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In “Surveying the stories we tell: English, communication, and the rhetoric of our surveys of rhetoric”, Ianetta and Fredal (2006) point out that disciplinary histories are not objective records but “fictionalized accounts” that “engage questions of territoriality and power” (p. 186). While Ianetta and Fredal’s survey focuses on disciplinary histories of rhetoric, their observations also apply to the history of technical communication – a history that, as Savage notes in the preface to Power and Legitimacy in Technical Communication, “is in the very early stages of being written” (p. 4).

While technical communication has existed as an academic discipline since its inception as [deal with this crap about the Morrill act later], no “important” or widely circulating disciplinary history emerged until the early 1990s: Connors’ The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America, Russell’s (1991) Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990, Adams’ (1993) A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges, Kynell’s (1994) Writing in the Milieu of Utility.

Like the histories of rhetoric reviewed by Ianetta and Fredal, these emerging histories of technical communication are “shaped by the tensions inherent in disciplinary status” (p. 186); put in more concrete terms, histories of technical communication must prove that an area once associated with “wretched” writing, “younger faculty members or various fringe people” and “professional suicide” has “truly” attained “a state of efficiency and productive professionalism”(p. 192).

As with all “fictionalized accounts”, disciplinary histories sometimes dwell on noble themes to “overlook the current situation” and “dwell instead on a glorious and regal past” (p. 186). Like the histories of rhetoric reviewed by Ianetta and Fredal, disciplinary histories of technical communication “meditate” on one recurring theme: the “expansive interdisciplinarity” of the discipline (p. 186). According to the mainstream historical narrative, technical communication always “functions interdisciplinarily” (Johnson, p. 14), drawing on research strategies and methods from other scholarly fields associated with technology and communication. Insert quotes from the sources listed above.

The (his)tory of technical communication as an interdisciplinary field provides an overarching explanation for the field’s unseemly “paradoxes, disagreements and contradictions” , and accounts for both technical communication’s “strong and penetrating perspective” [Johnson, p. 14] and its enduring “identity crisis” [Johnson-Eilola, cite].

However, it does not matter whether the authors praise or blame interdisciplinarity in any given historical account; as Ianetta and Fredal note, the scholarly discussion of interdisciplinarity lends “metatheoretical sophistication” to a discipline that [insert a statement about tech comm’s theoretical naivete].

However, these mainstream disciplinary histories are always incomplete: they smooth over “indelicacies”, concealing gaps, contradictions and silences. While the story of technical communication’s interdisciplinary history sparks “critical self-reflection” (cite) to explain the “persistent disagreements” about the “knowledge domain” of technical communication (Savage, p. 21) , technical communication has not always functioned “interdisciplinarily”.

For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s – the same era in which the mainstream histories emerged – the disciplines that “nourish” technical communication developed a new emphasis : underlife studies. Drawing on Goffman’s work on underlife in public institutions from sociology research two decades earlier, the disciplines of organizational sociology (cite), literacy studies (cite) and composition began to investigate “insert quote”. However, despite the fact that technical communication is closely allied to these disciplines [rephrase this] and despite Brooke’s observation that “insert quote”, technical communication has not developed a corresponding emphasis in underlife as an area of research. Viswaswaran notes that [insert quote about attending to silences] ; as [name of reviewer] says about [the one guy who never wrote about underlife when anthropologists were studying it] , technical communication’s neglect of underlife is not “merely accidental” (p).