Do you think the field of technical communication has tended to reflect trends in American culture

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

133

0 1991, Baywood Publishing CO., Inc. 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