What counts as technical writing? A situated look at writing for technical and scientific purposes

Assessment of writing for technical purposes is oriented in the main toward standards developed in accordance with general literacy goals and composing practices developed in English Language Studies for Writing-Across the Curriculum programs. Increasingly, interpretation of technical writing practices cast it as being defined by direct participation in the work of disciplinary communities. This dissertation shows, first, how criteria for assessing technical writing changes dramatically when developed from this "situated" perspective. Second, it suggests that such development provides improved support for overall technical writing pedagogy--practically, by articulating the goals and expectations of the competent members who form the disciplinary community teaching any novice; and ethically, by providing ways to insure the presence of resources for thinking critically about the work and developing in it toward informed interaction with a wider community, in or out of the discipline. Data on situated technical writing practices and their assessment by competent members of a technical and scientific community were gathered during a participant-observer year in the School of Engineering at the University of Guelph. The character and operation of the work of engineering are highlighted by comparing them to the specifications for writing outlined in technical writing textbooks currently in use. As the inquiry proceeds, it focuses on three key issues: (1) how members of a discipline orient to work through writing; (2) what resources of document, text, and language are used for writing situated in the engineering disciplines; and (3) why engineering writing pointedly includes graphical as well as lexical ways of articulating substantive material. These topics effectively form questions that arise and are answered in the course of making the comparisons that form the focal points of the central chapters. As its outcome, this study produces a local and particular inspection of what a group of expert engineers takes to be techniques adequate to writing for technical purposes. Featuring three separate considerations of physical documents and their design, the creation and uses of text formats, and the specialized deployment of graphical and lexical language resources, the central chapters detail how expectations for writing practices are seen from the point of view of the actors who are the expert members of the disciplinary community. By establishing this situated vantage point, the study seeks to initiate inquiry into the relationship between the assumptions made in competent members writing assessment practices and those invoked by the practices in writing pedagogy as it is viewed from the situation of the humanities-trained instructor. The claim made here is that writing approached from the actor's point-of-view has a significantly increased chance of being accepted as rational action, or practices meeting the expectations placed on it by a disciplinary community. This study suggests, finally, that we can draw on the coincidence of what is achieved with what is expected to develop criteria for response and evaluation that will reinforce both our practical and ethical reasons for teaching technical writing.