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, 30th Anniversary
Edition. Harper
Perennial.
