Robert R. Johnson - Audience Involved: Towards a Participatory Model of Writing

Audience Involved: Towards a Participatory Model of Writing

Robert R. Johnson

Introduction

Johnson begins his article by describing four ways in which technical communicators have responded to criticism that their pedagogy is based solely on the “unreflective use of formats”. These include increased attention to audience, invention, visual meaning, and ethics. Unfortunately, Johnson feels that in developing these ideas, technical communicators have borrowed theory from other disciplines while offering few contributions of their own. By exploring technical communicators’ unique relationship with their users, Johnson hopes to challenge general composition and rhetorical studies with a more reciprocal and participatory model of writing.

Writers and the Hegemony of Authority

The creation of discourse has changed from an individual model to a community model in recent years. This community model can be divided into two common sub-models. The first of these involves a writing process in which a single author produces a text with the planning and revision assistance of a group. The second sub-model involves “plural authors, singular text”, in which multiple authors collaborate throughout the entire production process to produce a single document. Missing from these models of collaboration is a discussion of audience. Historically, audiences have been viewed as either “addressed” – an external object to be acted upon by the text, or “invoked” – a fictional construct of the author’s imagination. Johnson argues for a conception of the “involved” audience, in which the audience participates directly in the production process. His discussion is informed by both the history of technology, and the history of rhetoric.

Technological Knowledge: Some History and Definitions

Technological knowledge can be defined in two ways. The first involves the history of technology, and includes models of technological determinism, science versus technology, and the social construction of technology. The second is grounded in the discipline of rhetoric, where technological knowledge can be categorized as a productive knowledge or art. Under this model, the effectiveness and quality of a product, such as an instructional document, is dependent upon the judgment of the users.

Usability: An Overview

Johnson defines usability as “part of an iterative process that allows users to provide feedback during the conceptual, design and production stages of a product’s developemnt. Usability is beneficial to technical communicators in that it argues for their early inclusion in the development process, helps them to assume a role on the development team (rather than being viewed merely as “scribes who ‘write up’ technical information”), and allows the writers to effectively implement user knowledge into the development process.

Users and Usability Specialists: How They Work Together

Here, Johnson presents two scenarios in which usability specialists collaborated with users to produce improved texts, which he defines as “virtually any symbolic representation that enables humans to interact with technological artifacts”.

In the first scenario, Johnson describes a classroom assignment in which he instructed his students to develop improved documentation for the university’s new voicemail system, which was very poorly documented. Working in teams, the students administered surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to targeted users. This resulted in an impressive amount of feedback. In analyzing this data, it seemed that the situation involved two different forms of knowledge: the knowledge of the developers and the knowledge of the users. Developers viewed the system with a “highly rational, hierarchical view”, while users inhabited a different knowledge space, in which their focus was limited to the object before them and the ways in which they needed to use it. It became the duty of the technical communicators to bridge this gap. The vendor of the phone system was so intrigued by the outcome of this user-writer collaboration that they sent representatives to the university to meet with the students involved in the project.

The second scenario Johnson describes involves usability testing of a computerized interview scheduling system. The graduate students involved in the project made use of “low-fidelity prototyping”, in which a mock-up of the proposed interface is fashioned from paper cut-outs. During a prototyping session, one of the students would play the role of the computer as the student interacted with the subject, manipulating user interface elements in response to the user’s input. This process helped to identify the most intuitive user interface design. Johnson describes this as a “turning of the tables”, that puts “the burden of production on the ingenuity of the programmers to create a usable system”.

Conclusion

Involving users in usability evaluation and testing can help technical communicators make design decisions. It may also foster increased user-awareness among system developers. Creating effective systems requires that users be allowed to participate along with writers and developers in the production process.

This involved audience model also has ramifications for the wider field of composition studies. Involving an intended audience in the writing process can have interesting effects on a writer’s conception of what they are producing. Johnson lists several ideas for activities and experiments that would bring the audience into the composition classroom. The learning potential under such an arrangement is endless.