"Novelty or Replication: A Pedagogical Foray into the Technical Communication Class"
About the AuthorJosephine Walwema received her MA in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of New Mexico. She is now a doctoral candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design Program at Clemson University. Her research interests include the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, technology as human capacity, and mechanical technology. Contents |
Conceptual FrameworkAs with writing instruction, research in technical communication has drawn lavishly from rhetorical theory. That research (Miller's "What’s Practical"; Katz's "Ethic of Expediency"; Sanders's "How can Technical Writing be Persuasive") has yielded perspectives in the development of theory and instruction in technical communication. On visual design, Caroline Miller and Jack Selzer explore a rhetorical approach to technical documentation that uses Aristotle's notion of common and special topics to help engineers meet audience needs. I examine templates in MS Word as a technology of making (in technical communication). Not to be confused with technique (often considered mechanical), a techne true to the ancient arts of making reflects and is informed by a conceptual understanding of the making process itself. Thus techne is knowledge of a particular art and is central to a practical discipline like technical communication. Templates offer typical example formats for document types ubiquitous in technical communication such as memos, résumés, and reports, which present themselves as readily available for appropriation. As a model, the template is rigid and prescriptive. Its primary intent is predetermined. It is meant to allow for a replication of multiple documents. As Richard Barrett puts it, templates are a "general description of key algorithms" (1). They can be customized, of course, but students who lack (the conceptual) understanding of the layout often trot out those same exact formats every time they design résumés. My position is that templates, in fact, can function tacitly (as models) to convey principles of résumé design. Once directly taught, students can design them to fit their specific (rhetorical) needs so as to render them with novelty each time. Given their ubiquity, templates constitute a part of what Richard Lanham in The Electronic Word calls ''visual commonplaces" in reference to the classical concept of topoi where a strategy of argument can be found (37). Topoi are understood to offer general and strategic approaches that can be appropriated to meet specific design needs fitting the rhetorical situation. They also constitute attributes considered widely acceptable for a given artifact. Wanting to understand how instructors use templates in the classroom, I carried out an informal survey through our instructor listserve. I posed general questions related to the manner in which instructors teach résumés, a familiar document, with already available templates. I then tallied the responses. Here are the most poignant responses from the questions: “What matters is student content and so using templates is of no consequence.” “Professionally designed templates are decidedly better than what students can create. And since they are not copyrighted and come with the software, they should be freely utilized by anyone who wishes to do so—even students.” “The template is a box in which the student can place their own material. Kind of like going to the post office and purchasing a padded enveloped to put your personal belongings inside for shipment to another location. It is not necessary to build a padded envelope, just the reassurance that the content is well packed for shipment.” My survey responses and the secondary scholarship on teaching with templates buys into a content/form split (as represented in the words envelope and content), assigning invention to content only and thus limiting its domain. Approaches such as this one that focus on the content more than the container are not peculiar to technical communication, nor are they new. They run the gamut from case studies in law and business even as they play into the enduring duel between philosophy and rhetoric. However, what is at stake here is whether or not replicating existing templates fulfills a pedagogical purpose. And this is where I see the benefit of designing visual texts based in rhetoric's pedagogical disposition understood from its many critical terms pertaining to theory, reasoned judgment, and strategies of invention. |