Great point - it can't. (can it?)

subtly brilliant

But why would you be worried if that was cross-classified as technical writing?

More of the disconnect from Week Two - engineers, teachers, writers, students.

both of which involve technology...

Examples?

Exactly. They have digressed to simply defining their field by the genres they enact because it's easier (and more cognitable).

Why is this distinction important?

Exactly. You could write a series of how-to's or tutorials for "how to think about racism" that don't involve ANY technology, but still fit the definition (and replace "racism" with any other word you want) - how to walk? how to look at jello? C'mon, let's have a contest. What topic could not be technically broken down? How to hear watermelon? How to smell the sun?

Exactly. Like I said, they want microchips.

What a wonderful way to parse. It's both? Right?

Wow, what an attack!

Having just read this piece, I'm a bit shocked by this summation. I think Dobrin's point is trying to complicate the definition, not pin it down.

Such an interesting point - and one we've run into across multiple readings now. We can't control the meaning for everyone, yet TC strives to control the potential meanings... because? Clarity (of some degree) is needed by the reader? Lack of clarity will lead to misuse of tech? Help me out here.

and why is that valuable?

What an honest and thorough framing statement here.

Great question... can we take this up briefly? Like, why are definitions of fields useful in general? Psychology is the study of the mind and human behavior. How does that titration of meaning help us? I don't get it.

Pffffffffffffffft.... wow. Cowards.

but cooking utensils are as much technology as a microwave - what's the distinction? a microchip?

How could it not be?

Remind me of Frederick Douglass and the time he heard his slave master say "reading will make him unfit to be a slave" - it will, he thinks to himself, then my goal is to learn to read. He literally derived the opposite conclusion that his master intended (though, it is of note, Master Hugh Auld was talking with his wife, not Frederick).

1. This feels like a part of the problem. Technical writing has to perform functions that are as wide-ranging as technology itself. To distill it down to a soundbite is - at best - sacrificing the nuance and import of the field for sheer cognitability - and at worst, simply unachievable.

begs the question: "what is the right size of focus for a field?"

examples: Psychology? Ed Psych? Psychology of Amnesia?

We can widen or close the lens in other, major fields and find entire subfields within those foci. Is tech comm not a subfield at the end of the day (or is that what this is all about: TC thinks it is its own province).

I want to double down here because this feels key.

There's a paradox at work here. Let's focus on pedagogy research, but know that it applies across the board.

You pilot a study in your class and it works. But that's not enough data - sure you can approach it ethnographically, bolster the 'narrative' of why it works ad nauseum, but it has to be tested at scale to accrue the validity and attention to be taken up widely. That is, it HAS to work across contexts. That is a major problem because we are immediately and inherently introducing variation - the enemy of quality, remember - and so this is no small hurdle. My point feels really salient and not talked about nearly enough - if your intervention isn't successful at scale, it could be that it doesn't transfer across contexts OR that the variation introduced by hosting it in other contexts derided the quality - that is, it changed how it was implemented. That's scary because you can only teach so much. You need others. And - how many? - is a serious question.

I guess the pushback or remedy would be to really vest yourself in training those who are going to scale it for you. Like, you have to set them up to do what you did exactly. So it can't be too complex (I guess?) and it has to be really well explicated (so they understand it). The main paradox here is the tension between knowing something works for you and knowing something works at scale - but I also think that there's a paradox within this notion of outward facing explication.

That is, there's a gain here. We can learn to know more about our own interventions... by focusing not just on how we perform them, but how we might express that performance to others. One of my dad's "tricks" (so to say) in business was to find someone who had been doing their job for a really long time (think TPS reports for 20+ years) and then ask them to explain their process. Spoiler alert: they often couldn't articulate it. It was so ingrained into thier mind they don't think about it as a process. And, of course, getting them to think about it, to chart it, to write it down - it's the same self-reflexive move we use in writing at large - and it works ffs. By thinking more about how you do what you do you not only heighten your own sense of what you know and how you know it, but you also prepare others to try to do it as well (another beauty of the trick - it helps with cross-training and preparing others to take over the TPS reports should one day you leave, die, or get fired).

I don't buy this. They should be in the Communication department. And with the size of their budget, why wouldn't they want to be? Is TC in English because... it's easier to push around?

Bingo!

This seems like the rallying call. But "texts used to get work done" is a bit flimsy, no? What texts don't purport, in some way, to get something done? I can't get into this - and maybe that's the point of the article. The field is still emerging such that it's hard - even for Rude - to stake out what really makes TC what it is.

so... it's rhetorical?

still not happy with this definition

how else might she have framed or approached this?

Another great disclaimer. If all the great academics are great at disclaimers (a heinous claim, but work with me here), what does that say about the need for disclaimers in research?

This is fire.

Because it's actual data. Instead of digressing into semantic hair-splitting and tired anecdotes of conversations with colleagues, Rude actually has a data set. That, to me, takes this article to a new level.

why? why is this the era chosen, and what does it risk excluding?

How do we feel about the repeated "it may" here?

I love epic disclaimers like this (side note: Moffett is amazing at these). And it seems so much more real than articles which portend to be offering some divine unassailable truth.

This seems like the bigger gain to me. By staking out we actually scaffold ourselves to fill in the gaps - that's the ambrosia here.

Great point - but how common do we want them to be?

What other fields might we say have dealt with this same overlap (in their emergence)?

What an amazing anecdote. I love how this shows a portal into how an everyday interaction can provoke serious thought, work, and research.

I love this. Weird truth about TC: it's new, and as a new discipline, the staking of its 'territory' or 'turf' - both implicitly taken up by research questions and methods (the focus of this article) have implications for English, Communication, and perhaps IT. The point being: by laying claim to an area of inquiry, TC is usurping power from someone or somewhere. It isn't distinct enough imho to manifest its own space out of ether.

This definition is a bit soft (to me). "Mediate knowledge, values, and action" is key here - the attempt, to me, is to try to differentiate TC from other textually-focused pursuits. Is it not fair to say that great literature mediates knowledge? values? action? How about journalism? In fact, I'm a bit hard-pressed to understand what exactly is soooo different about TC - what I see are two things: an expanded definition of 'text' - okay, neat. And then a focus on 'action' - the notion that TC leads to action, that it's for people looking to do something (with technology). And that's probably valid on some level I don't really grasp (yet), but I don't really see the clear lines between TC and the broader disciplines it seems to sit on the precipice of - my question for my peers is: how would you paraphrase this definition? How else could you say this? And what do we really need to make distinct? Boil it down to "directions" or "tutorials" (something I'm sure Rude would object to) - how are they different than other genres? And, dare I ask, are they different enough (or, perhaps, in demand enough) to warrant their own distinct, discreet field?