20

2

HISTORY, RHETORIC, AND HUMANISM

Toward a More Comprehensive Definition of Technical Communication

RUSSELL RUTTER

When I began to teach technical communication about thirty-five years ago, my chief resources were a big book (Mills and Walter) and an ever-turning ditto machine. In those days, we sought to preserve the separateness of technical communication and to prevent its ingestion by larger programs like "Freshman Rhetoric." Evidence of this effort appears in early definitions of technical communication (my essay cites several of them). Still, I thought, separation did not seem a sufficient basis for definition.

In 1975, I offered a regional paper on literature and technical communication. This modest effort happily disappeared without.a trace. However, I reconceived the paper for the 1981 Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention as "Literature and the Teaching of Technical Writing," which was later reprinted. What, I had asked, connects literature and technical writing? The answer, I thought, was imagination, and I published another essay, this time with a focus on imagination as a unifying element in the technical writing course ("Looking-Glass").

I commenced an effort to demonstrate in a more scholarly way the priority of imagination in science and technology as well as in literature, assembling information from figures like Wordsworth, Einstein, Neils Bohr, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Smeaton to buttress my point in "Poetry, Imagination, and Technical Writing." It is significant, I think, that the essay was accepted by one editor of College English only after his predecessor had rejected it as unpublishable. After publication, the essay drew hostile comments, some of which I tried to answer in subsequent issues of the journal.

Publications notwithstanding, I began to believe that connecting literature and technical writing sounded like the pleading of a litterateur and that imagination was too nebulous a concept to link technical writing to anything. Then I read and reviewed W. Ross Winterowd's Composition/Rhetoric: A Synthesis for The Technical Writing Teacher. Winterowd taught me that the missing piece was not merely literature, much less the nebulous imagination, but rather rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition. Armed with Winterowd's argument that all disciplines of English reside within rhetoric, I began research that led me to write and publish "History, Rhetoric, and Humanism." Again, some of my colleagues and well-wishers wondered whether a rhetorical and historical approach was relevant to technical communication, with its known emphasis

From the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 2l.2 (1991): 133-53. Reprinted by permission of Baywood Publishing, Co., Inc.

H r s TOR Y, R H E TOR r C, AND HUM A N r S M I 21

on workplace practicality. One journal reviewer objected, "[T]his is the kind of thing that we ought not to be publishing." Thanks to other reviewers and to editor David Carson, the article appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, subsequently receiving an award of achievement from the New York Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

I am mightily pleased that my essay has been selected for inclusion in this volume. As I look back on my efforts to work out in my own mind and then to publish my work on rhetoric, humanism, and technical communication, I am even more mightily pleased by this volume. It constitutes eloquent testimony that technical communication has developed that hallmark of a mature discipline-a sense of its own traditions.

Russell Rutter

WORKS CITED

Mills, Gordon H., and John A. Walter. Technical Writing, 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978.

Rutter, Russell. "Literature and the Teaching of Technical Writing." Technical Communication: Perspectives for the Eighties. Ed. J. C. Mathes and Thomas E. Pinelli. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1981. 571-77.

---. "Poetry, Imagination, and Technical Writing." College English 47 (1985): 698-712.

---. "Review of Composition/Rhetoric: A Synthesis. by W. Ross Winterowd." The Technical Writing

Teacher 14 (1987): 272-75.

---. "Through a Different Looking-Glass: Technical Writing to Train the Imagination." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 11 (1981): 121-29.

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 cooping 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 [1] and Roger C. Pace [2] in their studies of the communication problems that preceded the 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?" [1, p. 101]. For Pace, the Challenger disaster "illustrates in graphic terms how 'human' the process of communication is," and he urges that technical communication scholars and decision makers "broaden their perspectives of communication to include the human values inherent in the process" [2, p. 218].

The failure of space shuttle Challenger demonstrates what the project manager I mentioned earlier observed-that there is more to technical communi-

22 , HIS TOR I E S

cation 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 g)Inmunication as opposed to focusing narrowly on writing" [3, p. 46]. They conclude their study with what I see as a commitment to the liberal arts [3, p. 47]:

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 pragmatism 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. 156-157]:

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. 640],

. . . we must learn to think well collectivelythat 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 SOltS of social context, the sorts of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value.

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 education. 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 alternatives. 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. 42]. 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-x]. 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 attention 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

HISTORY, RHETORIC,

aadition which emphasizes the classical period, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century.

IRE CLASSICAL PERIOD: PLATO, ARISTOTLE, .AJ.~D 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],

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 [10, 523A-527E]. Plato's greatest disciple, Aristotle, claims that most people speak "at random or with familiarity arising from habit," not from learning or art [11, 1.1], a passage rendered by another translator as "a knack acquired from practice" [12, 1.1]. 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, 12.1.3], 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

AND HUM A N ISM I 23

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 Renaissance English educational theory, The Schoolmaster, he emphasized just this point. "Learning," he wrote [14, p. 50],

. . . 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 ever questioned the premise that learning makes experience less burdensome, just as the use of mathematical methodology excels that favorite of budding mathematicians, trial and error,

Ascharn's near contemporary, Francis Bacon, the premier Renaissance a@stle of induction, observation, experimentation, and applied studies, wrote thaf the 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 know ledges (as it is now used) is as of fair bodies of trees without roots; good for the carpenter, but not for the planter" [15, 6.290). 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, many Atalanta and, if

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. 155],

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. 157],

. . . 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

24 I HIS TOR I E S

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 [15,8.101],

... 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 8.101], 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 commodity" [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 assessment 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.

HIS TOR Y, R H E TOR r c , AND HUM A N ISM I 25

person will do and how well he or she will do it. In our own time, as we urge corporations 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, 12.1.1], is likely to offer a perspective on human interaction and motivation that contributes usefully 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 it progression by means of paradigmatic changes that Kuhn has called "crises" [18, pp. 66-91], (2) the origins of positivistic as-

umptions about communication in the misperceptions of science and in programmatic expediency, and (3) the rhetorical nature of technical communication.

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 there-at times menacing and intrusive but undeniably givers of good things that are not easily done without. Such a conception 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

uch a reductionist view of science and technology lies behind much of what passes for instruction in and truth about technical writing: if science and tech-

ology are rigid, monolithic, and devoted to formulaic thinking and nothing but pure objectivity, the anguage used to write about them should resemble em. This point is radically false, with regard both to ience and technology and to writing, and when it is ed this bluntly, it probably seems false to most people. But it's not stated this bluntly-c-or, most

es, even stated at all. It needs to be brought into open.

Thomas Kuhn demonstrated long ago that scien- c theories used to explain the phenomena of nature 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. 10-42]. 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 "norma] 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. 160-173]. Albert Einstein urged that excessive reliance on the power of facts and methodologies-i-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. 47]. 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. 27]. Gary Zukav has said that those who cannot live with the imaginative, subjective element of the new physics are less physicists than technicians [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 differences between their own intraand 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 "become very good predictors of each other's behavior" [18, p. 202]. Science for Kuhn is less a product of facts alone than of mindsets, expectations, and paradigms. James Adams' observations about individuals are valid also for scientific 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

ing was studying words to gain the semblance of knowledge ratber than studying things to gain knowledge it elf [15,6.117-121]. Language, he says el ewhere, foists onto its users ideas that have no basis in reality, so completely confusing the truths of nature that tbey cannot be clearly discerned [15, 8.78, 86-89]. If Bacon's criticisms were valid, no wonder the poet John Milton dismi sed education as "that asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles which is commonly set before [the young] a all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age" [25, p. 632].

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 concepl of the imagination, would repre ent the world of nature as directly as mathematical signs represent the universe of mathematics [26, pp. 144-150]. This ideal of mathematical precision finds expression in Thomas Sprat's History of the RoyaL Society (1667), which tells u that the Society' fellows have resolved [27, p. 113]:

26 I HIS TOR I E S

view is extremely important in keeping the tone of debate within reasonable bounds of refinement. In many ca es, no olution i possible until each person can gain a feeling for the viewpoint of the other.

Often we have exaggerated the importance of scientific method narrowly conceived and forgotten that science and technology progress by means of spa - modic change, serendipitous di covery, 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 REDUCTIONISM 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 merely because they are perverse? Of course not. Current theories of technical communication are th products of chance and misunderstanding certainly, but they have re ulted also from nineteenth-century responses to explosive growth in demand for technical writing course . It is unreasonable to criticize too strongly those who pioneered in our di cipline, but a century of effort and experience bould enable us to excel them in our approacbe to it. To do this, we need to ee the discipline as tbey saw it, and that means knowing mor about its development.

A late as the eventeenth century, what passed for science rested not on experimentation but rather on the authority of the ancients, e pecially Aristotle, Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny, and Ptolemy [23, p. 10]. William Gilbert wrote in 1600 that the cientists of his day make no progress becau e "they treat the subject in words alone, without finding any reasons or proof from experiments" [24, p. 47]. Francis Bacon thougbt that one of the greatest di temper of learn-

. . . to reject all amplification , digre sions, 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 peaking; positive expres ion, clear enses: a native easine s [sic] bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can. . . .

This statement is founded on the conviction, expre sed mo t succinctly by Thoma Hobbes, that words are nothing more than marks used to represent thing [28, pp. 18-19]. It was to develop such a set of marks that the Royal Society spon ored John Wilkins' project to design a new language. The result of this project was his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), a booklength work that strives "by a combination of straight lines, curves hooks, loop , and dot , to devi e for each tbing a symbol which would denote its genus and species" [26, p. 155].

No one in the seventeenth century envisioned science as the colossus that today we take for granted,

HISTORY, RHETORIC,

me center of education and the wielder of economic power, the establisher of values and the provider of undreamed-of conveniences-and seventeenthcentury 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. 3]:

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 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 II, the Society chose to use its

AND HUM A N ISM I 27

limited resources to produce new knowledge, rather than dissipating them on the instruction of novices [23, pp. 255, 269-271], a choice that Sprat had to defend with considerable vigor [27, pp. 323-331]. 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 seventeenthcentury 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. 96]. 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 sacred precincts

merely passed for good. If current practices are sidered inherent options to be evaluated, not inherited axioms that brook no questioning, transacri writing will assuredly be rendered more rational ~ light of knowledge in this case will cause the fruit grow better.

28 I HIS TOR I E S

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 persuasion so much as the knack of imparting to technical prose the proper degree of polish [33, 35]. 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 do not satisfy the needs of science and industry as they are now constituted. The long-pervasive view that successful technical and scientific writing 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 development. R. John Brockmann 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 on 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

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS AS RHETORICIANS

It is time to return to the subject of rhetoric an - rhetorical ideal. To understand the dynamic nature - science and technology and to discover that the posed gods of objectivity and pragmatism are jus illegitimate offspring of expediency and mis standing is to realize that technical communicari rhetorical above all else. David Dobrin has said ~ any statement embodies alternity, that is, state is and simultaneously "brings into the domain 0 - sciousness what isn't" [37, p. 239]. If language' - univalent, positivistic concepts of reality that p pose that it is so must give way to those which that reality is crafted by the writer. That is ~ . - .: must be conceptualized as an activity that by i lection and organization of information and i sessment of audience creates its own version of

ity and then strives to win the consensus of its that this version is valid. If technical communi - actively create versions of reality instead of sermerely as windows through which reality in all - pre-existent configurations may be seen, then cal communication must be fundamentally rh cal: it builds a case that reality is one wayan some other.

This perception is valuable in the workplace cause so many scientists and technical specialists sess just the positivistic view of writing that I been discussing. This is not surprising. Many of work every day with closed systems within whi h t assumptions of positivism are valid. But communica tion is not a closed system. Technical communi students, at least, should know that communication is open-dynamic because it involves people, who

not be totally predicted, quantified, containerized. _ defined. Technical communication has to be met; -cal because its task is not to serve technology ab-

HISTORY, RHETORIC,

stractly conceived but rather to produce "writing that accommodates technology to the user" [37, p. 242].

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 epistemologically and metaphysically untenable, and that, given the nature of language and of human communication, technical writing cannot be particularly and especially 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 Whitburu'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 poet 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 calculated 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 of DNA [43]. Victoria Winkler, discussing the use of models to stimulate invention, offers a paradigm for shaping a technical report [44]. 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 practice" [10], because they rely on learning as a guide to experience [13, 14], and because they need to bring eloquence, empathy, and imagination to the world of work [17] are-and

AND HUM A N ISM I 29

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 environments. 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.

FaigJey and Miller found in 1982 that people in professional 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 [46, p. 287], 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 importance 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 write--do more than inscribe, type, or keystroke. Large percentages of Little and [Link]'s respondents thought that abilities like "adapting to changing demands" (83 per-

roles, group purposes, communal organization, ideology, and finally theories of culture" [50, pp. 235- 236]. 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 technical 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. 13]. 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 communicator [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 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. 12]. 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 on 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

30 I HIS TOR I E S

cent) and "handling deadline stress" (78 percent), 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. 18]. For Faigley and Miller the corresponding 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 Opportunities 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. 50]:

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'j=-for the governing of behavior" [49, p. 44]. Everywhere-in business and industry, not just in Java, Bali, and the Trobriand Islandspeople are suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun, and those webs are culture [49, p. 5].

Thoughts like these seem to underlie the position taken by Faigley that perspectives for technical communication research should include the textual, the individual, and the social. The last of these perspectives mirrors concern for what Faigley calls "social

HISTORY, RHETORIC,

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 do 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 composition 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 on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants" [30, p. 59]. The disinfectant of pragmatism has enabled us to simplify style, discover what managers want in the reports they request, know what makes a discourse community 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. 156], I believe this is why.

Ultimately I am not so pessimistic as Dobrin seems to be. Technical communication 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, I think, every effort needs to be made in university programs to eliminate biases

AND HUM A N ISM I 31

against such subjects as rhetoric, literary criticism, history of science and technology, 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. I do not offer here a prefabricated program for implementing the kinds of instruction that I 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 pages, and do some of their own graphics, technical communicators who are in addition wise enough to work effectively within their organizations without being swallowed up by them. Sometimes they have been liberally educated, frequently they have reached their enviable wisdom after several career changes and many years of work, and always they possess remarkable singleness of purpose. People like this cannot be manufactured 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 I am seeking to return technical communication to the mainstream of rhetoric and the liberal arts, I should reiterate that what I 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. It does not mean that large doses of theory and philosophy should at once be administered. Again, what I have said does not mean that we should

until our varied studies of style, format, document design, information transfer, workplace contexts, and the rest all find some sort of lodgement 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. 245]:

32 I HIS TOR I E S

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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 do need to understand is that majors and careers are by-products of education, not the purposes for which it should be sought. Education should seek to create sensible, informed, articulate citizens. 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, theoryoriented program that also emphasizes the craft of writing. I think that articulate citizens who can also accommodate technology to 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 [57-59]. He would be chagrined to learn that some of its champions have felt compelled to oppose its association with humanism and liberal studies [60].

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 comprehensive, and more historically oriented definition is forthcoming. They will continue to survive

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