Scientific and Technical Communication: Theory, Practice and Policy

The Process and Product of Writing

The collaborative process is, contextually defined, more effective in some parts of the writing process than in others. The generalizations provided here need to be examined in light of your group dynamic and individual preferences.

Collaboration is effective in the process of invention, especially when one needs to generate ideas. It is often easier to generate ideas when a number of people participate in the process of brainstorming. Group brainstorming sessions require a facilitator and record keeper to keep ideas flowing, to get as many contributions from as many people as possible and to have a list of these ideas for future reference. Groups can meet subsequent to brainstorming sessions to choose which ideas to pursue, organize them and assign subjects and deadline to individual members.

The act of composing is a solitary activity embedded in all of the interactive aspects of thinking and writing. While writers usually draft documents individually, they continue to perform research, talk with colleagues, write and modify outlines. Even a writer who thinks herself alone is not alone. Because of increased access to information through electronic communication, shared data bases and information networks, each writer has become more reliant on other writers. Writers are have also reliant on how data bases and networks are organized, and the available skills and resources to use them. Computer networks and electronic mail provide a medium for an immediate exchange and feedback on drafts. Still, many writer prefer to write drafts alone and without interruption.

Collaboration is also quite effective in the process of revising and editing a document. People with a variety of viewpoints can evaluate ideas and their presentation. Written feedback allows you to systematically go back and revise your prose. Here the writing process become genuinely recursive when, after drafting the document, you go back to integrate your work with the suggestions of collaborators.

Document production is also aided by collaboration. Major proposals, manuals and newsletter have a number of elements, photographs, tables, graphic art, appendixes. Under normal circumstances, individual writers cannot professional reproduce all of these elements. In the production stage of document design it is necessary to bring in collaborators, editors, graphic designers, to aid in putting together the document.

The Interpersonal Benefits

Collaborative writing acts is a social threshold over which employees pass. Collaborative writing provides a situation in which the standards and values of a profession are made known to new employees. Employees involved with different levels of a profession get a chance exchange ideas and views about goals and policies. People like to working toward a common, defined goal. Members of a team like competing against other teams and sharing credit and blame. Organizations can coordinate their efforts easily when teams work together as opposed to the same number of individuals working separately.

When professionals and researchers come together from different backgrounds, they construct aspects of larger conversation in which questions of professional values and public welfare can be addressed. Inter- disciplinary and professional collaboration is a social threshold that leads to the lay public. Science and technology, as well as other professions, are seen as socially insular. When scientists and technologists venture into the public sphere, they receive the benefits of the consumer's wisdom concerning their products. In return, the public receives a needed education about two institutions that profoundly affect their lives.

Recommendations and Guidelines

Agree to a set of goals as well as strategies and procedures for reaching that goal. After formulating ideas, the participants must determine what the subject of the document will be. Accordingly the audience, relationship, rhetorical purpose and context for the document need consideration in light of requirement regarding deadlines, length, organization and style. If you anticipate problems in coordinating meetings or deadlines, try to set up a fixed schedule as early in the writing process as possible.

Define specific roles an the outset. In longer documents, the group can assign chapters to individuals, or who conducts research for the group, does the actual writing or checks and revises the draft. Be clear that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities at the outset to make the process as smooth as possible. Choose a coordinators as soon as possible. It will be their responsibility to chair meetings facilitate the exchange of ideas, and arbitrate disputes.

Discuss openly the group dynamic. Consider two groups of collaborative writers who reach a consensus in one of the following ways:

(1) The members of the first group come to agreement by deciding individually to do the same thing;
(2) The members of the second group come to agreement by a collective decision to do the same thing. 9

Reaching consensus in (1) occurs, if at all, by accident. The reasons why I may have reached an agreement on a particular subject in a document is unrelated to how my collaborators reached their decision. Unless we thrash out the our differences like the second group in (2), we cannot justify our choices in the long run. Justification, especially in science, is an important feature in the reporting research findings. In defining the goals of the group, consider how you want to reach them. Consensus among group members is not a necessary condition for successful collaboration, especially a consensus built on false assumptions and expectations.

Constraints and Limitations

The writing process is built around many constraints and limitations. Since the writing process is complex, we face limited knowledge about, and access to, some of its components. Most profound are our own cognitive limitations. We are imperfect knowers. Our knowledge ourselves and the elements of writing, audience, purpose, relationship and context, are neither complete nor available on personal reflection. What we know about ourselves and our own practices is limited, and made possible, by our cognitive capacities and the social contexts in which we live and work. In this book, we offer other ways of thinking about how social contexts influence, and are influenced by, our writing process.

Along with cognitive and social constraints there are other practical limitations including audience constraints, format constraints and subject constraints and time constraints.

Audience Constraints

Audiences for scientific and technical writing are varied. And like ourselves our audiences are composed of imperfect knowers. Due to the perceived universality of scientific knowledge, uniform training and homogenous population of scientists and technologists, the audience for technical documents is also portrayed as homogenous. But there is an increase in the representation of women and minorities in science and technology. Laypersons are becoming more interested in the effect science and technology have on their lives. These new audiences for scientific and technical writing will have different backgrounds and expectation. You cannot expect an audience to pick up every point you see as important. Even technical language generates many associations and interpretations.

Audiences for technical documents have several reasons for reading them. Members of your audience will occupy different positions within an organization. Lay persons may want to read the document. All of these people will have varying levels of expertise, insight and reason. If, for example, you have been retained by the town council to report which proposed highway route would most benefit to the town, you know you cannot just talk about how the road is engineered. Politicians, town residents, environmentalists, transportation officials and other engineers will have access to the document. Unfortunately, you are unable to determine the needs and technical expertise of all member of the audience. Even in a memo distributed to a few people within your department, there will exist some discrepancy between what you think you say and how others understand the information.

As a result, you will need to respond to the needs of a variety of readers. Since you cannot know or anticipate all their needs, you will have to make decisions about the level of technical complexity, organization and design of the document. By considering scientific and technical writing in context, you increase your choices and ability to provide choice for readers.

Format and Subject Constraints

Scientific and technical writing is prescriptive. There are formats and standards for presenting material. These formats outline the choices required by the writer by framing the expectations of the reader. In so doing, document formats constrain the writer and reader's choices. Lay persons unfamiliar with the format of a document have limited access to its contents. If there is disagreement about a finding or results of a study, its uniform presentation smoothes over areas of discrepancy. You do not see, for example, a member of a research team who has some questions about an experiment providing a side-bar comment in a journal article. An document 's prescribed format infers that the writers adhere to the values of a discipline, profession and journal. Readers, especially outside readers, wanting to challenge the content of a document challenge not only the writers, but to some degree challenge the sponsoring discipline or profession of the writer and the standards of the journal and publishing house.

Subjects provide constraints by their complexity. Scientific and technical writers use jargon as shorthand to avoid unpacking concepts with which they are unfamiliar. Some subjects, by nature, appear impossible to convey to certain audiences. Although the subject and format of many scientific and technical documents is frequently preordained, writers must focus on details suitable to the audience's interests. In theory, no subject is too complicated for a lay audience to understand.

Time Constraints

Scientific and technical writers are always bound by time limits, usually by people who don't understand the demands of the project. The amount of time you have to complete a project, with respect to the project itself, limits the amount of other resources, research, collaborators, production quality, you bring to writing about it. Larger projects require extensive planning and will have intermediate deadlines requiring status and progress reports, and revisions. Shorter projects may not require as much planning and only cursory revisions. Within deadlines for a project other things happen. People get sick. Computer hard drives and floppy disks crash. Research is delayed. Collaborators disagree. You change your mind about the contents of the document.

Many organizations provide computer software or use time management techniques and evaluation charts to keep writers on track. These strategies map out the relationship of activities in the writing process upon one another. When planning a writing schedule, anticipate delays. If, after careful planning, you determine a writing project will take three months, add another 40 to 50 percent, a month and a half in this instance, to the final deadline. Remember, it always takes longer than it takes.

Cognitive and Social Constraints

Our knowledge of the components of writing is filtered through the social institutions, academic disciplines, fields, professions, in which we participate. Knowledge and information are socially constrained and defined. Academic disciplines, for example, organize their subject matter by specialized word use, borrowing language from other disciplines, and determining criteria for what counts or does not count as knowledge. The boundaries around disciplines and professions are artificial, drawn at the risk of excluding the perspectives, methods and insights of other disciplines and professions. As professional specializations and accompanying boundaries increase, practitioners isolate themselves from one another and the public.

The French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878) defined the normal state of an organism's health as an equilibrium between blood and lymph flow (its milieu interieur). For example, to compensate for a rise in outside temperature (the milieu exterieur) a mammal's blood vessels would constrict allowing heat to escape from its body; thereby restoring the balance between the mammal's internal and external conditions. For Bernard, disease was defined from the patient's standpoint, a temporary inability to adapt to an organic imbalance. The job of the physician was to determine how well or poorly a patient made necessary adjustments to their surroundings and prescribe treatment accordingly.

Bernard's model of disease and treatment drew a strict boundary between experimental medicine and concurrent developments in microbiology and evolutionary biology in two ways. First, diseases was understood as organic imbalance not as an infection from a pathogenic agent. Second, from the physician's standpoint an organic imbalance could, in principle, always be medically corrected. With the physician's help, and given the right treatment, an organism could adapt to radical change in environment. Theories regarding microbes and human evolution had no place in Bernard's concept of medicine. As a result, Bernard's discipline may have been partly to blame for the slow acceptance of microbiology and evolutionary biology in nineteenth century France. 10 Our knowledge and actions are bound and liberated by the social contexts in which they arise.

Discussion

1. In many activities, writing, painting, dancing, laboratory experimentation, playing sports or music, teaching, there is the persistent notion that great writers, painters or scientists have special ability that makes them great. This ability is ineffable - something which cannot be described and cannot be taught to others. Do you believe that any practitioner entering a field must possess, to some degree, this ability - a minimal, but equally inexpressible ability to perform certain tasks? Why?

2. Do you think writing is crucial to the conduct of science or engineering? Why or why not? Do you see similarities between how the writing process and the experimental process are carried out? What are the similarities and differences?

3. One of the ideas presented in this chapter is that the universal acceptance of scientific knowledge can be explained, in part, by the uniform way in which scientists write. Do you agree or disagree? Do you think it is in the best interests of producing and communicating knowledge, in science and your particular discipline, that practitioners express themselves in the same way? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having standard forms of communication?

4. How do you think social organizations, schools, academic disciplines, religious organizations, professions, shape the way your write? Do you agree with the idea that your self-expression is partially, or wholly, the product of factors such as race, class and gender? Why or why not? Do cultural values influence the way we write? If so, what cultural values influence your writing? Do you think these cultural values are understood or communicated by individuals to groups of people? What kinds of values does science and technology embody? How does scientific and technical writing convey those values? Give an example from a document that you prepared recently.

5. One of the primary considerations of modern scientific and technical communication is audience. This consideration was shared in the Athenian forum. But fear existed that unscrupulous speakers, given their intimate knowledge of the audience, could manipulate them to do things they otherwise would not do. In an age of increasing professional specialization, this fear has been revived in another form; namely, that specialists are content to write just for one another. Do you think familiarity with an audience is always a benefit to the writer? Do you think increasing specialization helps or hurts a writer? Do you think a writer's reputation helps, or gets in the way of in writing and reading a text? When do you think familiarity with the audience is harmful? Do you think professionals and experts must be encouraged to write so that a lay audience can understand what is being said? Why or why not?

Exercises

1. Begin a journal in which you honestly compare your writing process to the model of the writing process presented in this chapter. What are the similarities and differences between how you actually write and the recommendations offered in this chapter? What do you think are important aspects of writing that you follow which are not mentioned in the chapter? Try to keep this journal for the entire semester documenting the ways you approach different assignment, different strategies you try and the results.

2. Many of you have had pervious experience with collaborative writing and peer review. In a letter to your instructor, tell them what you think the strengths and weakness of collaborative writing are. In writing the letter you can use the criteria listed in this chapter as jumping off point. Do some projects lend themselves to collaboration more readily than others? How did the group divide the labor? Did one person do all the work? Were drafts of appears checked and approved by everyone in the group? Were group Can peers assess each other's work honestly? Is peer review better when it is anonymous? If the instructor is using peer review in the class, what ideas or suggestion do you have for making peer review session more effective?

Works Cited and Consulted

Anderson, Paul V. "What Survey Research Tell Us about Writing at Work," Writing in Nonacademic Settings. Eds. Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami. New York: Guilford Press, 1985. 3-85.

Bazerman, Charles. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Britton, Earl W. "What Is Technical Writing? A Redefinition," College Composition and Communication Vol. 16 (May 1965): 113-116.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Technical Communication. 2nd. ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990.

Ede, Lisa and Andrea S. Lunsford. Singular Texts, Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

Fuller, Steve. Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.

Fuller, Steve. Social Epistemology. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988.

Gallison, Peter and Bruce Heavly (eds.) Big Science. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Kirkpatrick, David. "Here Comes the Payoff from PCs." Fortune, March 23, 1992.

Knorr-Cetina, Karin. The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford: Pergamon, 1980.

Kraut, Robert, Jolene Gallegher and Carmen Egido "Relationships and Tasks in Scientific Research Collaboration," Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Proceedings, 1986.

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life. London: Sage, 1979.

Markel, Michael H. Technical Writing Situations and Strategies. 3rd. ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Mendelsohn, Everett. "Explanation in Nineteenth Century Biology," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Eds. Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. Vol. 2 Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1964. 127-50.

Middleman, Louis I. In Short: A Concise Guide to Good Writing. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

Pickering, Andrew. (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992,

Price, Derek de Solla. Little Science, Big Science and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Williams, Joseph M. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

1 One the stated goals of science is to uncover the "laws of nature." Since laws of nature are universal you could, ideally, deduce an explanation of a naturally occurring event from a set of premises that included a statement of the appropriate law of nature and a statement of relevant conditions which caused the phenomenon to occur.

2 One definition of technical writing stresses that good technical writing conveys only one meaning so that the reader interprets the material in only one way. See W. Earl Britton, "What Is Technical Writing? A Redefinition," College Composition and Communication Vol. 16 (May 1965): 113-116. By assuring that a document has only one interpretation, the writer helps to assure the universal acceptance of specific knowledge claims.

3 The benchmark for this research is Robert Merton's The Sociology of Science Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977, but in this section we will be drawing on ideas presented by Charles Bazerman Shaping Written Knowledge Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987 and Steve Fuller Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.

4 See, for example, Andrew Pickering (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. London: Sage, 1979, and Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford: Pergamon, 1980.

5 Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions uses the phrase "puzzle solving" to illustrate the daily activities of scientists who rarely perform truly original research, but work to flesh out details and answer questions about a defined subject.

6 These strategies were inspired by Chapters 2 and 5 of Louis I. Middleman's book In Short: A Concise Guide to Good Writing. New York: St, Martin's Press, 1981.

7 See for example Ede, Lisa and Andrea S. Lunsford Singular Texts, Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), Paul V. Anderson "What Survey research Tell Us about Writing at Work," in Writing in Nonacademic Settings, ed. Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami (New York: Guilford Press, 1985, 3-85), and Robert Kraut, Jolene Gallegher and Carmen Egido "Relationships and Tasks in Scientific Research Collaboration," Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Proceedings (1986). Peter Gallison and Bruce Heavly in (eds.) Big Science. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992 explain the development of pidgin and "Creole" technical languages in big scientific projects requiring many scientists and engineers from different disciplinary backgrounds.

8 See for example Ede, Lisa and Lunsford (1989) and Kraut, Gallegher and Egido (1986).

9 This distinction is introduced by Steve Fuller in Chapter Nine of Social Epistemology (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988.)

10 See Everett Mendelsohn "Explanation in Nineteenth Century Biology," in Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky (eds.) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2 Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1964, pp. 127-50. See also Steve Fuller Social Epistemology. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989, pp. 197-98.

Writing Scientific and Technical Texts
Chapter 3: Part 3

James H. Collier with David M. Toomey

Book Contents

Chapter 3: Part 3

Writing Scientific and Technical Texts Chapter 3: Part 3

James H. Collier with David M. Toomey

Book Contents

Chapter 3: Part 3

Writing Scientific and Technical Texts
Chapter 3: Part 3