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.