Relocating the Value of Work
Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age
Johndan Johnson-Ellias
Ellias starts off the article discussing what the primary use for technical communicators was fifty years ago. He states that after the wave of industrial technology, which includes products such as; washers, automobiles, and televisions. That information also became a valuable product. His problem with technical communication is that after the wave of industrial technology, information was second to the product. Making technical communicators subordinate. Ellias stresses the need for technical communicators to over come the subordinate role of supplying information and how to steps to industrial products and software. He wants technical communicators to apply contextualized information, helping the user understand the task at hand and the reasoning for the task.
He also states that there are three services of work and technical communicators need to be in the last category of symbolic-analytical work but they have to transition themselves there. He states the three categories being: routine production, which involves repetitive work. According to Ellias technical communication falls into this category because of routine manual writing, which produces technical procedures and follows a predetermined template. The second category is in-person service work; this includes your customer service representatives. Technical communication also falls into this category because people no longer read their instructions; they call the help line instead. Technical communicators help to set up the help line by creating stock answers to typically asked questions. The third category is symbolic-analytic work; this is the category Ellias states that technical communication fall into. Symbolic-analytic work possesses the ability to identify, rearrange, circulate, abstract, and broker information (page 182). This refers back to his idea of contextualizing the information. Ellias wants to relocate the need for technical communication, he wants the technical communicator to understand why the task is being done and for exactly what audience. He stresses the importance of not just relaying information on how to accomplish the task. He wants technical communicators to understand the task and teach the task emphasizing communication instead of technology.
Later in the article Ellias breaks the idea of communication focus instead of technology focus into four categories; experimentation, collaboration, abstraction, and system thinking. He says that that technical communicators should experiment and implement usability to discover what works well and what doesn’t. Collaboration includes working together that in technical communication it will almost always be a team project including, designers, developers, marketers and writers. When he talks about abstraction he talks about thinking about the original project and rethinking to make it more efficient. System thinking refers to thinking beyond system problems and solutions, but thinking more about how the problem occurred. He stresses those four ideas, because he feels if they are implemented in a learning environment technical communication may be able to strive to be symbolic-analytic work.
2 comments:
I think the point the author makes about splitting the focus into four categories is valid. I think the four ares can apply to projects outside of the technical communication field as well. If all projects required these four steps, I think usability would be greatly impacted. While reading this, the phrase "thinking outside the box" kept popping into my mind. Writing seems like an easy task, but if we think outside the box on every project, we will create documentation that is more effective for the end user.
Johnson-Ellias' notion of conducting usability experiments in order to discover the best method for delivering one's message seems like a good idea that is probably not practiced enough by technical communicators. Experimenting in this way, however, would seem to be the only objective means by which the effectiveness of different documents could be judged. On the other hand, technical communicators should possess enough knowledge on the subject that you would think experiments would not always be necessary. I suppose a balance must be struck.
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