Beyond the Mechanical: Technical Writing Revisited

Marla Mudar Iyasere

More Than Language Engineering

The optimism of Jay R. Gould (2) and Robert J. Connors (349) about the future of technical writing can be sustained only if we persist in setting for technical writing the same standards we apply to other sophisticated modes of writing and require refinement in style as well as accuracy in content. The importance of content in technical writing, of the information presented, may seduce us into seeing technical writing as purely a form of language engineering and into teaching our students to perform mechanical writing tasks, churning out dull reports to fit mindlessly into the institutional norms of industry and government (Harris 632). Attention to content alone produces results like the following:
Annually each instructional unit on campus is surveyed with respect to its data processing activity during the past year and its projected usage in the near future. While this data is required to satisfy a systemwide report, it is more importantly used on this campus for planning purposes so that the proper paperwork can be initiated in an attempt to satisfy, to the extent possible, the data processing needs of this campus ... While it has been clearly apparent that the data processing needs of all sectors of the campus have been met with varying degrees of success in the past, it is also clearly apparent that if our usage predictions are accurate we may well acquire enough computing resources in the early 1980's to satisfy all the expressed needs since this year's input will be used as one of the major factors in determining the allocation of resources to [this campus] in the procurement of the Honeywell replacement.

This passage is typical of technical writing gone awry. Technical reports can be flawed by what Edmond Weiss calls "reckless chopping and heartless stripping of sentences" (7), or rendered incomprehensible by dependence on formulaic phrases, verbosity, and excessive subordination, as in the passage quoted above. Simple recitation of the subjects of the main clauses in the selection on data processing reveals its essential inadequacy—reliance on weak, indefinite subjects. Use of passive voice constructions with indefinite pronoun subjects relegates to subordinate position the main ideas in the passage; lengthy strings of prepositional phrases add to the wordiness and make the passage seem interminable.

Related problems arise when writers of technical information over-emphasize content at the expense of form. As a result memos and reports are often circulated for their information alone, whether they be written badly or well. At such times, the bad writing may obscure or altogether misrepresent the information disseminated. In the interest of economy, perhaps, the college dean who wrote the following memo compressed too much and so notified committee members that all committee meetings would be held at the same time the members would be teaching class:
The first meeting of the newly selected Executive Committee will be held on Wednesday, October 11, beginning at 9:00 a.m, in the Deans' Conference Room. This meeting was scheduled so as to coincide with your respective class hours.
Overloading a sentence with too much information can also create problems. Trying to avoid confusion, one college president succeeded only in generating more confusion among the faculty who received his report on grievance procedures:
This is the same group that served last year. The only grievance currently pending is one that was begun last year. It was felt that in order to avoid confusion as to which Executive Committee of the Panel would have jurisdiction in the event that another grievance arose, that the same panel would serve for a second year although this is not to be taken as a precedent.
And sometimes the writer becomes confused himself. Caught up in the profusion of information he was attempting to present, one college vice president left out words altogether and failed to fulfill the grammatical requirements of the sentences he was composing:
To effectively contribute to and shape the budgetary processes it relates to faculty affairs of concern to this campus, requires a committee with legitimacy. Autonomous, independent, and formally elected committee of the faculty fulfills this requirement. The fact that the budgetary processes, indeed never-ending, requires that the committee have continuity. Staggered terms for members fulfills this requirement.
All of these excerpts were written by top level college administrators for audiences of college faculty; all of the writers made the mistake of assuming that what they had to say was of singular importance and so paid too little attention to how they communicated that information. They, and too many others like them, need to understand that effective technical writing is a hard craft to learn, harder than the technically qualified sometimes think, and to be proficient in it requires more than just mastery of its forms. True proficiency requires as well sophistication in the uses of language and at least as much intelligent thought as other forms of exposition.

Virtues of Technical Writing

Although technical writing is designed for and concerned with technical, non-dramatic subjects, it nevertheless demands the same virtues common to effective discourse in whatever expository mode: coherent organization, efficient use of language, and appropriateness of tone. Good technical writing is compelling, fluent, fascinating. Its readers read with great attention, eager to know what comes next. Effective technical writing is important and provocative but not sensational or unprofessional (Weiss 158). The following passage affords a useful example of successful technical writing:
Dyslexics are those afflicted with severe reading and writing problems which can be ascribed neither to overall lack of intelligence or educational opportunity, nor to emotional or social difficulties. They suffer only from a genuine developmental handicap which is a neurological disorder built into the brain processes either through Inheritance or possibly through irregular development in the earliest year of life. The application of the new teaching methods and their obvious success demonstrate the growth from the image of dyslexics as mentally, physically, or emotionally impaired individuals to the way dyslexics are perceived today—as intelligent individuals who simply must process information in a special way. While much still needs to be done to educate dyslexics effectively, progress is being made both educationally and medically for the benefit of dyslexics.

This summary of a research report on current treatment for dyslexia, written by a college freshman, shows us the strengths of effective technical writing. In contrast to the passages cited earlier, this paragraph effectively presents main ideas in the main clauses whose subjects are vivid, concrete, specific ("Dyslexics," "They," "The application . . . and success," "progress."). The subject-verb-object (modifier) sentence pattern, provides an orderliness without monotony as variety is achieved and interest maintained through use of appropriately subordinated detail in both cumulative and periodic structures. Other rhetorical patterns, such balance and parallelism, as well as the selective repetition of the word "Dyslexics" to open and close the paragraph, further enhance the clarity and orderliness of the piece.

This brief analysis illustrates the features technical writing shares with other types of composition but does not deny technical writing's unique rhetoric and pedagogy (Sawyer 390-98; Samuels 307-28; Peterson 40-43). Perhaps the fact that technical writing relies as much on the principles of effective writing as does any other type of exposition cannot be overemphasized, for the term "technical writing" is itself somewhat misleading. The word "technical" calls too much attention to the content, too little to the process, to how content is shaped. This focus on the technical aspect has misled both the defenders and detractors of technical writing: The former are determined to prove the un- qualified specialness, the uniqueness of the discipline, while the latter remain resolute in their insistence that technical writing is, at best, unimaginative and pedestrian.

Complex Thought Processes

As a mode of composition, technical writing is a "deliberate human construct" which insists on intellection and sophisticated use of language. Even an apparently simple exercise such as writing instructions requires complex thought, as G. B. Harrison, the distinguished Shakespearean scholar, observed:
The most effective elementary training I ever received was not from masters at school but in composing daily orders and instructions as staff captain in charge of the administration of seventytwo miscellaneous military units. It is far easier to discuss Hamlet's complexes than to write orders which ensure that five working parties from five different units arrive at the right place at the right time equipped with the proper tools for the job. One soon learns that the most seemingly simple statement can bear two meanings and that when instructions are misunderstood the fault usually lies with the wording of the original order (149).
The importance of the "language of translatability," as Leonard Bloomfield calls it, rather than the literary 'language of thought," in technical writing does not mean that technical writing is a mindless activity. The subject matter may be non-dramatic, often non-human, and the language less emotionally charged than that used in persuasive exposition, but technical writing nonetheless entails the same processes of perception (cognition), verbalization, and construction which are fundamental to all complex hypothetical verbal structures.
Psychology of Perception

All three aspects, cognition, verbalization, and construction, involve critical selection, ordering, and coherent arrangement of elements, external objects or words, into a significant and perceivable whole. The psychology of perception reveals that in the act of cognition, the mind selects from the field of physical objects before it and, through a delimitable series of reactions, translates the object into a mental symbol. The act of perception is thus the act of symbolization, as Sir Russell Brain, a prominent neuro-physiologist, explains:
The sensory qualities of normal perception, such as colours, sounds, smells, touches, are generated by the brain, and are unlike those physical events which constitute the states of objects by which they are caused. The facts of physics and physiology show that perception is the end-result of a series of physical events, the last of which, a state of activity of the brain of the percipient, differs so completely from the events occurring in the object perceived that the qualitative feature of a percept can have no resemblance to the physical object which it represents.... The physical world is, therefore, what we infer about the causes of our perceptions, and since it is a product of inference, it is a symbolic representation of the structure of events occurring in space-time (10, 39-40).
Language, whether employed discursively or metaphorically, is the record of that symbolization:
Language, of course, is our prime instrument of conceptual expression. These things we can say are in effect the things we can think. Words are the terms of our thinking as well as the terms in which we present out thoughts.... Before language communicates ideas, it gives them form, makes them clear, and in fact makes them what they are.... Without words, sense experience is only a flow of impressions, as subjective as our feelings; words make it objective and carve it into things and facts that we can note, remember, and think about. Language gives outward experience its form and makes it definite and clear (Langer 153).

A. J. Kirkman explains that sequential thought, with its emphasis on logic and order, rather than associative thought, with its emphasis on emotional relationships, dominates in technical writing (2). Technical writing, then, is not a spontaneous, emotional activity but a deliberate and cerebral one.

Cognitive processes in technical writing, from making simple lists to analyzing and synthesizing complex data, inform and shape all aspects of the execution. As Robert de Beaugrande has shown, without such deliberate thought, the raw data would remain a flow of impressions without structure, coherence, and meaning (121.45). This process of formulating ideas and shaping and reshaping them into lucid, coherent structures makes technical writing a complex enterprise. The written report is especially challenging because it is not a recreation of the logical processes the scientist or investigator went through to arrive at his conclusions; rather, it is a creation or the logical process the reader must go through to understand and accept the writer's conclusion (Samuels 309). In such writing a clear, perhaps causal, connection exists between the quality of thought and the quality of writing.

Learning by Writing

Technical writing also goes beyond what has already been discovered or mastered to what the writer learns as he writes, "the reorganization or confirmation of a cognitive scheme in the light of an experience" (qtd. in Emig 124). In this regard, technical writing represents a valuable way for writers to continue to learn about their subjects. Learning through writing likewise achieves a controlled synchrony of parts into wholes. Gathering information can be largely a process of acquiring unrelated facts, isolated bits of information unanchored to anything else. If, as David Ansabel explains, we subsume material "under a relevant and more inclusive conceptual system," that material becomes meaningful in terms of its new frame and, by interaction, promotes new insights (qtd. in Irmscher 244). The process of writing about a technical subject helps define and clarify for the writer what he knows and doesn't know about the subject. This self- discovery of knowledge is crucial because successful learning is engaged, committed, personal learning (Emig 126). The knowledge writers discover on their own tends to be indelible and more gratifying than that which they simply receive or mimic. Furthermore, learning to write effectively involves the writer in the challenging and difficult act of serious critical thinking and the formulation of abstract ideas. Mastery of the art of technical writing make the value of focus, organization, and structure, all of which are essential elements in the acquisition of other knowledge. Technical writing clearly offers more to study than the scientific or technological details of the subject. Although technical writing is functional, it is as well complex, demanding, and educationally rewarding.

California State University
Bakersfield, California

Works Cited
de Beaugrande, Robert. "Cognitive Process and Technical Writing." Journal of Technical Writing and Communcation 12:2 (1982), 212-45.
Brain, Sir Russell. The Nature of Experience. London, 1959. See also Kenneth Burke. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
Connors, Robert J. "The Rise of Technical Writing in America.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 12:4 (1982), 329-52.
Emig, Jean. “Writing as a Mode of Learning." College Composition and Communication 27:2 (1977), 122-28.
Gould, Jay R. "Illiteracy in Communication." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 8:1(1978), 1-4.
Harris, Elizabeth, "In Defense of the Liberal-Arts Approach to Technical Writing." College English 44:6 (1982), 628-36.
Harrison, G. B. Profession of English. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962.
Irmscher, William F. "Writing as a Way of Learning and Developing." College Composition and Communication 30:3 (1979), 240-44.
Kirkman, A. J. “The Communication of Technical Thought." The Chartered Mechanical Engineer (1963).
Langer, Susan. Philosophical Sketches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962. See also Leo Vygotsky. Thought and Language. trans. Eugenia Haufmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962.
Peterson, M. S. Scientific Thinking and Scientific Writing. New York: Reinhold, 1962.
Samuels, Marilyn S. “Scientific Logic: A Reader-Oriented Approach to Technical Writing." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 12:4 (1982), 307-28.
Sawyer, Thomas M. "Rhetoric in an age of Science and Technology.” College Composition and Communication 22:5 (1972), 390-98.
Weiss, Edmond H. The Writing Systems for Engineers and Scientists. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982.