PHD Comps Annotations

This piece by Carolyn Miller focuses on introducing new (for 1979 and still important today) “notions of what technical and scientific rhetoric can be and do” (48). Her work here looks at more than just the connections between scientific writing and technical communication though. She is extremely critical of the perceived connection between science and technical communication in this piece because of the traditional positivist view of science (which is clearly, to Miller, not the role of technical communication) and the historic connection between engineering and technical communication (as a service course). She claims that this positivist connection to technical writing is a “form of intellectual coercion, it invites us to prostrate ourselves at the windowpane of language and accept what science has demonstrated” (50). This windowpane metaphor is important to technical communication because it places individuals either inside or outside a particular place (or discourse community), and is often used by science fields to separate those who “see” what is self-evident and those who do not (Clay Spinuzzi would call this a “hero” complex).

Miller, after discussing the connections that are assumed to be between technical communication and science fields, calls for a new epistemology for technical communication. This is a call that is echoed through much of the research on technical communication still, including other works by Carolyn Miller, David Russell, Anne Beaufort, Mary Soliday, J. Blake Scott, and many others. The epistemology she creates here “holds that whatever we know of reality is created by individual action and by communal ascent” as a way to see the world (51). She continues developing her epistemology later by saying “if we pretend for a minute that technical writing is objective, we have passed off a particular political ideology as privileged truth” (52). This is important to think about in connection with other cultural research, and discourse community work, because the cultural connections that technical communicators deal with, between communities both inside and outside of the entities we work for, are important communities that define and redefine the work that we do and the knowledge that we share or produce.

In this article, Grabill and Simmons focus on the social construction of risk and risk communication. Their study attempts to define risk as arhetorical by decontextualizing the concepts of risk and failure as something that is socially constructed. Grabill and Simmons define risk as currently having three aspects in the professional communication field: as something that “dissolves the separation between assessment and communication,” foregrounds the power in risk communication, and the technical communicator is the only person with the research and writing skills necessary for all of the processes involved in risk communication (360). Their goal was to define how important it is to examine both the disciplines and the institutions involved in risk communication to better understand how the various hierarchies of power are established and exercised in the communication of risk. These definitions of communication structure and power create a new meaning (at least for 1998) into how we as technical communicators are “supposed to” communicate with the “general public.”

Grabill and Simmons use Michel Foucault’s “The Subject and Power” as a lens through which to look at the concepts of risk and the power structures involved in the conversations surrounding risk. Foucault claims that “institutions exercise power through regulating and constraining knowledge making, production and consumption through rules and practices. Understanding how power is exercised, and looking for gaps, we can resist, even alter, unequal power relations” (as qtd. In Grabill and Simmons, 361-362). Foucault’s view (and Grabill and Simmon’s) shows that the power structures involved in document construction is one in which the power of decision making is given to “experts.” This choice of decision making, and distribution of information ends up masking the complex social connections and interactions that are involved in the creation of knowledge, therefor denying the citizens involved any real power in the creation of the knowledge and limiting the social needs of knowledge making. This, I (and Grabill and Simmons) would claim, would also weaken the message given by the “experts.”

In this article, Lester Faigley focuses on three different theoretical perspectives commonly used in professional communication (as of 1985). He develops definitions for the textual perspective, individual perspective, and social perspective of technical communication. In this work he explains how each perspective is developed and how each perspective is commonly used within technical and professional communication work. While dated, Faigley’s work shows us that each of the perspectives that the field uses are formed, often, in academic departments outside of professional communication departments. While these definitions that Faigley gives his audience can help create a better understanding of conversations in the field of technical communication, it is most important for my potential research to use his work to understand that he focuses on the social perspective and claims that it is the most useful for the field (arguments that he echoes or is echoed by research such as Mary Soliday, Mike Rose, Carolyn Miller, and many other researchers over the years).

Leaning into the social perspective that Faigley discusses, he developed his perspective through the framework of Mikhail Bakhtin as a way to show the usefulness of the social perspective. He also uses this framework to also show various flaws in the textual perspective and the individual perspective. Through this use of Bakhtin’s work (as many social focused technical communication researchers do), he shows that technical writing should be built on social foundations because of its more specified role that it plays outside of the academy. To do this he shares a series of main foundations that discuss the social issues that has importance for my work in professional communication. Those foundations are communication is linked to the culture of any particular society, writing is focused on the forms and genres (and discourse communities), academic and non-academic writing have overlapping communities, and that discourse competence allows entry into the community. These are important to Faigley (and my work) because they are all foundations that are built on larger implications outside of an individual course, program, or person.

In this article, Linda Driskill focuses on the idea of understanding contexts because the success or failure of business documents depends on contextual knowledge and how technical communicators use it (and is often discussed as “business savvy” in a business program). Her work develops specific approaches to particular aspects of communication (genres are the basis of communication courses, writing behaviors lead to standardization, technology is a source of behaviors) (57). From these three behaviors she develops a “systems approach to organizational behavior” and a pedagogical stance for teaching technical communication courses (57). These approaches are often, (a) not concerned with meaning (what Driskill calls a “company as a large abstract machine”), and (b) taught as a context free course (or generalizable information only zones) (57-58). By framing her work in this way, Driskill is able to separate the expectations from the actualities of the work in the field.

Her views on technical communication contradict previous work by Lester Faigley (his article on Nonacademic Writing) because, as Driskill claims, Faigley refuses to connect the idea of culture, and its definition, with other disciplines that work with culture. This is important to note because Faigley’s work is important to the field but by not connecting the ideas of culture with other disciplines, it limits the ways in which we as researchers, and teachers, can make connections to culture in the technical communication field. Because of these issues with Faigley and others, Driskill calls for a “greater congruence between organizational situations and rhetorical studies” (67). To do this she says, much like other researchers (Miller, etc.), that we need to develop much broader models of meaning and the sources of meaning in the writing contexts we teach and face. This is a similar call to genre research of Soliday, Prior, and Henze, because each of the researchers are arguing for a broadening of contexts and definitions that are using both organizational and rhetorical terminology as tools to guide decision making in technical communication (67).