For over thirty years, “humanistic” theorists in the field of technical communication have attempted to link it to the more established academic disciplines of rhetoric and literary theory.  These theorists, such as Carolyn Miller and David Dobrin, have based their attempts on the following (grossly simplified) logic: objectivity, in language as well as reality, is a sham; therefore, those of us in technical communication do not objectively report reality, but rather, persuade readers to accept reality as we see it; furthermore, to claim that we do anything less is to distort the truth.  Patrick Moore subscribes to an opposing view termed  “positivist,” yet it is so universally panned that no one outside the sciences presently dares embrace it.  Moore notes that Miller “expresses her concern that technical communication is ‘coercive’” (Moore, citing Miller, 100), and goes on to cite other humanistic theorists, such as Dobrin and Charles Bazerman, who try to make technical communication theory dance to the tune of rhetoric, which is more pleasing to their ears.

Since the late 1970s, the conflation of technical writing with other, more explicitly “creative” forms of writing such as fiction or poetry has progressed to the point where there is now some confusion, both within technical communication and outside it, about what it is that technical writers actually do.  Do we, like other “creative” writers, make regular use of our rhetorical skills in order to persuade readers to believe our texts?  Or do we—as our readers probably think, and our employers certainly prefer—make every attempt, in our technical documents, to simply report on what we have observed?

By the 1990s, the two sides had become so contentious that, according to Moore, persons on either side had trouble accepting that those on the other side were even in the same academic community:

If scholars bring up—or even assume—the importance of nonrhetorical language in technical communication, they are dismissed as positivists or inhumane by some academics.  But if a scholar brings up the idea that technical communication is literary or creative writing to a group of professional technical writers, the scholar is regarded as out of touch with reality.  (102)

Moore’s essay is one of several written since 1990 that seeks to bring the field of technical communication back around to a disciplinary self-awareness rooted in those activities which technical writers are most frequently called upon to do: observe and instruct.  It is an understanding that, while tempered by the humanistic theories of Miller and others, nevertheless seeks to re-ground the field as one that necessarily, through its use of “instrumental discourse,” strives for objectivity in language.  By attempting to narrow the theoretical focus of technical communication, Moore and others have contributed to a recognition by those within technical communication of how its theoretical framework has expanded over the last three decades—in short, a recognition of the existence of our own interpretive community, a community with varied goals and practices.  In this essay, I will use the work of several theorists to discuss, first, what the term “interpretive community” entails; second, what the term means for the field of technical communication; and finally, I will extend Moore’s analysis of the coercions of reality to include two other coercions which technical communication can combat.

I

When I say that I am a technical communicator—or an English professor, or a mechanic, or anything else—what, specifically, am I saying?  The statement “I am a __________ ” implies more than just a job description; it also suggests a community of persons, each of whom thinks and says and does approximately the same things as me.  My professional peers and I hold similar, though not necessarily identical, views about our field, its history, its practices, and how we relate to other fields.  According to Stanley Fish, an “interpretive community” is defined as follows:

[An interpretive community is] not so much a group of individuals who [share] a point of view, but a point of view or way of organizing experience that [shares] individuals in the sense that its assumed distinctions, categories of understanding, and stipulations of relevance and irrelevance [are] the content of the consciousness of community members. (141)

The interpretive community Fish is describing is that of literature professors.  But academic disciplines organize the world according to their own particular biases; therefore, the term “interpretive” can certainly be applied to any academic community.  Furthermore, each interpretive community has its own text or texts; for professors of literature, they are literary texts; for lawyers, legal texts; and so on.  For technical writers, it is not only the technical document, but also that upon which the technical document is based: software, computers, and the like.  This is a topic I will return to later in this essay.

The most important goal of the interpretive community is the continuation of its project— that is, to engage the texts within its purview and expand, refine, or discard its understanding(s) thereof.  Since one of the agreed-upon goals of the community’s constituents is to continually strive for a better or wider understanding of its texts, it therefore follows that the community must perpetually remain open to new or old, i.e., “rediscovered” interpretations of those texts:

[T]he interpretive community is an engine of change because its assumptions are not a mechanism for shutting out the world but for organizing it, for seeing phenomena as already related to the interests and goals that make the community what it is.  The community, in other words, is always engaged in doing work, the work of transforming the landscape into material for its own project; but that project is then itself transformed by the very work it does.  (150)

In this way, the community ensures its continued viability.  Thus, a crucial component of the interpretive community is that its beliefs constitute “an entirely flexible instrument for organizing contingent experience in a way that does not preclude but renders inevitable its own modifications”—that is, modifications of those same beliefs (Fish 151, italics mine).  In this way, the interpretive community and its texts avoid paralysis and eventual death.

Something like the transformation Fish describes has been occurring in technical communication since the 1970s.  Carolyn Miller was the first widely read technical communication theorist who sought to re-focus the field away from a primary relationship with empirical reality and instrumental language in favor of a more creative, i.e., “humanistic,” approach.  Dobrin and Bazerman have expounded on Miller’s ideas, rapping the knuckles of teachers of “traditional” technical communication, whose classes “limit the vitality of the language used, thereby limiting the creativity of the writer” (Moore, citing Dobrin, 101).  Recently, Moore and others have attempted to undo some of Miller’s and his contemporaries’  excesses.  In their respective essays, these modified “positivists” react to what they perceive as the field’s humanistic turn by first essentially “crying foul;” that is, decrying the theoretically stifling atmosphere to which they are forced to object.  John Hagge’s observations are similar to Moore’s:

[T]hose who view all discourse as overtly rhetorical are themselves, ironically enough, coercive and have put others who hold different views into a difficult professional position, forcing them either to adopt the current consensualist ideology or to suffer professional opprobrium.  (Hagge 473)

What I am trying to show here is not that one side or the other is right, but that the debate itself is an excellent example of how an interpretive community carries its perceived mission forward.  When viewed through the lens of Fish’s definition of “interpretive community,” we can see how our own community, over the past thirty years, has allowed for the development of new ideas by those within the community. Our community has seen those “new” ideas gain acceptance, and then dominance.  Finally, our community has seen those once-new, now-dominant ideas themselves be questioned, by still others within the community, but at a date sufficiently late enough to allow the new newcomers to bear witness to how the theoretical, if not the practical, norms of the community have fundamentally changed.

The fact that our interpretive community is as fractious and contentious as it is, and that there is not currently one overwhelmingly accepted way of doing or understanding technical communication, is something that our community should celebrate rather than deplore.  As Lyotard notes:

Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative.  It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity.  What saves them from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction.  Science “smiling into its beard” at every other belief has taught them the harsh austerity of realism. (41)

II

What is the interpretive community of technical communication?  As I have shown, it is a community that is currently in contention.  Technical communication has as its goals: 1) the study of methods of utilizing language so that it might best help people use the instruments to which technical documents are companions; and, 2) the training of persons to write such documents.  Although the theoretical underpinnings of how we do what we do is currently a hot topic of debate, humanistic professors of technical communication cannot ignore what technical writers actually do each day of their professional lives.

Since technical communication’s more empirical aspects  have been downplayed or overlooked by those in the “humanistic” camp, it might be a good idea to re-visit the relationship between the technical document and the reality it is supposed to reflect.  The technical document is essentially a printed reification of the empirical reality, and potential functionality, of the machine to which it is companion; as such, the technical document must, to the highest degree possible, objectively reflect that machine.  In a sense, the machine and its attendant documentation have a complex relationship in which each is an elaboration of the other: the machine does what the document says; the document says what the machine does.  The technical document is, for the machine, “…a referent…which is susceptible to proof” (Lyotard 24); in this way, the document is the “I” in Lyotard’s statement regarding one of the characteristics of scientific knowledge: “[n]ot: I can prove something because reality is the way I say it is.  But: as long as I can produce proof, it is permissible to think that reality is the way I say it is” (ibid).  Of course, the proof is the machine.

A reciprocal relationship between the machine and its technical document is critical.  Readers of a technical document are not engaging in speculation, as they might with fiction or poetry; rather, the reader is trying to understand the machine, and he or she expects the technical document to explain it to him.  Moore noted the following:

Reading literature, as Coleridge said, requires a “willing suspension of disbelief”…  But such is not the case in technical communication.  The readers must believe that the objects designated by the words exist, because if those objects do not exist or if those objects are ambiguously or erroneously specified by the words, then many kinds of undesired effects could occur.  (111)

Hagge, in his commentary on Moore, further emphasizes this point, describing how, in the early development of the field of engineering, engineers agreed that the language they used as clear and direct as they could make it:

[E]ngineering language was conceptualized as needing to be unambiguous and objective as possible because actual engineering practice demanded such language to ensure that engineering projects were completed in the way in which engineers had promised they would be completed…  To act differently—to act as if all language were like rhetorical and literary language, in which words only relate to other words—is to commit both a category error and a mistake that might be fatal.  (472)

The “undesired effects” and “mistakes that might be fatal” to which Moore and Hagge respectively allude are the possibilities of physical injury, and even death, if the machines that accompany our technical documents are misused because what our language is unclear.  Such possibilities highlight what is unique to technical communication, and what clearly differentiates instrumental discourse from other, more rhetorical uses of language: our words are linked not just to other words, but to things and processes that exist in the world.

III

Moore responds to the humanists’ charge that technical communication is frequently coercive by citing the various ways in which reality is even more coercive: the elements, society, and even our own bodies coerce us, and the clear, unambiguous language found in technical documents can help us to combat these coercions  (112-3).  However, Moore overlooks two examples of external coercion which technical communication can also help to alleviate: technology itself, and the printed word.

Technology—by which I mean the suffocating universe of electronic devices that purports to meet every conceivable need, real or contrived—is so pervasive in Western society that some cannot help but feel overwhelmed by its complexity and scope.  The cell phones, dishwashers, DVDs, laptops, microwaves, scanners, etc., each of which seems to acquire a new feature every year, all coalesce into something so huge, and so seemingly inhuman, that it’s easy to see how one could feel more intimidated than gratified.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception,” wrote about culture as an industry—one which, while shallow and ultimately worthless, is nevertheless so massive that the individual is simply unable to live outside of it.  Their words, however, are also applicable to technology and to the widespread sentiment that all of the technological products we use  add up to an inexorable force to which everyone must succumb.  The culture industry’s hollow promises of happiness are comparable to those offered by technology, which purport to simplify life but actually make it more complex:

Continuing and continuing to join in are given as justification for the blind persistence of the system and even for its immutability.  What repeats itself is healthy, like the natural or industrial cycle.  The same babies grin eternally out of the magazines; the jazz machine will pound away for ever.  In spite of all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls and the specialities, and in spite of all the restless industry, the bread which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype.  (Adorno and Horkheimer, in Soundscapes)

Just as the “culture industry,” in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s opinions, churns out endless fodder for the individual to delude him- or herself into feeling a fleeting sense of happiness, so, too, do all of the different products out there that purport to serve our needs and make our lives simpler, simultaneously make life more frustrating.  Without clearly written, useful technical documentation, all of the products mentioned above are extremely difficult to figure out, not to mention how much more difficult life becomes when these same products break down.

No less imposing than the technology is the language used to sell it.  In the advertisements that manufacturers use to sell their products, consumers are constantly reminded of how the products will simplify their lives.  Advertising for these products appeals to the consumer’s perceived need for greater simplicity in his or her life.  But technology, through a combination of complexity and inhumanity that most people accept as routine, frustrates at least as often as it assists, and because of this its promises are not believed.  As a result, consumers have come to regard the advertising for a product as something apart from the product itself; the advertisement is just a lie, a tale told in order to seduce the consumer, while the product is the “truth.”

The sense that advertising is a lie leads, in turn, to a mistrust of language itself.  If advertisements are lies, and if we are bombarded—all day, everywhere—with these lies, we almost cannot help developing a sense that language itself is no more than a tool one uses to deceive.  Adorno and Horkheimer comment on this situation in culture when noting that due to the ubiquity of its products, words have lost their specificity:

Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-marks which are finally all the more firmly linked to the things they denote, the less their linguistic sense is grasped.  The minister for mass education talks incomprehendingly of “dynamic forces”, and the hit songs unceasingly celebrate “reverie” and “rhapsody”, yet base their popularity precisely on the magic of the unintelligible as creating the thrill of a more exalted life.  …All the violence done to words is so vile that one can hardly bear to hear them any longer.  (Ibid)

In order to combat the vagaries of language that are inherent in the language of advertising, technical documents must remain clear, and must remain firmly tied to the products they accompany.  If language is truly misunderstood to the extent that Adorno and Horkheimer think, then we as technical writers have a duty to our readers, who are after all only our readers because they bought a certain product, to make the process of learning about that product’s proper use as simple and efficient as possible.

Still another reason that technical documents must be clearly written has to do with the medium in which they’re read.  Even while we know that advertising is meant to seduce us, the printed, rather than simply written, word still conveys a sense of authority in and of itself.  Walter Ong has examined the evolution of the word, and has noted that the most far-reaching effects of that evolution have not been felt as the word moved from speech to writing, but rather, as it moved from writing to print.  Whereas in writing the letters usually flow from one into the next, in printing the letters exist as separate units, not only on the page but also at the printing press.

Alphabetic writing had broken the word up into spatial equivalents of phonemic units…  But the letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur.  With alphabetic letterpress print it is otherwise.  Words are made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute.  Print suggests that words are things for more than writing ever did.  (118)

Along with this new sense of what words are comes an understanding of the printed document itself.  Speech comes from the mouth, and is necessarily linked to the speaker; and although writing separates the words from the speaker, printing, especially in the form of the bound book, does this even more so.  The book is a thing in space, and the manner in which most people approach it is that of a finished, complete, authoritative record:

The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form.  For print is comfortable only with finality.  Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts.  (132)

What makes the printed text even more authoritative is its mass production: “[p]rint encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency” (ibid).  And it’s this same perception of the printed text that demands specificity on the part of the technical communicator.  Printed documents are the sum total of what we do, so we better get them right, and part of getting them right means leaving behind our esoteric discussions about the creativity and rhetoric that is “inherent” in technical communication.  It is a simple observation, but, in light of the humanistic perspective’s continuing popularity among teachers of technical communication, an important one to make: if people regard printed text with the automatic esteem Ong describes, and they are reading the documents we produce in the belief that those documents represent the final word on how to understand the products we are explaining, then those documents ought to exhibit as close a relationship with the physical world as can be had.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max.  “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.”  In Dialectic of Enlightenment.  London: Verso, 1979: pp. 120-167.  At Soundscapes, 06 Jan 2002 ( style='text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'>http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/).

Fish, Stanley.  “Change.”  In Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies.  Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989: pp. 141-160.

Hagge, John.  “Ethics, Words and the World in Moore’s and Miller’s Accounts of Scientific and Technical Discourse.”  In Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 10, No. 4 (October 1996): pp. 461-475.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois.  The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Moore, Patrick.  “Instrumental Discourse is as Humanistic as Rhetoric.”  In Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 1996): pp. 100-118.

Ong, Walter, S.J.  Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.  London: Routledge, 1982.