6. Thinking about Process and Visual Rhetoric and Postmodernism
Nearly every page of Greg Wilson’s “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism” is rich with insights about the product/process, industry/academia dichotomies operating in today’s social world. Nearly his entire essay, as well, intends to suggest concrete solutions to these gaps through a very realistic solution of agency, “the ability to act in one’s own interest” in this global economy (73). Since I’ve been interested in what we mean by writing process, I want to use this reading response to gather some of the sections that seem particularly relevant to a process-based pedagogy that mimics/creates a process-based work world. I get the feeling that postmodern industry is seeing its way away from capitalistic obsession with product (perhaps as emphasized in the Bosley reading) toward valuing a worker’s initiative to become a symbolic analyst no matter the job—to insert and apply their expertise wherever needed.
Wilson bases his definition of postmodernism by contrasting the modernist “epistemologies and pedagogies that . . . fate technical communicators as scribes and not as agents in the representation of technology [because they teach only] a limited set of skills” (75). This statement does reflect the move away from skills-based teaching to process-based teaching that we all see today in our classes. I believe that, by emphasizing a personal learning process of writing no matter the product, we would be teaching students the reflection and critical thinking skills necessary to maintain this agency to make oneself useful.
At this point, my idea of process becomes shaky—by “process,” how much do I mean rhetoric? How much do I mean agency? How much do I mean flexibility? A lot, I suppose. “Process,” for me, is a word to demonstrate the idea that good work is measured by the ability to think in the moment, to be present enough with oneself and ones surroundings (one’s context—whether writing a feasibility report or a lab report or a translation, etc.) and aware enough of one’s strengths and weaknesses to determine where and how they can be useful to filling a specific gap at their workplace. Emphasis should not, in my mind, be so much placed on the product because if students have the essential knowledge and experience to adapt, they will be able to apply those essentials to a variety of tasks that involve problem-solving, collaboration, systems thinking etc. This is kind of like the idea of holistic grading: if students practice a good process, the product will be glowing (or at least B-worthy), like a self-fulfilling prophesy, but if students procrastinate and have ill-formed conceptions about how to read, think, and write, their final product will definitely reflect that instability.
Wilson offers what he believes are those essential facets of knowledge and experience in today’s technical communication field: systems thinking, collaboration, abstraction, and experimentation, mostly internal processes that involve a lot of goal-oriented, discovery-oriented, and intuitive thought processes. In other words, they involve a lot of visualization, organization, and relationship-oriented analysis. Here, I feel that our visual/technological culture (and I guess we have always been visual thinkers—we are sensory beings) is training us all to think more in terms of what works when we see it. Visualizations can both help the thought process and help show, clearly, how a system works. I believe visual rhetoric is the key to many of these issues of professional communication, both in the psychological sense and in the practical sense. Visual thinking, organizational webs to demonstrate work processes, and subsequent products-with-vision demonstrate the technical communicator’s important place in industry.
Work Cited
Wilson, Greg. “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 15.1 (2001): 72-99. SAGEPub. PDF File.