TCOM_ Annotated Bibliography #1 Due

Connors, “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America,” 3-19

Rutter, “History, Rhetoric, and Humanism…” 20-34

Durack, “Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical 

Communication,” 35-46

Annotated Bibliography #1 Due

Boettger and Friess. (2020)/ “Content and Authorship Patterns in Technical Communication Journals (1996–2017): A Quantitative Content Analysis,” Technical Communication 67.3

J. TECHNICAL WRITING AND COMMUNICATION, Vol. 21 (2) 133-1 53, 1991

HISTORY, RHETORIC, AND HUMANISM:
TOWARD A MORE COMPREHENSIVE
DEFINITION OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

R U S S E L L R U I T E R
Illinois State University at Normal

ABSTRACT

Recent research suggests that pragmatic emphasis on writing proficiency
alone does not produce a good technical communicator. Attention must also
be given to the technical communicator as liberally educated generalist who
writes well and feels an affinity for science or technology. To this end,
technical communication needs to be studied in the larger context of evolving
science and technology, developing trends in technical education, and the
oratorical tradition of broad learning applied to the active life. Recent studies
of the collaborative culture of the workplace should be supplemented
by increased attention to humanistic questions of what a person needs
to be and know in order to cooperate effectively as a practicing technical
communicator.

For a number of years I have directed the technical writing and the cooperative
education programs in English at a midwestern regional university. Many of our
technical writing students spend up to a year co-oping in industry. Last year a
project manager at a large electronics firm told me over coffee that writers, to
succeed at his company, have to do more than just write fluently. Technical
writing, he said, is one-third writing proficiency, one-third problem-solving skill,
and one-third ability to work with other people. Writing proficiency is essential,
he told me, but by itself it is not enough. I had already come to a conclusion
somewhat like this, but it was gratifying to hear it expressed by someone who had
spent twenty-five years writing in industry.

My project manager’s point is reinforced by D. A. Winsor [l] and Roger C.
Pace [2] in their studies of the communication problems that preceded the

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doi: 10.2 190/7BBK-BJYK-AQGB-28GP http://baywood.com

134 / R U l l E R

explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. As Winsor and Pace show, several
managers and engineers knew that the type of O-rings used in the Challenger had
already cracked under test conditions and thus might crack during launching.
Memorandums were written which established that failure could well occur, and
eventually a conference was held involving managers and engineers at which,
even though the possibility of O-ring failure was discussed, the decision was taken
to launch the Challenger. “Why,” Winsor asks, “did those who knew of the problem
with the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters not convince those in power to stop the
launch?” [l, p. 1011. For Pace, the Challenger disaster “illustrates in graphic terms
how ‘human’ the process of communication is,” and he urges that technical com-
munication scholars and decision makers “broaden their perspectives of com-
munication to include the human values inherent in the process” [Z, p. 2181.

The failure of space shuttle Challenger demonstrates what the project manager
I mentioned earlier observed-that there is more to technical communication than
proficiency in writing, more even than knowing facts. This point is urged by
Victoria M. Winkler and Jeanne L. Mizuno in their survey of advanced technical
communication courses offered in colleges and universities and in industry [3].
“From the literature,” they conclude, “it appears that advanced courses in
academia should concentrate on technical communication as opposed to focusing
narrowly on writing” [3, p. 461. They conclude their study with what I see as a
commitment to the liberal arts [3, p. 471:

In sum, our role is still in educating, researching, theory-building, and producing
professionals who are competent communicators and effective problem solvers. Our
role is not to simulate corporate training in the university classroom.

David N. Dobrin criticizes the whole enterprise of teaching technical writing in
the university, claiming that it is so narrow and so heavily mortgaged to prag-
matism that it lacks cohesiveness and moral purpose [4]. How is the problem to be
solved? “Here’s a way of starting,” he writes [4, pp. 156-1571:

If someone asks you what you do when you teach technical writing, don’t say that
you teach people how to write technical prose, or write reports or manuals, or heaven
forbid, how to transfer information. Don’t even mention writing, because writing is
unfortunately not the issue. Tell people that we teach students how to make their
work useful to the people they work with. That’s a start.

It is indeed a start-but what comes next? I think Kenneth Bruffee, in his
discussion of conversation [5], points the way to an answer. “To think well as
individuals,” Bruffee writes [5, p. 6401,

. . . we must learn to think well collectively-that is, we must learn to converse
well. The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse
better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of
community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value.

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 135

Civilization, society, conversation-these place people and knowledge ahead of
systems and activities. Technical communication needs to associate itself, more
than it has so far, with that heightened form of conversation called liberal educa-
tion. It needs to associate itself more closely with the traditions of rhetoric and
humane learning.

The need to do this becomes more urgent every year. Ever-faster computers
enable us to derive and classify mountains of data in days or hours or minutes, and
ever-more-sophisticated desktop systems present hordes of layout and page-
design a1 ternatives. Whatever benefits these adjuncts to communication may
confer, it seems to me that electronic efficiency, which tells us that anything can
be done, bids fair to replace human judgment, which tells us what should be done.
The threat posed by the electronic revolution will abate only when the faculty of
judgment is informed by a philosophy comprehensive enough to harness the
technology at our disposal. The philosophy of pragmatism is apocalyptically
inadequate to the job. Erich Fromm has said that excessive love of technical
systems is a form of necrophilia [6, p. 421. I am more inclined to say of any system
what Raymond Chandler once said of the craft of fiction, that by the time you
know all the tricks, you haven’t got anything to say [7, pp. ix-XI. We need to ask
more insistently what technical communicators need to know and be as educated
human beings, not just as users of systems. We need to reassert that wise people
who can speak and write well are still the best assets we’ve got. This article
explores the ways in which the practice of technical communication might be
affected for the better by contextualization of the discipline-by increased atten-
tion to its origin and development and to the tradition of humanistic rhetoric and
the oratorical ideal to which it rightfully belongs.

BEING AND KNOWING BEFORE DOING AND WRITING:
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION AND THE

LIBERAL ARTS TRADITION

Technical communication belongs to a tradition that asserts the primacy of
knowing and being over willing and doing. It insists that the person thinking is
more important than the tools used or the system acted upon. What follows is a
selective review of this tradition which emphasizes the classical period, the
Renaissance, and the nineteenth century.

The Classical Period: Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian

Plato’s opposition to the theory and practice of rhetoric is well-known, but
recent research suggests that too much has been made of it [8]. In the Phaedrus
Socrates tells Phaedrus [9, p. 269D],

136 / RUUER

If you are naturally rhetorical, you will become a notable orator, when to your
natural endowments you have added knowledge and practice; at whatever point you
are deficient in these, you will be incomplete.

The abuse of rhetoric by the Sophists, Plato says elsewhere, lies in their emphasis
upon practice alone, not upon “knowledge and practice,” and it is by this faulty
emphasis that they reduce rhetoric to a matter of amoral expediency [lo, 523A-
527EJ. Plato’s greatest disciple, Aristotle, claims that most people speak “at
random or with familiarity arising from habit,” not from 1earning.or art [ll, 1.11,
a passage rendered by another translator as “a knack acquired from practice” [12,
1.11. The great Roman synthesizer and teacher of Greek rhetoric, Quintilian,
adopts by turns Plato’s moral outrage at the abuses of rhetoric and Aristotle’s
more dispassionate analysis of events that rhetoric seeks to shape. The twelve
books of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory [13] show how little of the orator’s
education and character development are to be left to expediency, habit, or
knackery. Following the masters, Quintilian writes that [ 13,12.24],

. . . no man will ever be thoroughly accomplished in eloquence, who has not
gained a deep insight into the impulses of human nature, and formed his moral
character on the precepts of others and on his own reflection.

One of Quintilian’s most memorable one-liners, that “no man, unless he be good,
can ever be an orator” [13, 12.1.31, captures in a few words the conviction that
character precedes action. Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian all insist that for the
orator, being precedes doing. They insist, in other words, that what kind of person
an orator is determines the success of what an orator does, or even whether he
judges the action as worthy of being undertaken. All three reject the notion that
rhetoric is a tool skill that can be mastered solely by practice.

The Renaissance: Ascham and Bacon

When Roger Ascham compiled the most widely known compendium of Renais-
sance English educational theory, The Schoolmaster, he emphasized just this
point. “Learning,” he wrote [14, p. 501,

. . . teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty, and learning teacheth
safely, when experience maketh more miserable than wise. He hazardeth sore that
waxeth wise by experience.. . . We know by experience itself that it is a marvelous
pain to find out but a short way by long wandering.

No humanist every questioned the premise that learning makes. experience less
burdensome, just aslthe use of mathematical methodology excels that favorite of
budding mathematicians, trial and error.

Ascham’s near contemporary, Francis Bacon, the premier Renaissance apostle
of induction, observation, experimentation, and applied studies, wrote that the

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 137

road to knowledge “does not lie on a level, but ascends and descends; first
ascending to axioms, then descending to works” [15,8.137]. His opposition to the
deductive and disputatious methods of his predecessors is well known. What is
given less prominence is his conviction that simply heaping up data cannot
produce useful science. Bacon complained that “the delivery of knowledges (as it
is now used) is as of fair bodies of trees without roots; good for the carpenter, but
not for the planter” [15, 6.2901. The formulation of theory (or, to use Bacon’s
word, axioms), while it does not immediately produce more timber, nourishes the
roots and keeps the tree growing. If practice ensures tangible products, theory
ensures life and continued growth. This conception of science, rather organic than
mechanistic, is at the heart of Bacon’s thought.

To illustrate this vital interplay of theory with practice, Bacon adduces the
ancient myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes, who ran a race in which Hippomenes
would, if he won, marry Atalanta and, if he lost, suffer death. In this myth
Hippomenes distracted Atalanta by throwing several golden apples slightly to one
side of the path as they ran. Atalanta, though the faster runner, lost the race
because she stopped to pick up the apples instead of concentrating on winning the
race. Drawing from this tale a signification that surely would have stunned its
ancient Greek authors, Bacon criticizes those who seek axioms or theories yet [ls,
8.101],

. . . nevertheless almost always turn aside with overhasty eagerness to practice; not
only for the sake of use and fruits of practice, but from impatience to obtain in the
shape of some new work an assurance for themselves that it is worth their while to
go on. . . . Thus, like Atalanta, they go aside to pick up the golden apple, but
meanwhile they interrupt their course, and let victory escape them.

From this illustration Bacon develops his distinction between experiments of light
and experiments of fruit [15,8.152; also 8.1011, a different form of the metaphor
referred to earlier of nourishing the roots of a tree, not just harvesting the timber.
Speaking more directly, Bacon complains “that arts stop in their undertakings half
way, and forsake the course, and turn aside like Atalanta after profit and com-
modity” [15, 13.143; my emphasis]. The pressure on practicing technical writers
to work solely or primarily on skills that will enable them to finish a document
tomorrow, and on teachers to avoid “experiments of light” because their courses
have been built on a reputation of producing instant fruit, is analogous to the
pressure Bacon felt in his own day for scientists to produce immediate results-if
only to assure themselves and others that their activities should be continued. For
communicators, scientists, and technical specialists alike, though, Bacon’s assess-
ment holds good [15,12.252]:

[Studies] perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are
like natural plants, that need proyning [pruning] by study; and studies themselves do
give forth directives too much at large, except they be bounded by experience.

138 / RUTTER

The Nineteenth Century: Huxley and Newman

This value of studies and of theory in general was recognized by Bacon’s
admirer and Charles Darwin’s champion, the pugnacious biologist Thomas Henry
Huxley. Huxley criticized the notion that fruitful technology (or applied science)
can be developed in the absence of light-producing science (or pure science).
Believing like all good biologists that fruit cannot be made to grow in the dark,
Huxley wrote [16, p. 1551,

I often wish that the phrase, ‘applied science,’ had never been invented. For it
suggests that there is a sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use, which can
be studied apart from another set of scientific knowledge, which is of no practical
utility, and which is termed ‘pure science.’ But there is no more complete fallacy
than this. What people call applied science is nothing but the application of pure
science to particular classes of problems.

John Henry Newman, who as a philosopher, theologian, and champion of liberal
education feared much of what scientists like his contemporary, Huxley, stood for,
agreed that application without theory at best wastes time, resources, and psychic
energy. Responding to the charge that a liberal education fails to prepare people
for useful professional lives, Newman insisted that such an education [17, p. 1571,

. . . gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth
in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. A
liberal education makes a person more-not less-useful in a professional setting
because it teaches that person to value ideas more than facts and systems and because
it confers powers of persuasion and empathy without which cooperative endeavors
remain impossible. A liberal education shows him how to accommodate himself to
others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his
own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to
bear with them.

The authorities cited in this brief review-rhetoricians, scientists, philosophers-
share the conviction that what a person knows and is determines what that person
will do and how well he or she will do it. In our own time, as we urge corpora-
tions to hire people and not just to fill slots, we ought to find it satisfying that
the humanist tradition as it is embodied in various disciplines believes that
Quintilian’s ideal orator, a good person who can speak well [13, 12.1.11, is likely
to offer a perspective on human interaction and motivation that contributes use-
fully to the practical endeavors of business and industry.

Study of the traditions discussed yields other useful perspectives on technical
communication. In the following section are explored three of these: 1) the
dynamism of science and its progression by means of paradigmatic changes that
Kuhn has called “crises” [18, pp. 66-91], 2) the origins of positivistic assumptions
about communication in the misperceptions of science and in programmatic
expediency, and 3) the rhetorical nature of technical communication.

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 139

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS THROUGH CRISIS AND
ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

To most people, science and technology, like the Federal government, are
massive, all-pervasive, and simply t h e r e – a t times menacing and intrusive but
undeniably givers of good things that are not easily done without. Such a con-
ception of science and technology won’t suffice for a technical communicator,
though, any more than the analogous view of government will suffice for a
political scientist. Yet just such a reductionist view of science and technology lies
behind much of what passes for instruction in and truth about technical writing: if
science and technology are rigid, monolithic, and devoted to formulaic thinking
and nothing but pure objectivity, the language used to write about them should
resemble them. This point is radically false, with regard both to science and
technology and to writing, and when it is stated this bluntly, it probably seems
false to most people. But it’s not stated this bluntly-or, most times, even stated at
all. It needs to be brought into the open.

Thomas Kuhn demonstrated long ago that scientific theories used to explain the
phenomena of nature are born, flourish, and finally die [18]. The death of a theory
leads to radical questioning of what for years has been taken as “normal science”
[18, pp. 10-421. The growing inadequacy of a paradigm that for generations has
proved satisfactory precipitates a crisis that rocks the scientific world until a new
paradigm is put in place that explains the phenomena and thereby restores to
science its equilibrium. While “normal science” is dedicated to experimentation,
objectivity, and resistance to pointless innovation, Kuhn asserts that scientific
progress results from crises and from the revolutions that follow them [18,
pp. 160-1731. Albert Einstein urged that excessive reliance on the power of facts
and methodologies-on Kuhn’s “normal science”-was a flaw in even a great
physicist like Ernst Mach, who, Einstein alleged, had too little faith in imagination
and intuition to go beyond his data and make the best use of what he had
discovered [19, p. 471. However, Einstein praised Kepler for recognizing that
scientific knowledge emanates from external data and the mental synthesis that
gives it pattern. This knowledge, Einstein wrote, does not “spring from experience
alone but only from the comparison of the inventions of the intellect with observed
fact” [20, p. 271. Gary Zukav has said that those who cannot live with the
imaginative, subjective element of the new physics are less physicists than tech-
nicians [21, pp. 36-37].

Kuhn calls attention to the existence of scientific discourse communities, urging
that scientists transcend excessive preoccupation with data and methodologies and
recognize that separate discourse communities speak separate idioms and hold to
separate versions of science. Scientists, Kuhn continues, must study “the differ-
ences between their own intra- and inter-group discourse” in order to discover
what someone from another group would see and say. In time, Kuhn urges, they
may think less in terms of the supposed error or madness of their colleagues and

140 / RUlTER

“become very good predictors of each other’s behavior” [18, p. 2021. Science
for Kuhn is less a product of facts alone than of mindsets, expectations, and
paradigms. James Adams’ obseqvations about individuals are valid also for scien-
tific discourse communities [22, pp. 22-23]:

Certainly in a problem between two people, the ability to see the problem from the
other’s point of view is extremely important in keeping the tone of debate within
reasonable bounds of refinement. In many cases, no solution is possible until each
person can gain a feeling for the viewpoint of the other.

Often we have exaggerated the importance of scientific method narrowly con-
ceived and forgotten that science and technology progress by means of spasmodic
change, serendipitous discovery, and imaginative flexibility. Formulaic rigidity
and undue preoccupation with day-to-day procedures have not alone ensured
technical and scientific advancement, and it is hard to see why they should ensure
the advancement of technical and scientific communication either. If we must
mimic science and technology, let us mimic their creativity as well as their
emphasis upon order.

THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AND
THE REDUCTIONJSM OF TECHNICAL

COMMUNICATION THEORY

If science and technology are as free-wheeling as history tells us they are, did
scientific and technical communicators become so committed to pragmatism mere-
ly because they are perverse? Of course not. Current theories of technical com-
munication are the products of chance and misunderstanding, certainly, but they
have resulted also from nineteenth-century responses to explosive growth in
demand for technical writing courses. It is unreasonable to criticize too strongly
those who pioneered in our discipline, but a century of effort and experience should
enable us to excel them in our approaches to it. To do this, we need to see the
discipline as they saw it, and that means knowing more about its development.
As late as the seventeenth century, what passed for science rested not o n

experimentation but rather on the authority of the ancients, especially Aristotle,
Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny, and Ptolemy [23, p. 101. William Gilbert wrote in 1600
that the scientists of his day make no progress because “they treat the subject in
words alone, without finding any reasons or proofs from experiments” [24, p. 471.
Francis Bacon thought that one of the greatest distempers of learning was studying
words to gain the semblance of knowledge rather than studying things to gain
knowledge itself [15, 6.117-1211. Language, he says elsewhere, foists onto its
users ideas that have no,basis in reality, so completely confusing the truths of
nature that they cannot be clearly discerned [15, 8.78, 86-89]. If Bacon’s
criticisms were valid, no wonder the poet John Milton dismissed education as

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM I 141

“that asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles which is commonly set before [the
young] as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age”
[W, p. 6321.

Such followers of Bacon as George Thompson, John Dury, William Petty, and
Robert Boyle were attracted to the idea of creating a language that, stripped of all
connotations of past usage and all concepts of the imagination, would represent
the world of nature as directly as mathematical signs represent the universe of
mathematics [26, pp. 144-1501. This ideal of mathematical precision finds expres-
sion in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1669, which tells us that the
Society’s fellows have resolved [27, p. 1131:

. . . to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back
to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in
an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close,
naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses; a native easines
[sic] bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can. . . .

This statement is founded o n the conviction, expressed most succinctly by
Thomas Hobbes, that words are nothing more than marks used to represent things
[28, pp. 18-19]. It was to develop such a set of marks that the Royal Society
sponsored John Wilkins’ project to design a new language. The result of this
project was his Essay T o w a r b a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
(1668), a book-length work that strives “by a combination of straight lines, curves,
hooks, loops, and dots, to devise for each thing a symbol which would denote its
genus and species” [26, p. 1551.

No one in the seventeenth century envisioned science as the colossus that today
we take for granted, the center of education and the wielder of economic power,
the establisher of values and the provider of undreamed-of conveniences-and
seventeenth-century scientists did not think of technology much at all because it
was still in the hands of guilds, artisans, and the illiterate [29]. The audience that
Sprat addressed was small, no more than a few hundred experimental scientists
and their supporters and critics. This humble, quiet, and unnoticed beginning has
been described by Whitehead in this way [30, p. 31:

The beginnings of the scientific movement were confined to a minority among the
intellectual elite. In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered
Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo
suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his
bed. The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute
to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human
race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted
whether so great a thing happened with so little stir.

This little band of scientists possessed modest facilities and no learned journals as
we know them [31]. Experiments were reported by letter or in publications such as

142 / RUTTER

the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Sprat and his colleagues sought
clear, acknowledged standards for reporting results because, in the absence of
efficient communication networks, foggy, and non-uniform reporting could lead
to delays or, worse yet, misunderstandings that might take months or even years
to recognize and, given the uncertainty of seventeenth-century postal services,
to correct.

The Royal Society’s stylistic directives were most definitely not intended for
communicators in heavy industry: there were no such communicators because
there was no heavy industry to employ them. Nor were these directives aimed at
the classroom. To be sure, the Royal Society published trenchant criticisms of
formal education and numberless calls for its reform, but, having received its
charter in 1662 from King Charles 11, the Society chose to use its limited resources
to produce new knowledge, rather than dissipating them on the instruction of
novices [23, pp. 255, 269-2711, a choice that Sprat had to defend with consider-
able vigor [27, pp. 323-3311. Scholars like Kuhn [18] and Whitehead [30] have
shown how science has evolved since the seventeenth century, yet many of our
most cherished myths about style and the proper approach to technical and
scientific communication reflect ideas about language that were originally floated
when science was in its infancy, a tiny group of men struggling to gain acceptance
in a world where education was dominated by philosophy, rhetoric, and the
humanistic tradition.

It has always been easy to lionize seventeenth-century science-to overestimate
its mass and to ascribe to it immediate influence. Enormously potent in the long
run, its early accomplishments were the work of a mere handful of remarkable
adventurers who dared to question the authority of Aristotle and the hegemony of
neo-Aristotelian science. For all the fame of giants like Galileo, Kepler, Bacon,
Newton, and Boyle, science was until recently a modest affair. As late as 1839
science professors at Oxford University petitioned to be relieved from their
lecturing duties because practically no students were enrolled in science. Nor did
technical education fare better. Scattered attempts were made in England as early
as 1825 to develop schools for the teaching of technology, but long work hours
and pervasive illiteracy made education so hard to obtain that most students
quickly dropped out and the movement sputtered. Not until the passage of the
Technical Instruction Act in 1881 was it possible for the average Briton to aspire
to a formal technical education [32]. In the United States, impetus for large-scale
technical education came from the Morrill Act, which in 1862 endowed what we
now know as land grant colleges [33]. One of the greatest feats of the nineteenth
century was the development of technical instruction, what Whitehead has called
the invention of invention [30, p. 961. But it was slow in coming and far more
recent than usually realized-when it is thought about at all.

With the increased enrollment in technology and science came increased calls
for courses that would teach students how to write about technology and science.
These courses were taught by junior faculty who had not yet earned entry to the

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 143

sacred precincts of literature and by senior faculty who, having once earned entry,
forfeited the right to stay [34]. For these courses was developed a new rhetoric, an
applied rhetoric, not Aristotle’s art of finding the best available means of per-
suasion so much as the knack of imparting to technical prose the proper degree of
polish [33, 351. Gradually it became the norm to assume that so-called “hard”
disciplines would supply the cake of content, while departments of English would
supply the frosting of style.

It is intellectually simple, though astronomically dull, to regard writing merely
as a matter of polish, but worse yet, it leads to a trap. Colleges and universities turn
out graduates who discover by experience that recipes for writing that their
college instructors once adopted in response to sudden demands for technical
writing courses d o not satisfy the needs of science and industry as they are now
constituted. The long-pervasive view that successful technical and scientific writ-
ing turns solely on polish, correctness, and objectivity has never completely
reflected the needs of science and technology, but it is hard to see how writers in
the workplace can ask for something better in their new hires when they were
taught that good technical writing is mostly a matter of fitting facts into content
outlines developed long ago. Too often the discovery of something better has been
left to chance.

One part of a broader, more liberal approach to technical communication is
acquiring perspective that follows study of the profession’s history and d e v e l o p
ment. R. John Broekmann has argued cogently for the importance of a historical
perspective for technical communication, offering his own study of government
patent records, a bibliography of other historically-oriented studies, and a promise
of his own forthcoming volume o n the subject [36]. As such historical study
shows, some of the more dubious ends of technical communication are in fact
runaway means, means that, though they sometimes look as if they came from the
fountains of the Scientific Revolution itself, were actually hatched spontaneously
in the standing puddles of Victorian technical education. I have tried to show here
that knowledge of the history of science, technology, and communication yields
power needed to shape current practice-to retain what is good and subordinate or
discard what has merely passed for good. If current practices are considered
inherent options to be evaluated, not inherited axioms that brook no questioning,
transactional writing will assuredly be rendered more rational. The light of
knowledge in this case will cause the fruit to grow better.

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS AS RHETORICIANS

It is time to return to the subject of rhetoric and the rhetorical ideal. To
understand the dynamic nature of science and technology and to discover that the
supposed gods of objectivity and pragmatism are just the illegitimate offspring
of expediency and misunderstanding is to realize that technical communication is
rhetorical above all else. David Dobrin has said that any statement embodies

144 / RUTTER

alternity, that is, states what is and simultaneously “brings into the domain of
consciousness what isn’t” [37, p. 2391. If language is not univalent, positivistic
concepts of reality that presuppose that it is so must give way to those which posit
that reality is crafted by the writer. %hat is, writing must be conceptualized as an
activity that by its selection and organization of information and its assessment of
audience creates its own version of reality and then strives to win the consensus of
its readers that this version is valid. If technical communicators actively create
versions of reality instead of serving merely as windows through which reality in
all of its pre-existent configurations may be seen, then technical communication
must be fundamentally rhetorical: it builds 8 case that reality is one way and
not some other.

This perception is valuable in the workplace because so many scientists and
technical specialists possess just the positivistic view of writing that H have been
discussing. This is not surprising. Many of them work every day with closed
systems within which the assumptions of positivism are valid. But communication
is not a closed system. Technical communication students, at least, should know
that communication is o p e n – d y n a m i c because it involves people, who cannot
be totally predicted, quantified, containerized, or defined. Technical communica-
tion has to be rhetorical because its task is not to serve technology abstractly
conceived but rather to produce “writing that accommodates technology to the
user” [37, p. 2421.

If, as seems certain, technical communication is essentially rhetorical, then the
very definition of the discipline must undergo change. Several recent studies open
out in an especially compelling manner this question of definition. Carolyn Miller
has questioned the assumptions of positivism, redefined the role of the technical
communicator, and argued cogently that technical communication itself must be
defined in broader, more humanistic terms [38]. David Dobrin has shown that
such a positivistic approach is not only unpleasantly reductive but also epistem-
ologically and metaphysically untenable, and that, given the nature of language
and of human communication, technical writing cannot be particularly and espe-
cially objective [37,39]. Again, Merrill Whitburn argues that the next revolution
in the profession of English will be realized when the oratorical ideal of applying
broad knowledge to particular problems is rediscovered [40]. While Whitburn’s
study, with its breadth and variety of documentation and its lucid presentation is
to me the finest of its type, others are suggestive. Russell Rutter has shown that the
synthesizing powers of imagination, those powers that enable a p e t to create
poetry out of the miscellany of experience, are just those powers that enable a
writer to create usable documents out of the variegated material of experience in
the industrial setting [41]. Marilyn Schauer Samuels has shown that in some ways
the content of any document is fictive, a selection and a shaping of inchoate stuff
to produce a ca?culated total effect [42]. Michael Halloran has shown rhetoric at
work in a scientific setting by describing the ways in which Watson and Crick
shaped for different audiences a single body of material recounting their discovery

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 145

of DNA [43 1. Victoria Winkler, discussing the use of models to stimulate inven-
tion, offers a paradigm for shaping a technical report [MI. In the process she
confirms that such shaping-a key aspect of rhetorician’s art-is part of the
technical communicator’s job.

Technical communicators, because they depend on both ,“knowledge and prac-
tice” [lo], because they rely on learning as a guide to experience [13, 141, and
because they need to bring eloquence, empathy, and imagination to the world of
work [17] are-and should be expected to be-rhetoricians. They are placed
squarely in the tradition described earlier in this article. Even the humblest
technical communicator needs Quintilian.

THE VALUES AND LIMITATIONS OF RESEARCH ON
THE CULTURE OF THE WORKPLACE

Friends and colleagues who have allowed me to try out on them the ideas
expressed above have objected that my call for a broader definition of technical
communication unjustly ignores recent research on writing in the workplace and
recent applications of anthropological concepts of culture to workplace environ-
ments. To the extent that this research frees technical communication from the
classroom cloister and tries to discover what occurs when people in the workplace
try to talk to each other, it has been productive. It in fact confirms some of what I
have been saying. However, it was never meant to supplant humanistic values that
place being and knowing before doing and writing. In short, this research defines
a problem that it cannot be expected to solve.

Faigley and Miller found in 1982 that people in professimal and technical
occupations spend the most time, about 29 percent of the work week, writing [45].
The average for all occupations was 23.1 percent-over a full day each work
week. Figures vary from study to study, but these figures seem typical. Yet
workplace writing is not well understood. In college and university technical
writing courses, primary emphasis has traditionally been placed on mastery of the
craft of writing. Perhaps this emphasis has been excessive [a, p. 2871, although
Little and McLaren found that fully 80 percent of their respondents thought
that what they called grammar and mechanics was crucial to their performance
as technical communicators [47]. What better testimonial is there to the impor-
tance of writing as a craft than the high value placed on the basic techniques
of writing?

However, as was noted earlier, technical communicators must know how to do
more than w r i t e – d o more than inscribe, type, or keystroke. Large percentages of
Little and McLaren’s respondents thought that abilities like “adapting to changing
demands” (83%) and “handling deadline stress” (78%), abilities related only
indirectly to proficiency in writing, were at least as important as proficiency in
writing. Little and McLaren found that 88 percent of all respondents spent some
time working with others [47, p. 181. For Faigley and Miller the corresponding

146 / RUTTER

figure was 73.5 percent [45]. If mastery of the craft is important, so also is the
ability to function productively in the collaborative context of the workplace. This
point is made vigorously by Jay R. Gould and Wayne A. Losano in their Oppor-
tunities in Technical Communications [48, pp. 17-19, 25, 69-70], the standard
resource for persons considering careers as technical communicators. So far, so
good: proper attention is given to the importance of collaboration and the ability
to deal with unplanned events.

The essentially collaborative nature of technical communication has prompted
some scholars to see the discourse communities referred to by Kuhn and others as
cultures in the anthropological sense of the world [49, p. 501:

Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system
itself, cultural products-products manufactured, indeed, out of tendencies,
capacities, and dispositions with which we were born, but manufactured nonetheless.

Fledgling technical communicators whose writing skills are polished to a fare-
thee-well may yet experience frustration and bafflement if someone doesn’t show
them that circumambient assumptions and patterns of behavior characterize any
culture created by groups of people who share common interests and goals.
For culture, as Geertz defines it, “is best seen . . . as a set of control mechanisms-
plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’)–
for the governing of behavior” [49, p. 441. E v e r y w h e r e i n business and
industry, not just in Java, Bali, and the Trobriand Islands-people are suspended
in webs of significance that they themselves have spun, and those webs are
culture [49, p. 51.

Thoughts like these seem to underlie the position taken by Faigley that perspec-
tives for technical communication research should include the textual, the indi-
vidual, and the social. The last of these perspectives mirrors concern for what
Faigley calls “social roles, group purposes, communal organization, ideology, and
finally theories of culture” [50, pp. 235-2361. Other recent studies presuppose the
primacy of culture. Carol Lipson requires technical communication interns at
Syracuse University to describe the cultures of the companies where they intern
because [51], she has found, increased sensitivity to workplace culture makes
these interns more employable. David Bradford discusses the evolution of tech-
nical communicators from mere channels of information to senders of it-sources,
persuaders, rhetoricians “involved in fashioning the matter of the message, not
just manipulating the medium” [52, p. 131. Jeanne Halpern shows that electronic
publishing and such media as E-mail, A-mail, and teleconferencing have made
collaborative, cross-cultural skills more important than ever to the technical com-
municator [53]. In their study of research and development writing at Exxon,
Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller establish that editing, research reporting, and the total
process of document cycling constitute a formidable management tool and a
channel through which members of an R&D unit project an identity to others in

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 147

their culture [46]. Little and McLaren glance obliquely at this matter when they
observe that to their respondents “the amount of formal education matters much
less than the kind of education and the individual’s desire to shine at his or her
own work” [47, p. 121. Again, so far, so good.

Yet it seems to me that focusing on the culture as an entity into which writers
must fit themselves is similar to focusing o n model reports as containers into
which writers must fit their materials. Both activities emphasize what a technical
communicator will do, but neither really addresses the question of what the
technical communicator will need to be. The ability to fit into a culture, like the
ability to write to specification, is no small thing, but only a broader conception of
the communicator, a conception that focuses as much on the person as on writing
and the nature of science and industry will produce professionals who can readily
engage in Bruffee’s “conversation of mankind” [ 5 ] . If fitting information into
pre-existent content outlines is supplemented only by emphasis on fitting new
graduates into pre-existent cultures, I do not think the result will be progress. To
put the matter more positively, optimal value will be derived from research on
workplace cultures and research on document production only when these have
been set in a rhetorically-oriented liberal arts context.

CONCLUSION

I have tried-with some success, I hope-to avoid unwarranted negativism.
Certainly it is no part of my intention to deprecate the efforts of those who have
devoted productive lives to writing well and teaching others to write well.
Likewise, I d o not mean to suggest that recent attention to the collaborative
cultures of the workplace is misplaced. I insist, in fact, that we continue these
efforts-but I am convinced that we must make additional efforts in a somewhat
different direction.

Technical communication has sometimes been hampered by its strengths. In
years gone by it has insisted on its separateness from entrenched, basic composi-
tion and from the beautiful impracticalities of literature and literary theory. In the
name of practicality it has scoured away flowery style, it has cleansed itself of
subjectivity, it has purged away what it regarded as the hocus-pocus that prevents
the university writing major from being prepared to write in the real world. For
twenty years I have been part of this purging, scouring, and cleansing effort, and a
worthy effort it has been. “But,” as Whitehead says in another connection, “if men
cannot live o n bread alone, still less can they do so o n disinfectants” [30, p. 591.
The disinfectant of pragmatism has enabled us to simplify style, discover what
managers want in the reports they request, know what makes a discourse com-
munity in the workplace different from a classroom-even to help people get
hired as technical writers. But it hasn’t addressed the development of these people
as people. In fact, it doesn’t place people first at all. If, as Dobrin suggests,
technical communication lacks moral purpose [4, p. 1561, I believe this is why.

148 / RUlTER

Ultimately B am not so pessimistic as Dobrin seems to be. Technical com-
munication will solve the problem of narrowness and excessive commitment to
pragmatism when it is clearer that the problem is in fact a problem. To this end, H
think, every effort needs to be made in university programs to eliminate biases
against such subjects as rhetoric, literary criticism, history of science and tech-
nology, and more abstract studies generally. Given the history of the discipline,
the best beginning point might be in teacher training-including in technical
communication curricula more courses that provide a broad, cultural perspective.
There is also opportunity in rhetoric courses, or indeed any courses that define use
of language in terms of audience and purpose, not in terms of genre theory. H d o
not offer here a prefabricated program for implementing the kinds of instruction
that H think are essential. In fact, my hope is that some of the issues raised in this
article will spark debate about the traditions to which our discipline belongs. If we
put as much work into this as we have put into cooperative education and the
development of classroom materials, we will surely succeed in broadening the
base of technical communication.

We should also temper our belief in the value of workplace experience in and
for itself. Of course all of us have known technical communicators who can write
well, edit effectively, take pictures, design gages, and do some of their own
graphics, technical communicators who are in addition wise enough to work
effectively within their organizations without k i n g swallowed up by them. Some-
times they have been liberally educated, frequently they have reached their envi-
able wisdom after several career changes and many years of work, and always
they possess remarkable singleness of purpose. People like this cannot be manu-
factured routinely in colleges and universities, no matter what curriculum is
available. I am convinced, though, that such attainments as theirs would be less a
matter of chance and purely personal excellence if curricula were available that
focused less exclusively on writing and workplace culture and emphasized that
technical communication should rest upon a strong liberal studies base.

While it should be clear by now that H am seeking to return technical com-
munication to the mainstream of rhetoric and the l i k r a l arts, I should reiterate that
what H have said here does not mean that we should abandon efforts to teach
students how to improve syntax, design pages, revise, or display information
visually. Ht does not mean that large doses of theory and philosophy should at once
be administered. Again, what 1 have said does nof mean that we should sever our
ties with business, science, and industry: going to the workplace to find out what
it is like to be there has so far been our most positive step. What we Qlo need to
understand is that majors and careers are by-products of education, not the pur-
poses for which it should be sought. Education should seek to create sensible,
informed, articulate ditizens. Some of these citizens will want to become technical
communicators, and they should have the option of focusing on the subject as it is
embodied in a broad, theory-oriented program that also emphasizes the craft of
writing. 1 think that articulate citizens who can also accommodate technology to

HISTORY, RHETORIC AND HUMANISM / 149

its users and see technology in a broader societal perspective will do just fine at
IBM.

Earlier in this essay I quoted a passage from Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster
[14], which in authentic humanist fashion champions broad-based learning as a
preparative to active public life. Ascham would endorse technical communication
programs because they offer students good learning that enables them to assume
responsible communication positions outside the university walls. I think he
would be disturbed, though, by definitions of technical communication that deny
its imaginative dimension [54, pp. 3-12], assume its arhetorical servitude to brute
fact [55], consider it the product of indoctrination, not education [56], or deprive
it of its identity in written language by saying that it is technical because its
content is technical [57-591. He would be chagrined to learn that some of its
champions have felt compelled to oppose its association with humanism and
liberal studies [ a ] .

Of course, these definitions have been questioned [37-40,42,61,62], but I think
they will survive, overtly or otherwise, until a more humane, more compre-
hensive, and more historically oriented definition is forthcoming. They will con-
tinue to survive until our varied studies of style, format, document design,
information transfer, workplace contexts, and the rest all find some sort of lodge-
ment in an embracing conceptual structure. To me, the most appropriate structure
is also one of the oldest: liberal education grounded in oratorical traditions that
emphasize the mastery of rhetoric for use in the active life. I wholeheartedly
second Merrill Whitburn’s insistence on the primacy of liberally education human
beings [40, p. 2451:

Everywhere, men and women are striving to substitute inferior instruments-
pathetic little methodologies-for a superior instrument, an astute, informed, wise
human being. With the advent of the information revolution, a communication
revolution that focuses in large part on the human being, all that belongs to
our personality, is valuable-what we sense, what we imagine, what we feel, what
we think.

To state this another way, liberal education contextualizes a person,. places that
person in a social, historical, and rhetorical setting. It confers power to see, power
to choose, power to design new solutions. It liberates the hurried communicator
from that supposed panacea, doing it the old way because no one can imagine any
alternative-certainly not an alternative that requires time to develop. The long
way around is indeed, as the adage has it, the short way home: a general, liberal
education, seemingly indirect in its refusal to focus on skills alone, actually goes
directly to the true topic of any good education: it frees people for life. If some of
those people also feel an affinity for writing and technology, it empowers them to
make technology more accessible to its users in an information age that needs all
the assistance enlightened human minds can give it.

150 / RUTTER

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pp. 15-20,1975.

Other Articles On Communication By This Author

Rutter, R., Poetry, Imagination, and Technical Writing, College English, 477,1985.
Rutter, R., Teaching Writing to Probation Officers: Problems, Methods, and Resources,

Rutter, R., Through a Different Looking Glass: Technical Writing to Train the Imagination,
College Composition and Communication, 33:3,1982.

JTWC, 11:2,1981.

Direct reprint requests to:

Professor Russell Rutter
Dept. of English
Illinois State University
Normal, Illinois 61761-6901