Faber article is important to the field because of his
exploration of what constitutes professionalism. It is a struggle (at least in
Technical Communication) that we’ll read more about the rest of the semester.
In recent years, the Society for Technical Communication has undertaken two
initiatives to prove, if you will, the professionalization of Technical
Communication. One is the effort to provide certification.
They established a test that has three levels: foundation, practitioner, and
expert. This timed test covers nine core areas of technical communication and
it costs over $600 to take the test (regardless of which test you take). This
testing was created in much the same way that plumbers, engineers, lawyers, etc.
take an certification exam. One of STC’s intentions with the certification exam
is to professionalize the field. The other effort is the Body of Knowledge(BOK) project. This project, which is a voluntary collaborative effort between
academics and industry professionals, explicates in one place the body of
knowledge, hence its name, for technical communication.
As the website states, this task is difficult in Technical Communication
because the knowledge is dispersed, that is so interdisciplinary, that
collecting all the knowledge in one place is challenging. Both projects
contribute to STC’s efforts to professionalize the field, which is good for
technical writers who must defend their field on a continual basis as well as
to increase their value to employers, which hopefully also increase their
salaries and prestige.
The same kind of skepticism of Technical Communication that
happens in industry also happens in academia. I’ve been lucky in my department
to have colleagues who respect the work that I do. But many English departments
don’t regard Technical Communication on the same level as Literature, for
example. Although it is happening less and less, but still does happen. Part of
this disdain comes from the perspective of Technical Communication as a
practical discipline, when in fact it is heavily theoretical. Faber mentions
this discord in his discussion about a teaching student a rhetorical approach
(democratic) to their work and the capitalistic approach of the workplace. Among
the “lack of theory” perspective, I experience this challenge in two ways: in
the classroom, when students tell me they are only taking my classes in order
to get a better job and higher wages, but in the same breath degrades the work
of a technical communicator as too practical and not as lofty as an editor or
creative writer. I also experience when graduate students tell me that they
want to get a job in the academic realm of Technical Communication because
“that’s where the jobs are.” Yet, they don’t want to take any of my classes or
learn anything that technical writers really do (like document design and deep
audience analysis). They think that because they have a rhetorical degree (that
is, anything that has to do with the study of language) that they can easily
write a technical document. If they do actually take my classes, they are
shocked when they get their first writing back with a lower grade than they
expected. I once had a graduate student select Technical Communication for her
comprehensive exams because she thought it would be a slam dunk because she
worked as a technical writer. I asked her what Heidegger meant by “standing
reserve,” which is a reading from the digital literacies course and also on the
comps list. Of course, she hadn’t read it and was in fact not familiar with the
comps list. These instances, which are becoming fewer, demonstrate the kind of
perspective nonprofessionals in Technical Communication have toward that area.
If you are getting the Graduate Certificate in Technical Communication, what
inspired you to seek out this degree? How much knowledge did you have about the
field before applying for admission? Is your perspective different now? What
changes to the program would you suggest I consider for the future?