And down the road we go

We are successfully blogging Central Works. I am impressed with the level of writing so far.

I would like to propose that we take a break next week from the summary and critique in Central Works and instead try to make connections, on the one hand, between the pragmatic nature of work that technical communicators do in the work place, and on the other hand, the kind of theoretical work that we have been reading in Central Works.

In some ways this ties into Gloria Steinem's lecture here at MSU last night. Steinem is well known as a pioneering feminist, but I was impressed with her command of history and ethics as well. However in one of the pieces I read after returning from her lecture was her criticism of academics who use the term "praxis" instead of "practice."

This brings up the question of a gulf between theory and practice in our field of technical communication. To put it in plain English, what does the technical writer at a software company get out of a discussion of ethics (like that of Katz) or a discussion of a humanistic foundation for technical writing (like that of Miller)? To turn the question around, how much do the academics writing theoretical pieces about technical communication know about and relate to the tech writer in the cube pounding away at her keyboard?

In our blogs for the next week, let's explore this question. I believe that as we do, we will be able to turn up some evidence of connections and relationships between the tech writers and theory heads. Let's see what you come up with.

I am also going to invite Johndan Johnson-Eilola to join us in this discussion. I know he is a very busy person, but he just might have 30 minutes during the next week some time to join us.

The price of expediency in tech writing

For his article “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust” Steven Katz takes a bit of a philosophical look at what technical communication should be used to accomplish. Katz talks about how in order to be successful, a writer must adopt the ethos whatever organization they are working for. He quotes Walker Gibson’s idea that “in this style responsibility is shifted from the writer to the organization they represent” (198). The problem arises when the organization puts expediency before ethics. According to Katz, “the ethic of expediency underlies not only technical writing and rhetoric but also most behavior in Western civilization…those same principles were used to form the “moral” basis of Nazi society” (199). Katz talks about Nazi Germany, how it prescribed to Aristotle’s idea that an ethic is based almost exclusively on expediency (200). After examining Mein Kampf, Katz deduces that “for Hitler there seemed to be two kinds of expediency…to supplant an existing morality: political expediency…and technological expediency (202). In this article, the German people are described as an efficient people of an industrious nation who lost themselves in the ethos of technology, who took the ethic of expediency to the extreme (203). In supporting this, Katz references a memo sent from a Nazi officer to his superior about need improvements in a van used to gas Jews. Katz acknowledges that the memo is well written and makes a solid report on the logistics of why the upgrades are needed, but brings up if the use of technical communication was valid. This example shows how expediency is used for an unethical end, contributing to a misguided cultural ethos. According to Katz, this problem has not gone away, that “technological expediency in the guise of free enterprise can become de facto both a means and an end” (207). The expediency that is fueled by the rhetoric of science and technology is justifying actions or events that are unethical. Katz makes a final point that “we should question whether expediency should be the primary ethical standard in deliberate discourse,” if we should truly be giving it so much power in our society and our lives (208).


The points that Katz raises here are some that on the surface may appear simple, but are anything other than that. This idea of technical communication bending to the cultural ethos of expediency is one that questions not only our own morals, but that of society’s as well. Katz states the truth when he says that we as technical writers must adapt to the ethos of whatever organization we are working for. To do so will make our writing successful, but at the same time we have to keep in mind if those ethics truly are ethical. Did the Nazi who wrote the memo not have a solid understanding of technical writing? No. Didn’t he adhere to the cultural ethos that he was working with? Yes. Does that cultural ethos make the action ethical? No. Like Katz says, when a culture caters to expediency--and the ideas of science and technology--there must be a line drawn at how far it will go. According to Hitler, expediency such as the memo example was needed to make Germany strong and prosperous. We can condemn the German’s for supporting these actions, but what about our own society? Katz raises the point that free capitalism has caused us to fall to the same ideas of expediency that the German’s did, and I can see his point. Everything in our society, including technical communication, is used towards a means to an end. A document on how to build automobile parts cheaply can be technically well written, but can also cater to this idea of expediency and come at a price. There is no ultimate answer to how far we as technical communicators should go in supporting this, there is only our own ideas and beliefs to guide us. All we can do is act upon those beliefs and ensure that we are not going too far.