Values

What effects do you see from the debate on ethics in technical communication in the past decade? Where do you think the profession/discipline will go next, as far as ethical issues are concerned? What are the responsibilities of technical communicators as to the ethics of the documents they help create?

If we look at Katz’s Ethic of Expediency, I clearly see the need for careful evaluation of any text written, specifically when involving humans. This article serves as an excellent reminder of what humans are capable of when humaness gets stripped out of language, out of communication, out of rhetoric. It does take conscious and deliberate effort in the planing and writing process of any document to remember the impact on the audience, the affected, the persons written about. Humaness has to be a fundamental pillar of all of our thinking, and technical writing cannot be excluded from it because it contains the term ‘technical’. I am not sure that I would go as far as Dragga and Voss, in some of the illustrations they adapted for more humaness (e.g. the lumberjack cartoon character seems more trivializing to me than humaninzing) but the point is well taken. And this is what I draw from both articles, a strong and valid reminder advocating a basic humaness in all of our writings. There will naturally be variations among all of us, but a vigilance against the dehumanizing that happened in the Nazi culture must be maintained at all times.

Ideology, a New Rhetoric, Authorship, and Power Relations

Is technical communication ideally neutral, or inevitably political? or does it rest in some position between these extremes?

Many of the readings we have encountered suggest varying ways of truth finding and/or knowledge creation, intent on removing partiality, balancing power relations, detecting inequalities that privilege one position over another, or removing marginalization by either inclusion or exclusion. In short, there is a clear call out to stop the othering of the Other. The Barton & Barton article, was fascinating from several angles, and illustrates the afore mentioned calls for removing imbalances clearly in terms of power relations as expressed in the visual representation of the map. Maps with the intent to possess, claim, legitimate, and name (p. 236) that represent an optimist yet highly distorted Weltanschauung, are, according to B&B, based on rules of inclusion and exclusion.

“Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions…” Nietzsche

What is your attitude toward empiricism? Is it possible to understand socially constructed knowledge through statistics? Or is empiricism more than statistics?

Passion and reason – Blyler and Charney. While Blyler passionately argues for radical, critical research, Charney takes the path of advocating a more rational, moderate, multi-method approach to research; one that acknowledges the shortcomings of each method in isolation, yet does not devalue any method in its entirety. During the reading of the passionately written, citation-heavy article by Blyler, I frequently was reminded of Foucault’s definition of discourse (read: rhetoric) as epistemic and as a form of social action. Blyler really calls for a sort of metadiscursive research approach that seems to have the ability to shed all discursive practice in which the researcher is embedded. To me that sounds super-human. Enter Nietzsche, alleging all truths to be allusions, a ‘fact’ (LOL) of which we are completely unaware, and, thus, rendering Blyler’s passionate call for the seeking of more accurate truths, founded in the realization of subjectivity and subject participation, also an allusion. Sigh.

Synergies among methodoly proposals (Harrison/Sullivan)

My interest in the social media aspects of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technologies with respect to organizational knowledge management has naturally led me to the closer examination of the rhetorical situation and fitting responses to communicative exigences. With this as my baggage when reading Harrison, I found myself nodding almost throughout the entire article. She says, “The rhetorical situation places contextual boundaries around singular events and thus focuses our attention at tn analytic level below that of “organization.” Audiences, exigencies, and constraints forming rhetorical situations may arise within organizations, but the idea of organizations as social units forming a broader context for rhetoric cannot be accommodated to this approach.” (p. 257/8)

Rhet sitch – right on!

Driskill, Selzer, Winsor, and others in the ‘Workplace Studies’ section focus on nonacademic writing, not on technical writers per se. What effect does this focus have on the research, methods, and conclusions of these authors?

Driskill urges an increased focus on the rhetorical aspects of a situation when determining the writing context. I could not agree more, specifically, in the realm of communicative exigences. In order to find the fitting response (Bitzer, 1968) to a communicative exigence in an organizational context, one needs to be very clear of the particular rhetorical situation. I see the lack of this at my workplace frequently. However, until now, that social media have entered the workplace, no one dared or even thought of changing the status quo, i.e. the perceived adequacy of communication was not challenged. An example of what I mean by this became apparent by the introduction of the corporate blog. The communication perceived as adequate when addressing issues with engineers was that it could not sound light, it had to be impersonal and must sound ‘corporate’. I don’t know of any empirical studies that verified this perception.

With introduction of the blog, however, little by little the technology allowed for the rhetorical situation to emerge. Almost through the backdoor, a lighter tone emerged in the conversation facilitated by the technology. Judging from the number of contribution and comments, it became apparent that an existant communicative exigence had found its fitting response. Not top-down, but rather bottom-up. In short, I completely agree with Driskill that we have to be much more analytic in determining the rhetorical needs in an organizational setting in order to develop the right kind of communication for that particular situation.

writers’ attitudes toward technical communication (Miller/Herndl)

In the these and the previous readings, much time has been devoted the topic of finding an adequate space and place for a Technical Communication program at a university. Often, the debate attempts to create dichotomies: Technical Writing vs. Literature, Humanities vs. Sciences, positivism vs. constructivism, rhetoric vs. science, techne vs. ars, objectivism vs. subjectivism, deductive reasoning vs. inductive reasoning. We have heard opposing views of what constitutes knowledge and how knowledge gets created. Invention yes, invention no. Is language knowledge or does language merely transport knowledge?

An inscribed history for TC – a blessing and a curse

Is having an inscribed history (or a set of them) important to forming our discipline? If so, why? If not, why? What form of disciplinary history would you prefer to see?

I find this question to be quite significant in general but more so, now, after having read several of the selections in Central Works. Clearly, there is a need for a history to establish a discipline, to give the discipline a foundation, to give it reason for existence, to allow for extrapolation and future development. Further, an inscribed history establishes patterns, processes, and theories that validate the discipline. However, the inscribed history itself may stand in the way of progress because of how and by whom it was written.

What’s technical about TC (Dobrin) – A response

What are the implications of Dobrin’s definition of tech comm for our identity as a profession of ‘tech writers’ or a discipline of ‘tech comm’? In what ways might or might not Slack’s ‘articulation’ (Thayer) be a workable response?

Dobrin’s definition of tech comm attempts to give technical writers organizational power by affording them the status of subject matter expert. “Technical writing is writing that accommodates technology to the user.” Curiously, but quite fittingly, Dobrin mentions the fact that the verb allows for syntactic wiggleroom in the invertibility of the direct and indirect objects. I would like to add one more facet of the verb ‘to accommodate’, it implies active contribution on the part of the accommodator and that clearly aligns itself with Slack’s definition of articulation. The technical communicator negotiates meaning with the information sender and the information receiver. This is an active process that clearly presumes subject matter expertise. Subject matter expertise is perceived as value added and, thus, conveys organizational power. With organizational power comes recognition and influence, both invaluable to implement progress and change.

What’s social in social media?

Musings regarding the impact of social media on social capital…