ENGL 5371 Foundations of Technical Communication

To begin to understand something, one might juxtapose a thing with what it is not. Technical Communication is not journalistic writing, expressive writing, or creative literature. It does not use symbolism or vague literary references. It is not used to entertain, unless the author gaffes. Avoid that ethos.Technical Communication is intended to inform, instruct, and persuade an audience with a specific goal in mind. It involves creativity. It is often collaborative and requires inter/transdisciplinary acumen. It may appear to be objective, but is created through the cultural, socio-historical subjectivity of its makers. It is drenched in systems of power. It is a vehicle for domination and resistance. It affects lives and livelihoods.

Technical Communication has messy origins. It is located at intersections of science and technology studies, writing and literacy studies, rhetoric and argumentation, and design and new media theory. As such, Technical Communication can be broadly conceived, practiced, and theorized. Some might describe technical communication as the development of instructional documents; others might describe it as the research of contexts for non-academic writing. Still others would describe it as the discipline for scholars whose interests focus on discourse as it occurs within science and/or technology. To be sure, technical communication histories, theories, and practices have wide-ranging legal, political, medical, environmental, ethical, and social implications.

In this class, we will investigate the various origins and theories of technical communication with one primary aim: to support you to develop a sense of how your thinking and future scholarship fit into the field. Perhaps it fits squarely in Science and Technology Studies. Perhaps your work is at the periphery of mainstream Tech Comm. Perhaps you want to be a document designer. Perhaps you want to discover novel ways to teach future engineers, scientists, and software developers. All of these are fine choices—and this class is meant to foster a generative environment to test ideas and to sketch out possibilities for your scholarly and professional future. As a foundational class, this course provides necessary background knowledge for your future as a graduate student in the TTU TCR program. But as with all classes, this course, as I approach it, will provide one particular (if incomplete) narrative about technical communication—we'll poke holes in this narrative, question it, revise it, and determine where we think the field might (need to) go next.

The trouble with technical communication, we'll find, is that it is both a practice and a field of study; it requires deep theoretical understanding of discourse, technology, and human interaction but it also requires frequent doings and makings. To understand and engage with the "foundations" of this field will require you to seek an approach that privileges praxis – rather than relegating yourself to just the doer or just the scholar. Because this is a foundational class, a large part of the course introduces you to what it is we expect of graduate level scholars. It makes very little difference what your end goal is—rather, in this class, we begin a journey of scholarly acumen, which doesn't merely prepare you to be a scholar; rather, the class will prepare you to approach the world through a scholarly lens, with a scholarly disposition. This means that you constantly seek/engage /witness new knowledge-making and that we humble ourselves to new knowledge; it means that you hold yourself to the ethical code of a scholar, and read, write, and research, daily.

Potential Texts: Longo's Spurious Coin | Da Vinci's notebooks. Ed. Irma A. Richter | Scott, Longo, and Wills' Critical Power Tools: Technical Communication and Cultural Studies | Savage and Kynell-Hunt's Power and Legitimacy in Technical Communication