New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication

Research, Theory, Practice

Paul V Anderson, John R Brockman, Carolyn R Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351842761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication represents the most important collection of writings about technical communications ever compiled. Focusing on a wide range of theoretical and practical issues, these essays reflect the rigor, vitality, and interdisciplinary nature of modern technical communications. This represents a collection of the very best scholarly work being done.

PART ONE

Empirical Research

CHAPTER 1

Studying Writing in Non-Academic Settings

LEE ODELL

DIXIE GOSWAMI

ANNE HERRINGTON

DORIS QUICK

This essay is based on two principal assumptions. The first is that teachers of writing must also be students of writing. Whether we teach “composition” or “technical writing,” we need to examine critically our classroom procedures and the theory that forms the basis for our discipline. We must be continually asking such questions as these: Are my theory and teaching procedures consistent with what writers actually do? If I analyze written products and composing processes, do I find corroboration of my theoretical assumptions and classroom practices? When composition teachers and researchers have asked these questions, the answers have often been disconcerting. When researchers have attempted to find out what writers actually do, they have called into question widely held assumptions about the value of outlining [1], the necessity of topic sentences [2], and the importance of such “basic” methods of paragraph development as comparison and contrast [3].

One might assume that the teaching of technical writing would be more in tune with the practice of writers, since such courses are designed to equip students to meet the specific writing demands they will encounter when they enter business and industry. Yet there are at least some bases for questioning this assumption. For one thing, textbooks are often derived from other textbooks, and teachers of writing tend to reflect the values of their own teachers rather than their understanding of what writers actually do. Further, a recent study by Paul Anderson notes several disparities between the technical writing done in some university classrooms and that done by workers in several fields [4]. Anderson’s study indicates that many of these workers have to write to different types of readers: to some who are quite well-informed, to others who are not; to some readers who are at the writer’s own level in an organization and to others who are at levels higher or lower than the writer’s. Consequently, Anderson questions the practice of those technical writing teachers who insist that students address all their writing to a single type of audience, “the intelligent but uniformed layman.” In addition, the study indicates that writers have to do a number of different types of writing (e.g., memos, letters, instructions) much more frequently than they have to write formal reports. Thus Anderson suggests that technical writing teachers who place a great deal of emphasis on the writing of formal reports may not be preparing students to handle the demands they will encounter in business and industry.

Our second principal assumption is that when we attempt to find out what writers do, we should not rely solely on teacher-designed, experimental tasks. We should also be concerned with the writing tasks people actually do as a normal part of their day-to-day work. We think experimental tasks are attractive, especially those in which researchers stipulate a rhetorical context – a purpose (e.g., to inform or persuade) and a specific audience (e.g., readers of a particular magazine), by manipulating such important variables as audience and purpose. Moreover, such tasks have been useful in testing basic assumptions from discourse theory. By carefully varying the rhetorical purposes of a series of assignments, and by asking writers to do those assignments in a setting where the composing process could be videotaped and timed, Ann Matsuhashi [5] has provided important support for James Kinneavy’s claim that “The aim of a discourse determines everything else in the process [our emphasis] of discourse.” [6] Prior to Matsuhashi’s study, this claim about purpose and process had been supported solely by analysis of theory and written products. In addition to helping researchers test theory, experimental tasks can be very useful in studying the development of writing abilities. By giving the same experimental task to children, adolescents, and adults, researchers have been able to record developments in syntactic skills [7], persuasive strategies [8], and ability to anticipate the information needs of readers [9]. Furthermore, Linda Flower and John R. Hayes have shown that it can be useful to present writers with novel tasks, tasks that make it difficult to rely on “stored plans” or routine strategies for producing a piece of writing [10]. Such tasks can, for example, let us see how the composing process of skillful writers differs from that of less skilled writers.

While recognizing these uses of experimental tasks, we think that teachers and researchers should also get outside the classroom and look at the writing people do in non-academic settings, writing that is rarely published or distributed widely but that is central to one’s success in a given job or profession. Our experience in working with writers in non-academic settings suggests that the contexts for and the consequences of this writing can be substantially different from what one encounters in experimental tasks designed by a teacher or researcher. In this latter type of writing, especially when the experimental task stipulates an audience other than the teacher or researcher, the writer may have had little prior experience in writing for the assigned audience and has little reason to believe that the writing will ever have its intended effect on the assigned audience or that the writing will have any consequence beyond earning a grade or satisfying a teacher’s or researcher’s request. By contrast, our experience suggests that writers in non-academic settings experience the writing situation quite differently. They often have detailed knowledge about their audiences and have developed a repertoire of strategies for dealing with their audiences. Further, these writers can usually assume that their writing will actually be read by someone who can, in fact, be informed or persuaded and that the reader may very well be dependent on the writer’s ability to inform or persuade. Finally, these writers know that their writing will have important consequences; if they do not write reasonably well, they may not obtain what they want; they may have the additional trouble of dealing with an angry or confused reader; they may not be promoted or given merit raises; or they may lose their jobs. Since we assume that context and consequences can have an important influence on written products and the writing process, we think it important to examine the routine, non-experimental tasks that continually confront writers in non-academic settings. As we shall argue in the final section of this essay, we think that the study of writing in non-academic settings has implications for teaching and for learning.

In the next three sections of this essay, we shall introduce three research strategies which we have developed in the course of our own study of writing in several different non-academic settings. Each focuses upon a different type of data: one examines the linguistic features in samples of work-related writing; another examines workers’ criteria for evaluating the writing done by someone else; a third, the discourse-based interview, examines the reasons writers give for making a particular stylistic or substantive choice in their own writing. We have developed these three different strategies because we believe that in order to understand writing in non-academic settings (or, indeed, any subject matter) one must be able to draw upon a repertoire of complementary investigative strategies. Our decision to use a particular strategy or combination of strategies has depended upon the setting we have been working in and upon the types of questions we have wanted to answer.

As we discuss each research strategy, we shall explain how that strategy was used in a particular non-academic setting to answer a particular question. Further, we shall suggest additional questions which arise from our use of a given procedure. Since we are primarily interested in encouraging further study of writing in non-academic settings, we shall, for the most part, be less concerned with reporting our findings than with describing research procedures. The one exception to this plan will appear in our discussion of our third research strategy — analysis of the reasons writers give for making a stylistic or substantive choice. In this discussion we shall present a more thorough discussion of findings from one study since those findings are not available elsewhere.

Although we shall discuss each strategy separately, we want to emphasize at the outset that they are complementary; moreover, each has provided support for one basic conclusion about writing in the non-academic settings where we have worked: for the writers we have interviewed, this writing is not rule-governed. There are very few instances in which these writers rely solely upon a particular stylistic maxim that says, in effect, “Always do X” or “Never do Y.” Instead, each of our strategies shows that when these writers make choices of style and substance, those choices reflect a complex awareness of rhetorical context, of the interrelations of audience, persona, and subject matter.

WRITING SAMPLES

One way to assess writers’ sensitivity to rhetorical context is to ask this question: When writers in non-academic settings address different audiences in an attempt to accomplish different purposes, does their writing show variation in such linguistic features as, say, syntax? In an attempt to answer this question, we analyzed an extensive collection of writing done by administrators and caseworkers in a county bureaucracy, a Department of Social Services [11].

In gathering this writing sample, we departed from the usual practice of devising a series of experimental tasks which asked people to write for different audiences and purposes. Indeed, we did not attempt to give any writing assignments at all. Instead, we began by trying to determine what kinds of writing were actually done by workers in the agency. At our initial interview, we asked workers to keep copies of everything they wrote during a two-week period. This provided an extensive writing sample, which we supplemented in the following ways: we tried to notice what types of written materials were on people’s desks; we accepted some participants’ invitations to rummage through files in which they kept copies of everything they wrote; we asked for copies of materials when participants occasionally approached us in the hallway or interrupted an interview, saying, “Here’s something else you might be interested in.” Such procedures, obviously, are not systematic, and they rely heavily upon the good will and interest of the participants. In all our studies, however, we have found that researchers may expect a good bit of cooperation and interest from participants, especially if we make it clear that we are not interested in evaluating their work but, rather, are interested in identifying the skills they have developed as a result of writing repeatedly on the job. Consequently, we have found that participants can often identify types of writing that we would not have anticipated. As participants mention such pieces of writing, it is a simple matter to check back with other participants, asking if they, too, do that sort of writing. This procedure does not guarantee that we can identify every single type of writing done in a given non-academic setting. But it does let us identify several types of writing that are done by a number of people at a particular site and that participants themselves have identified as having different functions and audiences.

In our early interviews at the Department of Social Services, administrators described and provided examples of three types of writing done by all administrators in the agency:

• pink memos – relatively short, informal pieces of writing (written on 8½ by 6 inch sheets of pink paper) that usually serve a routine function such ...