Political-Ethical Implications of Defining Technical Communication as a Practice

Let me present one possible version of the history of teaching writing in the last century and a half. When the tradition of classical rhetoric was restricted to composition in the nineteenth century, teachers of writing found themselves teaching service courses, usually defined as skills courses. Furthermore, having lost touch with the classical tradition, they began to teach writing particularly suited to current needs and, by extension, to teach thought forms that imitate modern consciousness?a form of consciousness largely molded by forms of production, or technology. As Richard Ohmann says, much modern composition instruction reflects this technological con sciousness: it casts the writing process in terms of problem solving, stresses objectivity and thereby denies a writer's social responsibilities, distances the interaction between writer and reader, deals with abstract issues, and denies politics (206). As a result, teachers of writing indoctrinate students, turning them into the sorts of people who will fill the slots available in our techno logical society. If this story is a suggestive account of rhetoric's metamorphosis into composition, it is even more interesting applied to rhetoric's transformation into technical communication. Rhetoric has always aimed at teaching professional discourse?particularly the discourse of the assembly, the court, and later the pulpit?and so it is possible to see technical communication as a direct descendant of rhetoric, even more in tune with its aims than is composition. However, though technical communication shares classical rhetoric's orientation toward the professions, those of us who teach technical communication don't often think of ourselves as carrying on the rhetorical tradition. Indeed, it is rather hard to do so, since we teach thought forms and discourse forms demanded by the workplace, and we often find ourselves representing the military-industrial complex instead of the humanistic tradi tion. As John Mitchell puts it, we "indoctrinate our students in the forms appropriate to their employers," for "the students know they must dance with the guy teat brung them, and they elect our courses to learn his dance steps" (5). In fact, the social contract that legitimizes the teaching of technical writing seems to insist that we adopt the technological mindset. For example, J.C. Mathes, Dwight Stevenson, and Peter Klaver warn engi