Does Clio Have a Place in Technical Writing? Considering Patents in a History of Technical Communication

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. John Brockmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Technical Communication ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Science Writing ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Technical Writers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Writing Standards

Technical writers need a historical perspective in order to distinguish between enduring and transitory writing standards, to understand the variety of past styles in building future styles, and to give the profession a better sense of self-identity. To overcome the problems in developing a historical perspective, such as a dearth of artifacts to examine and the peculiarities in rhetorical time and place which undercut attempts to generalize on historical information, the 200 year-old federal collection of patents is offered as a solution. This collection of patents is also very often the only remaining written work of the ordinary mechanic of the nineteenth century, and this collection truly reflects technical not legal, business, or science writing.

John Lingard and the catholic revival

1977 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 313-327
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
English History ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Catholic Priest ◽  
Better Than

The nineteenth-century histories of England were inspired by and reflect the political and religious ideologies of the era; the liberal anglican school described by Duncan Forbes, the varieties of high church scholarship from Christopher Wordsworth to canon Dixon, the optimistic whiggery of Hallam and Macaulay, the protestant high toryism of Southey, the political protestantism of Froudc and the teutomania of Freeman. Most of these writers had two ideas in common; a strong sense of the importance of national history as a reinforcement of the English sense of self identity, and the oneness of English history. This was a view given classic expression m John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, and has been perpetuated by Trevelyan and Churchill into the twentieth century. Far better than most of his predecessors, Green’s history was more than just a history of the nation written from a partisan point of view, and owed its popularity as much to its breadth of sympathy as to the author’s gift for quicksilver generalisation and narration which move the reader on at the pace of a hare. In this last quality, it was most unlike the most popular nineteenth-century history of England before its publication, the work of a Roman catholic priest John Lingard, though Lingard also professed to rise above the turmoil of parties to write an impartial history.

Bibliography of Articles on the History of Technical Writing

1983 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. John Brockmann
Keyword(s):  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Technical Communication ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Technical Writers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Slow Evolution

This collection of thirty-six articles exposes the problem and the promise of historical research in technical writing. The central problem is that historical research in technical writing has too often been focused only on celebrated authors or scientists as technical writers. The central promise contained in some very recent essays is that historical research in technical communications is beginning to consider the slow evolution of technical communication taking place across a broad spectrum of both celebrated and uncelebrated writers. This historical approach, though more difficult to carry out, is immensely more accurate and meaningful.

scholarly journals Educating Technical Communication Teachers: The Origins, Development, and Present Status of the Course, “Teaching Technical Writing” at Illinois State University

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Gerald Savage
Keyword(s):  
Technical Communication ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Status ◽  
State University ◽  
Graduate Course ◽  
Communication Program ◽  
Illinois State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Communication Pedagogy

Since the early 1980s, Illinois State University’s English Department has educated numerous technical communication practitioners as well as dozens of teachers of technical communication throughout the United States. Today, the program’s faculty members are nationally recognized for their contributions to scholarship and education and its Ph.D. and M.A. students are sought after to teach in the technical communication programs of other universities. A critical component of this success was the development of the graduate course, Teaching Technical Writing in 1990. This essay situates the development of that course in the history not only of the technical communication program at Illinois State University but in the history of the technical communication field, particularly since 1950. Although the essay focuses on one course in one midsized, Midwestern U.S. University, it is, I believe, exemplary of the development and current status of technical communication pedagogy throughout the U.S.

Teaching the History of Technical Communication: A Lesson with Franklin and Hoover

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Todd
Keyword(s):  
Technical Communication ◽  
English Language ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Teaching History ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The University

The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The article provides and defends four guidelines as a foundation to study ways to incorporate history into classroom lessons: 1) maintain a continued research interest in teaching history; 2) limit to technical rather than scientific discourse; 3) focus on English-language texts; and 4) focus on American texts, authors, and practices. The second part of the essay works within the guidelines to show a lesson that contrasts technical texts by Benjamin Franklin and Herbert Hoover. The lesson can help students see the difference in technical writing before and after the Industrial Revolution, a difference that mirrors their own transition from the university to the workforce.

scholarly journals Han Yu (2015). The Other Kind of Funnies: Comics in Technical Communication. New York, NY: Baywood Publishing Company.

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 25-27
Author(s):  
Suzanne Rintoul
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Technical Communication ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graduate Courses ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Technical Writers ◽  
Communication Challenges

Han Yu’s "The Other Kind of Funnies: Comics in Technical Communication" challenges the notion that technical writing is too “rational” or “serious” to accommodate the conventions of comics-style communication. She does this by illustrating comics’ unique ability to distill and reinforce information in ways entirely appropriate not just for complementing the purposes of many technical writers, but also for fulfilling the needs of their diverse audiences. The book’s major strength lies in Yu’s capacity to locate the productive nexus between two ostensibly dissimilar modes so that by the final chapter those connections seem not only probable, but natural. This text will be especially useful to scholars of rhetoric (particularly those invested in visual culture and/or technical writing) and practitioners of technical writing eager to embrace new (or in some cases re-embrace older) ways of seeing the relationship between textual and visual elements. The clarity with which Yu distils complex theoretical concepts makes this book appropriate reading for undergraduate or graduate courses as well as for non-scholarly audiences.

Feedforward (ff) en Metaforische Transfer (mt) -Dimensies Van Technical Writers'

1984 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
J.W. Broer
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Technical Communication ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Communication Problems ◽  
Writing Problems ◽  
Technical Writers ◽  
The World ◽  
Technical Writer ◽  
Use Of Knowledge

A map of the world of 'technical' communication shows the (a, ß)-universe, flat country filled with language experts and scientists, including engineers. In the centre Technical Writing is situated, a territory in turmoil, on the border of α-land and ß-land. In the U.S.A. the territory is developing fast as the professional core of a new skill. As emigrants, many people of an α-type or ß-type nature end up in the territory. Having a problem of professional identity they possess a hy-brid personality. The attention paid to this problem causes them to lose sight of the two 'natural' forces of an emigrating individual, that is to say feedforward — an anticipative composition principle — and metaphoric transfer — 'as-if use of knowledge from the individual's professional past, to solve the communication problems met at present. Feedforward (Ivor A. Richards, 1893-1979) is a principle of creative action, proceeding from more generic to less (a top-down hier-archy); a number of 'formators' (Charles W. Morris and Bess Sondel), the tools for making text according to the feedforward scheme, are discussed. Nowadays visual elements as formators receive more emphasis. Text is seen as a distribution of three types of elements ('knowing', 'feeling', 'acting') glued into a unit, the communicative 'whole', by the formators. The textual whole should match the type of readers as originally anticipated by the technical writer (27 types, a classification based upon estimating three levels of knowing, feeling, acting; examples are included). Some prescriptions for solving Technical Writing problems found by metaphoric transfer are discussed. To illustrate the traffic of ideas arising from metaphoric transfer, a detailed map of the border area science/ technical writing is shown.

Evolutionism and Positivism (c. 1860–1900)

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Culture History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Remote Past

This was the way that one of the executive members of the Swiss National Museum phrased, at the end of the nineteenth century, the changes that had taken place in the previous decades: the interest in the national past was replacing the former emphasis on the Great Civilizations. Another transformation that had occurred was that the study of prehistory, rather than the history of the Roman and medieval periods, was definitively on the agenda. This change of emphasis, which took place between the 1860s and 1880s, had been in motion throughout the century but had finally crystallized in the last two decades of the century. By then, nationalism had transformed its character into a predominantly conservative doctrine. Another adjustment was also apparent. The acceptance of evolutionism had emerged as a major scientific theory to explain change. Issues of nationalism, regionalism, and imperialism became intertwined with scientific theory and further nourished the interest in the remote past. The development of methods to study evolution in the natural sciences promoted a scientific approach to the prehistoric period. At the same time, this affected attitudes towards the Roman and the medieval past. In this chapter, therefore, I reject the view expressed by other historians of archaeology such as Trigger (1989: 148) and to a certain degree Sklenár (1983: 123–6), who think that nationalism constituted a threat to cultural evolutionism and its eventual dismissal. This, they think, took place when scholars moved towards the adoption of the culture-historical perspective in the first decades of the twentieth century. The following pages will reveal, however, that the belief in evolutionism was not contrary to the nationalist cause. Late nineteenth-century archaeologists believed in the evolutionary theories to a greater or lesser extent. Despite this, they also became deeply implicated in the construction of their national past, to a degree not seen in previous decades. Culture-history did not oppose evolutionism; it accepted its tenets and moved beyond them.

From Sappho to Sand: Historical Perspective on Crossdressing and Cross Gender

1981 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 502-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty W. Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Great Mother ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
History Of

This article reviews the history of crossdressing throughout history. Commencing with the Great Mother Cult through the Greco-Roman period and Judeo-Christian times followed by the Renaissance period and through to the nineteenth century, it is accompanied by fairly comprehensive references.

scholarly journals Framing the Latin American nutrition transition in a historical perspective, 1850 to the present

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Ablard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Nutrition Transition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Onset ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Global Food

Abstract This paper argues that many of the foundations and trends that led to the rise in obesity and other diet-related health problems in Latin America began to develop in the late nineteenth century. The tendency towards presentism in the nutrition transition literature provides a much abbreviated and limited history of changes in diet and weight. Whereas medical and nutrition researchers have tended to emphasize the recent onset of the crisis, a historical perspective suggests that increasingly global food sourcing prompted changes in foodways and a gradual “fattening” of Latin America. This paper also provides a methodological and historiographic exploration of how to historicize the nutrition transition, drawing on a diverse array of sources from pre-1980 to the present.

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