The justification of Technical / professional Writing

The three Traditional forms of writing that shaped thinking and beliefs about writing and design. (Schriver, Karen p.55-79) Firstly, the craft tradition.

Craft Tradition – Cultivates knowledge, usually the active and not the passive voice. (The type of voices) Then it considers the types of typeface, the formal and informal. Craft Tradition – Emphasises grammatical correctness. The main thing about the craft tradition is the know how to achieve a good final product.

Secondly, The romantic tradition – writers and designers are good because of an inner vision, how they see things. To be like this you either can or can not design a good communicative document.

A teacher or audience may even damage or destroy a writer’s point of view. For this reason student should keep a journal, allowing them to reflect back on their thoughts. With students the teachers should setup a nonthreatening environment for the open discussion about the writers work as students.

Having the right atmosphere is important according to Schriever. Allow the students to develop an individual style. The critique between the teacher and student allows the discussion about the student’s strength and weaknesses. This needs to be done in a writing workshop. "Romantic tradition in both writing and design is focused on the idea of working by intuition." (Schriever, K p.57)

Finally, the rhetorical tradition, art of persuasion, the true rhetorician always wants to identify the best strategies of persuasion for the reader. The twentieth century rhetoricians believes that communications can be speech or written text, on the big screen or printed. Rhetoricians also believe that writing can be taught, usually sensitive to the reader’s knowledge and beliefs.

Page 59 of Karen Schriever’s book mentions the audience four times, reminding us of the reader that the rhetorical point of view is audience centered.

Changing from the correctness to the presentation. Craft tradition writers were considered to be grammar doctor. Think about your roles here at uni as writers and recall some of the comments you have had written on your essay. Were the comments helpful? Karen Schriever says no. She talks about the freshman English teacher, the standards of writing, and the English teacher’s rules.

Then she describes the craft tradition style of teacher; they are usually preoccupied with, grammar, mechanics and spelling as well as punctuation and vocabulary. ‘The good old craft tradition dominated approach.’

The teacher’s critical view blocked the student’s creative view. One of the myths Schriever reveals on page 61 is that close attention to detail won’t make better writers more able communicators. Then comes the idea that practice of these modes and techniques would allow the student to develop complex genres. And at the level the craft tradition writers were still considered grammar doctors. Writing teachers started to improve their relationships at Uni to the point where some of the lecturers would ask writing lecturer to check their material.

Then the push and the pressure were on by the engineering facility to teach Professional and technical writing. At first they use literature lecturers but a study proved this wasn’t helpful. The literature lecturer failed to recognise the needs of professional writers and organisations. The literature lecturer even thought that professional writing was below them.

Some even claim that the technical genres and the stylistic guidelines devoid and killed the rhetorical approach. Then the 1950, style of teaching seen the development of quantitative graphics and the decorating of data. Not just boring words.

Managers today according to Schriever lived a life of myths about writers and their true role. The best is gained from the writer’s skill or knowledge but many managers today are craft tradition still only employed for fixing errors. Where writers better serve by the rhetorical tradition?

Critiques of the craft tradition in writing. Page 64. Mainly only focused on grammar and did nothing accept serve as a negative to the students. This appears to hurt more than it helped. The biggest problem here is that they failed to meet the needs of the audience. Rhetorically ineffective.

Renewed interest in the rhetorical tradition. 1945 an onwards, the new generation of rhetoricians, creating the persuasive message by: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery.

This tradition was clearly focused on knowing their audience and analysing what their audience wanted.

1950 Technical writing came to age, ‘the new romantics’ the romantic school believes great writers are born not made. They hold strange views about craft and rhetorical tradition. In this students are encouraged to work in writing workshops, then what about the strange poor boring guys on page 67, "write essays to celebrate personal discoveries." (Schriever, K p67.)

Schriever here quotes Paul Anderson 1995 about the consideration of the audience, Anderson’s book is, Reader-centered approach to technical writing.

Some felt by now that the profession of Professional and Technical writers excluded the unqualified. By now the practitioners form a profession and the writers started to relate more to their audience. The writers were talking directly to the audience on a one-on-one basis. It was now clear they had moved from non-audience to audience focused.

STC- Society for Technical Communications. The birth of the technical writing community. In America from 1970 to 1990s documents design was well underway with four strands of document design. Empirical studies, explorations of social and cultural issues, examinations of theoretical issues and the arguments about the nature, scope and technical communications.

The community continued to develop, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writers, (ATTA) came in to being in 1973. The teachers even developed a sense of community. By now everyone wanted links and the international community linked into Document Design.

Started in the UK and English Professional and Technical writers were industry household names, and the English also started the use of graphics in document design. The Americans referred to these as ‘adjunct aids.’ This has seen the starting of a global writing community, crossnational collaborations.

But the American government was very interested in this new professional technical writing industry. They engaged writers to redraft the IRS tax form. They had several research and evaluation project to complete. Testing the effect of plain English, Studying low income, Evaluating how people understood complex statements and exploring the cognitive process in reading and writing, plus developing usability testing procedure.

Federal funding in America for Document Design disappeared during Reagan and Bush’s era. (Page 73) Prior to these administrations President Carter, in 1978 developed a policy on Plain English. By 1979 a center called Communications Design Center (CDC) had been born but in time its funding was removed and the CDC closed.

Kevin Luke

Student ID 97089562.

Word count 1117.