Political-Ethical
I liked the connections that Dale L. Sullivan made within his essay “Political –Ethical Implications of Defining Technical Communication as a Practice.” He drew on the ever present debate between humanism and vocationalism. He makes note of the pattern of “indoctrinat[ing] our students in the forms appropriate to their employers…” and uses the support of others to say that teaching with classical rhetoric in a technical writing classroom becomes “dangerous” because these principles may not align with the principles of their discipline. This also connects well into the discussion on the role and identity of the technical writer. This fascinates me because it is truly something which can be pondered over. A cycle between society, those who influence society, and those you are taught from society continues to go around and around here. Though I felt that Sullivan did less explaining about ethics than implying about ethics, I enjoyed many of his connections.
He pulls from classical rhetoric to draw the connections between “praxis, virtue, and social action” which culminates in this paragraph:
Let us not take this depiction of ethics and apply it to our present situation. I have tentatively decided to define technical communication as a practice; therefore I am claiming that it takes virtue to participate in technical communication. I can do this, according to Aristotelian ethics, only by agreeing that my students are developing character traits that enable them to perform their functions well. Moreover, I imply that these functions are good, that they fit in with the ideal virtue that dominates society. (215)
I want to conclude that Sullivan is saying that by continuing to follow this cycle and by viewing technical communication as necessarily a practice, it would be ethical His path of connections, though they may make sense are derived from a simple form of ethics, and may not be applicable for today’s society. In this I mean to say that it is even less ethical today. I was a little skeptical about what exactly his viewpoint was until the end of his paper. This was because of his use of the subjunctive tense at the beginning as he speculated.
He uses classical rhetoric to speculate and define our “present situation”. I feel, as I started in the previous paragraph, that if society still worked as it did in the time of Aristotle, things would be much simpler and that method of thought could work ethically. However, these days it does not necessarily take “virtue to participate in technical communication” and this is where is falls apart.
His main ideas revolve around his teaching technical communication and his experience with the curriculum, the students, and the discourse community. Reading between the lines, and trying to comprehend as much of this paper as I can at once, I feel the undercurrent of rebellion. Rise against the unethical and problematic current teaching of technical writing! Redefine the technical writers as purposeful and beyond the discourse of industry! Give the student the power to decide! “…We either teach politically…or we contribute to the mystification that so often in universities diverts and deadens the critical power.” (217) This of course makes sense if we look back at what the title of this paper is.
I would like to wrap up this response with this quote from Sullivan which he got from Patricia Bizzell’s “What Is a Discourse Community”,
“Our dilemma is that we want to empower students to succeed in the dominant culture so that they can transform it from within; but we fear that if they do succeed, their thinking will be changed in such a way that they will no longer want to transform it.”
Sullivan, D. L. (1990). “Political-ethical implications of defining technical communication as a practice.” In J. Johnson-Eilola & S.A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 211-219). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.