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Has Technical Communication Arrived As a Profession?

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Has Technical Communication Arrived As a Profession? APPLIED RESEARCH SUMMARY ᭜ Reports results of a practitioner survey on the definition of technical communication and the role of technology in their work ᭜ Argues that technical communication demonstrates a stable set of core values which suggest the field has a professional identity The Future Is the Past: Has Technical Communication Arrived as a Profession? KATHY PRINGLE AND SEAN WILLIAMS INTRODUCTION 139). In other words, like Grice and Krull, Davis sees n the May 2001 Technical communication, Roger technical communication as a profession with a dual iden- Grice and Robert Krull introduced a special issue on tity that involves some set of core skills that dovetail with the future of technical communication by outlining technological skills. Isome skills that participants at a 1997 conference at Davis doesn’t suggest what those core skills are, how- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute had identified. From the ever, and Grice and Krull base their predictions on intuition list of things identified at that conference, Grice and Krull and conversations that occurred four years prior to the suggest that three categories run through all of the sugges- publication of their special issue. Some questions emerge tions. then. If we are going to postulate what the future of tech- 1. Technical communication will involve some kind nical communication holds, shouldn’t we understand what of information design skill, whether it’s testing, writing, is going on now? What is actually happening in the pro- visual design, or training. fession? What are practitioners in the profession actually 2. Technical communication will involve shifting doing? How do practitioners actually define the field and technological skills, including statistical testing, database their work? Likewise, shouldn’t we have an historical per- design, Web design, and authoring languages. spective that allows us to see whether, in fact, the profes- 3. Technical communication’s future roles are al- sion has changed in any significant way and then speculate ready occupied by those from other professions. on the future based on that historical understanding com- They go on to detail the first two of these points more bined with some sense of current practice? Davis herself, clearly in the introduction, suggesting that they want to quoting Michael Keene at length, suggests something sim- focus their attention on the first two topics because the ilar, arguing that our knowledge domain is that of prac- third might be too complicated for this special issue. tice—we must look to the work of real people in context to An important characteristic of technical communica- understand what the profession finds valuable (p. 142). tion as a field appears in their discussion. Namely, technical The purpose of this current article, accepting Davis’s communication, they predicted, would be both a design challenge to look toward the real work of technical com- field and a technological field that requires practitioners to munication to understand the field, examines the dual possess a core set of information design skills—writing, aspects of technical communication outlined by Grice and editing, creating visuals—at the same time they possess the Krull by investigating how practicing technical communi- ability to rapidly “adopt and drop tools skills” (p. 136). Marj cators imagine their work and the profession, specifically Davis’ article, “Shaping the future of our profession”(2001) with respect to technology. In short, we wanted to inter- which appeared in Grice and Krull’s special issue, agreed rogate the duality of “core information design skills” and with the argument they outlined, suggesting that “the fu- “technology skills” proposed in 2001 by asking practitio- ture of the technical communication profession is obvi- ously tied intimately to the future of technologies. But unless technical communicators want to remain in a ser- Manuscript received 15 December 2004; revised 25 March 2005; vant role, we must become more than tool jockeys” (p. accepted 1 April 2005. Volume 52, Number 3, Month 2005 • TechnicalCOMMUNICATION 361 APPLIED RESEARCH Has Technical Communication Arrived as a Profession? Pringle and Williams ners to reflect both on the definition of technical commu- through the Renaissance—and especially the English Re- nication and the role technology plays in their work. We naissance—we see perhaps one of the most significant wanted to weigh claims that communication and rhetorical advances in technology for communicating: the printing skills are important for success in the field against claims press and moveable type. With this new technological that knowledge of specific tools is likewise vitally impor- advancement came the need for new workers, including tant to success in the field (Hayhoe 2000). someone to look over documents before they were printed Since the purpose of this special issue is to look forward (O’Hara 2001). As Elizabeth Tebeaux explains, “Ultimately, to the future of technical communication, we complement our the English Renaissance defined technical writing, which case studies of practicing technical communicators with a was clearly a by-product of print technology and literacy, look at the history of technical communication. The combi- but the seventeenth century marked the expansion, the nation of historical perspective and current practice enables development, the flowering of this tradition” (1999, p. 249). us to see a broader perspective of the field and technology’s During the 1800s in England, technical writing emerged role in it than just our limited study would and hopefully in the forms of “books that provide instruction on performing enables us to make better predictions about what the future of work in a broad range of fields, such as medicine, agriculture, technical communication holds. navigation, and military science” (Tebeaux 1999, p. 209). What we predict is that technical communication will Tebeaux’s study of these works of technical writing demon- be what it is and what it was. That is, technical communi- strates many similarities with current practices. For example, cation historically has been characterized by a tension these books used page layouts and formatting that included between employing sophisticated rhetorical and analytical headings, subheadings, and graphical elements. In addition, skill to create effective communications at the same time these works also included drawings, tables, and a “plain style” those skills relied on technology for their implementation of writing (Tebeaux 1999, p. 211). During this time, easier-to- and demonstration. Current technical communication prac- use fountain pens aided writers by eliminating the need to tice is no different. Since past practice demonstrated this exert as much energy as was necessary when using nib pens tension, and because our study of current practice suggests (Schriver 1997). that technical communicators are both communicators and Although many scholars attribute technical writing’s technologists, it seems reasonable to suggest that the future major birth in the United States to World War II, not all are holds more of the same. convinced of this origin. Brockmann (1998) traces its be- Perhaps, as Marj Davis hopes, we have finally arrived at a ginnings to the 1850s, when mass production became pos- point in the field where we can articulate a set of professional sible through factories. He bases this argument on an anal- attitudes and practices that will help guide us toward the ysis of sewing machine and mower-reaper instruction sense of group identity required for recognition as an authen- manuals from the time. These manuals, Brockmann argues, tic “profession.” Perhaps, because technical communication is are similar in characteristics to more modern-day instruc- what it was, the field shows stability in values and practices tion manuals. Likewise, after the Civil War, the Morrill Act that we as professionals need to embrace as our own, impart in 1862 prompted the foundation of land-grant colleges to new members of the community, and use to guide our (Rutter 2004), and these colleges supported the develop- future development as a profession. ment of engineering as a discipline (Connors 1999). During this time, engineering students were trained heavily in A BRIEF HISTORY OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION humanistic studies, but this emphasis in the humanities was Technical communication has a long history, although for short-lived because students’ humanistic studies ultimately most of its history it existed without any proper name. resulted in poor literacy among engineering graduates Robert Connors argues, for example, that “For as long as (Connors 1999). men have used tools and have needed to communicate By the early 1900s, however, with the recognition that with each other about them, technical discourse has ex- humanistic training for engineers resulted in poor literacy isted” (1999, p. 173). Evidence exists, in fact, that can trace among engineering graduates, changes emerged in techni- scientific and technical writing back to ancient times where cal writing. Since engineers and other scientists produced anonymous technical writers wrote on tablets in Babylon most of their writing and other communication out of a (Moran 1985). Moving forward in history to the Middle necessity to convey information to their audience (Longo Ages, we also see that technical writing existed with 2000), technical communication began to emerge in higher Geoffrey Chaucer’s the Treatise on the astrolabe
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