Ann Duin & Craig Hansen, Eds. Nonacademic Writing: Social Theory and Technology. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. ISBN: 0-8058-1628-3

The search for "technical writing" books is a hard one, as most books address more of a "how to" approach to "doing technical writing" than an inquiry-based approach to exploring technical and professional communication as a field. Sometimes, newer books will offer a chapter or an introduction to who technical writers are, what they do, and maybe a few comments on the importance of the technical communicator, but few I have seen really offer ideas about what critical thinking can be in the professional sphere. Very few take on an exploration of the doubts, values, resistances, or problems in approaching technical communication critically. Then the double bind occurs when books which do focus on professional and technical communication as a field center on it in very specific ways, and lack the invitation for a multi-disciplinary approach, leaving students thinking, "but I don’t want to be a Technical Communicator, so how does all this apply to me?"

I originally used Nonacademic Writing in my first WRT 405 class back in 1996. Though I only used it that once, I would use it again, having used other books in the meanwhile and having found that none have measured up to providing complicated, interesting inquiry into questions like "what is technical communication?" Nonacademic Writing offers both a wide range of approaches to thinking about what professional and technical communication is, raises good questions, and is relevant to students across a broad range of life work.

The book is a collection of research essays composed by teachers, technical professionals, and writers from various backgrounds (including an essay by our own Catherine Smith: "Understanding Institutional Discourse in the US Congress, Past and Present"). As Marilyn Cooper states in the "Forward," this text is meant to investigate the field of nonacademic writing from various perspectives, and to begin a dialogue on the topics where more extensive scholarship has yet to be done. Nonacademic Writing explores communication in contexts other than academic ones, but still builds in connections to academic thought, research, and explores the connections and distances between academia and "the real world." The book addresses a wide range of topics, from pedagogical theory and ethnography to investigating communication acts in corporate settings. The shift from describing the field as "technical or professional writing and rhetoric" to "nonacademic writing" is important; perhaps "technical" and "professional" have been terms which have limited the scope of what "technical writing" courses can provide. The idea of "nonacademic" writing opens the world past the academy, like the essays in the book do, to civic writing, semiotic theory, history, publishing, literacy studies, politics, electronic writing, and even computer programming.

When I used the book, I used it tangentially as a kind of "support reading" for other work we were doing in the class. Students read essays each week, and then posted their responses to our class listserv. This book supplied me with an interesting opportunity: it lists email addresses of essay authors, so I emailed them and invited them to join our conversation on the list. Seven of them joined, so students were carrying out their discussion in a broader, somewhat "nonacademic" context even in the class, dealing with an expanded, professional audience.

My mistake was in not recognizing the power of the book. The fact that it does call many standard assumptions into question and challenge commonly-held ideas about the professional world through lenses such as gender and language, led to much more resistance on the part of students than I had expected (connecting back to the question which has been explored in this program of late, "what is an advanced student?). Particular students found some ideas very threatening, such as in the case of Mary Lay’s article, "The Computer Culture, Gender, and Nonacademic Writing: An Interdisciplinary Critique," which set off an argument among male computer science majors so inappropriate that I had to pull the discussion off of our list entirely. Unfortunately, Lay’s claims held true in the very class we were sitting in; the male student’s vociferous objections to her claims ended up supporting them by alienating many of the female students in the class, and women’s contributions ended up being silenced completely. Getting students to acknowledge Lay’s authority and to be somewhat open-minded to her ideas was harder after experiencing conflict over the text, but it was a valuable lesson for us all. To avoid this kind of friction in the future, I would recommend focusing on the text more, making it part of a larger project where students are given the opportunity to investigate controversial claims in their own fields, and question their assumptions. I would also do a little more foundation work, explaining to students that many of these essays may make them feel uncomfortable or challenged, and have discussions about how to handle that in advance. I would make the book more of a central text, and take much more time with it than I did in this first 405. I would take more time to prepare them for difficult as well as challenging reading. The essays are not always completely accessible ( I was introduced to this book in a graduate seminar) and are generally heavily researched and footnoted, but provide a good range of reading experience. If you use the whole book in any way, it demands time and effort.

If you don’t use the whole book, several chapters are in and of themselves valuable for use individually. "Some People Weren’t able to Contribute Anything But Their Technical Knowledge: The Anatomy of a Dysfunctional Team" by Rebecca Burnett shows the importance of the technical communicator to project management. Burnett also explores the differences between classroom and workplace collaboration, and looks at what it means to be a "student professional." Dorothy Winsor’s "Writing Well as a Form of Social Knowledge" offers a wonderful case study of one engineer’s experience with collaborative writing in the workplace, and explores tacit knowledge at work. Students found the Winsor essay enlightening and interesting.

The book is costly, running about forty dollars when I used it in 1996. Still, I think as a core text, or as a personal resource for teaching, it is worth it. What was valuable in my 405 was looking closely at the editing process that the book went through (described in the preface), reading the bios of authors, and looking at the wealth of not only scholarly but professional expertise in everything from teaching to research and work with impressive associations such as IEEE. This helped provide an authoritative foundation for students who were resisting inquiries at the intersection of scholarly and nonacademic writing, who wanted the course to be all resumes and cover letters. Because of the eclectic make-up of the book, the easy brush off of ideas that might be seen as "academic" and therefore not relevant to student’s professional lives is not available as an avenue of resistance. That is one of the wonderful complications this text provides: it makes good distinctions about what we call "technical writing" which expand the field enormously, but it simultaneously provides the intersection point between "academic’ and "nonacademic" thinking and experience. These are the really great complicating moves that make the teaching of "technical writing" more than how to get the margins straight.