Introduction
This week's readings discuss various aspects of technical communication. In the article Positivists, Aristotelians, and the Challenger Disaster, Walzer and Gross discuss the ethical issues involved in the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster and how technical communicators must consider ethical issues in a similar way. Ornatowski's article Technical Communication and Rhetoric considers the relationship between rhetorical communication and technical communication. Lastly, the Schriver reading analyzes the negative impact that badly written technical documents have on readers, causing them to blame failure on themselves instead of on the documents.
The Impact of Poor Design : Thinking about Ourselves as Users of Texts & Technology
We will review the impact of poor document design, and how users deal with poorly designed documents. To support this study, Schriver conducted a survey of how consumers react to electronics.
In The Impact of Poor Design: Thinking about Ourselves as Users of Texts and Technology, Karen Shriver discusses the impact of poor document design on readers. According to one of Shriver's studies, consumers often blame themselves for their failure to figure out complicated products rather than criticizing the product, the manufacturer or the manual. Many people reported having problems with products and not being able to fix them by reading the manual (215). In such cases, poorly drawn technical illustrations, missing and faulty information, and ambiguous sentences are often to blame (220).
In addition to badly designed instruction manuals, manufacturers tend to put too many features in new technology. Manufacturers view these additional features as selling points, but they often actually make products more confusing for consumers. Donald Norman calls this obsession with adding new features to products "creeping featurism" (227). Many consumers return products they find too complicated or burdensome for their needs (241). If confusing functions and bad instruction manuals make using new technology unpleasant, "users many resist change and feel less enthusiasm for making new purchases" (222). When coupled with bad document design, these added features can cause "serious cognitive problems for users" (246). According to Schriver, document and product designers should work together to make products that people can use and clear, informative manuals (246).
Something similar might also be happening with students' reading of textbooks. When students fail to understand a lesson, what they attribute to difficult subject matter or their own inadequacy could instead be the inadequacy of textbooks written without fully considering the students' points of view (224). While students are taught not to question the authority of textbooks, most textbooks do not bother to mention that they are just presenting one viewpoint (225). An alternative method to teaching is telling students that textbook authors are not all perfect and that if readers do not understand, it may be because the author was not clear (226). In response to these problems, Shriver suggests that more research be done on the design of instructional texts such as manuals and textbooks (227).
Questions to Review Your Understanding
1. Have you ever had problems figuring out a technical product you purchased? If so, did you place the blame for these problems on your own inadequacy, on the product, or on the instruction manual? If the problem was with the product or the instruction manual, what was wrong with them?
2. As a technical communicator, do you think that students should be encouraged to "argue with their textbooks" or should they always accept what is written?
Technical Communication & Rhetoric
A great technical communicator understands the theoretical relationship between rhetorical communication and technical communication. With this understanding, we realize that technical communication and rhetoric are interconnected. Cezar M. Ornatowski's article Technical Communication and Rhetoric addresses an important subject with a practical approach. In his article, Ornatowski states, "My aim is to bring some order into this complicated territory, rather than retrace or update earlier reviews of the issue by cataloging current work." Furthermore, he states that technical communicators become vehicles for information and are responsible for the collaboration between the science/technology community and society, which includes business, academia, and pleasure readers. By using the following points from Ornatowski's article along with the additional resources provided, we as technical communicators can broaden our understanding of technical communication and rhetoric.
Ornatowski provides us with a practical understanding of technical communication as rhetorical actions in context by addressing the technical purpose of a document as well as the social and political aspects of a document.
As technical communicators, we must recognize the power struggles between organizations, and how information is negotiated to satisfy the political and social agendas of an organization. This is where the rhetorical actions in technical documents are developed. For example, the Rhetoric in Science Notes by Randy Harris provides us with an entertaining but practical view of the relationship between science and rhetoric actions in context. This brief article can be viewed at : www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~jgwilkin/if/winter97/mar25/abstract.html
In Technical Communication and Rhetoric, Ornatowski addresses the importance of political, cultural and ideological influences on technical artifacts. He uses the technology of a bicycle as an example. The driving factors that refined the technology came from the public not the technical community. Ornatowski says, "In this process of re-presentation, competing interest mobilized resources. It is through [processes like this], rather than through some purely 'technical' process of refinement and testing that the shape of bicycle technology was effectively determined."
Since technical communication is essential to science/technology, technical communicators, the facilitators of information, must use their understanding of the complex relationship between technical communication and rhetoric to bring factual data and persuasive writing together for clarity and readability.
Questions to Review Your Understanding
3. Why do you believe technical communicators must understand the value rhetorical writing brings to technical communication?
4. Share at least three ways to handle workplace politics as it relates to technical documents.
Ethics & Technical Communication
As technical communicators, we must recognize the power struggles between organizations and how information is negotiated to satisfy the political and social agendas of an organization. Using the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster of 1986 as the basis for analysis, Walzer and Gross provide three different approaches to handling power struggles in organizations : positivist, postmodernist, and Aristotelian. Each approach looks at the possible causes for the breakdown in communication that led to the crash, and the failure to deliberate the reasons for delaying the fatal launch.
Positivists argue that facts are unbiased, self-evident, and speak for themselves. Thiokol gave NASA crucial factual knowledge about the poor performance and unreliability of the O-ring in cold temperatures. One of the engineers even gave NASA a demo of the disastrous effects ice water had on the O-ring. Despite this information, NASA's Management Team continued to support the launch. This viewpoint supports Thiokol's decision to delay the launch, and attributes the disaster to ethical misconduct and a breakdown in communication.
Postmodernists contend that knowledge is subject to interpretation, and data is only factual when the interpretation is accepted as a whole. Although Thiokol gave NASA evidence of O-ring erosion, NASA argued for the launch, guided by previous missions where the O-ring had eroded but did not cause the mission to fail. This approach supports the decision made by NASA, where they used their best judgment and experience to measure the validity of Thiokol's data. From this viewpoint, the disaster is the result of misguided data and a breakdown in communication.
Carl Herndl, Barbara Fennell, and Carolyn Miller's have also investigated the Challenger Disaster. Their findings provide a rhetorical perspective that supports the postmodernist approach. They argue that "different experiences and commitments provided the engineers and managers with different understandings of the problem and with different argumentative resources" (303).
Aristotelians suggest seeking the best reasons for assent and descent when group consensus is not immediately possible. NASA and Thiokol should have first discussed factual knowledge. If a consensus could not be reached based on the facts, then ethical issues and implications should have been considered. NASA acted unethically, debating only the engineering (scientific) data, but failing to consider the safety of the crew first, if at all.
Each approach focuses on the different flaws in the NASA and Thiokol's decision making processes, but centralizes on the theme that misunderstanding and miscommunication were the contributing causes of the accident. As technical communicators, we have the responsibility to act ethically and represent the truth, in spite of organizational discord.
Questions to Review Your Understanding
5. As a technical communicator, share an example of where you have played a role in the postmodernist technical approach, and the positivist technical approach.
6. Research and identify another newsworthy situation where the postmodernist, positivist, or Aristotelian approach were used to analyze the outcome. Post the links of your results here.
"Actors in American Film." Valpo.edu. 2003. Valparaiso University. 10 Feb 2005.
Fennell, Barbara A., Carl G. Herndl, and Carolyn R. Miller. "Understanding Failures in Organizational Discourse : The Accident
at Three Mile Island and the Shuttle Challenger Disaster." EServer TC Library.org. 1991. EServer.org. 13 Feb 2005.
Holdren, John P. "Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program." Harvard.edu. Dec 2002. Harvard University. 10 Feb 2005.
Magon, Vijay. "Technology Evolution Drives Towards eGovernment." DocFinity.com. Dec 2002. Optical Image Technology, Inc.
10 Feb 2005. Moore, Patrick. "Rhetorical vs. Instrumental Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication." EServer TC Library.org.
1997. EServer.org. 10 Feb 2005. Schriver, Karen A. Dynamics in Document Design. New York : Wiley Computer Publishing, 1997.
Welch, Kathleen. "Compositionality, Rhetoricity, and Electricity." GMU.edu. 2003. George Mason University. 10 Feb 2005.