Hi/A Few Comments

Lee asked me to check in on your blogging of Central Works. I was hoping to do this last week, but time got away from me. But I really enjoyed reading your posts thus far on Central Works.

I'll make two brief comments: one on my own essay, the other on the task of editing the book.

I don't know if you'll be getting to my essay or not, the one called "Beyond Skill Building," but here is some context (I'm probably repeating a bit from my opening commentary). When I wrote this piece, back in 1992 or so, I saw a lot of work on computers and composition (the first-year course) but much less on computers and technical communication (the service course and advanced courses). It was fun and interesting to survey people in the field to see both how and why they were using computers. The results were not surprising: people were trying to get a handle on how to use computers for technical communication purposes. This was a kind of functional orientation that seems critical when people just get going with technology. The field is much more critical now, looking at not not only functional uses but also being critical of the technology itself.

We are also slowly starting to see past that binary: a web designer, for example, needs both functional and critical skills. Maybe the better term here then is rhetorical literacy--you have that, in my opinion, if you can work productively with technology to create meaningful, rhetorically sensitive things for end users. But you're probably being more than user-centered here: you're paying attention to technology and to users, but also to the larger contexts in which people work. This recognizes the larger set of forces that shape work and the worker.

Editing Central Works was interesting--and challening. How do you decide what gets in and what gets left out? On one level this is a practical decision: we only got so many pages from Oxford, and wanted to offer broad coverage. So there isn't much duplication. But I'm sure we were driven by politics too, even as we tried to keep that out.

We all hold values; they can't be avoided. And I suspect our collection--and our representation of that collection--reflects the work that happens to speak to us. We try to be honest about the constructed nature of the book in the table of contents. I hope people see that. To downplay our views, we gave the authors a chance to comment on their own essays. Many people have told us that this is the best feature of the book. And I agree--the words of the authors themselves are much more powerful and interesting than what the editors had to say.

Stuart