Approaches to Rhetoric & Composition Pedagogy
XIII. Response to Slack, Doak, & Miller’s “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority”
Critical Arguments
Working off of Foucault’s argument that certain discourses produce authors—they are granted the privilege of authorship—Slack, Doak, and Miller contest that technical writing is not one of the privileged discourses. The three argue that the technical writer is perceived as a transmitter or translator rather than an author. Slack et al. locate the technical communicator in three views of communication. Transmission, an early theory in which the sender has power over the receiver, suggests that the technical writer should be transparent in the transmission of the message which is crafted by the engineer. Slack et al. examine translation, where power is shared between the sender and receiver and meaning is fluid, as a step towards acknowledging the power of the technical writer, but a lacking attempt. The newest approach to communication, articulation—in which identities are constituted of elements connected to each other in changing and nonnecessary ways (the point of articulation), constantly reshaping power and meaning—grants authorship to the technical communicator as a negotiator in the articulation of meaning.
Quotations
“From this, Foucault concludes that ‘the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society’ (124). At its most mundane, this is simply to note the fact that certain discourses are granted the privilege of authorship while others are denied this privilege. It is more remarkable to notice, with Foucault, that this very fact suggests an inversion of the way in which we typically understand the relation between an author and a discourse: Rather than authors producing certain discourses, certain discourses are understood to produce authors.” (12)
“The technical writer’s job in this period dominated by the transmission view of communication is to assure that messages are accurately encoded and that they are transmitted with minimal noise over clear channels. In fact, the professional technical writer, as surrogate engineer, is rendered essentially transparent in the process…” (18)
“The promise (for some the pestilence) released from the Pandora’s box of the translation view of communication is the power of the technical communicator as translator. Given the fluidity of meaning and polysemy of any text, a translator can never be transparent.” (24)
“Articulation thus points to the fact that any identity is culturally agreed upon or, more accurately, struggled over in ongoing processes of disarticulation and rearticulation. For example, clearly, one element that makes a train a train (and not, say, a caboose) depends on our agreed-on cultural conception of train. To stretch this a bit, we could say that we have an ideology regarding what we empower as a train.” (27)
“By resting on the conception of author as articulated to the contribution of meaning, by challenging the articulation to differential relations of power between sender, translator, and receiver as being somewhat evident, and to have the conception of science as objective fact finding, we would advance the rearticulation of technical communicators (along with media and technology) as having authorial power.” (30)
Theories & Methods
Using three different views of communication, of which two are established and one is (at the time) growing, allows Slack, Doak, and Miller to argue that conceptions of communication have shaped the definition of the technical writer. The search for authorship in technical writing relies on Foucault’s argument that authorship is granted by certain discourses, of which technical writing is not.
Reflection & Connection
Before this class and these readings, my own conception of the technical writer seems to have been informed by transmission theory. More so, technical writing seemed to exist in contention with literary writing—it was as if the English department housed two very different practices. Literature is often prized in the English department, not without some right, but perhaps to the demise of technical writing. I say that because no one appears to need to make an argument for literary studies in the department, yet technical writing draws closer to questions of value. Slack et al.’s article approaches this problem in a smart way, I think, by relating our conceptions of communication to our understanding of the technical writer. Miller again does this with success in “Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” this time by critiquing our understanding of the processes of science. Whereas the writer is prized as an author and creative or inventive force, technical writing was presented to me as a means of relaying a message in the style of a vacuum cleaner instruction manual. That is, the writer seemed nonessential to the communication. As these two articles argue, however, technical communication is always engaged in rhetorical processes. Putting the author into technical writing, as Slack et al. and Miller have done, makes me think that it should be required in the English major. Students would benefit from the generic features that aren’t addressed in literary studies, particularly the “real world” writing (esp. organizing social action) that Yancey mentions.
A Question
Why does technical writing have to put up such a hearty fight for its value as opposed to literary studies?
XIV. Response to Paradis’ “Text and Action: The Operator’s Manual in Context and in Court”
Critical Arguments
Paradis identifies four elements of the operator’s manual: the idealized object, tool, or process, the agent, the environment, and the action. With these constituents, Paradis argues that the manual seeks to introduce the mechanical product—a neutral object—into a reality of human values and purpose. The operator’s manuals’ rhetorical purpose is to construct a “world of ‘reasonable actions’ in order to bridge the gap between technology (and its functions) and human society. More so, a successful manual will translate the expert’s knowledge into lay language. This translation is most important for complex technologies since, as Paradis argues, many technologies work within a mythology of images—people often recognize the function of tools without an explanation. Paradis also suggests that manufacturers must frame their product in written text lest they be faced with negligence. Ultimately, Paradis argues that operator’s manuals are problematized by their rhetorical purpose of distilling expertise into lay terms insomuch that manuals must account for the consequences of misuse and present them to the user.
Quotations
“The rhetorical practices of disciplines have broader social consequences, as well, since expert knowledge is routinely exported to society in innumerable manifestations of modern instrumental control….Nearly all of these products are transferred from institutional settings of expertise by means of written operational discourse, which helps frame them in terms of relevant actions carried out in social contexts.” (367)
“I conclude with a consideration of the same manuals in light of recent legal liability proceedings in order to illustrate how these texts are socially burdened by tort law and the concept of liability, the larger object of which I argue is to impose purpose on the basically neutral world of technology. In this light, the operator’s manual can be seen to play a profound role in the effort–sometime specious–to adapt technology to human ends.” (368)
“Many lawn mower purchasers can by mere inspection decode the fraction of the technology necessary to operate the instrument satisfactorily. Hence, the sport of dispensing with the manual: ‘When all else fails,’ the saying goes, ‘consult the manual.’ The highly accessible technologies common in consumer society are thus based on a social substrate of shared generic imagery, a kind of Platonic world of idealized forms and processes that is presumably the product of elementary and secondary education, supplemented by television culture….Access to more complex technologies, may of which have great institutional impact, usually requires a formal framework of explanation.” (371)
“If we had to comprehend fully the rationale of every technology we availed ourselves of, even electric power would be removed from common social use. On the other hand, as procedures become elaborated in detailed protocols, they increasingly leave the realm of common sense behind. They demand strict compliance and assume a highly problematic responsibility to be accurate and exhaustive.” (375)
Theories & Methods
Paradis examines two court cases which call into question whether or not operator’s manuals for studguns did enough to connect the operator with the proper use of the tool. The two manuals are examined for rhetorical efficacy. Paradis’ argument is based on the intersection of the “neutral” technological world and the world of human action and value.
Reflection & Connection
One of the most intriguing sections of Paradis’ article is the consideration of the generic images which inform an operator use of a tool. Often, these stock images have the ability to be misused, appropriated onto tools that seem intuitive but, rather contrarily, are specialized in their function or process. The studgun in question might suffer from this misappropriation of industrial imagery, in particular the imagery of the hammer. Because the studgun has the same purpose as the hammer (drive a pin into a material), the former appears to the operator a sibling of the latter when, in fact, the studgun’s blood relative is a firearm.
Because some industrial and construction practices are so intuitive, one is likely to err from . But what else motivates this reluctance to consult the text? There seems to be more at play than just the tool itself. The collective imagery of industrial technology (and the construction industry in particular, esp. in the case of the studgun incidents) is constituted not only of the intuitive tools that Paradis argues for, but of an idealized form of masculinity. That is, in a construction environment, the tool’s Platonic form is an easily operated implement, while the Platonic form of the operator is a proficient male. Some of this must arise from a historically male-dominated industry in which hands-on work is championed as masculine. Admitting to the text, or consultation in general, connotes an admission to falling short of an idealized masculinity. Besides the troubling construction of masculinity, this imagery also promotes action severed from consultation—a process that ends in injury at the least.
A Question
Does technology really exist as a neutral object as Paradis claims? Can a product be manufactured without some connection to human purpose/goals?
XV. Barton and Barton’s “Ideology and the Map: Toward a Postmodern Visual Design Discourse”
Critical Arguments
a
Quotations
a
Theories & Methods
a
Reflection & Connection
a
A Question
a
