McGee & Ericsson
This article is a tale of the little man (composition instructor) against the big monster (microsoft). Microsoft, rampant, invading, is stuffing its notions of grammar into minds across the world. Teachers cannot enter the homes and workplaces of students as Microsoft word can and so their influence, in comparison to the computer’s, is minimal.
I agree that most people, myself included, don’t stop to think about who designed this technology. We just use it and how it works only becomes a concern if it breaks. When word corrects my grammar I envision…will I don’t envision anything I just say, “o.k. The computer says so,” as if the computer were a person. Sometimes I correct (usually with word spellings) and sometimes I ignore what the spell check says (if it doesn’t make sense to me or I don’t understand the rule, but mostly if it doesn’t make sense to me). I don’t think the researchers give enough credit to users. Grammar isn’t my strong suit but I know enough about language to know that sometimes a certain way of constructing a sentence sounds right. Even if we don’t think about how the computer and its programs are designed we still know that they are machines and have imperfections and make mistakes. True, less confident writers may rely more heavily on the spell check but even so…I don’t think the Microsoft grammar check has quite the death hold that the authors make it out to have. I see plenty of mistakes in my writing and in student writing to know that the spelling and grammar check is often ignored.
As far as solutions, I definitely think we should continue to learn in depth about grammar because it is studying how language works and functions; it is a study of patterns.
Slattery
This reading was interesting because I know nothing about technical writing. The notion of people sifting through e-mails, text messages, pdf files, and old drafts in order to compile a new but not unique text is so strange to me. Technical writers are putting pieces of a puzzle together. What disturbs me is that they don’t have expertise in what they are piecing together. Do they learn about the subject as they work on it? I imagine that they would because they’re reading about it. It’s also weird how work gets over distributed so that nobody really knows what’s going on. This doesn’t surprise me because you see it anytime you are trying to get answers from a company. I still remember being a student with a financial aid question and the woman at the desk didn’t have an answer. She didn’t try to find out what my concern was; she just knew it wasn’t her department. She repeated the same line over and over again. “Go to building such and such, third floor. Go to building such and such, third floor.” It seemed like she spent a good amount of her life behind that desk. I imagine the drawers were quite organized and clean because her area of responsibility was limited. It’s dangerous to the intellect to have work divided up like that where what you are an expert in is such a small piece that you don’t even really understand your role in it. The work scene that Slattery describes for technical writers is affected by this type of distribution. I know that writing is used for different reasons and by different people. I suppose technical writing strikes me as being of the writers’ lack of knowledge in the subject and because of the strategy of shifting around different texts to form one final version. It’s very bizarre but an interesting look at how written language is alive because it is so much a function of society. Is it meant to serve a poetic function? A secretive function? In the case of technical writing…a conglomeration of disconnected experts.
April 21, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I liked your reflections on the distributedness of contemporary professional writing. Though, I wouldn’t limit the kind of “textual coordination” that Slattery describes to just technical writers. The point is that computers have changed writing processes for most writers, students and “SME” professionals alike.
Most companies that hire technical writers prefer the writer to have some familiarity with the subject. That is why we encourage our English majors who want to become tech writers to get a minor in an area they think they want to write in, e.g., computers, science, engineering. Tech writers are employed in all sectors. Tech writers also argue, however, that their non-expert status helps them think like the typical user so that they can ask questions from the experts, who can’t even seem to agree on how many cables are in the widget. Prior to tech writers, it was mostly the engineers doing the writing. That was when instructions and manuals were *REALLY* bad. Another problem now is with outsourcing. A lot of instructions are bing writting in India and China. And they are mostly *REALLY* badly written.