This week’s readings provided what I imagine to be a suitable and appropriate backdrop to our semester-new investigation and study of Technical Writing Theory and Research. Robert Connor’s “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America” outlined tech writing’s struggle from an ancient practice to a field of serious academic and nonacademic practice. Tech writing’s rich history prompted by the kind of global event that most prefer to avoid was especially eye opening. Russell Rutter’s “History, Rhetoric and Humanism” continued to make clear tech writing’s awkward position in the American university by putting our discipline in the lens that its pioneers saw it through.* Patricia Sullivan spent time in “After the Great War” considering Emmet Lee Owens 1924 VPI Technical English course in an attempt to glean what we, as teachers, students, and practitioners of tech writing, can gain from examining an almost century old course. And, lastly, Carolyn Miller in “What’s Practical About Technical Writing?” probed the essay’s prompt and related Aristotle’s understandings of rhetoric and techne to our contemporary practical-based technical writing courses.

In this latter essay, Miller points to her university’s mission statement as a reflection of nonacademic’s influence over the academy’s treatment of the technical writing curriculum and it’s one-way channels. She notes, “My own university, a land-grant institution, provides a case in point. Its ‘mission statement’ declares that the university ‘has responsibility for the academic, research and public service programs in areas of primary importance to the State’s economy” (66). Clearly, her own institution puts its priorities in fiscal gain to better the state and in doing so promotes a practical-heavy curriculum. This got me thinking about the genre of the university mission statement as a reflection of its susceptibility to industry-university collaboration.

West Virginia University’s mission statement follows: “As a land-grant institution in the twenty-first century, West Virginia University will deliver high-quality education, excel in discovery and innovation, model a culture of diversity and inclusion, promote health and vitality, and build pathways for the exchange of knowledge and opportunity between the state, the nation, and the world.” While a little more charitable with its graduates (whose resources are encouraged to sow beyond the state), WVU’s statement relates little on its emphasis on capital and economy. Does this mean that our institution eschews industry-based needs and encourages a more rhetorical approach to technical communication?

I think it might, but who knows.

At any rate, an interesting inquiry, perhaps for our upcoming research assignments, might include a thoroughgoing investigation into the rhetoric of land-grant institutions and their technical communication curricula.

A parting thought: Discussing the rise of technical writing in the states, Rutter writes, “Gradually it became the norm to assume that so-called ‘hard’ disciplines would supply the cake of the content, while departments of English would supply the frosting of style” (28). Is this the kind of reputation English still has as an academic discipline? That, as Dennis Allan considered during ENGL 682’s first meeting last Thursday, we lovers of the written word sit upright, stroking chins, ruminating on the prose of Milton incestually asking one another in a cyclical and prolix way what makes a certain passage beautiful ad infinitum?

Again, I think it might. But who knows.

*In a vulnerable effort to share what confounded me a bit about this one: Rutter writes that, “[S]ome of the more dubious ends of technical communication are in fact runaway means, means that, thought they sometimes look as if they came from the fountains of the Scientific Revolution itself were actually hatched spontaneously in the standing puddles of Victorian technical education” (28). Runaway means? I admit I’m not sure what he’s going for here. In this brief (and I’ll say it: unclear) passage discussing the importance of historical perspective as it should, arguably, be held in tech writing, I speculate that he’s arguing tech writing’s mother of invention was necessity and that in considering practical writing and its tensely wrought position in and outside of the academy, we should not lose sight of how immediate and necessary the invention of genre of form can be. But who knows. Maybe you do.