Mapping the Research Questions in Technical Communication by Carolyn Rude
The central research question this article poses foregrounds texts, broadly defined as verbal, visual, and multimedia, and the power of texts to mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of contexts
The identity of any academic field is based in part on the research it conducts.
technical communication is commonly defined as a practice, not as an area of research.
Technical communication shares and borrows methods, theories, and even content areas with design communication, speech communication, and rhetoric and composition as well as with psychology, education, and computer science.
Research questions define a field internally and externally by pointing to the knowledge making that is unique to the field.
Main Ideas:
Research in technical communication asks questions that are variations of this central question: How do texts (print, digital, multimedia; visual, verbal) and related communication practices mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of social and professional contexts?
4 areas of questions:
Disciplinarity: How shall we know ourselves? What are our definitions, history, status, possible future, and research methods?
Pedagogy (teaching methods): What should be the content of our courses and curriculum? How shall we teach students best practices, history, and possibilities? How shall we negotiate competing claims for content and pedagogical methods and compete for academic resources?
Practice: How should texts be constructed to work effectively and ethically? What design practices include international users and users with disabilities? What are best practices of text development and design? How can content be managed for reuse?
Social change: How do texts function as agents of knowledge making, action, and change?
still unformed disciplinary identity and lack of external recognition
relative newness of the field
tech communication with service to more dominant fields
status of technical comm programs within english deps
Research methods in the field
Demand greater variety of methods
Mapping Metaphor:
A map contrasts with a taxonomy as a way to analyze a subject: mapping the research ?s and the visual rep of relationships suggest networks and intersections more than categories and boundaries
Any mapping of a field will construct its power relationships (v true)
If we are to understand ourselves and our field, we must understand where power is located and how it shifts
Can show biases
Central Question:
See main idea
Comm practices: the text itself exists in an activity system—situation analysis, development, production, and circulation—all of which involve communication.
Mediate: writers, the organizations that hire them, and the texts they produce influence what readers know and do and even what issues get noticed.
Knowledge: outcomes of texts: values
Contexts: texts are not separate from their origins and impacts
Disciplinary:
Several studies explore the relationship between academia and industry
critical because the need to provide useful information on complex processes and tech explains the field’s origins and growth
Studies of power lament tech communication’s powerless place in academic and business settings but also express resistance to the dominance of science, business, and industry.
The linking of technical communication and knowledge should not be surprising because language is a means of conceptual work
Methods:
must accommodate the assumption that writing is a social activity, often produced collaboratively but also influenced by and influencing the context.
Power comes not from the alignment with traditional sources of power but from the empowerment of participants who are affected by the outcomes of research (****)
Pedagogy:
Curriculum and pedagogical methods have been shaped by the question that drives so much of the research: What and how do people write in non- academic settings?
What and how shall we teach students to prepare them for this writing?
user-centered orientation to communication research and practice
Curriculum has evolved along with workplace practices.
Conceptual: Literacy, tech, globalization, ethics
The concept of literacy implies social significance
literacy and its tools have expanded with new workplace requirements and technologies
Political: Stakeholders in technical communication pedagogy include faculty within tech comm programs, faculty in other programs within the university who compete for resources and the right to determine the nature and value of knowledge, organizations that hire graduates, and students themselves
Very interesting insight
Practice:
text design (including usability) and procedures for developing and managing information (collaboration, management, cross-cultural teamwork, structured authoring, single sourcing)
Only when texts work for their users can they mediate knowledge, values, and actions
Methods of research on the effectiveness of design for users of texts include usability testing and protocol analysis as well as tests of content mastery
Questions about text development concern gathering information, determining how to present it, reviewing it, and managing the process
Content from experts to consulting users
constant change and uncertainty
Social Change:
take us beyond the boundaries of our own courses, history, and practices to social, cultural, and political issues and to the nature of knowledge and meaning
Pursuing questions about the role of writing in human activity, particularly as writing enables negotiation and policy making, takes the field to its roots in rhetoric, developed as a means for free people to negotiate values and power and to take action.
Conclusion:
The identity and value of the field also reside in what it contributes to the world beyond better practices
Technical communication has based its practices and teaching on research
The practice and teaching of technical communication require improvisation and innovation.
Interest in texts as they enable knowledge and action links academic and practitioner research
Our texts are meant to be used to enable people to think well, to make informed decisions, and to take appropriate actions in the best interests of humanity
Technical communication has produced a body of research that influences not just the design of texts but also attitudes toward and engagement with users
Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline: Janice M. Lauer
Distinctive Features of Composition Studies
the interaction among writer, reader, subject matter, and text and to challenge the bases for existing classifications of discours
epistemic potential of writing and its implications for improving powers of inquiry
this field has been marked by its multimodality and use of starting points from a variety of disciplines, all marshalled to investigate a unique and pressing set of problems.
But what are the criteria by which a field may be judged a functioning discipline?
epistemic court: a community of experts who reach consensus in accord with their interpretations of the discipline's basic tasks
4 Â levels that Habermas identifies are a first level of everyday communication, a second level called warrant- testing, on which discourse is fraught with problematic claims to truth, a third level termed warrant-establishing, on which communicators examine the adequacy of the field itself-its goals and methods of investigation-and a fourth level of self-reflection on the nature, function, and purpose of knowledge itself.
Through this process, the field has been seeking warranted consensus about knowledge of written discourse
distinguishing between social and technical knowledge, helps clarify the nature of the judgmental process
In social fields, advocates have two kinds of audience: 1) the epistemic court of experts and 2) larger affected populations for whom social knowledge exercises a rhetorical function, attempting to gain their acceptance of its conclusions and to induce their action.
The reciprocity between theory and practice in composition studies is two-edged: it can be mutually beneficial but it can also threaten the open-mindedness that Habermas posits as another criterion for ideal speech
A final feature of composition studies as a social field is the role it plays within English studies and society as a whole
knowledge generated by social fields plays an important role in both academia and society because its overreaching purpose is to transform the society into a community by helping to define the zone of relevance in matters of human choice
Advantages and risks:
The vastness and density of the problem domain itself offer a rich field of inquiry for the enterprising but a terrain of quicksand for the unwary
The use of several modes helps researchers to avoid a nearsightedness that overlooks many and sometimes even the most significant problems in a field because they exist outside the walls of a particular mode of inquiry.
it cultivates a fruitful reciprocity among modes
Theoretical work provides guidance and hypotheses for empirical research, which, in turn, offers one kind of test or validation of theory
Multimodality also gives the discipline a hierarchical perspective through which to view problems rather than methods as ends
anyone who borrows work from another field must not only acquire an accurate and thorough grasp of the work itself, but also must understand its context, history and the status it enjoys in its parent field
Collaboration, humor, honesty