Double Entry Journal: Week One

Peeples, Tim. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Writings from the Field. New York: Addison Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc., 2003.
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Faigley, Lester. "Nonacademic Writing: The Social Perspective." p 47-60.

p 48: His goal is to outline fields of research that could better understand the disconnect between tie job and the classroom. They are the textual approach/perspective, the individual, and the social.

What could we then do to make the findings more cohesive, as I'm sure each has some valid point to offer the field...

p 49: "A text is not so much an object as an outcome of an individual's cognitive process," in the individual perspective.

This perspective seems to assume all things being the same as it looks into cognitive development. How would people's individual experiences differentiate the ways they concieve the task, and would a researcher in this area ignore those differences and focus on the majority or try to define categories???

p. 50 The social perspective encourages a focus on "how individual acts of communication define, organize, and maintain social groups.
The inside out of the individual perspective, and yet seems to do just what the individual perspective should.
Looks at "social relations, tensions, or conflicts that go beyond the text as a physical object and the writer as an isolated strategist."
Finally we're getting somewhere! Ah, acknowledging how daunting the task of thinking about the writer really is!

p.51 Discourse community, speech community...
Is this where these words originated??? 1985? I'll check with Pat Bizzell's work.

p.53 "Although inner speech is not voiced, it consisits of fragments of speech the speaker has drawn from the community in which he or she lives. More important, inner speech takes the form of a dialogue, which implies the continuous presence of an 'other.'"
Sweet....

p. 54 "all language is interaction, .. all texts entail contexts, and how texts accomplish interactions between writers and readers, rather than embodying meaning all by themselves."
The social persecive, again, seems to look at the individual more than the individual perspective, as it recognizes the relationship between the individual and her community, as she is the result of an interaction with the community, and so, as such, is the text. Brilliant!

p 56: Questions: "What is the social relationship of writers and readers, and how does the text function in this social relationship? How does this kind of text change over time? How does the perspective of the observer define and limit the observation of the text?"
What about how the mediums used to compose and read the texts affect its meaning in conjunction with all of these considerations?

Miller, Carolyn R. "What's Practical About Technical Writing?" p 61-70.

p. 61 The distinction/privileging or either knowing how of knowing that: theory vs. praxis. Rooted in the Greek city-state.
This question is everywhere... what do we value? Bang for your buck? Or a developed understanding? She glories in the hard work, as though it's glamorous to be blue-collar. Yet, she is not. (See metaphor on 62)

p. 62-63: The "conceptual contradiction" that tech writing is inadequate, and that it's a good model.
The age old question: do we teach to conform or subvert? Which is more ethical? If we teach to change the system, what sacrifices will be made in the meantime???

p. 66 Internships added to tech writing programs...
This is good, the blending of theory and practical application is necessary in order to truly get a feel for what its all about. If, after teaching a techcom class based all on theory, I went into the workplace, I would fear that I'd have no clue what I was doing either...

p. 67: The problem: Assumes that "what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good." Well that squelches any notions of innovation, but not necessarily, I suppose. Change comes from the inside???

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Slack, Jennifer, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. "The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority." p 80-98.

p. 82: The transmission model: look at comm as though mailing a package to someone-- if it's broken when it arrives, it's on the reciever. This lack of responsibility of the author is lame. And completely short-sighted. What of an author who considers no audience? (Sophistic rhetoric.)

p. 83: "meaning is a fixed entity" in the transmission view. Delusional! Meaning is never fixed...

p. 84: "Technical writers are not seen as adding or contributing to meaning. In fact, if they are, they are not doing their job!"
What the f? These people have no clear understanding of the process or function of language. It's ethnocentric, arrogant, and just plain wrong. Grrr.

"Meaning resides only in te sender's intentions." Are these people crazy? For real...

p. 85: Translation: "concern over the constitution of meaning in messages in which power is negotiated between sender and receiver." Finally we're getting somewhere. But how does this 'concern' play out? It's not enough just to be aware of the problem...

p. 86 "Communication is not a linear process that proceeds from sender to receiver, but a process of negotiation in which sender and receiver both contribute-- from their different locations in the circuit of communication-- to the construction of meaning." Word.

P. 87: “Power is displaced and fluid along with meaning.” … “Communication is thus an ongoing struggle for power, unevenly balanced toward encoding.”
• Less accurate than the articulation, but certainly more efficient.

P. 88: A communicator must be familiar with differences in encoding patterns among different audiences “because encoding is always an imperfect translation.”
• It’s likely never perfect on either end. In any case, wouldn’t multicultural studies (bad term, I know), or contrastive rhetoric be useful to technical communicators?

p. 89: Articulation: "Characterized by concerns with the struggle to articulate and rearticulate meaning and the relations of power." Finally, I feel a totally accurate depiction of communication, and yet the most difficult to standardize... but ultimately, this is what happens, be it slowly over time as in academic discourse, or instantly and in real time as in colloquial conversation... just like my students emailing me 800 times this weekend looking for rearticulations of their critical reading assignment...


Ornatowski, Cezar M. "Between Efficiency and Politics: Rhetoric and Ethics in Technical Writing." p. 172-182.

Katz, Steven B. "The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust." p 183-201.

Porter, James E. "Framing Postmodern Commitment and Solidarity." p 202-218.