more classes on a subject than another person is a big deal. I would not think such a difference in classes is completely negligible, even when considering deviations from the statistics. A single semester can tell you a lot about a subject.

I doubt Lauer and Sanchez would disagree with me, too, because one of important part of their paper is the section in which they provide advice on teaching visuospatial abilities; they believe, then, that visuospatial abilities can be taught and learned. Their beliefs about teaching visuospatial abilities are also reinforced by Figure 2 from their paper (193) in which it is shown that the average scores for both low and high visuospatial ability groups improved during the single semester during which they observed those students. A single semester’s worth of a case study in which “the performance of both groups of students [in the study] increased with instruction” was enough for them to draw conclusions for their published paper.

I know it may be pretty crummy to harp on someone else’s research in a blog post, particularly when the research analyzed calls, as it should, for other scholars to take deeper looks into the overall problem/issue (212), and therefore does not claim to be definitive. The conclusions of Lauer of Sanchez, though, gave me mixed feelings nonetheless. At one point they say an extra semester of instruction on a subject does not keep a student from being “on more or less equal footing” (191) than another student, while showing, at another point, statistics proving that student performance can improve, in a single semester, through instruction. Does performance not have anything to do with how much a student has learned, then? Or did the researchers assume that the low spatial students were so poor with visuospatial learning that any head start they had with design courses was rendered moot by the spatial strength of their counterparts?

A few of this week’s readings bring up how certain groups with power, groups with hegemony, define what technology is (Haas) – or they define how texts, be they electronic or in print, can be owned (Howard). In the case of ownership and copyright, the “privilege” of copyright law (Howard 402) is bestowed upon the United States public by its Constitution and governing bodies. The Haas and Selfe & Selfe readings show how a certain group’s agenda sets the tone, through certain rhetorical strategies, for how technical communication and technology itself should be defined. What is cool about the Haas and Selfe & Selfe readings is that some academics are working diligently to redefine certain ideas to better serve underprivileged groups.

Now, a few weeks ago our class discussed scientific methods, particularly ethnographic studies, and I asked a question about how much success some groups, like feminists, who have tried to redefine science’s agenda to better serve the underprivileged, have found during their attempts at changing consensus – or at least forming a different consensus that could serve as a binary to the one in power. I asked that not because I didn’t think the feminists had much to say in their arguments (I pretty much agreed whole-heartedly), but because I was worried whether creating a binary opinion about science and its methods would really change much in a field like science, which was established quite some time ago as a power in the Western world, or technical writing, which oftentimes seems to serve a business agenda (this was discussed in our class’s last face-to-face meeting when many of us wondered how beneficial the “symbolic-analytic” work ideal for technical communicators really is). Can we change any definitions for fields that have long, structured histories?

Thankfully, we were asked to read Bernhardt’s “The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens”, and, after reading that work, I think that applying cultural theory and criticisms to fields like digital rhetoric and computer technologies will prove very fruitful. Part of the reason it will prove more fruitful is because electronic texts do not seem as well established as ideas like science. For example, electronic texts have changed dynamically (in at least one way) from how Bernhardt described them, mainly through the ways we use them:

Screen-based text differs from paper text in many ways…. We use text on screens under different conditions and for different purposes than we do paper texts.… A real virtue of paper text is its detachment from the physical world. We can read [paper text] on planes or in the car; we can put books in our backpacks or leave them at home. (411)

Bernhardt’s claim here doesn’t stand true anymore, as we have laptops, webbooks, Kindles, and tablets on which we may read electronic text on planes or in the car; we can put those new technologies in our backpacks or leave them at home.

Are digital texts, then, young enough that arguments about them can actually have a lasting effect?

I have tried having students discuss their own “sanctioned, cultural behavior[s]” (Bosley 473) in class. I was easily able to cover these kinds of issues in my class because a student of mine, on one random Tuesday afternoon, volunteered that one of the papers we read for a Feature Article assignment seemed like it was “written by a girl” (and they said this in a very, very condescending way). Unfortunately, the discussion that followed this unseemly comment went about with only a little bit of success. I did, just as Bosley warned, have to “deal with resistance to cultural integration” (473) with many of my male students, who found my modest objections to their anti-feminist commentary incorrect. I also had to “deal with” students who either didn’t want to even address the issue, or just didn’t think the problem was worth discussing in a Composition and Rhetoric class.

Just as a reminder to everyone: I don’t mean to write so overly negatively about teaching composition students. Some of my frustration stems from my own inexperience with teaching the subject, an inexperience that is all the more exasperating because I desperately – desperately – want to move some of my students. On the bright side, I do now have experience to learn from, and in the future, I might be better able to implement some of these teaching ideas in later semesters.

Another reason my post may seem negative is that I had some problems with the Wilson article in general. When Wilson first defines “agency”, he claims that it is “the ability to act in one’s own interest” (73). To me, this sure seems more like the definition for a word like autonomy; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition for “agency” is, actually, “A person or organization acting on behalf of another, or providing a particular service” (here’s a link to a list that contains the OED link from the WVU Library website), and this definition seems little like Wilson’s. Later on in Wilson’s paper, he states that:

It also remains questionable whether writers who understand their place and know to whom they are writing are critical thinkers with agency or merely more efficient cogs in the corporate machine. 78

Wouldn’t a writer who is an agent generally be a “cog” for a machine since they act “on behalf of another”?

I guess the idea, though, is that there is not real “ability to act [completely] in one’s own interest” these days. We – instructors and students of writing – will have to “articulate [ourselves] as invaluable to the function of the company” (84) for which we work, and we will always be cogs to a machine – but we can always be cogs on a higher tier of the machine. And that’s the point of Wilson’s and Bosley’s activities: Since we live in a postmodern world, where our perceptions are shaped by “cognitive maps”, we need students to realize that they, whether they realize it or not, operate according to “sanctioned, cultural behavior[s]”. The fact that it’s tough for me to get some of these ideas across to my students is something I’ll just have to, for the time being, get used to. I myself forget that that an idealistic idea of autonomy may not exist – even for me, an American WASP – so it’s not worth getting frustrated with my students when they have trouble grasping the idea of a “cognitive map”, or that their behaviors might be “sanctioned” by the world around them.

Works Cited

Bosley, Deborah S. “Cross-Cultural Collaboration.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 466–474. Print.

Wilson reading

It didn’t help, either, that when I began this week’s readings, I found that we were reading Flower’s and Hayes’ “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”, a piece that’s maligned amongst much of the pedagogy literature (Berlin, for example) I have read in ENGL 609. I myself don’t mind reading criticisms of cognitive rhetoric, or of anything that has to do with cognitive psychology. As Faigley reminded me:

“The idea that thinking and language can be represented by computers underlies much research in cognitive science in several camps, including artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology” (533).

Each of these “camps” would fall under the “Computational Cognitive Science” umbrella I learned about in classes at a previous program, and the limitations of that area of cog sci (“computational models are relatively rarely used to make new predictions” about behaviors since they can only mimic human ones [Fundamentals of Cognition 11]; computational models don’t account for humans’ “conflicting motivational and emotional forces” [Fundamentals of Cognition 12]) are items I’m always fond of mentioning.

There is something to be said, though, for having, as Charney advocated, some uniformity in research. As Slattery writes, in “Undistributing Work through Writing”, “a research methodology grounded in the study of writing can be a fruitful way to examine individual workers’ practices” (312). The idea of grounding (or couching – I like that word because it reminds me of days, before graduate school, when I had free time) any research in something recognizable, like a methodological framework, aids those who sincerely wish to test that research so they can either refine it or rip it to shreds. And Flower and Hayes, as Faigley mentions, helped to make research about the writing process more scientific, applying the conventions of another field to the field of composition in an effort to “springboard for further research” by others through “testable hypotheses” (Flower and Hayes 366).

That Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, and Zachry would write that Flower and Hayes’ work, which not only provides testable hypotheses but argues that the act of writing is driven by goals (366), would be rejected by practitioners blew my mind. When I refer to practitioners, I mean writers that “might have [questions] like: ‘what kinds of things have I done that lead to a successful outcome?’” (Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, Zachry 73). I would assume that such writers would appreciate Flower’s and Hayes’ work. The comment in the paper by Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, and Zachry about the need for visual conventions left me a little dumbfounded, too. Those authors call diagrams like the one based on Flowers’ and Hayes’ theory “high-level, abstracted views of writing processes” (Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, and Zachry 72), but diagrams like that seem fairly common to fields like engineering and information science – fields in which, from what I understand, there are two things:

1. Lots of cognitive theory (I came across “information architecture” and “knowledge management” a few times as I was reviewing my assigned journal for Tuesday’s presentation), and
2. Lots of technical writers.

I found a few examples of similar diagrams online through Google:

• A “business process re-engineering diagram”
• Some process-flow diagrams
• A great example I found in a textbook titled Fundamentals of Cognition (239) was adapted to an image I found online: The dual-route cascaded model
• An adaptation, from the same textbook (83), of the “model of face recognition put forth by Bruce and Young (1986)”.

Some conventions I can point out amongst these visuals are: Arrows, boxes, characters denoting words that look a lot like jargon, and a lack of color.

How do some technical communicators succeed in their field if they can’t handle those visuals? I’m not saying that it’s easy to understand those diagrams for me or anything, but shouldn’t technical communicators be better about handling these diagrams than the average writer?

 Works Cited

Faigley reading

Flower and Hayes

Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, and Zachry

I also noticed a couple of similarities between two of the “methods” discussed in this week’s readings. The theoretical sampling method the Koerber and McMichael paper introduced to me (465) appeared much like the “method as explicitly argued praxis” from the Sullivan and Porter work (310). “Praxis”, according to Sullivan and Porter, is a “practical rhetoric” (305). When praxis is applied to research (and I’m assuming that Sullivan and Porter mean both qualitative and quantitative research), researchers acknowledge that multiple community frameworks/ideologies, and not just the one implied by the use of one methodology, are applicable to their studies. How in actuality, though, researchers succeed in not only “accept[ing] that the methods [they] normally choose to use provide powerful filters through which [they] view the world” (Sullivan and Porter, 310), but “become critical of methodology” (311) and apply praxis, comes about in two ways, as far as I can tell. Researchers alter their methodologies according to the context of their situations, and they explicitly tell the readers that they veered from a single methodological structure when composing their research.

Koerber and McMichael’s theoretical sampling method, though discussed by those authors as a sampling practice for qualitative research, seems to rely on the context of a study – “sampling emerge[s] along with the [researcher’s] study itself” (465). Sampling methods change as a study moves along, just as it should in “method explicitly argued as practice”.

In general, the two ideas matched up fairly well. However, when I took a second look at the theoretical sampling method, I realized that it did not resemble methodology as praxis as closely as I had imagined. The main reason I noticed a difference between the two theories was that their critical stances seemed much more dissimilar than I had initially thought.

Koerber and McMichael take a relatively casual stance towards critical research. During research, when a general direction for data starts to formalize, those who employ theoretical sampling methods will look for data that disproves any early assumptions (Koerber and McMichael 465). As I already mentioned, Sullivan and Porter hope that researchers become “critical of methodology”, but they can do this a few ways. One of them, as posited by Sullivan and Porter is to simply refuse to follow a method strictly by the numbers. That is not to say that researchers can be critical just by haphazardly changing the courses of their studies; the contexts of their situations must demand, as they usually do, that researchers stray from the methodological norm (Sullivan and Porter 308). Stated less simply, a researcher can be critical of methodology by “see[ing] the activity [of following the generally accepted framework for a methodology] as at least in part ‘constructing methodology’” (Sullivan and Porter 311).

That last quote, though, shows that the two ideas/methods/theories, while not quite identitical twins, are still closely related. By using a phrase like “constructing methodology”, Sullivan and Porter stress that all researchers are implicit in the social construction of the conventions of methodologies (308). Furthermore, the socially constructed ideas implicit in the term “methodology” can be subsumed under the umbrella term of theory – Sullivan and Porter outright say that view “research methodologies as theories”. Then again, Koerber and McMichael might think of things the same way: they write that sampling changes according to new data directions, but also that researchers “[adjust] the theory [they’re employing] according to trends that appear in the data” as well (465), treating the term “theory” like a synonym for “sampling method”.

Works Referenced

Koerber and McMichael reading

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.

Porter, James E., and Patricia Sullivan. “On Theory, Practice, and Method: Toward a Heuristic Research Methodology for Professional Writing.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Suart A. Selber. New York: Oxford, 2004. 300-313. Print.

Slavin reading

The author of one of the readings, Mary M. Lay, puts technical communication in the same position of power as other supposedly “objective” fields like science and engineering. The people working in these fields, as Lay mentions, hold views that are positivist by nature, and they consider their findings and meanings “objective” (151). They also view certain scientific disciplines as more objective and, therefore, worthy of greater esteem (152). They even go so far, Lay tells us, as to claim that sex plays a role in this; some in those objective fields have argued that the concept of objectivity is anything but womanly, and that women are not scientific by nature (152). Science, though, has its own failings. Since technical communication is associated with these seemingly objective, but flawed, disciplines, Lay posits that while it “ranks higher than other supposedly subjective types of writing” (152), technical communication needs to be redefined (148).

The articles by Slack et al and Johnson-Eilola go in an entirely different direction. In their studies, they situate technical communicators, and the field of technical communication, not in a position of power, but in a tier below that occupied by the scientists and engineers who develop technology. The two studies vary slightly by how they explain this lack of power. Slack et al places the blame on a cultural conception of “author” (161). The power such a term as “author” connotes is great; much of the power of an “author” is derived from the privileged position some modes of discourse hold in society, since “author[s are] produced by [their] discourse[s]” (161). Some discourses, then, are just higher on the social ladder, and technical communication is not on the top rung. The reason technical communicators are not authors, then, is because their discourse lacks esteem.

But, as Thralls and Blyler point out in their discussion of ideologic social approaches to communication, some scholars “[associate] a hierarchical mode with dominance and oppression” (135). If a discourse is not well esteemed, then it is that way because someone has to be doing the esteeming. Some of the oppressors of technical communicators and their field, according to Slack et al, are the theorists who developed mathematical models of communication (163). The theorists doled all of the potential power of communication to “sender[s]” (165), aka engineers who find “meaning” through empirical studies (164). Some of the other oppressors are the employers who want technical communicators who are unnoticeable in their works (168).

Johnson-Eilola, on the other hand, blames a culture that, due to an industrial economic history, overvalues technology. Industrial economics (I know that I’m making a very simplistic statement here) thrived through the accumulation of capital through the selling of physical products and technologies. Technical writing, Johnson-Eilola explains, is meant, by businesses who still hold industrial ideas of economics, to “be added on to a primary product” and is therefore of less value than a business’s product (178). Technical communicators, then need to stress, amongst other things, that they not only add to a product, but that they carry out symbolic-analytic work (181).

Slack et al don’t focus all of their attention on the technical communicator’s position as an author, though. They unexpectedly decided that they wanted to worry almost as much about readers as they did about authors. As I was reading Slack et al’s article, I assumed that, since they mentioned they’d cover three concepts of communication, and they explicitly wrote that one of them (“articulation”) would play the role of good guy for technical communication (163), Slack et al would discuss how oppressive the other concept that wasn’t “articulation” – the “translation” concept (165) – is for technical communicators. This did not really happen, though, to the extent I was expecting. The only group the translation concept oppresses is readers, as it privileges anyone, even those pesky technical communicators, who encode messages (167). Translation, then, like articulation, can empower technical writers and put them on the high rung of the ladder Lay puts them on.

To tell you the truth, I really appreciated Slack et al’s recognition of audience. This seemed to place their article within an ideologic mode of discourse, as they “encourage alternative and more heterogeneous discourse” for everyone involved in communication processes (Thralls and Blyler 134). This is not to say that I did not appreciate Lay’s article for also being ideologic. Lay’s article discusses a major issue within the technical communication field, the need to redefine its values and accept the findings of feminists; it also questions the “mission” of many in technical communication of preparing practitioners for fitting into the industry (157). I just enjoyed watching Slack et al’s work take a different turn than I was expecting.

I may also have appreciated Slack et al’s work because its concentration on the responsibility of technical communicators, and the article’s overall consideration of audience power, differed from the focus of the Johnson-Eilola article with which I associate it. I noticed that a word Johnson-Eilola is fond of using is “value” (176, 185). This term “value” already has a capitalistic connotation; furthermore, it’s used in the context of redefining the role of technical communication in the workplace (Johnson-Eilola 181). It’s not a good idea for anyone to eschew the practical application of anything, but I was still frustrated by the Johnson-Eilola article’s emphasis on a technical communicator’s “work” (189), and not on their search for, or construction of, “meaning” (Slack et al 163).

References

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 176-192. Print.

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.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl; David James Miller; and Jeffrey Doak. “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power Authority.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 161-174. Print.

Thralls, Charlotte and Nancy Roundy Blyler. “The Social Perspective and Professional Communication: Diversity and Directions in Research.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 125-145. Print.

All of this seems boring to discuss, though, because most everyone already has discussed it. In fact, though I wanted, earlier tonight, to go over the material in Kent’s article in my discussion posting, I see that everyone else is just as preoccupied with his claims as I am, so writing about his piece would be pretty boring, too. Instead, then, I’m going to discuss how certain hegemonies impacted, or had little to no impact, on Robert Johnson’s article.

Loving digital objects, especially PDFs, I chose to eschew my copy of Johnson’s “Audience Involved: Toward a Participatory Model of Writing” in our textbook for a copy I could find digitally from a library (oddly enough, I had to go back to my old institution to find it). When I first began reading the article, I noted that it followed a format that is probably familiar to any graduate student: It began with a citation, a title line, an abstract, and then the main text of the article followed not long after. Sandwiched between the abstract and the main text was a section for the article’s tags, or subject headings.

Subject headings, in layman’s terms, help to both organize digital articles and retrieve them. The subject headings for this article, since it is an academic work, should consist of terms that that user would most likely choose to search by when trying to find the article in an electronic database. As a former library sciences student, I had been taught that the Library of Congress’s (LOC) Subject Heading Authority list of terms is one of the first, and finest, resources a student should consult when retrieving information, so I naturally checked the LOC’s list for the terms included with this document. Oddly enough, though, few of that document’s headings were on the LOC’s list.

Why would the document not include very many terms from the LOC’s list? Surely a writer who included “Writers and the Hegemony of Author(ity)” in his paper as a bolded heading in its main text would recognize the impact that excluding such terms, terms that are deemed authoritative by a body with a sizeable amount of hegemony and power backing it, would have on the popularity of his paper. It could even affect his ethos, as defined by Smith (118). I considered, though, that a third party may have indexed Johnson’s article with those terms; it may not have been him who did that. I came to consider such an idea because of Tania Smith’s discussion of one of the five canons of rhetoric, delivery (116). Smith deemed a third party’s involvement in the production of a text as a modern, up-to-date way to define delivery, which had always been a key facet of Classical rhetoric (118).

Other subject headings, then, may have better served the needs of the readers/seekers of Johnson’s article. I’m curious to know who actually added the subject headings for Johnson’s article, and I’m curious to know whether whoever added those tags did so after consulting some common users of the databases housing this article.

If the hegemony of the LOC did not impact Johnson’s article, though, another hegemony did: The contemporary rhetoricians Kent complains of who love to codify all aspects of rhetoric “according to certain ontological categories” (24). Johnson appears to be fond of taxonomies. He chooses to classify users according to three different types: addressed, invoked, or involved (363). He even mentions an attempt to establish another one, for “user knowledge”, through a plug, added in a footnote to the digital version of his text, for one of his upcoming book publications (363). Johnson’s employment of taxonomies in his theories shows that the hegemony of contemporary rhetoric, and its adherence to standards of Classical rhetoric (Kent, Smith) are very present in his article.

Works Cited

Johnson, Robert. “Audience Involved: Toward a Participatory Model of Writing.” Computers and Composition 14 (1997): 361-376. PDF. 31 Aug. 2012.

Kent, Thomas. “Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 8.1 (1989): 24-42. PDF. 27 Aug. 2012.

Library of Congress Authorities. Library of Congress, 2012. Web. 2 Sept. 2012.

Rude, Carolyn. “The Report for Decision Making: Genre and Inquiry.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 70-90. Print.

Smith, Tania. “What Connection Does Rhetorical Theory Have to Technical and Professional Communication?’ Readings for Technical Communication. Eds. Jennifer MacLennan.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 114-121. PDF.