Selting: Conversations with Technical Writing Teachers: Defining a Problem

Selting, Bonita R. “Conversations with Technical Writing Teachers: Defining a Problem.” TCQ, Summer 2002, vol 11, no. 3 (251-266)

A teacher lore based discussion of the standard positions held on just how much technology and software to teach in the TW classroom. The key issue: how to balance instruction in rhetoric, editing, writing, and reading of the documents with familiarity with the actual tools (software and hardware) that students will use in the TW jobs. Related: what should have a priority since some skills and not others can carry over in to other fields—especially since not every student in a TW course is going to be a TW. 261

Few deny the importance and role of technology, but nobody seems sure of just how to make sure the students obtani the necessary set of skills and abilities they need. Some folks spend minimal class time on it; others teach students, others have students teach students and still other think students should learn it elsewhere. 258

The machine and software is taught by some as an integral art of the course and is engaged with rhetorically.260

Most useful, I thought, was that some instructors incorporate the writing of instructions for software to context-specific applications. This seems to engage both the rhetorical concerns as well as the students' need to develop their familiarity with software. 262

Author: too many folks treat the issue as not problematic too regularly. 263

Get Selber, Stuart. “Beyond Skill Building: Challenges Facing Technical Communication Teachers in the Computer Age.” TCQ 3 (1994): 365-90.

Rich: A Rhetoric of Fitness: Persuasion and Perspiration

Rich, Susanna. “A Rhetoric of Fitness: Persuasion and Perspiration.” Et cetera. Fall 1996. 266-274.

Very accessible voice—not formal academic.
267 cites three rhetorical routines on contemporary fitness: divide and conquer; measure up

267 forms of measurement: time; weight; counts from a trainer; numbers of reps; heart rate
268 states a core message is More, Farther, Faster, Now
268-9 the pressure generates/ results in a form of dependence upon externals like videos, gyms etc
270 “Instead of getting into it, we are always struggling to get it over with.”
271 fitness conversations are one way, from the instructor or trainer down to the person—it is not a dialogue
272 we are isolated from one another; genders are often isolated; muscles are often isolated for development (spot exercises)

273 sisyphus as model for current fitness programs
274 put out makes us self-conscious and dependent
divide and conuer keeps us vulnerable and malleable
measure up helps to calculate and collocate thousands of clients.
we are meant to work for the programs, they are not meant to work for us (almost literal quote)

Cornell: On War and Games in the Ancient World

Cornell, T. J. “On War and Games in the Ancient World.” Sixth International Symposium for Olympic Research, pp 29-40.
29 Great list of resemblances shared by war and sport in intro
29 two prime theories about sports & war: sports are complementary to war and stimulate the attitudes; sports are an alternative to war.
30 while sports promote fitness needed by soldiers, it's an incidental feature not the primary function of sports

30 vital discussion in second paragraph: while sports helped develop the manly virtues needed in war ( a Victorian value/view), sports were not a form of military training.
30 sports training not always relevant to war
30 list of a few generals in classical period who did not like athletics for their soldiers
30 Romans (plutarch) greek athletics led to the feminization of the greeks and eventual downfall of the greeks
30 ancients stressed or denied the value of sports in soldierly training; victorians pomorted the charcter building and abstract vvitres of team, group, selflessness
30 there was little to no team sports in the clasical world—especially contact sports
only the Spartans
31-32 sport as alternative to war discussed
32 proposes that sports and war are autotelic, that is ends in themselves
32 war often had ritual/cultural purpose and not just a political instrument as proposed by Clausewitz
32 primitive war is highly ritualized
32 in Homer war and sports are highly ritualized events by aristocratic men
33 “The agonistic spirit expressed itself not only in athletics, but in competitions in art, drama and music, and in the constant striving to outdo one's rivals in all areas of life—public speaking, law politics, and philosophical argument.”
33 chivalric behavior in war only makes sense with an agonistic sense of war (contest) in which artificial rules ensure a fair fight. this reduces battle to a game
34 Gladiator contests were called a munus, which means gift (of the citizens who promoted them)
35 in Greece the citizens were the atheletes; in Rome, the citizens were usually spectators watching low-class pros, foreigners and/or slaves compete
35-6 discussion/dismissal of links usually made between war and games in Rome: ampitheaters and gladiator training
36 gladiators rarely soldiers; very rare to have large scale combat—usually one on one or pairs
37 battles rarely restaged for the public
37 games were at their height when Rome was at peace

Pritchard: Sport, War, and Democracy

Pritchard, David. Sport, War and Democracy in classical Athens.
from In Press Sport in the cultures of the ancient world. Special issue of the Int'l journal of the History of Sport
downloaded PDF

Overall, this is an incredibly well-documented and thorough discussion of some of the basic issues which interest me regarding sports, war, and Greece. There are over one hundred footnotes and an extremely useful list of works cited.

Key points:
3 sport atheletes had some of the highest esteem in Athens
3 athletes were rarely targeted by playwrights for abuse
5 athletics were closely associated with justice and moderation
6 two primary roles of athletics in classical athens: festival based agonesand physical education classes
7 athletics one of three traditional subjects in male education; grammar/letters and music were the other two
7 education privately funded; only the wealthiest could afford to send their boys to all three forms of training
8 Athenians held that athletic training was necessary in order to perform well in sports; the result is that only those boys who had been trained were encouraged to compete; hence the athletic heroes of athens were the sons of the rich
9 discussion of role of public schools in England preparing boys to lead the country
10 Orwell: int'l sport creates int'l ill will,not good will
11 popular culture regards sports as safe way to blow of steam & reduce anger
11 steam blowing related to Konrad Lorenz's aggression as innate drive and aggressive activities are drive-discharge catharisis—thus the more sport, the less aggression and war
12 social sciences discredit drive-discharge
12 psych & physiologists for simplifying aggression; phys anthros & biologists for fallacious extrapolation from animals toohumans; cult. anthros for ignoring observed cultural variation in responses to threats
12 multiple studies listed where watching violent sports resulted in agitated folks
12 study of students who responded differently; those who worked out their agg via punching ended up being the angriest and most aggressive
12-13 Berkowitz: aggression related experiences form network in memory and thus current agg potentially summons up past agg
13-14 Sipes finding that war/sport support each other's presence; study on 20 pre-modern culutres found 9/10 violent cultures had combative sports as well

14 battles and sports events were both considered agones
15 agones tested the moral fiber and confirmed/demonstrate the arete of the competitors
16 if men lost in the games, they deserved to receive abuse in the Athenian pespective
17 bc fifth century Athens democratized war
18 poor citizens now experienced war; shared that in common with elite
20-1 experiencing war and that form of agone enabled the poor to identify with the agones of the elite wealthy athletes “As a result, lower-class citizens came to beliee that upper-class athletes exhibited te same moral qualities and experienced the same ordeals as they did when fighting battles.

Review the bib for articles to order/get copy

Lanham: Electronic Word: Chapter 1

"The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution"

4 "Electronic typography is both creator-controlled and reader-controlled."
5 discussion of text and looking AT it and then looking THROUGH it. This discussion is very important, and it should be reviewed multiple times.
6 "The interactive reader of the electronic word incarnates the resopnsive reader of whom we make so much." I am not so sure about that. Must ponder.
9 "So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptula utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraoridnary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial... Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency." [italics author's]
11 digitization provides for endless editing and alteration of texts
15 discussion of competitive games versus play; mention of Greeks and Sophists
17 "Theory is in fact rhetorical practice, as we are becoming increasingly aware, part of a returning rhetorical paideia that began with the didacticism of Futurism and Dada and has been colonizing the humanities and social science ever since."
20 book and text as talismanic objects
24 more on paideia
24 more on AT and THROUGH--revisit this



vocab: aleatory, condign, suspirations, capacious

Mentioned sources that looked interesting:
Havelock, Eric. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences
Illich, Ivan and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind

Lanham: Electronic Word: Preface

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1993.

Lanham was raised in Classical Rhetoric class. It sounded intimidating, and then it sounded interesting. So I am slowly reading it.

x Lanham cites Jay David Bolter: we'll lose literacy for print, not literacy itself
xi electronic text liberates language from the rules of print
xi electronic word "incarnates the distinction between literate and oral cultures..."
xi manipulation of scale in electronic realm
xii print is philosophic medium; electronic screen is rhetorical mediuam
xiii "And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them."

Aristotle: Rhetoric: Book 2: Ch 10-

Ch 10-11

Difference between envy and emulation is that envy is being upset that someone has something you do not; emulation is being upset that you do not have something that someone else does. Envy is doing things to prevent your neighbor from living well; emulation is doing things so that you live well.

Ch 16

There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly-enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form -- to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches.

It was interesting to learn that hatred of the nouveau riche has been around for millenia.

Ch 21: Rocking the Maxim
1395b

The maxim, as has been already said, a general statement and people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connexion: e.g. if a man happens to have bad neighbours or bad children, he will agree with any one who tells him, "Nothing is more annoying than having neighbours," or, "Nothing is more foolish than to be the parent of children." The orator has therefore to guess the subjects on which his hearers really hold views already, and what those views are, and then must express, as general truths, these same views on these same subjects. This is one advantage of using maxims. There is another which is more important -- it invests a speech with moral character. There is moral character in every speech in which the moral purpose is conspicuous: and maxims always produce this effect, because the utterance of them amounts to a general declaration of moral principles: so that, if the maxims are sound, they display the speaker as a man of sound moral character.

Read through chapter 23
Reread 23. It's dense.

Geertz: Anti Anti Relativism

Geertz, Clifford. 1984

Pretty easy to read academic article. The title says it all: the piece explores in depth the attacks on relativism which are based upon a reversion to placing a universal form of knowledge at the top of a hierarchy. Just below that is morality. Geertz asserts that the two prime levers for doing this are "Human Mind" and "Human Nature."

The piece is an excellent example of professional writing which uses first person voice in places and engages in playful, sarcastic, and engaging tones. Similarly, he largely gives voice to the Anti Relativists before he pulls them apart. Very little discussion of Relativism takes place.

Key sections are second paragraph of 264: people spending too much time on what they do NOT believe; to question a universal truth often leads to being accused of not believing in anything.

page 270 Geertz covers the Anti R genre of child to adult as relativist to anti-relativist.

272 "There is the same tendency to see diversity as surface and universality as depth. And there is the same desire to represent one's interpretations not as constructions brought to their objects--societies, cultures, languages--in an effort, somehow, somehwat to comprehend them, but as quiddities of such objects forced upon our thought."


275 "Looking into dragons, not domesticating or abominating them, nor drowning them in vats of theory, is what anthropology has been all about."

Could you adjust that and change dragons to persuasion and anthropology to rhetoric?

276 The final words:

The objection to anti-relativism is not that it rejects an it-s'all-how-you-look-at-it approach to knowledge or a when-in-Rome approach to morality, but that it imagines that they can only be defeated by placing morality beyond culture and knowledge beyond both. This, speaking of things which must needs be so, is no longer possible. If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

Aristotle: Rhetoric: Book 2: notes

Chapter 1
1378 a

There are three things which inspire confidence in the orator's own character -- the three, namely, that induce us to believe a thing apart from any proof of it: good sense, good moral character, and goodwill. False statements and bad advice are due to one or more of the following three causes. Men either form a false opinion through want of good sense; or they form a true opinion, but because of their moral badness do not say what they really think; or finally, they are both sensible and upright, but not well disposed to their hearers, and may fail in consequence to recommend what they know to be the best course.

Chapter 3

The reason is that it is shameless to deny what is obvious, and those who are shameless towards us slight us and show contempt for us: anyhow, we do not feel shame before those of whom we are thoroughly contemptuous.

At the end of Ch. 3

It is now plain that when you wish to calm others you must draw upon these lines of argument; you must put your hearers into the corresponding frame of mind, and represent those with whom they are angry as formidable, or as worthy of reverence, or as benefactors, or as involuntary agents, or as much distressed at what they have done.

Chapter 4

We may describe friendly feeling towards any one as wishing for him what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his, [1381a] and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about. A friend is one who feels thus and excites these feelings in return: those who think they feel thus towards each other think themselves friends. This being assumed, it follows that your friend is the sort of man who shares your pleasure in what is good and your pain in what is unpleasant, for your sake and for no other reason.

Things that cause friendship are: doing kindnesses; doing them unasked; and not proclaiming the fact when they are done, which shows that they were done for our own sake and not for some other reason.

Chapter 5

Fear may be defined as a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.

... we can also see what Confidence is, about what things we feel it, and under what conditions. It is the opposite of fear, and what causes it is the opposite of what causes fear; it is, therefore, the expectation associated with a mental picture of the nearness of what keeps us safe and the absence or remoteness of what is terrible: it may be due either to the near presence of what inspires confidence or to the absence of what causes alarm. We feel it if we can take steps -- many, or important, or both -- to cure or prevent trouble; if we have neither wronged others nor been wronged by them; if we have either no rivals at all or no strong ones; if our rivals who are strong are our friends or have treated us well or been treated well by us; or if those whose interest is the same as ours are the more numerous party, or the stronger, or both.

Chapter 7
1385b

In considering this subject we must look at all the "categories": an act may be an act of kindness because (1) it is a particular thing, (2) it has a particular magnitude or (3) quality, or (4) is done at a particular time or (5) place. As evidence of the want of kindness, we may point out that a smaller service had been refused to the man in need; or that the same service, or an equal or greater one, has been given to his enemies; these facts show that the service in question was not done for the sake of the person helped. Or we may point out that the thing desired was worthless and that the helper knew it: no one will admit that he is in need of what is worthless.

Article: Staples: TC from 1950-1998

Staples, Katherine. Technical Communication from 1950-1998: Where Are We Now? Technical Communication Quarterly. Spring 1999, Vol. 8, No. 2 (153-64)

TW is mature as a discipline, is linked to workplaces and academia via pedagogy and research. However, maturity means moving away from TW's history and role as a service course.

154 GI Bill of 1944 swamped colleges with new kinds of students

154 popularity of engineering programs= popularity/need for TC/TW courses

155 TC instruction considered graphic as well as verbal presentations by end of 50s

155 TC largely taught by adjuncts/untenured in English & engineering depts.

156 by early 1970s, ten academic programs in TC/TW started

157 TC credentials/education regarded as a career advantage in 1984

157 key to professional identity was the foundation of professional journals in the 70s

158 schism in the profession in the 80s with growth: old-school, post-war men learned mostly by practice vs. new guard w/PhDs, capable in Rhet, and women

159 "Like Harris, Miller argues that praxis, applied craft, and techne, reflective art, can usefully support one another in technical communication."

161 TC/TW origins: teaching & a long relationship with applied technologies and with the workplace

161 the value of scholarship on teaching/theory is questioned by workplace/pragmatic advocates


Interesting articles referenced:
Fox on composition studies?

Kynell, Teresa Writing in a Milieu of Utility

Miller, Carolyn "What's practical about Technical Writing" 1989
apparently the article has important references about TW pedagogy and keeping critical awareness about when working with industry

Redish & Judith Ramey 1993 study about value added to tech products by communicators
"Special Section: Measuring the value added by professional technical communicators. TC 42 (1995): 23-29

Article: Kynell: TC from 1850-1950

Kynell, Teresa. Technical Communication from 1850-1950: Where Have We Been? Technical Communication Quarterly, Spring 1999, Vol. 8, No. 2. (143-151)

Formation of TC pedagogy; evaluation of shifts in engineering curriculum from 1850-1960.

144 1850-62 most engineers mentored or had a sparse training

144 1862 Morrill Acts = land grant colleges = practical education/professional trade

145 Mansfield Merriman, quoted in Kynell, "The only way to learn to write is to write."

146 Circa 1910 educators grasped that engineers needed real-world context to develop their writing and they should focus on the kinds of writing they'll actually face as professionals

146-7 Earle's 4 abilities that would make English more relevant to engineers
ability to: put into words an abstract though; describe, in writing, an object not present; write for different audiences; give a concept a full treatment by demonstrating understanding in writing


This piece and the Connors, and possibly the Carolyn Miller could go on the reading list as histories of TC/TW. If I am going to focus on TC/TW and comp, then I need to be aware of the histories of both. This article does pretty well in laying a foundation/basis, as well as reference points, to locate more specifics about how TC/TW and comp have been regarded as service courses for nearly a century. Thus, the problems we see with the treatment/references to writing and composition are, in fact, apparent manifestations of the modern university.

Flying by the seat of my pants here, but I do believe that once the shift took place in the 1860s or so away from the classical educational roots is also when composition began to lose face. Essentially, with industrialization and the gutting of Rhetoric, composition fell down in status. The application of text, of words, seems to be far less important than the creation or manufacturing of materials.





Interesting referenced articles:
Gerald Savage 1996 "Redefining the Responsibilities of Teachers and the Social Position of the Technical Communicator"

Miller, Carolyn. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English 40 (1979): 610-17.

Aristotle: Rhetoric: Book I: Ch 9

Consequently, whenever you want to praise any one, think what you would urge people to do; and when you want to urge the doing of anything, think what you would praise a man for having done.

I need to think about this, but it seems like a masterful approach to manipulation. Again, this needs consideration.

Praise is the expression in words of the eminence of a man's good qualities, and therefore we must display his actions as the product of such qualities. Encomium refers to what he has actually done; the mention of accessories, such as good birth and education, merely helps to make our story credible -- good fathers are likely to have good sons, and good training is likely to produce good character. Hence it is only when a man has already done something that we bestow encomiums upon him. Yet the actual deeds are evidence of the doer's character: even if a man has not actually done a given good thing, we shall bestow praise on him, if we are sure that he is the sort of man who would do it. To call any one blest is, it may be added, the same thing as to call him happy; but these are not the same thing as to bestow praise and encomium upon him; the two latter are a part of "calling happy," just as goodness is a part of happiness.

Reading this made me wonder what we have currently which is similar to or functions as an encomium. Does a positive 30 second news spot count as one? Do media representations of good deeds actually have the same cultural important that formal encomiums did in ancient Greece? I wonder just how important or lost the role of praise and honor have become in modern culture. Again, more to think about.