Miller's Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing, A Brief Note

Miller clearly explains her argument in these terms:

“I wish to argue that the common opinion that the undergraduate technical writing course is a ‘skills’ course with little or no humanistic value is the result of a lingering but pervasive positivist view of science.”

The positivist view that Miller is arguing against seems to be similar to, if not the same thing that Burke calls semantic meaning and argues against in "Semantic and Poetic Meaning." Positivism reduces science to the testable, and words are not science but they get in the way of knowledge. From that perspective, only sensory data is pure knowledge. 

For Miller, positivism has unfortunately influenced the teaching of technical writing in at least 4 ways.

1. First, we talk about clarity, but the term clarity is not objective because we can't actually explain what it means.
2. Second, we talk about style and form without talking about invention. Does science invent? Or discover?
3. Third, we teach that tone should be objective and impersonal, but there are real people reading our writing.
4. Fourth, we talk about levels of audience.

But philosophers don’t believe in positivism, anymore, and rhetoric is actually epistemic. In other words, words are themselves forms of knowledge, and knowledge is created. Science is about symbols and arguments, not just about material things. In short, science is a form of rhetoric.

Since communication occurs in communities, we should talk about understanding in technical communication and not just skills because discussions on skills tend to emphasize the writer, whereas a focus on understanding emphasizes both writer and reader. And that focus on both writers and readers is necessary because we don't want to neglect the one while privileging the other.

From Carolyn R. Miller, “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.” Johndan Johnson‐Eilola and Stuart A. Selber, Eds., Central Works in Technical Communication, Oxford University Press, 2004.