The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing: The Emergence of Professional Identity

Annotation by Joshua Barron

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.

~Aristotle¹

While I thought I was being original by seeking to examine Technical Communication from its historical roots, I now realize that I'm only emulating Aristotle. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, but it does bring my ego down to size a bit. [grin]

In this article the authors lay out the 36 year (at the time of publication) history of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. The history related in the article provides a thumbnail sketch of technical communication, evolving substantially over time. What began as primarily a body of tips and strategies for improving one's teaching in introductory composition courses has now become a full-fledged scholarly academic discipline with its own research exploring the theoretical foundations and practical applications of the discipline. Pearsall wrote, "[I]f communicators were going to be not only writers but men and women who understood and appreciated all the processes of communication...," then their discipline would obviously extend far beyond its origins in the technical writing classroom (as quoted in Kynell, 2009).

The article unashamedly reveals the role of self-serving political camaraderie between academe and journal publication, openly articulating one purpose of increasing the scholarly research in the discipline as a direct means to getting faculty members published and tenured. I was also interested to learn that the positioning of the discipline in human sciences resulted largely sale of the publishing company of the TCQ Journal to a human sciences-focused publishing house.

Each progressive section in the Rutter article closely aligns (and parallels) the major pieces of the ATTW society timeline.

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that's worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

~Henry Ford

In contrast to the opening quote from The Philosopher, I also ran across the other quote by Henry Ford. His straightforward challenge to the appreciation of history startled me, but it also got me thinking about potential drawbacks to defining TC from its history. Maybe I'll include these in the program analysis assignment.

Kynell, T., & Tebeaux, E. (2009). The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing: The Emergence of Professional Identity. Technical Communication Quarterly, 18(2), 107-141.doi:10.1080/10572250802688000. Retrieved online Wednesday, September 15, 2010, fromhttp://j.mp/ATTWhistory.

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¹Szasz, Ferenc M, ‘The Many Meanings of History, Parts I‐IV’, p208.