Scientific and Technical Communication: Theory, Practice and Policy

Introduction

Writing is at once a highly individual and a thoroughly social process. No two individuals approach the writing process in exactly the same way, just as no two individuals think and believe exactly the same way. And as complex as our belief systems and thought processes are, so too are the processes of writing. While writing is undeniably difficult, a writer's strategies and tasks originate within a set of existing community practices which, once understood, can be manipulated in creative ways. The forms of writing you use, the previous literature you have read, your knowledge of audience and purpose, your collaboration with colleagues, your disciplinary training and work experience define the writing situation by providing a repertoire from which you can make choices. Your writing process, or processes, will be the unique expression of your choices within the social and historical contexts in which communication occurs.

The writing process does not occur in isolation. As you participate in an academic discipline or profession and become familiar with the literature of a particular field, textbooks, journal articles, technical documents, newspaper articles, popular literature, you enter an on-going conversation comprised of certain topics, accepted beliefs and common questions. When, for example, you come into a room and encounter a conversation among a group of people, you listen for a subject about which you can comment and then enter the discussion. The more you know and learn about the issues and themes being discussed, the more perspective you gain, and the easier it becomes for you to participate. Accordingly, science and technology are institutions that have "rooms" and conversations, separate fields and languages of study and research, you can enter.

The forms of scientific and technical communication, proposals, instructions, journal articles for example, represent an acknowledged set of guidelines that bring precedent and order to bear on an exchange of ideas. These guidelines reflect the fundamental presumptions and goals, such as objectivity and conciseness, of its practitioners. For instance, the evolution of the experimental article in science came in response to changing ideas about the nature of scientific knowledge. As a scientific and technical writer, you will need to critically evaluate the presumptions and goals of the conversations within the community and justify your acceptance of them. Still, the forms and guidelines of scientific and technical writing are not an end in themselves. Your unique interpretations of those guidelines will comprise the voice you bring to the process of scientific and technical writing.

A Shared Myth

Like science, writing is a process subject to myth. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) originally formulated the scientific process as a series of steps, observation, hypothesis, experiment, data, conclusion, we know as the scientific method. The writing process is also formulated as a series of steps, inventing (generating ideas), drafting (presenting ideas and information) and revising (reworking and editing). Like the steps of the scientific method, however, it is a mistake to regard the steps of the writing process as anything more than a model of actual practice.

Writing is never a neat, linear sequence of steps. No one produces a flawless first draft. We all experience fits and starts in the process of writing; revising one section of a document before going to another, performing research in mid-draft and changing the focus of the document as a result. Some days you can write for hours, other days the words will not come. Some writers panic and quit writing in the face of deadlines. For other writers, panic is a necessary motivation. You may think you have reached the conclusion of a document only to find upon a second reading you must change its entire structure. Writing is sometimes sloppy. Writing takes time. And writing is difficult, just like science.

Science is never a neat, linear sequence of steps. No one performs an errorless first experiment. Scientists experience fits and starts in the process of experimentation; revising a hypotheses, performing other experiments and research and changing the focus of the original research. Some days experiments work like a charm, other days you cannot get results. Some researchers panic and quit working in the face of deadlines and funding cuts. For other researchers, panic is a necessary motivation. You may think you have reached the conclusion of a experiment only to find you must do it again and change its entire structure. Scientific practice is sometimes sloppy. Science takes time. And science is difficult, just like writing.

Due to their respective complexities, the practice of science and the process of writing are subject to myth. And these myths mirror each other. The myth of writing is that it is an innate creative "gift", either you have "it" or you don't. The myth of science is that it is completely explained by the scientific method, by carefully following the method one can attain certain knowledge.

Science is perhaps best understood not as a single method, but as a diverse set of activities that develop and change over time. Scientific "method" includes not only observation, hypothesis, experiment, data, conclusion, but relationships among peers, argument, negotiation, serendipity, coercion, statistical slight-of-hand and fund rising.

Writing is perhaps best understood not as an innate ability but as a series of distinct, directed tasks. These tasks include invention, drafting and revising, connected to a self-conscious effort to define the elements of, and your place in, a conversation within a community.

The Writing Process

The cognitive and social elements on which the writing process depends cannot be understood separately. Understood as a cognitive process, writing proceeds from a series of assumptions and existing ideas embedded in language. The writers takes those assumptions and ideas and transforms them through a unique manipulation of language and symbols. Understood as a social process, writing proceeds from a series of communicative conventions created by social groups and institutions. The forms of scientific and technical writing such as analytical reports, and abstracts are conventions adopted by academic and professional communities. While the specific elements of these conventions differ from group to group and culture to culture, they structure thinking and how one expresses ideas. Thinking is enmeshed within a web of social relations. In turn, these social relations evolve out of your expression. While one cannot map the impact of various and diffuse social relations on our specific thoughts, by understanding thinking and writing as social activities we get a better look at the broader contexts in which they occur.

Scientific Knowledge and the Writing Process

Models of the writing process in scientific and technical communication reflect the profound influence of conceptions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Recently, however, traditional accounts of scientific knowledge have been challenged on social and historical grounds. Debates concerning the nature of scientific knowledge will continue into the 21st century. Undoubtedly, these debates will continue to influence on individual and professional approaches to scientific and technical writing. In this section we will consider two views of scientific knowledge and examine how they impact our understanding scientific and technical writing.

Philosophers of science, particularly in this century, became interested in determining differences between knowledge in the natural sciences and all other forms of knowledge. Viewed historically, the natural sciences furnish an incomparably successful and progressive source of knowledge. Philosophers and other professionals became interested in defining the features of scientific practice and knowledge to see if they could be applied to other subjects such as human behavior, economics, or philosophy itself. Scientific knowledge apparently possessed the unique trait of preseving its content in different social and historic contexts. No other form of knowledge can claim such uniform interpretation and agreement. Traditionally, philosophers of science attributed the universality of scientific knowledge to at least two characteristics, the pattern of reasoning employed in science, and the repeatability of scientific experiments.¹

Issac Newton (1642-1727) demonstrated that the force of gravity is the product of two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In other words, the larger the mass, the greater the gravitational pull. As the bodies are moved further apart, the force of gravity rapidly diminishes. Among other things, Newton's laws of gravity describe the motion of falling bodies on the Earth's surface as well as weight and ocean tides. As gravity is natural, continuous phenomenon on Earth, its effect on falling bodies can be measured, predicted and demonstrated through repeated experiments conducted at any time and in any location. From the evidence produced through repeated experiments, scientists conclude they have an accurate picture of how nature works, a picture that does not change with the current social and political climate. Newton's laws of gravity are an example of scientific knowledge that has only one, universal interpretation that can be witnessed under different circumstances.

Given the traditional view of scientific knowledge, the goal of scientific and technical writers is presented as upholding uniform interpretation and agreement on information by writing a document that can be read in only one way.² Since scientific knowledge is universal texts were written not to "get in the way" of scientists' representations of nature. The concept of scientific knowledge as constant across social and historical contexts meant that scientific and technical writing reflected the practices of science as a series of logical steps unaffected by factors such as funding, relationships among researchers and institutional politics.

Sociologists of science, particularly within the last thirty years, became interested in determining the similarities between natural science, scientists and scientific knowledge and other disciplines, practitioners, and forms of knowledge.³ Responding to traditional views of scientific knowledge, many sociologists explain its universal acceptance in two ways. First, in order to become a member of a scientific community, scientists' must adhere to uniform theoretical commitments. Second, scientists have only a limited repertoire for responding to information and ideas given disciplinary standards, writing formats and disciplinary jargon.

Let's take another look at Newton's laws of gravity. From repeated observations and experiments, scientists elevated Newton's theory of gravity to a truth about nature. And we can agree that truth about the force of gravity Newton, and others, demonstrated does not change - it is invariant and universal. However, language, even if objective, is not invariant and universal. Language, as demonstrated by all other social interaction, is an unreliable means for transmitting the truth. If we view science as an institution influenced by linguistic, historical and social forces in any way similar to other institutions, then language remains a variable medium of expression. No matter what a writer does to ensure only one reading of an experimental article, inevitably there will be more than one interpretation of the information presented. Nevertheless, even if scientific knowledge was relayed by perfectly reliable linguistic means, scientists, just as ourselves, are imperfect knowers. We all process information differently. If you accept the idea that even if a scientific theory is true its means of expression, language, and reception, cognition, are variable and imperfect, how can the universality of scientific knowledge be explained?

One explanation for the universality of scientific knowledge is that in order to become a member of a scientific community, scientists' must adhere to the same theoretical commitments. In the physics community, for example, you cannot hold Newton's ideas with respect to the relation among space, time and gravitation. Students learning to become practitioners in physics learn that relativity theory is the fundamental theory of nature. As a result, practitioners learn to perceive nature in the same way according to an accepted theory. In other disciplines and professions, even if practitioners hold the same theories and views about the world, they disagree on their interpretations. While critics of the traditional view of scientific knowledge would not deny the truth of relativity theory and its explanation of natural phenomena, they deny the universal acceptance of the theory is due to its unchanging nature.

Another explanation for the universal acceptance of scientific knowledge is the scientists' limited choices in responding to information and ideas. Science is also unique in its reliance on a narrow range of communicative choices to convey information, governed by specialist jargon and defined writing formats. The uniform structure of the experimental article in natural science journals serves as an example. What counts as an appropriate expression of, or response to, an idea in science depends on how well writers follow disciplinary standards. If, for instance, a scientific or technical writer presented their ideas in a narrative form using dialog, the article would not be accepted into a mainstream journal. Authors must also use language and jargon appropriate to the discipline on order to have their views accepted. Critics of the traditional view of scientific knowledge claim that it, like all other forms of knowledge, is variable and contingent on time and circumstance. However, through institutional mechanisms requiring scientists to think and communicate along the same lines, scientific knowledge appears universal.

Questions concerning traditional conceptions of the nature of scientific knowledge pose interesting challenges for scientific and technical writers. One of these challenges involves how language is seen in relation to scientific and technical knowledge and information. From a traditional view of scientific knowledge, the function of scientific and technical writing is matching a word or symbol to the object it represents. On this view language is representational, mirroring the relationship between science and nature. If we hold that scientific knowledge is variable and affected by social and historical (and other) contexts, the function of scientific and technical writing is shaping objects through words and symbols. On this view language is constitutive and rhetorical, constructing the relationship between science and nature. However, even if scientific and technical writing practices are social, scientific knowledge is presented as largely unaffected by social contexts. In many instances, as studies of scientific laboratories have demonstrated the picture we get of scientific practice and knowledge in journal articles and textbooks is highly idealized, if not misleading. ⁴

Stages in Composing

The processes of scientific and technical writing depends on an important mechanism, recursion. In thinking and developing ideas, recursion is the process in which the mind turns around on itself to consider its own inputs and to take stock of its capacities, an example would be thinking about thinking. You have the ability to abstract, to "return again" and revise ideas and topics you had previously considered and see them in a new way. Throughout all stages of your writing process you continually revisit the stages of writing, inventing, drafting, revising and editing , and the elements and conventions of writing, ideas, formats, sentence structure, within different contexts and with different intentions about what you want to say.

The process of recursion also applies to the institutional settings affecting your writing process. Like individuals, institutions have "memories" of past experiences, methods and procedures. As a member of that institution, you will develop memories which will influence and be influenced by your writing process.

One way of learning more about your own writing process involves examining the relationships among you, as a writer, your audience, and the subject about which you writing. In scientific and technical writing, the relationships among writer, audience and subject are woven into the relations among science, technology and society. What you know about a subject, your purpose for writing, the appropriateness of presentation, and the characteristics of your audience are a part of your training, the discipline in which you participate and its social image.

Making decisions about how to communicate in a particular situation involves understanding the relationship among the writer, reader, subject and previous texts. Writing also requires performing research and distinguishing audience, relationship, purpose and content. Each document requires different considerations of these concepts as well as certain constraints. The model that follows takes the view that your writing practices will provide a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of science and technology by seeing language as not simply representational, but constitutive and rhetorical. Also, we will characterize science and technology as social institutions shaped by the contexts in which they participate. Effective scientific and technical writers recognize how those contexts influence the writing process.

Inventing

At the time of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Athenian citizens learned rhetoric as a means for participating in an open forum. Classical rhetoric had its beginning as a practical course for training citizens in techniques for addressing live audiences. Speakers had to be intensely aware of their audience; had to know it, know its attitudes, its emotional disposition, its presumptions, desires and prejudices. Knowledge of the audience primarily determined what was said and in what order it was presented. In this context, invention was defined as a process for choosing ideas appropriate to the audience, subject and occasion. The intimate setting of the Athenian forum allowed speakers to closely profile an audience and establish a basis from which to begin the process of invention. Audience was the chief principle informing any kind of discourse.

We do not share the Athenian's intimate relationship between speaker and audience. Printing, electronic media and telecommunications mediate our knowledge of the audience and audience reaction. These media also allow many different audiences access to our ideas. Still, scientific and technical writers must go through the process of invention to achieve the same ends as their Athenian counterparts. You must identify and explore ideas in relation to the audience, subject and occasion. Nevertheless, because modern audiences are more diverse and complex, the process of invention requires you to constantly re-examine your ideas in relation to audience, subject and occasion as you write.

Just as the writing process is recursive, so is each stage in the writing process. By learning more about your ideas, the subject, the audience, the contexts in which you are writing, the content of your writing will change as go back to re-invent, re-draft and revise your text. Although we lay out the process of invention is separate parts, these parts are not mutually exclusive. As you plan and organize a document, you consult the standards of your discipline and the publication for which you are writing, you perform formal and informal research, brainstorm, talk with other colleagues, think about ideas, and learn about audience and occasion.

Planning and Organizing

Planning and organizing occur on two related levels. First, you must plan and organize strategies for writing. These strategies are based on your awareness of the circumstances surrounding each writing situation. Second, you must plan and organize what kind of document you will write under these circumstances; considering (among other things) structure, scope, style and length.

In planning and organizing strategies for writing, consider under what conditions you do your best work, time of day, location, access to references, equipment, specific rituals, necessary distractions. Consider how you generate ideas, talking with other people, notes, lists, drawing pictures, outlining, and the time it takes. Map out your writing habits in relation to the constraints you will face, possible collaborators, research completed, results available, deadlines, budget, your knowledge and the audience's knowledge of the subject matter. Obviously, you cannot account for all your habits and constraints, as well as the habits and constraints of others. But the time spent planning and organizing your writing strategies will reduce time spent drafting and revising.

In planning and organizing what kind of document you will write, consider the audience, your relationship to it, your rhetorical purpose, and the context in which you write. At this stage, it is important to have a clear idea of your audience's needs in relation to the choices you make. Before mapping out your strategy in great detail, contact the primary reader(s) of your document. Electronic mail (e-mail) provides a wonderful medium for this type of exchange. By using e-mail, you give the reader the option of contemplating a response (or many responses), or responding immediately. E-mail also allows you to establish an on-going dialogue with your audience. This dialogue can serve as a basis for defining audience and purpose, generating ideas, doing revisions, and setting the context in which the document is received. Of course, e-mail is not the only option for contacting the audience, but writing a letter or fax, rather than calling will give the audience more time to assess your approach.

Formulating Ideas

About what will you write? What do you want the audience to know? For some writers, finding the "what" is the most frustrating part of the writing process. Writers perform different rituals to generate ideas: some consult on-line data bases and electronic networks, others browse through periodicals, references and books in the library, still others write lists, draw pictures, or prepare detailed outlines.

Much of the work of science is best understood as a cumulative or "puzzle solving" activity.⁵ Scientific researchers enter well-defined disciplines and areas of study which do not necessarily require original research. Ideas and topics for research are often generated as a by-product of the structure and direction of the field or discipline in which you are a part. For example, undergraduate and graduate students entering the laboratory commonly work on projects begun by senior researchers. As scientific and technical writers you will not face the dilemma of essay writers who search for new ways to express personal experiences. The cumulative and conventional aspects of scientific and technical writing provide one basis getting started.

Examine Previous Texts

Science and technology are cumulative in that the skills developed in lower level courses are necessary for upper level courses. It is difficult, for instance, to do well in a sophomore or junior level physics class, if you have not taken first-year physics and math courses. Disciplines and fields in technology and the sciences are differentiated by a shared literature; a literature on which research practices are based. Your knowledge of this literature, acquired as you move through school and your profession, gives you access to the accepted ideas and values of the community, as well as what counts as good or bad practice. In sharing a common literature and cumulative practices, you share a clear idea of audience, relationship, purpose and context within your field. In beginning to generate ideas for paper, look initially to the shared literature of you field.

Use Conventions and Style Guides

The conventional aspects of scientific and technical writing are found in the general organizing principles for certain documents, and standards for writing found in each discipline. The general organizing principles for many documents in scientific and technical are found in this book and other technical and business writing textbooks. These principles are given as templates (a pattern or outline) for writing documents. These templates can serve as an outline for generating and organizing ideas in defining the necessary elements in the document. A word of caution, however. Many technical writers fall into the trap of believing that closely following a template is all that makes up technical writing, nothing could be further from the truth.

The standards for writing in each discipline are found in professional style guides. Style guides are a list of requirements for preparing manuscripts for publication in journals. The dissimilar methods, professional standards and goals of disciplines have caused each to create its own style guide. Professional organizations such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) have widely differing practices. Topics range from what subjects a professional journal addresses, how the manuscript is spaced, how quotation and footnotes are formatted, how illustrations are prepared, and how mathematical and symbolic notation is presented. By consulting style guides for the leading journal in your field, you can begin to see what ideas are currently being researched, how those ideas are received, and how those ideas are presented.

Perform Informal Research

Research occurs on many levels and refers to different duties. Primary research refers to generating new or original information in working, for example, with micro-organisms in a biology, conducting interviews with welfare recipients, distributing questionnaires to public housing dwellers, or compiling statistical correlations. Secondary research refers to looking at existing information in books, periodicals, indexes and other sources available in libraries.

Primary and secondary research is usually goal directed. You know the research topic and want to collect information. You locate an article using an on-line data base, go to the library, photocopy the article and go home. But research is helpful if conducted at an even earlier stage of the writing process; before you have a firm topic or idea.

During the process of invention go to the library and wander around. Don't have too many preconceived notions about the sources you want to locate. Go to the card catalog (computerized or not), look at references, pick through periodicals, leaf through books and see if you are stuck by other ideas.

Talk With Colleagues

Seek out different opinions on your ideas by talking with colleagues, classmates, lab partners, group members and co-authors. Faced with vague ideas about what you want write, talking with someone, or a number of people, can help clarify them. Encourage questions. While people familiar with your ideas can impart their experience and give other sources of information, it also helps to speak with someone outside your discipline or field, a layperson. For example you may tell a layperson, "I'm thinking about writing a report on the use of radioactive isotopes in lab experiments on campus." The layperson could ask, "What does this have to do with me?" You respond, "Well, once these isotopes are used, the radioactive waste must be stored in containers on campus." At that point the layperson could respond with a barrage of question, "How is this material be stored on campus? For how long? Where does go? How does it get here in the first place? How many departments use radioactive isotopes in experiments? Can stored radioactive material affect the ground water? What are the university safety regulations regarding radioactive material?"

By having colleagues and laypersons (these are not mutually exclusive groups) ask questions and listen to ideas about your work, you make connections. You can get an indication of the audience's concerns and reactions. And you can gauge your ability to explain ideas to people from various levels of knowledge.

Brainstorm and Free Write

Two related activities for curing "page fright", the irrational fear of a blank page, are brainstorming and free writing.

The purpose of brainstorming is discovery, to uncover about what you are curious, and in what you are interested. By listing your range of responses to a general topic, you can determine what ideas are important to a general topic. While structured thinking offers obvious advantages, brainstorming allows you to explore ideas that fall outside the structure. Frequently these are the best ideas you will have.

Brainstorming is reminiscent of word association techniques used by psychologists. In this instance, you are trying to write down as many ideas as possible on your chosen topic. To begin, set aside 10 to 15 uninterrupted minutes. Write the general topic on the top of the page. As quickly as you can list questions, words, phrases, ideas about your topic. Use lists, not sentences. Try not to stop writing during the allotted time. Don't worry about spelling or word choice, compose the list as quickly as you can.

Once you finish, sort out the list into ideas you think you can use, and ideas you cannot. Set aside the list of ideas you cannot use, but save it. Ideas are a valuable, recyclable resource. From your brainstorming list you can compose and outline, or begin free writing.

Free writing involves drawing connections among the elements in your brainstorming list and putting them into sentences or questions. Like brainstorming, the purpose of free writing is probing ideas through writing without a given framework or restrictions. Guidelines for free writing as much the same as brainstorming. Set aside a certain amount of uninterrupted time. Think about the general topic and write, this time using complete sentences when possible, as quickly as you can during the allotted time. If you get stuck, abandon the thought and move to the next one, or pose questions. Try not to stop writing during the allotted time. Don't worry about spelling or word choice, compose as quickly as you can.

After you finish you should have a mess, incomplete sentences, questions following questions and awkward sentences. Much of this work will not find its way into the next draft. But scattered in the verbal wreckage you will find something you can use, questions that will guide research or sentences around which paragraphs are organized. Free writing gives you a chance to sift through your ideas and start linking them together.

Visualize

From the process of brainstorming and free writing, you an establish further links among ideas by sketching them. Two formal techniques for sketching are idea trees and idea universes. With both techniques the idea is roughly the same. Take the main idea and put it at the top of the tree, or in the center of the universe. Smaller ideas connecting to the main idea can be drawn as branch longer or shorter branches, or planets in orbits closer to, or further from, the sun. Each of the branches may have several corollary ideas, the leaves of the tree, and each planet may have accompanying satellites. The purpose of these techniques is to get you to actually see the links among ideas you are making, a cognitive map. As you move forward in the process of invention, you can revise drawing, changing the hierarchy, extending connections and eliminating others. Translated into other visual forms, flow charts, diagrams, models, these drawings also serve as rough drafts for the visual aids illustrating your ideas.

Use Outlines To Think Rhetorically

Typically outlines are used to break down the elements of a document, then arrange and refine them. And later in the chapter we will look at patterns of developing ideas that lend themselves to these types of outlines. But during the invention stage, outlines can be used for another purpose, to think rhetorically.

Thinking rhetorically involves assessing the writing situation in terms of problems and solutions. Inexperienced writers often spend more time in the writing process analyzing the solution, adjusting items in the text itself, than the problem, studying the requirements of the writing situation. Often when we analyze how great musicians play, cooks cook, dancers dance, or scientists "do science" we talk about the performance itself, how magically the elements just come together (Eureka!). One of the popular slogans of an athletic outfitting company is "Just do it", as if, without preparation, you can shoot a three-point shot, run a marathon or spike a volleyball. Almost all of "just doing it" is "just doing" years of practice. When we outline and draft documents we concentrate on the structure exclusively as the means to a solution, the document. To get to an effective structure we must spend our time thinking about setting up the problem we can solve. One way to think about the problems you have when drafting a paper is to consider you have not given yourself an equation you can answer. There are still too many variables. To eliminate some of the variables in writing, you need to assemble outlines that ask and answer questions regarding audience, relationship, rhetorical purpose, and context.

Audience

Who will read your document? The audience for scientific and technical writing is often cast in two mutually exclusive ways, experts and laypersons. However, such a distinction is useless unless understood as the endpoints on a broad continuum. Expert knowledge, for example, may only apply only to a few people within a narrowly defined field of study. Professional, physicians and lawyers for example, often look at journals in other field, electronics, linguistics, cognitive science, to learn about the techniques and research results. These professionals are not laypersons in the strict sense of the term, but are trying to learn new information. The knowledge of laypersons is also quite diverse. For example, a popular strategy for reaching wider audiences is through analogies; comparing features of a concept or technology with an idea or item within the audience's experience. The success of using analogies is limited by the audience's experience.

In the Phadrus (275e), Socrates notes one of the curious features of written texts:

... And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, what ever it may be drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.

Socrates points out a problem all writers face. Once a document is out their hands, writers can neither control the impressions of readers, nor control in whose hands a document will ultimately end. However, by making careful, educated guesses about audiences, writers need not worry about rushing to the "defense" of their documents.

Relationship

What is your relationship to the person(s) reading the document? The choices you make in writing a document, structure, vocabulary, tone, indicates your relationship to the reader. Generally, what counts as appropriate communication is a product of how relationships among people are defined. Writing to a potential employer, for instance, demands a different set strategies, and presumes a different set of values, than writing to a childhood friend. The formal tone you use in addressing a potential employer might seem artificial and raise concern when used with a close friend. All our of writing indicates our relationship to the reader. The standard structure and impersonal tone of a form letter lets the reader know they are dealing with an institution, not an individual. Many people fail to closely read form letters because they are impersonal. In some cases, the relationships among writers and readers are traditional and easily determined, friendly, hostile, passionate, uncaring. As our society and our roles in it become more diverse, however, you must look at the aspects of culture, and how you understand them, in determining the relationships in which writers and readers are situated.

How each of us perceive of relationships is a consequence of the culture in which we participate. The social roles writers and readers play is often defined as a function of race, class and gender. How we see ourselves and depict our relationships to others is based on a system of cultural values. This system of values grows out of the social institutions in which we are raised, family, neighborhood, religion, civic groups, schools and careers. Our interaction with these institutions partially depends on our age, wealth, race and gender. For example, writers of computer software manuals have a detailed profile of their consumers, who buys particular software, their level of education, their likely socio-economic status and their interests and hobbies. The tone and layout of the manual reflects the detailed assumptions of the reader profile. While the relationship between the reader and writer occurs within a system of values, keep in mind that 'class', for instance, is an abstract concept, not a concrete thing we can see or touch. As a result, how a system of values impacts, or informs, us is neither always clearly defined nor completely comprehensible. The social roles readers and authors scientific and technical writing play defines, and is defined by, a system of cultural values.

Writing Scientific and Technical Texts
Chapter 3: Part 1

James H. Collier with David M. Toomey

Book Contents

Chapter 3: Part 1

Writing Scientific and Technical Texts Chapter 3: Part 1

James H. Collier with David M. Toomey

Book Contents

Chapter 3: Part 1

Writing Scientific and Technical Texts
Chapter 3: Part 1