ATTW Bulletin

Frequently among technical writing academics, discussion turns to which university department should house technical writing programs. One viewpoint suggests that we have evolved far enough from English programs to compel a move away from that setting to another department—perhaps engineering—or to our own department. “Can this marriage be saved?” is an extended metaphor sometimes used to describe our rocky relationship with English programs. Our restlessness derives from several arguments: departments with an emphasis in literature do not understand or respect the needs of our growing field; demand for technical writing education is growing while demand for literature education is shrinking, thereby causing a divergence in world views and goals among faculty in the two areas; and, finally, technical writing as a genre is significantly different from that of literature and creative writing.

Despite these differences, I can say with conviction that students of literature and of technical communication can benefit from studying each other's text genres and exploring their similarities and differences. Even if the marriage cannot be saved, at least a deep friendship should continue.

I draw this conclusion from my experiences this past summer when I co-taught an online graduate course with my colleague Jen Shelton, a specialist in modern British Literature, at the English department of Texas Tech. The variable title course, Advanced Problems in Literary Studies, bore the subheading, “Writing the Trenches: Literary, Rhetorical, and Technical Texts About World War I.” In the course, we read non-fiction essays, U.S. army manuals, military reports, poems, and novels about that war.

The underlying premise for the course was that instead of focusing on how a specific genre covered a broad subject or rhetorical challenge, we tightly focused the subject on World War I and studied how multiple text genres represented it. The goal was to help students understand the power and limitations of each genre and, in the words of rhetorician James Kinneavy, uncover the different “aims” of these forms of discourse. Acknowledging the oversimplification of any model, we nonetheless started the class by teaching Kinneavy's aims for writing: referential, expressive, literary, and persuasive.

Most students came from our literature and technical writing programs. The 11 students in the course fell into three groups: those pursuing the MA in literature, those pursuing the MA or PhD in technical communication and rhetoric, and those in other graduate fields such as education or interdisciplinary studies. (See the course syllabus at http://www.faculty.english.ttu.edu/baake/WWI_course/WW%20I_syllabus.htm )

Grades for the course were based on weekly attendance in our live online chat, regular postings to the course discussion board, a “final exploratory paper,” and an exam that asked students to reflect on different genres of writing and to critique one of their peer's final papers. In the final papers, students drew on material read in the course and outside readings to develop and begin honing a research question. Examples of course papers included analysis of the term “shell shock,” which later became Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; an analysis of the changes in wording in medical field manuals from World War I to those in more recent wars; a comparison of themes in World War I poetry to that found among non-combatant American poets writing about the Iraq War; and an exploration of how the writing of African-American soldiers and officers differed in World War I.

We found that the technical communication students appreciated the expansive perspective brought by literature to the official reports on shell shock and related “technical” matters of war. Through the discussion of technical text genres, the literature students had a better understanding for their own literature, such as novels and poems.

A key finding about writing that percolated out of our online discussions and class bulletin board postings was that text genres differ not only in their aims, but also in their scope. The differences and similarities in genres became especially obvious in our last few classes when we looked at shell shock alternatively through the eyes of British report writers, poets, and novelists. One conclusion we came to through collective brainstorming was that literary genres, such as poetry or fiction, present reality in many dimensions. They offer an impressionistic milieu of possibilities involving setting and relationships among characters, their stated and implied feelings, the author's mood in relation to the events unfolding, etc. By contrast, the technical genres collapse reality into fewer dimensions, offering exigence-driven linear discourse designed to cut a path of action though all the possible outcomes or interpretations that coexist in the literary milieu.

We observed that literature functions to expand our understanding and empathy for characters, while rhetorical and technical writing delimits that focus so that we can take action. Both appear to be necessary genres for students of writing to know and read, regardless of their area of specialization. I believe that students will be better in their own fields for having read and closely studied material outside of those fields.

Finally, the course fulfilled what we believe is an ethical obligation to help students understand their world and its challenges by employing analytical skills uniquely acquired through interdepartmental English text studies.

Jen and I are currently working on an extended article that explores this course and the issues that emerged out of it. We hope to use our experience to reconsider a discussion that began in the 1980s among scholars such as Carolyn Miller, David Dobrin, and Marilyn Schauer Samuels who asked how technical writing, humanism, literature, and objectivity relate to each other. A quarter century later, this discussion remains as important as ever.

Meanwhile, I welcome comments and suggestions, as well as sharing of similar team-teaching experiences. Many established scholars in our field who obtained literature degrees before moving into technical communication may have insights into how we can incorporate literature into technical communication courses (and technical communication into literature courses). Send suggestions to ken.baake@ttu.edu