http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/TC/Theory A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and TC and Theory in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/TC/Theory http://tc.eserver.org/34198.html http://tc.eserver.org/34198.html Explores how and why the German and Chinese cultures differ in the presentation and perception of technical information. Presents a theoretical framework for technical communication across different cultures. Provides guidelines to technical communicators in Sino-German technical communication and services. http://tc.eserver.org/33697.html http://tc.eserver.org/33697.html A large number of scholars in technical communication advocate stances that rely more on qualitative methods often associated with more subjectivist research paradigms that seem to acknowledge Foucault’s notion of the episteme with its inherent social and power relations as determining factors in epistemology. Fewer scholars, mostly in textbooks, embrace the scientific method or a variation thereof. However, several scholars attempt to alert us to the benefits of a more varied approach that takes advantage of methods within empiricism to give our field credence and add validity to our research. In summary, I found a continuum of approaches. This continuum, however, is not evenly populated; it appears slanted towards more subjectivist theory and methodology and much more sparsely populated in the realm of empiricist theory. http://tc.eserver.org/33580.html http://tc.eserver.org/33580.html To study the possible impact of feminist theory on technical communication, this article discusses six common characteristics of feminist theory: (a) celebration of difference, (b) impact on social change, (c) acknowledgment of scholars' backgrounds and values, (d) inclusion of women's experience, (e) study of gaps and silences in traditional scholarship, and (f) new female sources of knowledge. Three debates within feminist theory spring out of these common characteristics: whether to stress similarity or difference between the sexes, whether differences come from biological or social forces, and whether feminist scholars can avoid reinforcing binary opposition. The article then traces the impact of these characteristics of feminist theory and debates within feminist theory on the redefinition of technical communication in terms of the myth of scientific objectivity, the new interest in ethnographic studies of workplace communication, and the recent focus on collaborative writing. http://tc.eserver.org/33561.html http://tc.eserver.org/33561.html This article analyzes the location of “value” in technical communication contexts, arguing that current models of technical communication embrace an outdated, self-deprecating, industrial approach subordinating information to concrete technological products. By rethinking technical communication in terms of Reich's “symbolic-analytic work”, technical communicators and educators can move into a post-industrial model of work that prioritizes information and communication, with benefits to both technical communicators and users. http://tc.eserver.org/31788.html http://tc.eserver.org/31788.html In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics. http://tc.eserver.org/31356.html http://tc.eserver.org/31356.html Raju demonstrates the importance of understanding cultural schemas—models providing patterns for understanding ideas or objects in a cultural context—when dealing with international technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/30296.html http://tc.eserver.org/30296.html Cultural studies is an academic field that focuses on understanding the unchallenged assumptions that constrain and shape communication and related interactions among people. Although the field has made considerable progress in the last half-century, many practitioners have either never encountered the field, or have encountered it only through extremist advocates who do the field a great disservice. As a result, they have lost the ability to benefit from the insights provided by cultural studies. In this paper, I review the recent book Critical Power Tools to provide an update on the current thinking in the field, and to demonstrate how the modern form of the field has much to teach technical communications practitioners who are willing to listen to what the theoreticians have to say. http://tc.eserver.org/29237.html http://tc.eserver.org/29237.html Although service-learning has the potential to infuse technical communication pedagogy with civic goals, it can easily be co-opted by a hyperpragmatism that limits ethical critique and civic engagement. Service-learning's component of reflection, in particular, can become an uncritical, narrow invention or project management tool. Integrating cultural studies and service-learning can help position students as critical citizens who produce effective and ethical discourse and who create more inclusive forms of power. Rather than being tacked on, cultural studies approaches should be incorporated into core service-learning assignments. http://tc.eserver.org/29114.html http://tc.eserver.org/29114.html My article traces the development, chronicles the impact, and explains the essence of Herbert Spencer's "The Philosophy of Style" (1852). Spencer's essay has had a significant influence on stylistics, especially in scientific and technical communication. Although in our generation Spencer's contribution to stylistics is not widely remembered, it ought to be. His single essay on this subject was seminal to modern theories about effective communication, not because it introduced new knowledge but because it was such a rhetorically astute synthesis of stylistic lore, designed to connect traditional rhetorical theory with 19th-century ideas about science, technology, and evolution. It was also influential because it was part of Spencer's grand "synthetic philosophy," a prodigious body of books and essays that made him one of the most prominent thinkers of his time. Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" carried the day, and many following decades, with its description of the human mind as a symbol-processing machine, with its description of cognitive and affective dimensions of communication, and with its scientifically considered distillation of the fundamental components of effective style. We should read Spencer's essay and understand its impact not so much because we expect it to teach us new things about good style, but precisely because: 1) it's at the root of some very important concepts now familiar to us; 2) it synthesizes these concepts so impressively; 3) we can use it heuristically as we continue thinking about style; and 4) it provides a compact, accessible touchstone for exploring--with students, clients, and colleagues--the techniques of effective style for scientific and technical communication. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler [1, p. 314]. . . . the fewer the words are, provided neither propriety nor perspicuity be violated, the expression is always the more vivid [2, p. 333]. However influential the precepts thus dogmatically expressed, they would be much more influential if reduced to something like scientific ordination. In this as in other cases, conviction is strengthened when we understand the why [3, pp. 2-3]. The psychology of language reception is still very imperfectly understood [4, p. 77]. http://tc.eserver.org/28873.html http://tc.eserver.org/28873.html Subject matter experts, under the influence of modernist notions of authorship, often view technical writers as mere grammar and punctuation specialists and marginalize them as their ignorant 'other.' Technical writers, on the other hand, as rhetoricians occupying a liminal space between different disciplines, can understand different disciplinary rhetorics. If subject matter experts, instead of marginalizing technical writers, would view them as liminal subjects who are knowledgeable in different disciplinary rhetorics, then technical writers, through liminal practice, may be able to use their knowledge of audience and rhetoric to improve the quality of documentation. http://tc.eserver.org/26691.html http://tc.eserver.org/26691.html If a single course is to be an effective representation of the discipline it should hope to include rhetoric, critical thinking, formalism, service learning, and civic rhetoric to, depending on how effectively so much can be managed within a semester. http://tc.eserver.org/25283.html http://tc.eserver.org/25283.html Rhetoric has a connection to almost every type of communication. Technical and professional topics and organizations are only some of the many types of knowledge and social life that rhetoric touches. Rhetorical theory can be applied to any form of knowledge, any genre or form of communication, and any human situation, although sub-fields of rhetoric usually focus on one area or another. There are people who study, teach, and/or perform 'scientific rhetoric' and 'technical rhetoric' as their primary profession. http://tc.eserver.org/24586.html http://tc.eserver.org/24586.html This study extends the corpus of an earlier qualitative content analysis about women and feminism and identifies the knowledge claims and themes in the 20 articles that discuss gender differences. Knowledge claims are reflected in expressions such as androgyny; natural collaborators; hierarchical, dialogic, and asymmetrical modes; web; connected knowers; different voice; ethic of care; ethic of objectivity; continuous with others; connected to the world; the cultural divide; visual metaphor; and gender-free science. Built from knowledge claims, the themes in the 20 articles include gender differences in language use, learning, and knowledge construction; gender differences in collaboration; and reviews of research about gender differences and political calls for action. Although the 20 articles provide little support for the existence of gender differences, by introducing, discussing, testing, and revising new ideas about women and feminism, they serve as an example of the process of knowledge accumulation and remodeling in technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/22195.html http://tc.eserver.org/22195.html Two borders that are very important in a primarily undergraduate Technical Communication program are the theory/practice borders we face vis-à-vis our students, and vis-à-vis the practitioners who hire our students. http://tc.eserver.org/20320.html http://tc.eserver.org/20320.html Postmodernism is the recommended posture for technical writers working in international contexts. But should professional writers, adapting to local cultures, automatically adjust their most firmly held communication principles? O, are there technical or ethical criteria higher than the obligation to adapt. http://tc.eserver.org/19130.html http://tc.eserver.org/19130.html As technical communication becomes more firmly established as a field, those in the discipline of technical communication and those in the profession are finding, sometimes to their surprise, that their interests differ. This difference is reflected in the varying claims to legitimacy made by those in professional practice and those in academia. These claims to legitimacy not only differ, but at times seem to be at odds with one another. My interest in these diverging legitimacy claims rests in my dual existence as a professional technical writer and as a graduate student in rhetoric and technical communication. I come to technical communication theory both as a technical communicator who wants to teach technical communication and as a technical communication consultant who wonders how theory can inform her own practice. Having read Technical Communication for years as a practitioner, I was initially surprised to see the difference between technical communication practice and scholarship, as reflected in the types of research that constitute the current conversation in academic technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/19086.html http://tc.eserver.org/19086.html My focus will be on Resistance to theory as expressed by advanced tech writing students. My experience has been that the majority of these students do not enjoy reading nor discussing an assigned theoretical article, such as Carolyn Miller’s 'What’s Practical about Technical Writing?' http://tc.eserver.org/19087.html http://tc.eserver.org/19087.html Technical Communication, as a discipline and as a practice, has always held an odd relationship to writing: We practice a subordinate for of writing, one step or more removed from those our cultures value most highly. We are not, admittedly, authors in the sense in which Foucault once defined the term. The writing that technical communicators do is of a different status than the writing that authors do. Although we could say that manuals and instructions and online help are the fuel that increasingly powers our economy, we would have to admit that our texts do not receive the esteem given to literature. But we might, instead, arrange the issue differently: what if technical communication rejects writing? Not merely in the sense that 'communication' is about multiple media, but in the more fundamental sense that technical communication is about a different order of production, more like the database than the essay. Rephrasing the question of value this way presents a different set of approaches to technical communication curricula, among other things, allowing us to take new perspectives on a set of issues that have haunted our field from the beginning. http://tc.eserver.org/14914.html http://tc.eserver.org/14914.html Defining the field of technical communication is a potentially impossible task. In some respects, the process of defining this profession is similar to Sisyphus' eternally futile task: Just as one theory is proposed within the technical communication discourse community, another article is published and the previous theory suddenly collapses. Unlike Sisyphus, however, the members of the discourse community should be able to successfully create a definition of the field based upon the best ideas from previous theories and writings. http://tc.eserver.org/13377.html http://tc.eserver.org/13377.html For over thirty years, “humanistic” theorists in the field of technical communication have attempted to link it to the more established academic disciplines of rhetoric and literary theory. These theorists, such as Carolyn Miller and David Dobrin, have based their attempts on the following (grossly simplified) logic: objectivity, in language as well as reality, is a sham; therefore, those of us in technical communication do not objectively report reality, but rather, persuade readers to accept reality as we see it; furthermore, to claim that we do anything less is to distort the truth. Patrick Moore subscribes to an opposing view termed “positivist,” yet it is so universally panned that no one outside the sciences presently dares embrace it. Moore notes that Miller “expresses her concern that technical communication is ‘coercive’”, and goes on to cite other humanistic theorists, such as Dobrin and Charles Bazerman, who try to make technical communication theory dance to the tune of rhetoric, which is more pleasing to their ears.