Teaching Technical Writing--How Did We Get Here From There?

In his article, “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America,” Robert J. Connors describes in detail the progression of technical writing instruction since the middle of the nineteenth century. Connors begins his essay by stating that technical writing, in one form or another, has existed since ancient times; however, he states that the attempt to actually create an instructional approach to the material is a recent phenomenon. Connors first describes the post-Civil-War boom of the industrial revolution in America, and the resulting rise of engineering education (and education available to a greater percentage of the American populace). Connors describes how fledgling engineering programs initially involved virtually no English instruction, resulting in an outcry over the large number of “otherwise competent engineers who were near-illiterates” (Connors 5). The response to these illiterate engineers resulted in two approaches. Schools either attempted to integrate miniature English departments into engineering programs, or they required engineering students to take varying numbers of English classes.

As Connors describes, controversy on several levels broke out and lasted through the 1970’s. Technical writing, the amalgamation of English and engineering education, became an illegitimate child of both programs, a child neither department claimed nor thought of highly. Connors describes that “English teachers saw engineers as soulless technicians, while engineers saw English teachers as dreaming aesthetes” (6). This led to a great rift in the philosophy over what technical writing curriculum should consist of; the English faculty wished to “humanize” the engineers by teaching them literature while the engineers desired a more nuts-and-bolts approach to writing. The instructors who taught these courses, generally less-experienced English teachers, were looked down upon by both groups, and found technical writing to generally be a sort of professional suicide lacking prestige or path to promotion.

Only after World War II and the resulting boom in technology and technological documents did the situation for technical writing instruction improve. The demand for writers who could produce technical documentation, as well as a gradual decrease in enrollment in literature study, eventually led to a greater prestige for technical writing instructors. Trial and error over various types of curriculum led to an approach that more mirrors our current state. This approach includes multiple levels of technical instruction including some nuts-and-bolts usage instruction, the exploration of “forms” such as report writing and proposal writing, and also the more advance concept of rhetorically based instruction that could be applied to numerous circumstances.

Connors provides a detailed and thorough examination of the progress instruction in technical writing has made in the past 150 years. He details large amounts of difficulty and disagreement between English and engineering programs over what to teach, how much to teach, and how to teach it. I must agree with R. Gerald Nelms in his introduction to Connors’s essay, in which Nelms mention that some anecdotal and memoir-based information might help further flesh out the history that Connors lays before his readers. However, Nelms goes on to emphasize that this approach was not particularly popular when Connors’s article was published in 1982, thus explaining the lack of this type of research.

Overall, the article holds a valuable history of our field, and brings to light controversy many current technical writing students, who now reach advanced levels of study in an age when technology is often revered and the study of it encouraged, may not realize the position of relative esteem that the profession now holds. This information can give us a context for appreciating the fortune we have to be able to pursue our education in a supportive (and hopefully somewhat lucrative) environment.