Understanding the Tech Comm Field in Terms of Practical Solutions to Common Problems

Selfe and Selfe’s article that begins the Johnson-Eilola and Selber text, Solving Problems in Technical Communication, provides readers with a heuristic for understanding the field of technical communication. Designed for those interested in mapping the field of technical writing and inspired by the wonder of a student looking for a concrete way to describe who profession, Selfe and Selfe first explain the elusiveness of providing a concrete definition for technical communication and offer readers ideas for systematically using text clouds to produce easily digestible data sets from written documents (p. 20).

By creating text clouds, the authors of this article explain how technical communicators wishing to answer the question, “What are the boundaries, artifacts, and identities of technical communication” (p. 21)? can use available computer programs to create a unique, yet distinct, model for understanding the values of their area of interests. To understand text clouds, though, is to interpret ideas from a given position and requires, according to Selfe and Selfe, that users of these creative representations understand the rhetorical implications of such a creation either as a creator of text clouds or end-consumer (p. 33).

The examples this article relies on to make their point are ones centered around the recognition of five key steps to determining whether or not a text cloud represents data in a way that becomes useful to users. While these steps are heuristic in nature, the authors first model them abstractly outside of a specific context and then offer a concrete example of these steps being used to better understand a data set comparable to those one might face in the technical communication profession.

Since this articles main focus is to provide a heuristic method for understanding the field of technical writing, I can see why the authors avoided contextualizing word clouds in terms of how they can be taught as effective tools for our own students’ uses. Also, even though this article focuses rightfully so on the rhetorical implications revolving text clouds, I found myself wondering at some point whether or not I was reading an article that should be interpreted through the lens of a teacher attempting to pick up strategies for teaching effective technical communications or if I was reading about how I myself should consider text clouds when I enter the professional world of technical communication. After looking back through the article with this idea in mind, I see minimal references to student/teacher relationships inside the technical communications classroom and instead believe that I find this article to be geared more towards those wishing to improve their own skills as professional technical communicators.

This led me top the question of how I might include word clouds in my own lesson plans for a technical communications class so that students were able to realize how useful the creation of these infographics can be? Should this type of representation or model for understanding be taught in the contexts of other infographic-type models for meaning making? Or maybe in a tech comm class instead the focus would be on teaching students how to effectively interpret word clouds and how to assess the underlying rhetorical implications of such a representation? Maybe there are other ways to include word clouds without overtly teaching them as having a five step heuristic model for interpretation/creation……and if there are, what might those heuristic models look like?

These questions alone were enough to make me at least consider the purpose of having this article appear first in Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s collection. Since this text is designed to be a book offering practical models for solving tech comm problems, maybe the idea of easing into practical applications was abandoned in order to focus on real-world possibilities. If so, I’m quite fine with that, but what I am attempting to note is how the seemingly abrupt beginning to this collection struck me as dissimilar to the organization of other texts with relatable topics of consideration. Nevertheless, I ultimately agree with Selfe and Selfe’s conclusions and find myself wanting to come up with some meaningful way to include rhetorical consideration of various representations in my own technical communication classes.