Chapter Two: Initial Outline and Rough Draft

Chapter Two
Contents
Chapter Two 1
General education 2
Required Writing Classes and a Common Body of Knowledge 2
Desired Skills for Technical Communicators 3
Service courses 5
TC service courses 7
Differences between Academic and Non-Academic Writing 9
How do these differences relate to this study? 9
Revision 10
TC instruction 12
Relationship of TC instruction to non-academic work 12
Textbooks 12
For TCers 12
For Non-TCers 12
Contingent faculty? 12
Engineers 12
Engineering communication 12
TC working with engineering 12
Academic 12
Practitioner 12
Research methods 12
Methodology 12
TC research methods relevant to this study 12
Importance of speed, broad approach 12



General education
Required Writing Classes and a Common Body of Knowledge
The belief in a common body of knowledge needed for effective writing is evident in the history of Harvard’s composition program in the 1870s (Brereton, 1995). Faced with growing evidence of poor writing skills, Harvard began requiring coursework in writing along with entrance exams designed to test a student’s writing skills (Brereton, 1995). Harvard’s program required students to write essays on texts from the Western canon, such as works by Shakespeare and Milton (Brereton, 1995). The belief was that by linking the practice of writing to commonly-accepted masterpieces of fiction, student writing would improve. Exposure to the data, the applied body of knowledge, of those famous authors would naturally cultivate good writing.

Harvard’s program did not spring forth in isolation: they were facing a very real influx of students who were not writing the way the Harvard faculty expected. Even earlier, during the 1840s, the less standardized English of the American West led to increased emphasis on grammatical correctness (Connors, 1985). In fact, during that time correcting other peoples’ grammar became a common pedagogical strategy designed to improve written communication (Connors, 1985). The idea that critiquing grammatical constructions was a valid method of improving one’s own writing is based upon the very real fact that grammar, any grammar, is a set of guidelines created by a community of use: languages and their grammars are socially-constructed systems, the application of experience and data familiar to a specific populace. Without standards of syntax, grammar, and usage, communication is difficult at best. However, what those standards are, or should be, is the subject of often strident debate, evidence of which can be seen in Texas’ recent adoption of a new recommended reading list for public K-12 writing instruction (Heinauer, 2008). And writing instruction is an ongoing struggle due to the problems inherent in identifying the qualities of good writing and how those qualities may be taught.

In 1944, in response to the coming flood of World War Two veterans entering college, the American Council on Education issued a report describing general education at the college level to be “those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational education that should be the common possession, the common denominator, so to speak, of educated persons as individuals and as citizens in a free society” (Bigelow, 1947). The list included items such as “emotional and social adjustment,” “family and marital adjustment,” “natural phenomena,” literature, music, “thinking about the meaning and value of life.” The second objective requires a student “[t]o communicate through his own language in writing and speaking at the level of expression adequate to the needs of educated people” (Bigelow, 1947, p. 258). The committee went on to recommend courses which could be adopted to help meet these objectives. While the committee did see communication as valuable enough to include in its own right, the overall tenor of the report suggests that knowledge. . .

Like the Harvard faculty a century earlier, the American Council on Education believed that exposure to fine, artistic writing would naturally improve students’ writing; however, neither the American Council on Education nor Harvard

Go bigger with this section: post-WWII education, GI Bill, technical and scientific advancement, Vannevar Bush, and all. . .that. . .jazz.


General education, at least from the standpoint of the 1840s through post-World War II America, was an act of conserving the knowledge and value of prior generations in order to ensure the continuation of life as we had come to know it. Regardless of whether educators felt, or continue to feel, that education is the attempt to broaden minds and free the nascent intellect, public education is in fact the attempt to preserve and protect existing knowledge and values. Arguments over reading lists (such as that mentioned above) and science curricula demonstrate that the battle over what is known and what is new continues to cause problems for teachers.

But the argument that there is a standard body of knowledge, a bucket of facts that every college-educated person needs to know, is compelling and not to be taken lightly. Because educators are tasked with passing along knowledge and skills which have proved fruitful in the past, we are tempted to reduce the experience of education to a demonstration of philosophical realism: The reality of the external world is codified and described by the teacher. The students, who exist in the same knowable world of phenomena, can learn about these phenomena through the teacher’s efforts because the phenomena exist independently of people. In other words, the world exists prior to us knowing about the world. In the classroom, realism pedagogy enjoins the teacher to speak about the knowledge and demonstrate the skills. The students learn by being in the right place at the right time and by paying attention. For classes in which a lot of information needs to be learned in order to master the ideas at the root of the subject, a realism-based approach is not necessarily a bad idea. The quantity of data required to understand such a subject requires that some method of mass-distribution be used, whether on site, online, or some hybrid combination of the two.

Many general education classes are based upon these assumptions, including courses in chemistry, calculus, literature, and political science, all of which rest on the bedrock faith that the “out-thereness” of the world (Law, 2003) is knowable, that it is possible for people to share this knowledge, and that the information about the world around us exists independently of our own existence.

The realist pedagogical approach is evident in the tangled history of TC service courses. Connors (1982) tells us that the beginnings of the technical writing service course are rooted in the engineering schools that grew out of the Morrill Act, and that by the end of the nineteenth century those engineering schools were graduating “competent engineers who were near-illiterates” (p. 331). The purpose of requiring TC instruction to engineering students was to convey the knowledge and skills (again, Law’s “out-thereness”) to the students who needed them. One problem with a realist approach to writing instruction is that the students in those classes already knew how to write; that is, they were already literate. They were also (presumably) already oriented to the physical sciences. Because the students already knew the facts they needed, a pedagogy based on realism would not fit their needs. In other words, if simply knowing enough information were the sole requirement to be a skilled writer, then all well-read individuals would be good writers.

Desired Skills for Technical Communicators
This is a proposal for the study of the differences between group revision in TC service courses and the group revision that takes place in engineering firms. In this section, I present some of the highlights of both recent and canonical literature on the subject of TC and TC education in order to then compare these ideals with service courses for undergraduates.

Researchers such as Johnson-Eilola, Whiteside, Hayhoe, Harner and Rich, and Rainey, Turner, and Dayton describe TC education with broad terms such as collaboration, context, emancipation, and technological change. According to Johnson-Eilola (1996), TC workers “rely on skills in abstraction, experimentation, collaboration, and system thinking to work with information across a variety of disciplines and markets” and that “symbolic-analytic work mediates between the functional necessities of usability and efficiency while not losing sight of the larger rhetorical and social contexts in which users work and live” (p. 245-6). While focused on professional technical communicators, Johnson-Eilola’s claim is true for almost any profession in which data is interpreted for multiple audiences; thus, his remarks are pertinent for any student in a service course.

With specific regard to TC curricula, Hayhoe (2005) wrote,
Academics need to work with our practitioner colleagues to identify in detail the body of knowledge and skills that technical communicators need to be competitive and effective on the job. We must then revise our curricula to focus on that knowledge and those skills to prepare future students. And we must work through our professional organizations with those in industry to ensure that our alumni and those without formal training in the field can learn what they need to know” (266).

In line with Hayhoe’s argument, the 2008 International Professional Communication Conference in Montreal featured a discussion entitled “Developing a Body of Knowledge for the Technical Communication Profession,” chaired by Hillary Hart. I mention this conference because its attendees are both academic and non-academic TC professionals, thus serving as evidence that a partnership between academics and practitioners is not an effort solely on behalf of the academics. Hart then went on to chair the STC’s Body of Knowledge project, still ongoing, which is an attempt at broadly defining areas of knowledge for technical communicators in a public, online venue. Taken together, Hart and Hayhoe indicate a growing desire to formalize what TC workers and researchers have been doing for almost a century.

Whiteside (2003), wrote that “[t]he global nature of today’s business economy spreads to additional challenges for technical communicators . . . including grant writing, usability, educational technology, user interface design, multimedia design, and knowledge management” (304). Whiteside’s statement holds true for those practicing TC as a profession or those who produce technical documents as part of another profession, such as medicine or engineering. Speaking more broadly, Rainey, Turner, and Dayton (2005), published a study which listed the following “most important competencies for technical communicators”:
• Skills in collaborating with both subject-matter experts and coworkers
• Ability to write clearly for specific audiences directed by clearly defined purposes
• Ability to assess and to learn to use technologies
• Ability to take the initiative (be a self-starter) and to evaluate one’s own work and the work of others (323).

While Rainey, Turner, and Dayton’s study is concerned primarily with professional technical communicators, their list of competencies can also be applied to students taking TC service courses. For instance, undergraduate engineering majors will someday routinely “collabora[te] with both subject-matter experts and coworkers” as well as “write clearly for specific audiences direct by clearly defined purposes.” TC researchers, for our part, must remember that some of the research intended to help our own colleagues can be applied to students enrolled in service courses.

David and Kienzler (1999) suggest that the “broad context” found when students “find clients for their work” may be a bridge between classroom and non-academic work. David and Kienzler also state that “students [in undergraduate service courses] are asked to find real-world problems to solve, and the work is frequently done collaboratively.” They go on to suggest that teachers of TC adopt an “emancipatory” pedagogy which will help “meet the call from industry.” By “emancipatory,” David and Kienzler mean an approach to teaching which encourages students to solve classroom problems (assignments) for the sake of solving “public” problems. They make note of “messy problems involving complicated relationships among multiple variables” and “action through knowledge translated across disciplines” for students in service courses. Those variables include ones found during research, but could also include the variables of people working collaboratively, rapid changes in writing technologies, and the relationship between service courses, “user departments,” and professional practice.

Harner and Rich (2005) claim that the changing nature of the TC profession is matched by the changing nature of academic program design, and that “it would be helpful to examine the state of many scientific and technical communication programs across the nation” so as to get an idea of what a common TC curriculum looks like as well as pedagogical strategies for meeting curricular goals. Like Hayhoe, Whiteside (2003) also called for professional and curricular standards for TC instruction, and both also indicate the need for increased communication from industry to help guide that standardization.

In sum, then, these sources demonstrate that TC is, or can be, a field of great depth and breadth. However, there is little evidence in the literature that provides insight into TC regarding how it’s taught to non-TC majors. There is also the further question of what should be taught, and whether there is a method for discovering the writing skills and knowledge in the workplace and getting it into the service course classroom in usable form.

Service courses
A service course is a course offered by one department to non-majors from other departments. For the purposes of this proposal, which suggests that TC service courses are an important site of research into group revision practices, understanding the difference between service courses and courses for majors within a discipline is important. For instance, the required course in Texas history that all students enrolled in Texas public colleges and university must take is offered by history departments as a service course. The word “service” indicates that the department is serving the campus at large by providing instruction in a specialized topic for those who are not necessarily majors in that department. Service courses are rooted in the notion of a “general education” curriculum which ensures that all students are exposed to the same pieces of knowledge.

In 1946, the American Council on Education issued a report describing general education at the college level to be “those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational education that should be the common possession, the common denominator, so to speak, of educated persons as individuals and as citizens in a free society” (Bigelow, 1947). In their list of ten objectives, which included items such as “emotional and social adjustment,” “family and marital adjustment,” “natural phenomena,” literature, music, “thinking about the meaning and value of life,” the second objective states, “To communicate through his own language in writing and speaking at the level of expression adequate to the needs of educated people” (Bigelow, 1947, p. 258).

Connors (1982) outlines the history of just such a course in technical writing: classes offered through English departments for the benefit of engineering students. But while we have this history, we also have articles that comment upon service courses without defining them. For instance, a number of articles discuss various aspects of service courses, such as choosing a textbook for teaching intercultural communication (Barker & Matveeva, 2006), changes in pedagogy (David & Kienzler, 1999), measuring transfer of rhetorical skills into other classes (Ford, 2004), and positioning required communication courses as writing-in-the disciplines courses (Russell, 2007). Despite the lack of definition, Barker and Matveeva go so far as to make broad claims, such as “we all know that a certain amount of skill instruction occurs in the course” (198). Yet at least one study indicates that a great many service courses are taught in the United States each year (Reave, 2004). Surely, it is time to get a handle on things.

Dobrin, trying to impart a feel for the trials of the technical writing teacher, laments that “[i]ndeed, technical writing is probably taught in more different ways—inside more different departments—than any other ostensibly humanistic course” (1982). Even at individual institutions, it is sometimes the case that “no systematic evaluation has been conducted on the effects of the current technical communication service courses” (Scott & Plumb, 1999).

But it is inaccurate to say that there are no sources of information concerning service courses. Course descriptions, for one, can provide claims of course content and purpose. For instance, out of course descriptions for 70 higher education institutions, TC service course descriptions claim to offer students practice in “basic genres and topics” (University of Alabama), “patterns of writing” (TTU), oral presentations (15 different institutions), and an avalanche of reports, proposals, and letters. While these course descriptions are obviously generic, often for the sake of allowing instructors some freedom to develop class-specific assignments and readings, they do point to coherence of purpose. Simultaneously, that coherence is disrupted by long-standing debate within the field of TC concerning the very definition of TC itself (Allen, 2004; Dobrin, 1985; Miller, 1979) or the nature of TC research (Blyler, 1995; Charney, 1996).

Research into what is taught in service courses is difficult in part because there are so many service courses offered. According to the Texas Common Course Numbering System, in Texas alone there are 66 colleges and universities offering a TC service course and each school, department, and individual instructor doubtless has differing interpretations of the terms mentioned in the course descriptions above. Another reason for difficulty in researching TC service courses is that while academic and non-academic publishing venues exist in abundance, there are few large repositories of information about service courses. Reasons may include a lack of emphasis on service courses with regard to tenure and promotion for professors, lack of trained instructors (and therefore lack of sustained research because these same instructors might be untrained in TC, or may be encouraged to carry out research judged more appropriate for future tenure-track positions), and the already-mentioned generic nature of course descriptions. As mentioned earlier, Barker and Matveeva claim that many TC service course instructors are likely working with “set syllabuses that do not allow much flexibility” (192). As cited earlier, Dobrin’s view is contrary to Barker and Matveeva’s, since he claims that “technical writing is probably taught in more different ways—inside more different departments—than any other ostensibly humanistic course” (1982). Despite the chronological gap between these two sources (2006 and 1982, respectively), they serve as a reminder that there may yet be a lack of consensus about what is taught, and even by whom, in TC service courses.

If our service courses are to fulfill their stated functions, then we must be more diligent in performing practical research that allows for some confidence that we are teaching writing which is similar to actual workplace writing. Furthermore, we must be willing to make this information widely available so that other researchers can continue to build upon what is already known.

TC service courses
Knievel (2007) suggests that “the service course is a particularly rich site of contention, promise, and crisis—a bellwether of the field” (1), and I would further argue that service courses are a logical place to study whether academic instruction is keeping up with workplace practice. While much research is devoted to studying students who will become professional technical communicators both inside and outside of academia (Harner & Rich, 2005; Hart-Davidson, 2001; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2001; Rainey, Turner, & Dayton, 2005), studying the instruction we provide those students (such as engineers) who will not be employed directly in our field is also critical. Studying service courses for engineering students who will not be professional technical communicators is important because that body of students is headed into a market which requires detailed, technical knowledge, and which also requires regular communication with multiple audiences, including fellow engineers, engineers in other fields, supervisors, employees, and potential clients. Engineering students come to the service course because they need training in genres, audience analysis, and the rhetorical and technological tools needed for getting information from those who know it to those who need to know it. Thus, it is our obligation to inform our service courses with workplace practice.

Faculty who teach TC service courses are almost overwhelmingly contingent (84%), non-tenure track faculty (Meloncon & England, forthcoming). Faced with heavy teaching loads and perhaps teaching TC for the first time (or without training, or both), those contingent faculty members might not have a wide range of contacts outside academics. While engineering departments across the nation maintain non-academic contacts through professional licensure of faculty, advisory councils, and ABET-mandated quality improvement initiatives, liberal arts programs often have little contact with the non-academic workplace. Even TC programs, which we might assume to have close ties with practice, often face cultural barriers that work against collaboration with their non-academic colleagues (Dicks, 2002). Thus, liberal arts faculty members might have few resources for developing and implementing new content for a TC service course.

With such a large contingent labor force, we can guess that many service course instructors simply are not versed in TC or TC research methods, and may not be able to carry out research designed to answer the question of what to teach in the service course. Contingent faculty are also among the most poorly funded in terms of professional development and research, and so even if they are able they may not have the money or facilities in order to conduct research. Lastly, it’s important to mention that many faculty members simply do not have the breadth of contact with the professional world necessary to find out what writing skills and practices are needed outside of classroom walls.

Technical communication (TC) is taught to a large number of undergraduates as part of a required service course for non-majors. A rough estimate based on Reave (2004)places the nationwide number of undergraduate students in TC service courses at around 700,000 in the academic year 2007. Thus, TC service courses affect a large number of future professionals, both in terms of those students’ future practice as well as how they perceive TC as a discipline. As those students move into the professional realm where TC is part of their everyday work, they will inevitably encounter situations for which their service courses should have provided some level of preparation. Ten years have passed, however, since service courses appear to have occupied the interest of TC researchers by way of a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly. None of the articles in that issue addressed service course content nor a method for keeping those same courses updated. In the meantime, the ethnographic approach seems to have maintained its popularity with writing researchers.

Part of the disjuncture between writing for the humanities (and thus the approach that humanities-based textbooks take) and writing in the scientific and engineering fields has to do with the mission of technical communication itself: clarity reigns supreme. Over and over, engineers are rightly taught that clarity is the goal of good writing (Boyd & Hassett, 2000; Lengsfeld, Edelstein, Black, Hightower, & et al., 2004; Leydens & Schneider, 2009). Indeed, ABET criterion 3(g) states that "Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain. . .an ability to communicate effectively” (ABET, 2007). The humanities, though, often approach writing as an art in itself, and that the act of writing (rather than its product) is worth studying. And as with the engineers who argue the opposite, the humanities scholars are indeed correct. These two approaches are both utterly logical, and yet incompatible.

Joanna Wolfe (2009) points out that textbooks for introductory TC service courses actually fail to serve a huge chunk of their clientele: engineering and science students whose rhetorical and epistemological approach do not mesh with those of the humanities scholars who produce the textbooks. To be fair, there are textbooks written by engineers or by humanities scholars who work closely for engineers. Hillary Hart’s Engineering Communication is such a book, created by a humanities scholar whose position and experience aligns her with an engineering college. But those books are few and far between, and their level of adoption does not even begin to approach those of the humanities-driven textbooks. As Wolfe bluntly puts it, “the most popular technical communication textbooks on the market focus on rhetorical situations that are far more likely to be encountered by someone with a job title of technical writer rather than one of engineer” (353, emphasis in original).

The contrast between what engineers and employers seem to want can be seen in Blyler’s argument in favor of a pedagogy of social action, urging teachers and students to take a rhetorical approach to the construction of power in both textual and graphical narratives (Blyler, 1995). In an earlier article, Blyler takes a humanities-based stance when arguing against a “formulaic” view of genre and purpose for business communication courses (Blyler, 1993). But formulaic is exactly what many engineers would like, and is often exactly the approach needed for effective engineering communication. In the humanities, we argue that texts are social artifacts constructed to meet the needs and expectations of (frequently) tightly-knit groups with a level of discourse contingent upon their workplace activities and needs. But Blyer’s argument suggests that teaching should take the opposite approach, and that we should not train students to write genres within such a specific context. Taking a broad approach to audience analysis and textual production would help student writers think more globally about writing and perhaps more critically about the purposes of genre. But to teach that broader view of rhetoric means we’re not responding to the stated needs of our client departments and are in fact working more pragmatically according to our own Jamesian “cash value.”

Bushnell argues that preparing students simply for their future jobs based on expectations provided solely by employers undermines the role of the university in producing writers who “shape knowledge” and who acknowledge bias rather than avoid it (Bushnell, 1999). However, for students in technical majors who take the service course as part of a communication requirement, the expectation to “shape knowledge” may be too great a leap: engineering students, for example, are taught to create knowledge (design structures, conduct tests) and then to report it. To introduce the idea of shaping knowledge in the form of a one-semester course, or to encourage students to take a rhetorically-bound epistemological stance, may be asking too much. Bushnell’s take on university education is also a bit dated: we no longer (always) aim to broaden minds and further intellectual horizons. Instead, it seems the more common goal is to train students for specific professions, which more and more commonly require even further specialization after college.

Academics and practitioners in TC have an ongoing conversation about how we can increase the perceived value of our profession (Hughes, 2002; Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Redish, 2003). Much of that discussion has to do with conversations about licensure, re-positioning TC in accordance with added value, defining TCers as knowledge workers, and the like. One practical place to start increasing the value we add, and are perceived as adding, is to offer higher-quality courses to non-majors. Our course descriptions say the TC service course is intended to give students practice writing for "business” and “industry,” for their “future careers in writing and business,” “writing for [the] professions,” and writing in a “business environment.” If that’s the case, then the service course is a logical place to begin introducing students to the value that good writing can add to the workplace.

Unfortunately, a faculty member wishing to update the content of service course has few resources other than his or her ability to gather new information. The TC literature barely discusses service courses, and there is little information on what content should be included. Popular textbooks, such as Johnson-Sheehan’s Technical Communication in the 21st Century and Markel’s Technical Communication do a good job of discussing genres and writing practices; however, an introductory text of any sort will necessarily have large gaps and will not address the specific writing needs of students from various majors.

Differences between Academic and Non-Academic Writing
How do these differences relate to this study?

Bosley contends that documents types represent a connection between academic and workplace writing, listing “proposals, grants, reports, procedures, white papers, user manuals, tutorials, online material, memoranda, meeting minutes, letters, promotional and public relations material” (Table 2.1, 29) as document types used by both (Bosley, 2002). For academics, however, most of these document types represent administrative work taken on by tenured and tenure-track faculty. Contingent faculty rarely have need to write public relations material, proposals or meeting minutes because their jobs are largely relegated to teaching. Bosley’s argument therefore applies only to a minority of TC faculty teaching the service course, since the majority of service courses are taught by contingent faculty.
Bosley indicates that academics and practitioners alike write and work collaboratively on committees and teams. However, Dicks indicates that this is in fact a difference due to the difference with which individual initiative is treated by both academics (publication and tenure) and practitioners (teamwork, collaboration and increased corporate value) (Dicks, 2002).

But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is for his or her direct benefit. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.

Dicks’ claim is that the differences between academic and workplace writers move beyond the generic and into the realm of cultural divides. Dicks enumerates five cultural differences which contribute to the disconnection between academics and practitioners, including “perception of information,” “language and discourse styles,” “views of collaboration versus individual effort,” assumptions about employment,” and “reward structures” (Dicks, 2002). In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the employee works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual. Individual benefits such as paychecks, raises, and promotions come only as the result of work which increases the value of the company.

Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and has produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed individually; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the corporate body. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes a backseat to corporate identity and profit. Our service courses, however, likely do not (and perhaps cannot) reflect the for-profit approach to group writing. If they cannot mimic those goals, then we can at least investigate and acknowledge those differences in meaningful ways.

The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing. In the next section, I discuss the academic definitions and perceptions of revision in order to provide some context for why group revision is an important aspect of this study.

Revision
Within academic culture, attempts to define revision offer microcosms of insight into researchers’ attempts to define an activity which resists definition. Ethnographic methods often get at the social (Katz), rhetorical (Winsor) or physical (Jones) aspects of revision; however, it’s clear that like almost any other writing activity revision takes place within specific (mixed) contexts. Haar (2006) provides examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.”

Revision involves as much technological expertise as any other variety of the writing process. Yet there is much less scholarship dealing with the technological aspects of revision than with writing (either writing in general or the writing of a first draft). Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999) use an interface between students posing assignments and revising, encouraging written interaction between students, and developing a community within the course itself. Even in 1999, such newsgroups were not new technology, and now ten years later they are one of the more antiquated online technologies.

Within non-academic, workplace culture revision takes on a different dynamic than in the classroom because writing often serves different social purposes. For example, workplace writers often do not get credit for their individual efforts; rather, the company gains value and recognition. In the workplace, writers often work together with little regard for plagiarism since the company, or the group itself, is considered the author. Since revision takes place in response to an audience, I argue that revision is when the work of the individual becomes the work of the group, and that work always takes place with the use of some tool, whether analog or digital. Uncovering that process and how the group works with technology to attain the group’s goals is a worthwhile goal for anyone trying to improve TC service courses.

Katz’ study, which places revision as an activity between co-workers (“writing review”), explicates the socialization of employees into the rhetorical commonplaces and practices of the workplace. Employees frequently get their writing reviewed, voluntarily or not, by a supervisor who has some power over the employee. For Katz, the interactions between employee and supervisor are just as important as changes made to the document: employees are working to improve the image of the company rather than writing for individual achievement like students in a classroom environment (39). This change, from writing as an individual to working with others to achieve a common goal, and which necessitates a cognitive shift on the part of the writer, needs demystification for both service course instructors as well as students.

Winsor claims that this shift in cognition occurs within an “environment [that] includes a complex of readers, purposes those readers have, history they share, expectations under which they operate, and a host of other factors that are relevant for rhetoric” (8). Unlike a classroom, a work environment de-emphasizes the needs and goals of the individual and emphasizes those of the group. How, then, can a service course instructor know the conditions and interactions that take place when writing as a team rather than a person, particularly when the students in the service course will primarily not be students of English, rhetoric, or technical communication (other than in the broadest sense)? Winsor’s answer is that it cannot happen until the individual is aware of the culture of that profession (9). Thus, if students are to learn effective revision practices for their desired profession, at least part of that profession’s culture must exist within the classroom experience and that part of that replication of culture must include the technologies with which revision are performed.

TC instruction
Relationship of TC instruction to non-academic work
Technical communication theorists struggle, and sometimes fight, to find a place to “fit” technical communication curricula. Carolyn Miller’s “What’s Practical about Technical Writing” addresses this problem head-on. She writes, “In its eagerness to be useful—to students and their future employers—technical writing has sought a basis in practice, a basis that is problematic. I do not mean to suggest that academics should keep themselves ignorant of nonacademic practices [. . .] But technical writing teachers and curriculum planners should take seriously the problem of how to think about practice. The problem leads one to the complex relation between description and prescription” (Miller, 1989). The relation(ship) she describes is whether the classroom or the cubicle should lead, whether academics are in the business of “vocational preparation” or “cultural awareness” (18). As she and others acknowledge, the question is part of a larger debate in American colleges and universities, and one which is “infected by the assumptions that what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good (21), clearly putting herself at odds with the Jamesian pragmatism which argues not only that “what is useful is good,” but that what is useful is true. While arguing for both academics and non-academics having a role in curricular development, Miller eventually stands firmly on the side of academics having the ultimate responsibility: “If technical writing is the rhetoric of ‘the world of work,’ it is the rhetoric of contemporary praxis. In teaching such rhetoric, then, we acquire a measure of responsibility for political and economic conduct” (24).

Dicks
Blakeslee
Dobrin

Dobrin writes, “The teacher of technical writing is teaching the student to perform for his or her peer in a particular technical community, a community of which the teacher is not himself a member. It is as if he were teaching Balinese dancing in Bali” (137).

Dobrin’s mistakes here are manifold: the students will, quite often, not be “performing” for their community at all, and instead will be “performing” for clients, co-workers, and supervisors who are not technical professionals, or at least not professionals within the same field. Next, Dobrin assumes that technical writing instructors do not belong to the same community to which the student belongs; however, the instructor should at least be able to recognize that the act of writing itself is of course a communal act and that therefore teacher and student do have a connection. Lastly, Dobrin’s immediate retreat to the world of the humanities by making a reference to culturally-based dances shows that, at least in this article, he is out of his realm. He should have included a reference to a technical field, such as “teaching a chemical engineer how to use a gas chromatograph,” particularly since the major example used in his essay is from a student majoring in chemical engineering. Granted, Dobrin’s text is quite outdated and TC has changed a great deal since then in terms of academic recognition. On the other hand, Dobrin’s text is still included in TC anthologies.


Textbooks
For TCers
For Non-TCers
Contingent faculty?
Engineers
Engineering communication
TC working with engineering
Academic
Practitioner




ABET. (2007). Criteria for accrediting engineering programs: effective for evaluations during the 2008-2009 accreditation cycle. Baltimore, MD.
Allen, J. (2004). The case against defining technical writing. In J. M. Dubinsky (Ed.), Teaching Technical Communication: Critical Issues for the Classroom (pp. 67-76). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Barker, T., & Matveeva, N. (2006). Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Technical Writing Service Course: Real Instructors' Practices and Suggestions for Textbook Selection. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(2), 191.
Bigelow, K. W. (1947). General Education. Review of Educational Research, 17(4), 258-265.
Blyler, N. R. (1993). Teaching Purpose in a Business Communication Course. Bulletin of the Association for Business Communication, 56(3), 15-20.
Blyler, N. R. (1995). Research as Ideology in Professional Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 4(3), 285.
Bosley, D. S. (2002). Jumping Off the Ivory Tower: Changing the Academic Perspective. In B. Mirel, Spilka, Rachel (Ed.), Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century (pp. 27-39). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Boyd, G., & Hassett, M. F. (2000). Developing critical writing skills in engineering and technology students. Journal of Engineering Education, 89(4), 409.
Brereton, J. C. e. (1995). The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bushnell, J. (1999). A Contrary View of the Technical Writing Classroom: Notes Toward Future Discussion. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(2).
Charney, D. (1996). Empiricism Is Not a Four-Letter Word. College Composition and Communication, 47(4), 567-593.
Connors, R. J. (1985). Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction. College Composition and Communication, 36(1), 61-72.
David, C., & Kienzler, D. (1999). Towards an emancipatory pedagogy in service courses and user departments. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(3).
Dicks, R. S. (2002). Cultural Impediments to Understanding: Are They Surmountable? In B. Mirel, Spilka, Rachel (Ed.), Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Dobrin, D. N. (1985). What's The Purpose of Technical Communication. Technical Writing Teacher, 12(2), 146-160.
Ford, J. D. (2004). Knowledge transfer across disciplines: tracking rhetorical strategies from a technical communication classroom to an engineering classroom. Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, 47(4), 301-315.
Harner, S., & Rich, A. (2005). Trends in Undergraduate Curriculum in Scientific and Technical Communication Programs. Technical Communication, 52(2), 209-220.
Hart-Davidson, W. (2001). On Writing, Technical Communication, and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication. Technical Communication, 48(2), 145.
Heinauer, L. (2008, March 26, 2008). State board of education struggling to decide how best to teach reading and writing. Austin American-Statements. Retrieved from http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/03/26/0326sboe.html
Hughes, M. (2002). Moving from Information Transfer to Knowledge Creation: A New Value Proposition for Technical Communications. Technical Communication, 49(3), 275.
Johnson-Eilola, J. (1996). Relocating the value of work: Technical communication in a Post-Industrial Age. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5(3), 245.
Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (2001). Sketching a Framework for Graduate Education in Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 10(4), 403-437.
Law, J. (2003). Making a Mess with Method. Retrieved from http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-making-a-mess-with-method.pdf
Lengsfeld, C. S., Edelstein, G., Black, J., Hightower, N., & et al. (2004). Engineering Concepts and Communication: A Two-Quarter Course Sequence. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(1), 79.
Leydens, J., & Schneider, J. (2009). Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities, and Challenges. Journal of Engineering Education, 98(3), 255.
Miller, C. R. (1979). A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing. College English.
Miller, C. R. (1989). What's Practical about Technical Writing? In B. E. Fearing, and Sparrow, W. Keats (Ed.), Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. New York: Modern Language Association.
Rainey, K. T., Turner, R. K., & Dayton, D. (2005). Do Curricula Correspond to Managerial Expectations? Core Competencies for Technical Communicators. Technical Communication, 52(3), 323-352.
Reave, L. (2004). Technical Communication Instruction in Engineering Schools A Survey of Top-Ranked U.S. and Canadian Programs. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 18(4), 452-490.
Redish, J. (2003). Adding Value as a Professional Technical Communicator. Technical Communication, 50(4), 505-518.
Russell, D. R. (2007). Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines: Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 21(3), 248-277.
Scott, C., & Plumb, C. (1999). Using portfolios to evaluate service courses as part of an engineering writing program. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(3), 337.