Annotation by Harrison Ownbey
Johnson, Carol Siri. Technical Communication Quarterly, Apr 2006, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p171-189
Johnson notices a chronological gap in literature about technical communication between the 18th and mid 19th centuries. As an attempt to fill that gap, she looks at technical communication in the American iron making industry. She examines the iron industry specifically because it represents larger social and cultural phenomena that occurred at the time.
In the beginning of the 18th century, iron makers relayed information to each other in a “prediscursive” manner, through person-to-person observation and practice instead of writing. In this model, the workers themselves contained the knowledge of the craft. As the industry expanded with the invention of the railroad, industry workers couldn’t spread knowledge fast enough. Therefore, manuals on making iron began to appear. While the quality of information was not as good as a peer-to-peer mentoring relationship, the medium allowed the information to reach a broader audience.
This article illustrates the close relationship between technical writing and industry. Before mass industry, technical communication was largely prediscursive.
Your annotation makes me curious. Did prediscursive communication have the same rhetorical elements that we employ today? How would the theory behind prediscursive communication differ from then and now? I realize that it is very well impossible to know that short of a time machine, but elements of the previous mode of communication generally influence nascent genres. Does Johnson address this by stating what conventions of the transition are holdouts from the prediscursive communication? The fun thing about finding a gap in the knowledge base is finding a gap within that gap that can be widened further.
ReplyDeleteGood question. Because most of the communication wasn't written down, there is not much of a record of it today. Johnson does mention that many of the iron workers came from Germany, a country with advanced iron making techniques but without adequate natural resources to continue the craft. According to the article, many of the German immigrants trained English speakers in the craft of iron making through sheer observation and practice, with a minimal amount of verbalization. Johnson writes that iron making was a very sense-driven practice, with workers judging the stage of processes based on color, smell, feel, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's difficult to compare their prediscursive techniques with anything in existence today, because the process of iron making back then is so different from the modern process. But perhaps it's possible to make some comparisons. That was one area where Johnson's article disappointed me a bit: she didn't explore the social/rhetorical implications of the facts she discovered. Perhaps that was beyond the scope of the article, but I would have appreciated it.