Has Technical Communication Arrived as a Profession

INTRODUCTION In the May 2001 Technical communication, Roger Grice and Robert Krull introduced a special issue on the future of technical communication by outlining some skills that participants at a 1997 conference at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute had identified. From the list of things identified at that conference, Grice and Krull suggest that three categories run through all of the suggestions. 1. Technical communication will involve some kind of information design skill, whether it’s testing, writing, visual design, or training. 2. Technical communication will involve shifting technological skills, including statistical testing, database design, Web design, and authoring languages. 3. Technical communication’s future roles are already occupied by those from other professions. They go on to detail the first two of these points more clearly in the introduction, suggesting that they want to focus their attention on the first two topics because the third might be too complicated for this special issue. An important characteristic of technical communication as a field appears in their discussion. Namely, technical communication, they predicted, would be both a design field and a technological field that requires practitioners to possess a core set of information design skills—writing, editing, creating visuals—at the same time they possess the ability to rapidly “adopt and drop tools skills” (p. 136). Marj Davis’ article, “Shaping the future of our profession”(2001) which appeared in Grice and Krull’s special issue, agreed with the argument they outlined, suggesting that “the future of the technical communication profession is obviously tied intimately to the future of technologies. But unless technical communicators want to remain in a servant role, we must become more than tool jockeys” (p. 139). In other words, like Grice and Krull, Davis sees technical communication as a profession with a dual identity that involves some set of core skills that dovetail with technological skills. Davis doesn’t suggest what those core skills are, however, and Grice and Krull base their predictions on intuition and conversations that occurred four years prior to the publication of their special issue. Some questions emerge then. If we are going to postulate what the future of technical communication holds, shouldn’t we understand what is going on now? What is actually happening in the profession? What are practitioners in the profession actually doing? How do practitioners actually define the field and their work? Likewise, shouldn’t we have an historical perspective that allows us to see whether, in fact, the profession has changed in any significant way and then speculate on the future based on that historical understanding combined with some sense of current practice? Davis herself, quoting Michael Keene at length, suggests something similar, arguing that our knowledge domain is that of practice—we must look to the work of real people in context to understand what the profession finds valuable (p. 142). The purpose of this current article, accepting Davis’s challenge to look toward the real work of technical communication to understand the field, examines the dual aspects of technical communication outlined by Grice and Krull by investigating how practicing technical communicators imagine their work and the profession, specifically with respect to technology. In short, we wanted to interrogate the duality of “core information design skills” and “technology skills” proposed in 2001 by asking practitio-