just motivating myself to revise...

Hilary Anne Ward
English 9990: Preparation for the Qualifying Exam
QE preface—draft
Sept. 13, 2006

Both as a research field and as a professional practice, the history of technical communication “is in the very early stages of being written” (Savage, p. 4). In the early 1990s, histories of technical communication as an academic discipline began to appear with Russell (1991), Adams (1993), Kynell (1994) and Rivers (1999) contributing the most “important” or widely read and cited historical accounts (Kynell and Moran, p. 1). While these historical accounts vary in scope and focus, a common thread in the mainstream historical narrative is the conclusion that technical communication “functions interdisciplinarily” (Johnson, p. 14), drawing on research strategies and methods from other scholarly fields associated with technology and communication. The authors of these histories use the story of technical communication as an interdisciplinary field, in turn, to explain both technical communication’s “strong and penetrating perspective” [Johnson, p. 14] and its enduring “identity crisis” [Johnson-Eilola, cite].