“Where do I go from here?” Paper 3, ODU 810

Rhetoric > Technical Communication > Epistemological Alignment

Having spent over thirty years as a professional corporate technical communicator, each job required composing technical documents to help the targeted audience understand, build, maintain, manage, design, deliver, use, train-the-trainer, or even explain how to sell technologies. Those years as a content producer behind me, it seems logical that my academic career focus on technical communication as a discipline. 

This differs from my Statement of Purpose on applying to this program: studying the pedagogy of STEM writing.  But, as I tell my students, “expect and accept change” (a working title for a book on business writing I have pitched to a publisher). My book-in-progress builds on a definition that I was, until this week, unaware of but always believed is essential to my role as a tech writer (Allen):

Communication requires rhetorical savvy; invention strategies; appropriate points of view that accommodate different kinds of interactions with the subjects; and flexible senses of the writer/reader relationships that can be adapted to a variety of subjects, purposes, styles, and formats.

That is what I teach my undergrads: the writer is having a conversation with the reader, sharing information from the expert (Zinsser). His simplified view agrees with Slack’s conclusion that tech communicators must realize their role in “articulating and rearticulating of meaning and power.”

But the point of this posting is to discuss the selection of my chosen English Studies discipline. My experience as a tech writer practitioner adds depth to the papers I wrote for ODU810 on this topic, yet I also want to address Authentic Writing in the classroom as a pathway to Tech Comm. Plus, I need to interview an ODU faculty member for this class. And there is a side conversation on the rise of profanity in popular non-fiction to discuss in the dissertation or at least in a separate paper. And I have possible access to a female Hollywood producer whom I would like to interview for the 2017 anniversary of Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" celebration of women in sci-fi. But who has the time for all these extra-curricular endeavors?

I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! – Theodore (“Dr. Seuss”) Geisel

This week’s readings wrestled with defining the roles and responsibilities and the professional writer. In an earlier paper, I referred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Philip Rubens who, in 1981, defined technical communication as “an empirical methodology that reaches into communicology, contemporary discourse theory, and even ethics, which […] offers a way for defining audiences, purposes, and by extension, the domain of technical communication with a great deal of precision” (Rubens).  This ties in with Foucault’s view that technical communicators are authors who “characterize the existence. circulation, and operation of certain discourse within a society” (Slack). But there are interpersonal and political challenges in the workplace for communicators to overcome.

Workplace Power Structures

In Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” comic strip, the character “Tina the Tech Writer” faces the “workplace power structures [that] downplay the authority of technical communicators even in areas they are qualified to speak to” (Johnson-Eilola).

Figure 1: Catch-22 for Dilbert's Tina the Tech Writer.

The Solution

What follows below is an application of incorporating technical communication in the design process. In my last role as a corporate communicator I convinced Infrastructure management that “technical communication [should be] a part of the software development process rather than an afterthought” (even though I had not yet heard of Johnson-Eilola). They finally understood that the panoply of documentation spread across the SDLC (System Development Life Cycle) was exclusive and redundant. Some docs were exclusive to a manager, others redundant when recreated by team members unaware that a doc existed or was unavailable across corporate silos. The original SDLC documentation included between twelve and thirty independent and often "secret" pieces of technical communication.

ASMD RACI Chart
(Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed),
all from one online document/repository

In practice, as technical communicator, I proposed replacing dozens of independent documents with a single, online repository of information and forms, both pending approval and approved for action. As the “non-engineer” I also recognized the “workplace power structures” to overcome. So, a key project manager was convinced to champion acceptance of a single “Application or Service Master Document” (ASMD), designed to document the “life” of an application or service “from cradle-to-grave,” eliminating the single pieces of paperwork that were strewn across a project’s lifecycle. It also gave ownership of content to the experts with oversight of information collection to the technical communicator.

Next Steps

We were in the final stages of implementing the ASMD when the company was subject of a hostile takeover. The project never saw light of day. I may continue studying the validity of applying the theory of combining all technical communication of a project under one umbrella, allowing experts to be responsible for the content and “technical communicators to be the purveyor of meanings,...mediator of meanings,...and author who among others participates in articulating and rearticulating meanings" (Slack).  

References

Adams, Scott. (06 Oct 2016). Tina Isn’t an Engineer. Dilbert by Scott Adams. http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-10-06. Accessed 18 Oct 2016.

Allen, Jo. (1990). The Case Against Defining Technical Writing. Journal of Business and Technical Communication.  Vol. 4, No. 2 (68-77).

Hearn, Rob. (16 Oct 2016). It Doesn’t Look Good for Tina the Tech Writer. TECHWR-L. 17 Oct 2016.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. (Summer 1996). Relocating the Value of Work: Technical; Communication in a Post-Industrial Age. Technical Communication Quarterly, Vol 5, No. 3 (245-270).

Rubens Philip M. (Mar. 1981). Technical Communication: Notes Toward Defining a Discipline. Department of Language, Literature and Communication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, from nasa_techdocs. https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19810013425

Slack, Jennifer Daryl; Miller, David James; Doak, Jeffrey. (1 Jan 1993). The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, and Authority. Journal of Business and Technical Communication.  Vol. 4, No. 2 (68-77).

Zinsser, William. (5 Apr 2016). On Writing Well, 30^th Anniversary Edition. Harper Perennial.