Textual Coordinators

This week, Slattery’s article struck me as I found that the writing process many companies are experiencing are the same as the ways my writing has evolved in the professional world.  Working in special events, I am currently the point person for two events – Mountaineer Week (a week long celebration of the history and culture of West Virginia) and the Student Affairs Hall of Fame Dinner (a dinner which inducts retirees into the Hall of Fame and recognizes an individual for an Outstanding Achievement Award).

Mountaineer Week as over 100 events that take place throughout the week, and we highlight some of those events for press releases, news articles, etc.  What I have found is that I am using material about this event that I acquired from the articles written last year, e-mails from my co-chairs, emails from outside vendors, and information from outside vendors’ websites.  I am finding that I add very little original writing, but doing more copying and pasting to form an effective marketing document.

For the Hall of Fame Dinner, I have to write short biographies on each of the winners for the program.  Knowing none of these people, I am relying on information from their nomination forms, anything written about them from their time at WVU, and their answers from questionnaires I gave them.  Again, I find myself adding such little original writer, but doing more arranging of words that have already been written.

My role, then has become much less about writing and more about “’textual coordination’ (Slattery, 2005) [which] refers more narrowly and specifically to the selection of texts from a larger information environment and staging and manipulating them toward the production of a new text,” (318).

Because my office is small, and I am the known point person for these events, it is simple for everyone to send their changes and additions to me via email so that I can keep them in a folder for my use when putting the pieces of each writing together.  However, on a larger scale, I agree with Slattery’s view that the distribution of labor and the patterns of organization are important factors to study when evaluating writing practices.  In larger businesses, I can see this kind of communication coming in from all angles and for much more technical subjects to be an extremely complex environment in which to produce texts.

Slattery also voices concern over technical writers losing their expertise on a subject because of the collaborative nature of writing, but I also wonder how this whole “copy and paste” phenomenon is affecting the validity of authorship in documents.  I realize that for a technical manual, there might not be a name put on the front of the booklet, but for many technical writings an author is listed. Does having authorship matter to those who may have made a significant contribution to a piece of writing only to have their words made different because they were copied and pasted in a different sequence?

And how does this alter the argument about us calling ourselves “technical writers” vs. “technical communicators”?

Slattery, Shaun. “Undistributing Work Through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Information Environments.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16.3. (2007): 311-325. PDF.