Paul Anderson. Technical Writing: A Reader-Centered Approach. 3rd edition. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995.

I’ve been teaching technical writing now in the Writing Program off and on for about five years, and I stumbled across Paul V. Anderson’s Technical Writing: A Reader-Centered Approach, 3rd edition a few years back. It didn’t look different from any of the rest of the tech writing books: a striking abstract graphic meant (I suppose) to indicate the cutting-edge progressive nature of communication in the workplace, like all the rest. (Maybe we will get a picture of an actual writer on the cover of the fourth edition?) Still, it was more inviting to read and better organized than many of the textbooks I looked through. I liked especially the way it approached writing as a way to interact with real readers, not just a way of jumping through hoops in the workplace. The tone of the book appealed to me, too: it is an approachable book, yet authoritative. As a new teacher, I needed to learn about technical writing too. I thought (and still think) book was the best place for me and my students to start. It's held up over time, too. Here's why:

I see 405 as the cousin or older sibling of 205 because they both deal explicitly with how people use symbols to get things done in the world (rhetoric). To my mind the two Studios differ in emphasis: 205 may have a more academic focus, studying the power and habits of discourse communities, whereas 405 has a more extracurricular focus, looking at how one can perform well in these communities. Anderson’s book is based on one central piece of rhetorical advice that seems to ring true (for the first time) to many of my 405 students. He claims that "writing is social action" and this has some very practical consequences, leading to the main advice of the book:

This isn’t a call to slangy talk-like prose. His emphasis on audience dovetails with 205. As one of my 405 students said in his classroom evaluations, shifting the focus from the writer to the reader simplifies everything. Trying to impress or dazzle the reader – which is I guess what my student thought college writing was all about – isn’t necessary. The goal is to figure out what you need, what the reader needs, and what you both expect. This reminded me of a definition of rhetoric by Donald Bryant: "the act of adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas" (qtd. by Edward Corbett, 3). In many ways, Anderson’s Technical Writing puts to work – literally – the claims about rhetoric introduced by Studio II.

One of the special audience issues that I face in my 405 classes is that students sometimes enter assuming that they will (or should or could) learn just a bunch of formulas for "success" for the great graduation hereafter ("the 3 ingredients of a great memo" or "the best arrangement in a report to your boss"). I recently read an article by Dorothy Windsor that helped me figure out why that made me so uncomfortable. Drawing from some engineering case studies (and Michael Polanyi), she suggests that much of what we know is in fact "between the lines," and comes from sharing a world view with experts. We can’t learn it all in school, in other words. But it is possible to learn how to ask the right questions about a rhetorical situation, and these questions are what Anderson’s text excels at providing: What does the reader need? How exactly will people read what I write? What do I (the writer) want to have happen? What is the history and rhetorical situation that precedes me? What are the conventions operating at this site?

Scenarios provide an answer to the above questions. I’m impressed by these end-of-chapter cases, in which tricky (seeming) real-world rhetorical situations are presented for students to respond to. I often assign them because they portray a real writer trying to make a tough decision. For instance, in one students have to weigh a bunch of factors about buying a new forklift, and have to then write up their recommendation. Often students stumble on this one the first time through, writing much much too long about why their boss should buy the forklift, when what really matters is just the recommendation. It’s an important lesson to learn after school: your thought sequence and learning process are not very important to readers who simply want your help to make a decision. Even when I don't ask students to respond to the scenario, I still have them read it and we can talk about what sorts of tensions they would have to negotiate if they were really to write it up. I think the scenarios are one of the most useful parts of the book, putting theory into practice.

My 405 students (I’m talking here about both UC and final-semester seniors) vary widely. Some already have jobs; some have interned at major corporations and are now "where the rubber meets the road" in writing; some are completely green, transferring in from other schools and don’t know much about Studio practices; many are ESL students. In my experience the Anderson book accommodates all these different audiences by being very well organized (what one would expect from any technical writing book), complete with useful graphs and charts, introductions and summaries for skimming or reading closely. The language in this technical writing book is neither technical nor patronizing.

This is a book that helps students accomplish manageable tasks for writing well in the workplace. It has a central theory – writing is social action; it helps people do things – and a practical application of that theory: think constantly about your audience. It doesn't just tell students these maxims; it practices them. Unlike some tech writing books, it’s not cobbled together by a lot of "tips" and lore. It’s limitations are the limitations of the workplace, and that includes little focus on ethics – the questions about why one would act – though the book does try to address these in a "focus on ethics" in every chapter. I find supplemental readings helpful in this area, some of which I’ve borrowed from Henry Janckiewicz and Molly Voorheis and Bobbi Kirby-Werner: I’ve borrowed articles on Morton Thiokol / NASA (Listed below is a book by Richard Feynman in which he writes about his role as scientist/detective researching technical documents in reference to the Challenger disaster). In sum, this is a useful and intelligent technical writing textbook that is likely to remain so in its imminent release as a fourth edition.

I find some failed examples from the real world to be useful in the classroom. Molly has some wonderful handouts of terribly put-together flyers that confuse the reader; in contrast, Anderson’s texts are mostly squeaky-clean. Also, I have an ethnography section in my 405, and I use the following to supplement Andersen in this area: "Writing at Exxon ITD [Intermediates Technology Division]: Notes on the Writing Environment of a R&D [Research and Development] Organization" by James Paradis, David Dobrin and Richard Miller, which is a great window into actual workplace writing and how revision & invention actually happen there; "Ethnographic Research on Writing: Assumptions and Methodology" by Stephen Doheny-Farina and Lee Odell, a useful intro to the ways one might conduct an ethnography of workplace writing; "Discourse Regulations and the Production of Knowledge" by Anthony Paré, an insight into how genres constrict and construct the ways employees make knowledge by writing in social work. I haven’t read it, but John Swales’ recent book Other Floors, Other Voices is an in-depth study of what he calls a "textography of a small university building." Though its focus is obviously academic, he might have a lot to offer students who were looking for ways to imagine writing not as a student, but as a professional. Of course, for another example of effective professional writing they might simply turn to their syllabus for Writing 405!

Burnett, Rebecca E. "Some People Weren’t Able to Contribute Anything but Their Technical Knowledge: The Anatomy of a Dysfunctional Team." In Nonacademic Writing, edited by Ann Hill Duin and Craig J. Hansen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. 123-156.

Corbett, Edward P.J. "Introduction." Classical Rhetoric, 2nd ed. NY: Oxford UP, 1971.

Doheny-Farina, Stephen and Lee Odell. "Ethnographic Research on Writing: Assumptions and Methodology." In Writing in Nonacademic Settings. NY: Guilford Press, 1985. 503-535.

Feynman, Richard P., as told to Ralph Leighton. "What do YOU Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character. NY: Bantam, 1989.

Paradis, James, David Dobrin, and Richard Miller. "Writing at Exxon ITD [Intermediates Technology Division]: Notes on the Writing Environment of a R&D [Research and Development] Organization." In Writing in Nonacademic Settings. NY: Guilford Press, 1985. 281-308.

Pare, Anthony. "Discourse Regulations and the Production of Knowledge. In Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 111-123.

Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith: Glouchester, MA, 1983.

Swales, John. Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University Building. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1998.

Winsor, Dorothy. "Writing Well as Social Knowledge." In Nonacademic Writing, edited by Ann Hill Duin and Craig J. Hansen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. 157-172.