Second set of readings annotated, due 1/14/19

Mapping the Research Questions in Technical Communication(Rude): 4th Reading

>Journal article in "Journal of Business and Technical Communication

>The classic "what kind of research do you do in your field?" Not only a question I guess for newer fields like writing studies, but even in math haha

>A lot about a field is how it defines itself, through the questions it asks, and answers.

>Rude proposes a central question for the field of writing studies, as well as four deeply related areas which have their overlap in the central question

>Central question, " How do texts(print, digital, multimedia; visual, verbal) and related communication practices mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of social and professional contexts?

>Four areas:

>Disciplinarity: How shall we know ourselves? What are our definitions, history, status, possible future, and research methods?

>Pedagogy: What should be the content of our courses and curriculum? How shall we teach students best practices, history, and possibilities? How shall we negotiate competing claims for content and pedagogical methods and compete for academic resources?

>Practice: How should texts be constructed to work effectively and ethically? What design practices include international users and users with disabilities? What are best practices of text development and design? How can content be managed for reuse?

>Social Change: How do texts function as agents of knowledge making, action, and change?

The Context for Asking About Research Questions:

>Savage(2003) says "The technical communication field lacks the status, legitimacy, and power of mature professions," and "we cannot be recognized by others if we cannot even recognize ourselves."

>Writing studies requires a variety of different methods from different fields to conduct effective research, making them "dabblers" of the sorts from different methods

The Mapping Metaphor:

>The mapping metaphor comes along as a road map for people to understand what is going where, and the general landscape of something in this case academia

>Any kind of mapping of a field comes with power dynamics

>In a mapping, one might already have some predisposition to place one topic above another, or in the metaphor of a map give it more space.

>Rude makes the argument that in any field, all topics are struggling to fight for space in their field for recognition.

The Central Question:

>"The phrase related communication practices recognizes that the text itself exists in an activity system—situation analysis, development, production, and circulation—all of which involve communication."

>Practices include interactions, research, translation and localization, review, visual design and productions, and circulation.

Disciplinarity Questions:

>The relationship between academia and industry is critical because of the need to provide useful information on complex processes and technology explains the field's origins and growth.

>Practitioners often feel marginalized and undervalued.

>Important for a field to know what jobs they can have, as well as what their careers might possibly develop into.

>Once again there is an issue about struggling for power in the space.

Pedagogy Questions:

>Learning about what writers do beyond the academy-what they write, how they get information, how an orientation to users and usability shapes their thinking, how they collaborate, and how they use technology-has led to an innovative curriculum within English studies.

>Rude talks about the concept of literacy implying social significance.

>Talking about literacy as the ability to negotiate a situation which requires communication.

>talks about multiple types of literacy

>Pedagogy is something most educators have a stake in, because it affects them in how to teach.

Practice Questions:

>How can I use this?

>Talks about relation to job again

>talking about information design, which obviously has relation to larger fields like cognitive psychology, reading, and graphic design.

>Design is an important aspect of how information is presented and why a certain way might be more effective than another.

>Most of what we know about design comes from practitioners than academics.

>People who work in practice have more access directly to the users, who are an important part of the study.

>Changes in tech have changed the field drastically, for examples moving from the user manual to online information search databases.

Social-Change Questions:

>Questions about knowledge and meaning as they relate to texts drive inquiry in the rhetoric of science and technology and in cultural studies as well as in technically communication.

>Social questions for technical communication researchers are vast: The environment, health care, intellectual property and access to information, transportation, safety of works, access to technology, science as it serves social goals, literacy, organization change, ethics, and more.

>Do interests in these social questions, harm the study and focus on practice?

>Social change and practice are set apart, since once can not necessarily put into practice the idea of social change.

>However, neither of them require knowledge beyond the results.

Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline(Lauer): 5th Reading

>This piece is an attempt to inform people about the reflections on why composition studies has merit to be a discipline on its own.

>How do we often distinguish disciplines? "At its deepest level, a discipline has a special set of phenomena to study, a characteristic mode or modes of inquiry, its own history of development, its theoretical ancestors and assumptions, its evolving body of knowledge, and its own epistemic courts by which knowledge gains that status. Its surface features include a particular departmental home, a characteristic ritual of academic preparation, and its own scholarly organizations and journals. Finally, permeating these features is a discipline's tone, the result of its evolution and the ways its scholars interact with one another and outsiders. We recognize a discipline not by each of these features taken singly but rather by their presence as a cluster"

>The field of composition studies has "been seeking warranted consensus about knowledge of written discourse."

>The relationship between theory and practice is two edged: it can be mutually beneficial or it can harm the open mindedness of the research field.

>Often times theory, can fail in practice.

>Lauer describes the field as multi modal, and therefore allowing itself to not suffer for a "nearsightedness." Hence referring to it as Dappled Discipline, multiple things going on