Book Review : Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing

In Composition in the University, Sharon Crowley recounts a history of composition as a scorned and marginalized discipline, and she calls for radical changes in the institutional role composition plays. Earlier, in Textual Carnivals, Susan Miller had described the ways composition was associated with popular writing rather than with literature, and, thus, how the teaching of composition was regarded as unequal to the study of privileged literary texts. If these early histories of composition describe a struggle for power, recognition, and legitimacy, Bernadette Longo's history of technical writing tells a quite different tale. Where Miller and Crowley describe a marginalized practice, Longo argues that technical writing developed as both the tool and medium of cultural power, stamped since the Renaissance with the cultural authority of science and, more recently, invested with the cultural power of contemporary systems of efficient production and management. Like Miller and Crowley, Longo calls for changing pedagogical and research practices, but her call for change emerges from a very different cultural history and from the powerful rather than marginalized social identity of technical writing. Longo recounts the rise of the technical writing textbook and interprets textbooks as an index of the cultural place of technical writing. She begins by reviewing the handbook tradition in ancient Greece and Rome. She traces this genre through the medieval tradition of hermetic books of secrets and provides an interesting account of Georgius Agricola's medieval textbook on mining. This narrative is organized by the persistent opposition between science and magic, between abstract reasoning and observation, between occult or textual authority and more popular experimental and practical utility. Thus, when she gets to the Renaissance, Longo discusses Joseph Moxon's handbook on the smithy and Comenius' publication of the first standardized technical writing textbook as part of Francis Bacon's revolt against Aristotelian abstraction and the Catholic Church's tradition of textual authority. Longo interprets the textbooks Moxon and Comenius publish as part of the rise of Bacon ian science with its emphasis on secular learning and the authority of empirical observation. T.A. Rickard's 1910A Guide to Technical Writing and W. George Crouch and Robert Zetler's 1948 A Guide to Technical Writing are