JAC Volume 3, Issue 1/2

Instruction in writing beyond the freshman level takes a variety of forms, all of which may be thought of as "advanced" composition. One of the best established forms and one that shows all signs of continuing growth is technical writing. Although some teachers of traditional advanced composition may blanche at the comparison I believe it helpful to take the relationship seriously. Technical writing is a form of advanced composition that relies upon well defined audiences and writer-roles, and that addresses itself to specific purposes found in industrial, manufacturing, research and development, and other bureaucratic and technological contexts. It is its specificity that makes technical writing distinct, but, like all advanced composition, its general function is to help students muster their linguistic and rhetorical resources to have effects on readers.

Selecting a textbook for a technical writing class is a task that can vary from the tedious to the burdensome. Teachers new to the course may be overwhelmed by the number of texts that appear to present distinctions without differences. Experienced teachers may avoid the task altogether by sticking with a familiar text, more from habit than from true conviction. The problems that this task presents to any instructor are several: the number of textbooks available is large and growing; and these books differ from each other in important ways that may not be immediately obvious, either to the naive or to the calloused observer. They differ in the maturity of the audience they assume, from high school and vocational school students to graduate students and working professionals. They differ in the types of endeavors they assume to be covered as "technical," from engineering and social sciences to government administration and health care professions. They differ in the rhetorical and pedagogical theories they assume, and in whether they use theory implicitly or explicitly: they can be process oriented or product oriented, heuristic or perscriptive, analytic (beginning with words and sentences) or synthetic (beginning with purpose and audience).

The National Council of Teachers of English and the Society for Technical Communication have produced a reference work that addresses itself specifically to the problem of textbook selection. A Bibliography of Basic Texts in Technical and Scientific Writing,¹ published by the STC and sponsored and developed under the auspices of the NCTE Committee on Scientific and Technical Communication, lists 78 textbooks in print as of August 1981, 67 with annotations and 11 others that were not available for examination as of that date. In addition, an "Instructor's Bookshelf" section lists supplementary resource material, without annotations.

The textbook annotations, prepared by Jone Goldstein, indicate the audience level and field of study or work assumed, general approach, major topics covered, special features such as handbook sections, model reports, assignments, and exercises. While concise, the annotations are informative, consistent, and accurate (based on my assessment of those about texts with which I am familiar). And although the comments are not intended to be evaluative, a few contain implicit judgments about the soundness of an author's approach; these judgments seem soundly based in a knowledge of current pedagogy.

Excluded from the bibliography of textbooks are several kinds of books: those intended for use outside of the classroom; highly specialized books (those intended only for nurses, police, or mechanical engineers, etc., or those covering only a single aspect of technical communication, such as editing, graphics, proposals, or abstracting); texts for students for whom English is a second language; texts that subordinate technical writing to more general concerns such as composition, oral communication, or business communication; publications about careers in technical writing; and anthologies of readings in and about technical and scientific writing. This list of exclusions is almost more enticing than the bibliography itself; one wishes that it were, instead, a table of contents, for it is just these types of texts that tend to be obscure, difficult to find and evaluate. Perhaps the compilers of this bibliography should consider preparing another on the works they omitted from this one.

Some of the excluded material, however, seems to show up in the appended "Instructor's bookshelf." This section is intended as a resource for teachers new to technical and scientific communication and as enrichment for more experienced teachers. It contains, admittedly, a "broad range" of material, listed under the following headings: bibliographies, pedagogical books and anthologies for instructors, anthologies and handbooks for students and instructors, journals, and references and specialized books. The arrangement makes for some peculiar associations. Under anthologies and handbooks, for instance, we find the two-volume professional reference, Handbook of Technical Writing Practices, along with several classroom anthologies, a classroom workboook, and, a dictionary of scientific and technical terms. Under references and specialized books, we find works on editorial practices in scientific publishing, reports from the Document Design Center, E. D. Hirsch's Philosophy of Composition, collections of recent research on cognitive processes in writing, and several standard works on graphics and reproduction technology. Without annotations, it is difficult, especially for the new teacher, to assess the relevance of such a variety of material. Listings like this (and I have been responsible for a similar one myself) inevitably represent the evolving inquiry of the compiler; they are, consequently, difficult to rationalize. They are heuristic aids for browsing, not rigorous guides to a field of knowledge, and one can always quibble about what got left out as well as what got put in.

Bibliographies can never fulfill every user's wishes, and they also never stay current. This one may stay more current than some if it is true, as Robert Connors has observed, that technical writing textbooks have longer lifetimes than the average composition textbook.² Perhaps we can hope for an annual or biannual supplement to help us keep track of the steady supply of new textbooks. But even if this bibliography is doomed to become just another bit of pedagogical history, it tells us something now (and it will reveal something in the future) about the state of an art in the early 1980s. The teaching of technical writing, like the teaching of most composition, is marked at least by great variety, if not by some real inconsistencies. The annotations on these textbooks indicate that a teacher has much to choose from: there are many conceptions of what technical writing is, when it can and should be taught, who does it and why, what the teaching of it ought to include and emaphsize. I am, in short, struck by the lack of consensus. These differences may represent the healthy diversity of active growth, but they may also, ultimately, reveal how far we have to go. Collaboration between the fields of advanced composition and technical writing might provide a sense of direction for this journey.