When did I become so disgusted with empty things? : the first time that I clutched my stomach before eating a hollow chocolate bunny, did I realize that my heart had also changed?

news and announcements

As of Oct. 26, the cast of under construction is pleased to welcome two new characters:




Updates to follow as the sketches gradually acquire detail.

not teaching

now:

Watch me spend the final hour of my ominous deadline looking for a paperclip.

the

emptiness of finishing something.

it's dark outside again

This gap in technical communication’s interdisciplinary history reveals an underlying disconnect between technical communication theory, which posits a fluid and interdisciplinary field, and our tacit knowledge that technical communication is inextricably tied to “industrial settings” (Savage, p. 3) .

and the wind blew and the snow snowed

However, as fictionalized accounts with the persuasive goal of claiming territory and power, these mainstream disciplinary histories are inherently incomplete: “we tend to avoid unseemliness when telling familial stories” (Ianetta and Fredal, p. 186). Indeed, while the story of technical communication as a historically interdisciplinary field smoothes over our “persistent disagreements” about the “knowledge domain” of technical communication (Savage, p. 21), technical communication has not always functioned “interdisciplinarily”.

...

Overheard [mostly by Jessica]last night at the Olympic Grill.

writing....

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).

...

Did you get my phone message? Asked Sarah L. urgently.
No.

Did you see?, she said, pointing to the computer screen.
Yeah. So?

Hasn't graduate school taught you anything about close reading, she stammered and began to read aloud with the thud of her hand punctuating every word.

bad news -- updated

A montage of email headers ranked least to most ominous:

Date: Mon 3 Apr 17:25:35 EDT 2006
From: Royanne Smith Add To Address Book | This is Spam
Subject: Classroom Observation
To: Hilary_anne@wayne.edu
Cc: lbrill@wayne.edu

Date: Thu 19 Oct 17:25:42 EDT 2006
From: Margaret Maday Add To Address Book | This is Spam
Subject: Boiler Project - 5057 Woodward
To: EVERYONE-SO-FAR@lists.wayne.edu

Date: Fri 7 Apr 10:21:37 EDT 2006
From: Katie Gutowski Add To Address Book | This is Spam
Subject: DO NOT USE STAIRWELL
To: EVERYONE-SO-FAR@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

Date: Tue 6 Sep 17:01:31 EDT 2005
From: Margaret Maday Add To Address Book | This is Spam
Subject: Extra Students
To: EVERYONE-SO-FAR@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

doom

Date: Tue 17 Oct 12:28:19 EDT 2006
From: "dissertation advisor" ab0128@wayne.edu Add To Address Book | This is Spam
Subject: QE preface and list
To: HILARY WARD ag9521@wayne.edu
Cc: "other advisor" ae8683@wayne.edu

Hi Hilary: Can we expect to find your revised preface and list in our
mailboxes this Friday? I'm feeling the need for some stimulating
reading over the weekend.

fragments of rationality

Images cropped from a storyboard about my workday.

...

side effects

Note: This permalink from bloggerandme suggests that I've been in bed for four seasons, dreaming...

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].

and

I think I am in love with everyday life. This morning I felt a twinge of sadness on seeing my checkered blouse for the last time in the hamper, then cheered up in anticipation of finally seeing the blouse on someone who can wear light green.

2007 ATTW proposal

Title: 2007 ATTW proposal
By: Hilary

While professionals exert social control by positioning themselves “as the sole providers of vital, knowledge-based services” (Faber, 2006, p. 315), recent work in professional communication suggests that this “professional dominance” (Faber, p. 322) is not absolute. Medical patients, for example, deploy a range of “discursive” and “bodily” countermeasures to “resist medical regulatory rhetoric” (Koeber, p. 87). However, no scholarly work has examined how these acts of “rhetorical agency and resistance” (p. 87), in turn, impact and change the “mainstream medical discourse” (Koeber, p. 93).

This paper, then, examines the impact of patients’ networked writing on one form of change in the mainstream medical discourse: depathologization, the process by which medical pathologies are reclassified as neutral traits. As virtual communities of individuals with a common medical diagnosis emerge over wide-area networks [WANs], these communities gradually break away from the medical community to establish a community identity that is not based on a medical-pathological model. These new communities are then poised to argue for depathologization.

I will examine the role of networked writing in the depathologization of several virtual communities, focusing on how the networked writing of the autism community has transformed mainstream medical discourse about autism as reflected in recent moves from within mainstream medical discourse to depathologize autism (Attwood, 2006).

it's hard, you know--

warming up to a new blog in October.

subtitle for preface draft:

"My preface: A prelude to a nonexistent fugue of empty brackets".

marranito

In English, I am eating a a "ginger pig".

use of foreshadowing

"Hwaet: So the new TAs took one look at me and wrote me off: What's she doing here? And no one bothers me for sage advice in the office.

So new girl 1 says / oh no, I lost my key.

New girl 2 replies / they probably have a spare one in the main office that you can use for today.

Oh good, says new girl 1 / who would I see about that.

I don't know says new girl 2 / but I think her name is like Margaret M--

But what do I know, you know, so I didn't say nothing."

ten seconds later

5 free days