While Technical Communication is commonly defined
as a practice and not a field of research, any well-established field should
have general research questions. So, what are the research questions in the field
of Technical Communication? This is a difficult question because the field is a
hybrid of many different fields, such as rhetoric, design, speech, psychology,
education, computer science, etc. But questions are important, and good
questions generate more questions.
To find the answer, Rude looks at 109 books,
analyzing them on the large-scale, to see what questions the field is asking. Rude
believes that Technical Communication’s main question is this: how do texts (defined
broadly) mediate knowledge, values, and action in social and professional
contexts?
From this question, Rude examines 4 related
questions that divide the field into 4 main areas (though some of the questions
can be in more than one area):
Questions of
- Disciplinarity: Who are we? Why are we here? What is our history, and what is our future?
- Pedagogy: What should we teach and how?
- Practice: How should texts be ethical and effective? What are the best practices?
- Social Change: How do texts function as agents of knowledge making, action, and change?
Much energy has already gone to pedagogy and
practice, but “a sustainable academic field is built on research questions that
develop knowledge” (205). In other words, what are these researchers trying to
discover? [But wait a minute: is Rude not implying a separation between knowledge
and pedagogy and practice here? If so, why? Do we need to?]
From Carolyn D. Rude, “Mapping the Research Questions
in Technical Communication,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication
23.2 (2009); 174‐201.
That actually made me think of this comic: https://boscafelife.wordpress.com/tag/comic-about-technical-writing/
ReplyDeleteI think it's really difficult to define the discipline of technical writing. And how can you teach something undefined? In creative writing or literary writing, your subject is more stable and the conversation about the same subject is often the focus of change.
In technical writing, your subject is constantly in flux (software, equipment, materials, oil and gas, scientific papers), making it really difficult to define as a discipline. In an increasingly information-dense society, how do you teach writing principles in a way that broadly applies to so many different subjects?
Technical writing seems more of a craft of "translation" than a craft of writing. It boggles my mind that my team sits down and writes manuals about equipment we've never seen in real life and will never even operate. How do you define that as a discipline? When technical writing for one field could be so different from another?