Dear Prudence, Won't You Come Out to Play?

When I first read the title of Carolyn Miller's "What's Practical about Technical Writing?" I thought the article was going be yet another defense of the significance and usefulness of technical writing classes and technical writing as a field.  It isn't.  Well, it is in the sense that it's mere existence (especially as a "foundational article") helps legitimize technical writing as a critical field, but it doesn't really have to do with emphasizing the importance of a properly formatted memo.  Instead, Miller acknowledges the two different forms of the term "practical" and uses her discussion to illustrate a need for technical writing teachers to evaluate (or re-evaluate) the way they approach the teaching of technical writing.  She believes it is essential that tech writing teachers (and, in turn, their students) consider not only what they are doing, but who they are doing it for.

Let me explain (through an outline of Miller's argument):

Practical can refer to the act of doing something, completing a task in an effective and efficient way. The term can also be used to refer to a certain mindset or attitude, one that is goal or action-oriented.  A practical person is someone who thinks about the most effective or efficient way to do something.  It's possible, then, as Miller points out, to be practical about the practical.  (Give it a minute.... now it makes sense).  Miller takes us to back to Ancient Greece to emphasize the relationship between these two practicals and how they connect first to rhetoric, and then to technical writing.  There were basically two classes in Ancient Greece: the "low" citizens (the workers, slaves, everyday people) and the "high" citizens (the politicians, the affluent).  The "low" citizens were practical because they were actually doing things, while the "high" citizens were practical because they spent their time theorizing about how things were done.  The "lower" class were positioned in the world of work, and that is where the attitude that technical writing is concerned only with the doing (that practical) comes from.  Work < Thinking/Theorizing.

Miller takes technical writing teachers to task for accepting these misconceptions about technical writing and basing their pedagogy on it.  She points out that when attempting to justify the need to offer technical writing classes, tech writing teachers actually emphasize the problems with them.  The contradictions have to do with whether or not tech writing teachers are actually qualified to teach tech writing to students.  Tech writing classes exist because Industry complains that graduates are deficient when they enter the workforce, so students need to learn more technical writing skills while they are in school (because Industry shouldn't have to train their workers to do what they are requiring their workers to do).  As Miller notes, "The justification for academic instruction is that academics know something that can help improve professional [industrial] practices" (156).  But what to writing teachers actually know about writing instruction manuals?  Coming from academia, writing teachers have little to no "real world" experience in Industry, so they rely on their own conceptualizations of the workplace and what goes on in it.  Unsurprisingly, instructional assumptions do not always align with industrial practices.

So, what are tech writing teachers supposed to do about these issues?  Miller says they need to adjust their perspective on the how in addition to the what.  Instead of presenting students with ideals, they need to consider what teaching practices will be helpful for students and what teaching practices might actually hurt them.  After providing a lit review of tech writing scholarship, Miller explains, "This discourse is infected by the assumptions that what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good.  The good that is sought is the good of an existing industry or profession" (161).  So, what are we doing and who are we doing it for?  We're teaching students how to draft memos because that's what their future employers will want them to do.  Is that the best use of our abilities?  Our students?  Miller doesn't think so.  She suggest we move away from thinking of technical writing as a techne (Aristotle's term) "which is concerned with the useful (with the quality of a product given a set of expectations for it)" and give more credence to prudence, which is "concerned with the good (with the quality of the expectations themselves)" (162).

Miller's article brings to mind the balance, or lack of balance, between theory and practice (she even has a section dedicated to saying praxis is where we need to be).  My biggest question is how can tech writing teachers find that balance?  My smaller, more manageable question is how can tech writing teachers shift some of the weight away from the demands of industry (which dominate and provide a need for tech writing classes) and more toward the reflection and consideration that makes up the academic side of the relationship.