10. The Authorship of Technical Documents
While reading the articles for this week, I became quite interested in the idea of “borrowing” pieces of past texts for new writing tasks as a part of technical communicators’ writing process. This repurposing of information from past documents is directly addressed in Jack Selzer’s article entitled “The Composing Processes of an Engineer” when Selzer notes that “Nelson jogs his memory by reviewing previously completed documents. . . Nelson often borrows sentences, paragraphs, sections—even graphics—from past documents and incorporates them into new proposals, reports, and correspondence” (320). I am most intrigued by this strategy because we so strongly discourage that kind of “plagiarism” in academia yet the Selzer article specifically seems to show that it is quite an acceptable workplace practice. As a writing practice for students, a similar strategy, patchwriting, has even been considered a failed attempt at plagiarism. I wonder, then, how commonplace this borrowing strategy really is for working technical writers and whether or not it has a place in technical writing pedagogy.
Reflecting upon this borrowing strategy and other collaborative processes has also led me to question the idea of co-authorship in technical documents. In her article “Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering,” Dorothy A. Winsor explains that the subject of her study, Dr. John Phillips, named his subordinate the co-author of Phillips’ conference paper because the subordinate had written documents that influenced the development of the paper: “The subordinate made only a few minor chances in Phillips’ draft. His ‘co-authorship’ was thus based on the development work [the creation and presentation of six sets of handouts] he had done, as inscribed in the documents Phillips was using” (345). Although Winsor doesn’t go into much detail about the situation, it seems to me like the subordinate’s documents should have simply appeared in the references list of Phillips’ conference paper rather than the subordinate himself being named a co-author of the paper.
What is the difference, then, between authoring a source of information for someone’s writing and co-authoring the work itself? Couldn’t we make the hypothetical argument that because every source we use in our writing contributes so heavily to the development of our work that the authors of those sources should be considered “co-authors” of own finished text? The intertextuality of technical writing is so pervasive that a list of “co-authors” of any given text could be potentially endless. And the situation is complicated even further when we throw the borrowing strategy from Selzer’s article into the equation. I suppose my main question is this: Where do we draw the line of the authorship of technical documents when strategies of borrowing from past texts, collaboration, peer feedback, synthesis of past documents, etc are all such integral parts of workplace practice? Or does authorship even matter at all?
Finally, should the strategy of borrowing text from past documents to construct a new document play a role in technical writing pedagogy? It seems counterintuitive to expose technical writing students to a writing strategy like this when we’re always hounding them about the dangers of plagiarism and the many ways to avoid it. When I read that almost half of a working technical writer’s proposal was “borrowed” from past documents (Selzer 320), however, I wonder if it could be at all beneficial to teach students the ethical, productive ways to “borrow” from past texts in constructing new ones, to collaborate in writing technical documents, and to co-author texts. If so, we need to have a consistent definition of technical documents’ authorship.
Works Cited
Selzer, J. (1983). “The composing process of an engineer.” In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 317–324). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Winsor, D. A. (1990). “Engineering writing/writing engineering.” In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 341–350). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.
This is a tricky issue. “Authorship” is something we have made up as a culture, so defining it for TC will always be a difficult, culturally mediated issue. I’m curious as to what others think about this.
Jillian, these are great questions. If we think back to some of the readings from earlier this semester (“The Technical Communicator as Author” and “Relocating the Value of Work”), it seems important for technical communicators to articulate themselves as authors in order to negotiate power structures and to place themselves in the “symbolic-analytic worker” category. The problem comes when we attempt to define authorship. As John notes, this is a culturally mediated issue. Overall, Western culture still buys into the Romantic ideal of the author as an individual, working alone (although this seems to be changing). In the writing classroom, however, we can work to redefine authorship as inherently conversational. As you point out, even if we write “alone,” we are drawing upon the work of others. Citing sources is one way of expressing this relationship.
One way to approach the plagiarism issue is to define it in terms of context. In the classroom, we can talk about the standards and practices of academic writing versus workplace writing. Last semester, my students and I spent a class period discussing plagiarism and authorship. I presented them with a variety of situations that could be considered plagiarism, and we discussed how to recognize plagiarism in academic writing. None of the situations was clear-cut, and the discussion was one of the liveliest of the semester.
At the end of the class period, I asked them to reflect on what it means to be an author, and how they define authorship. Some students wrote about how they had never thought about the relationships between their own writing and the work of others – citing sources was just something they “had to do.” One student commented that “there’s nothing new under the sun” and argued that we place far too much emphasis on being “original.” Others talked about how they don’t feel like they ever “own” the writing they do for school, but that they do see themselves as the authors of, say, Facebook statues. Still others didn’t see statuses or text messages as writing at all.
Overall, I think interrogating the concepts of “author” and “plagiarism” in the writing classroom can be highly beneficial to students. It’s difficult to come up with a consistent definition of either term (and I wouldn’t want my students to walk away thinking that “an author is X, and only X”).
I think you raise some excellent points, Ashleigh. I really like your idea of the authorship as being “inherently conversational.” It definitely makes sense to think about technical writing as conversational, especially when writing strategies like group collaboration (in terms of others directly and indirectly contributing to a written text) and borrowing pieces from past documents are so prevalent in the field. Maybe one of the added benefits of incorporating collaboration into technical writing pedagogy would be to allow students to revise their ideas of authorship and plagiarism within the context of technical communication.
Jillian, I appreciate your point that “borrowing from past texts, collaboration, peer feedback, synthesis of past documents, etc are all such integral parts of workplace practice.” How can we stress the importance of citing sources, when it is also important, in the postmodern classroom/culture, to collaborate and draw from others ideas? Most of my students see citation as “busy work,” even though we’ve discussed the purposes. I think when they reach their major fields and are challenged to position their ideas against important figures in the field, and against other students’ ideas, they will see the weight that citations carry.
Ashleigh, your classroom practice of introducing the terms as “up for discussion” is very encouraging!
John, and all, I suppose, for me, authorship means positioning my own ideas against others and constructing a piece of writing that is not necessarily “original” but that provides a new voice for the topic. For instance, in my paper research, I’m constantly thinking “Oh, Diana George already argued this” or “Wait, Greg Wilson disagrees with me!” But, I need to remind myself that just because my ideas aren’t the romantic ideal of being original and individual, it doesn’t mean that the process isn’t useful to me and my final audience (whether that be “important PWE people” or a small collection of fellow grad students). Discussing ideas is, and always will be, important, and, even if the audience isn’t large or “important,” the role of the author still is, because author’s write and writers form ideas, and ideas form the future of the field whether in the workplace or academia. Maybe the question of “author” depends largely on who that author thinks their audience is and what that audience would find useful. But, perhaps I’m steeped in the “academic culture”! I am interested in this idea of authorship as a cultural issue…thinking of MySpace and the Hispanic population…