Week One Response: What Can Technical Writing Be and What is its Role in the University?
I’ve enjoyed this week’s readings and largely because I feel they are establishing the foundation for this class and for the technical writing class I teach through two important questions: what is technical writing and how should we teach it?
The questions become more specific, especially in Miller’s article “What’s Practical about Technical Writing.” This article in particular hit on a couple of key points that I’ve wrestled with both as a teacher and as a student of Professional Writing and Editing. At the start of my graduate career, I had a similar debate in my pedagogy class to what is presented in Miller’s article. I was arguing for the necessity of teaching grammar and showing students how to identify the structures at work within the sentences they encounter and create, but a fellow classmate and PhD student wasn’t convinced this is what students needed, especially in our ENGL 101 classes.
His argument was essentially this: why load our students up with all that practical stuff when it would be better to teach them how to think and how to think about their lives? Miller addresses the same issue and seems to have a number of reasonable responses for people like my friend in regard to why we teach something like technical writing (and perhaps the grammatical elements implicit within): “We teach it because when students graduate and begin writing on the job, they do not do very well” (156). Obviously my colleague was talking more about introductory writing courses than technical writing, but the question still remains an important issue to sort out. Miller’s statement also resonates with the crushing sense of nihilism that develops for undergrads after graduation while continually seeking and interviewing for jobs they will not get, and with Bill Gates’ idea that essentially says employers would rather you find yourself on your own time.
For better or worse, this leads to a discourse where we want to either vote for the “practical” skill-based forms of teaching or the forms that focus on the self-discovery that come through engaging theory or literature. It seems with this binary set that we would see the self-discovery route as the impractical, but to my colleague’s point that may not be totally fair. Miller seems to offer a solution in which we can see the values of both pedagogies fused together through a combination of practical skill and rhetorical skill: “An understanding of practical rhetoric as conduct provides what a techne cannot: a locus for questioning, for criticism, for distinguishing good practice from bad” (163).
This echoes a little of what Rutter is saying: “Education should seek to create sensible, informed, citizens. Some of these citizens will want to become technical communicators, and they should have the option of focusing on the subject as it is embodied in a broad, theory oriented program that also emphasizes the craft of writing” (32).
Rutter bases this conclusion on the belief that “If technical communicators actively create versions of reality instead of serving merely as windows through which reality. . . may be seen, then technical communication must be fundamentally rhetorical” (28). There’s obviously a great deal to unpack here I won’t have space for, but it does seem clear both authors would agree that the importance of having someone to fulfill the role of the technical writer through praxis and rhetoric both in and out of the academy is undeniable
Here I turn back to my own teaching and feel at least partially validated in my choice to include a focus on rhetoric and rhetorical theorists in addition to the emphasis on practical writing skills through the creation of resumes and feasibility reports. My hope, not unlike what Rutters and Miller emphasize, is that students will leave my class and enter their technical fields with both the ability to produce the reports their employers ask of them, but also with the awareness of audience and purpose that different kinds of complex rhetorical situations will demand of them. I tell my students on the first day that the course will both provide technical writing skills, but will also function partially as a career exploration class. This should allow them to better understand the job market, their choices to pursue different majors, and how communication functions within a multitude of different contexts and situations.
For me, Miller’s thoughts on emphasizing rhetoric more than ‘practical learning’ (or vice versa) in the classroom really illustrate the kind of subversive divide between the humanities and sciences in the university. Looking back a little further to last century, Bob Connors elucidates this struggle too. After the Mann Report on Engineering Curricula encouraged engineers to spend more time studying up on English in 1918, Connors writes that, “It was during this period when the engineering-only hardliners threw up their hands and integrated English in the curriculum” (8) (Emphasis mine). Certainly surprising that even with a kind of olive branch from the humanities to schools of engineering that this is the kind of rhetoric used to describe tech writing’s escape from fists high and torches ablaze persecution (hyperbole, but you get it).
Hi Eric! And Aaron. I really appreciate Miller’s solution of techne, and her synonym for it: art. Techne is both thinking and doing at once, reflecting after doing, doing after reflecting, so that practice and theory are constantly in balance. The terms become a little unstable, though. Reading through Miller’s article, I begin to wonder what we all mean by humanism, by practicality, by utility, by rhetoric. Each of our authors this week seems to have a slightly different definition for each–Miller even shifts meanings a few times throughout her article. Maybe this inability to decide what we’re really talking about is the root cause of the engineering/English divide. The way of posing the problem (through binaries) is the problem. The solution to any binary usually is that one Miller reached, balance.
It’s nice that you, Eric, have applied the readings to your own teaching and arrived at your own term for this balance: rhetoric (which is often mine, too). I wonder about how you frame English 305 as an experience in career-exploration. How does that work? Do you have students define what career they want, research what kinds of writing they might do in that career, and focus them accordingly? Then enters the ethical question brought up by the reading: how much should we allow industry to influence academia? How practical should be be if being practical means being useful, and then we’re just producing students who can achieve the required task but add nothing new to it? How can we help our students become not just performers but innovators in their fields? Big questions, I know.
Christina, I also appreciated how Miller brought in Aristotle’s concept of techne. In fact, I originally thought she proposed techne as the solution to both the list of binaries on page 67 and to the problem of practicality – until I read the section on practical rhetoric as conduct. Techne does seem to help us move beyond that list of oppositions; rhetoric as conduct goes a step further by calling our attention to the ethics of communication.
Techne is an elegant concept, right? Kind of makes me want to read the Nicomachean Ethics.
Eric, I was interested in your closing lines: “My hope…is that students will leave my class and enter their technical fields with both the ability to produce the reports their employers ask of them, but also with the awareness of audience and purpose that different kinds of complex rhetorical situations will demand of them. I tell my students on the first day that the course will both provide technical writing skills, but will also function partially as a career exploration class. This should allow them to better understand the job market, their choices to pursue different majors, and how communication functions within a multitude of different contexts and situations.” This is something I’ve hoped for in every class I’ve walked into in the two professional writing (and editing) programs I’ve been in, that time will be spent on illuminating the job market, particularly the various fields and industries in which someone with a professional writing degree can find themselves. Unfortunately, the balance Miller wrote of is something I feel I’ve had little of in my education, a balance between theory and practice, humanistic studies and practical research.
I agree with you, Christina, that one of the weakest links within this discourse of the binary between science and humanities is that it’s hard to define the terms we’re using within our conversations. How do you define rhetoric? Professional writing? Technical writing? The workplace, when there are so many workplaces? I start to confuse myself and lose track of any point I’m trying to articulate or thought I’m trying to formulate when I start looking at and thinking too closely about the definitions of these different elements.