spark: a novel about electron transport

"And that's the problem, particilarly for our graduate students: the discipline thinks its going from literature to culture, and the market tells us we're going from literature to technical writing" (O'Dair, p. 47).

For those of us who have already gone "from literature to technical writing", this is extremely reassuring news: we are going with the flow of the academic job market while the literary scholars, well, deconstruct themselves. However, O'Dair concludes that graduate students should not be prepared to "obtain tenurable positions" by reading Piers Plowman; rather, the academic job market "would likely improve by sticking to technical writing" (47).

This assumption--that literature and technical writing are intrinsically different--makes me cringe: and not with indignance at literary scholars for dogging the gritty industrial/orginizational focus of tech comm. Here, I would rather argue the assumption literature and technical writing are different is responsible for a lot of lame, bad and humanistically shady traditions in technical writing. In contrast, some of the most exemplary--ie, intelligeable, searchable and useable--peices of technical writing are exuberantly literary.

For wildly successful examples of "literary" technical communication, check out:

Angell Daie's "The English Secretorie", a secretarial manual that is written in the form of an epistolary novel. Marginal glosses transform the novel into a searchable textbook on professional writing.

Dyer's "the fleece", a diagnostic poem about diseases of the sheep. The poetic form allows for frighteningly vivid descriptions:
That dire distemper sometimes may the swain,
Though late, discern; when, on the lifted lid,
Or visual orb, the turgid veins are pale;
The swelling liver then her putrid store
Begins to drink: ev'n yet thy skill exert,

280 Nor suffer weak despair to fold thy arms:
Again detersive salt apply, or shed
The hoary med'cine o'er their arid food.

The Kama Sutra, an intricately diagrammed web of process descriptions about how to have sex, employs narrative to annotate and clarify the diagrams:

"Imagine..In his garden there are two swings, one revolving and one ordinary. Now sometimes, alone, he switches from one to the other until his head spins. But his favourite swing has neither ropes, nor wood, nor cushions" ("The Swing).

This narrative draws on the literary figure of analogy to clarify a complex sequence of actions. (Note: The narrative style of the Kama Sutra is brilliantly parodied in Christopher Moore's novel, "Lamb").

Here is a more contemporary example example of creative nonfiction in tech comm: Planned Parenthood's "STD petting zoo", an interactive cartoon about sexually transmitted diseases.

Taking these examples as a starting point, O'Dair's claim that graduate students are not getting anywhere with Langland's Piers Plowman becomes harder to evaluate. Like many technical communicators, Langland realized that people pay attention to abstract concepts when you draw smiley faces on and make up stories about them. Conceptually speaking, the structure and function of the soul (as described by Medieval scholars on the Greek New Testament) is as complex and "technical" as the parts of an amoeba. The anthropomorposized "parts of the soul" in Piers are created to help readers grasp and therefore modify the content of their souls. For example, the anthropomorphosized "Vices" in Piers--
And then came Covetousness · I can him not describe,
So hungry and hollow · Sir Harvey him looked.
He was beetle-browed · and blubber-lipped too,
With two bleared eyes · as a blind hog;
--are an analogous textual ancestor of the lively, anthropomorphosized STDs in Planned Parenthood's STD Petting Zoo.

In summary, Piers Plowman may have more to tell O'Dair's graduate students about technical and professional writing than she realizes. For example, that human readers are better able to grasp abstract concepts when they are presented as "characters" and explanations when they follow the structure of a story.

Those graduate students who can read Piers Plowman and apply Langland's anthropomorphic style of depicting "Vices" on the stage to (say) a better design for "idiot lights" on a dashboard might be the first ones to obtain tenurable positions on the academic job market.