Humanistic Aspects of Technical Communication

This edited collection sets out to "challenge the long-standing dualities of science versus the humanities, facts versus opinions, and objectivity versus subjectivity" (p. 1 ). In place of this dualistic model, the editor, Paul M. Dombrowski, proposes that technical communication always occurs in a context of social responsibilities, and not in an objective vacuum. The primary purpose of this book is to acquaint writing instructors whose background is mainly literary with some of the social implications of technical communication, and to serve as an adjunct to conventional technical communication texts. The secondary purpose is to inform a general readership of scholars and professionals already familiar with technical communication, about recent humanistic approaches. The book contains chapters on the rhetoric of science, social constructionism, feminism and gender issues, and ethics. The structure is unusual in the amount of editorial material it presents. Each chapter, with the exception of the introduction, includes two reprinted articles preceded by an overview and critical comments on the chapter topic, a literature review, and a summary of the two articles provided by the editor. Chapter One Introduction offers an historical perspective on the split between science and humanism. It identifies two different pedagogical approaches to technical communication: the first being traditional dualism in which instructors accept the split and simply adopt an instrumental approach to communication, and the second being what Dombrowski terms contemporary holism in which the