preface so far

Since Miller’s (1979) foundational essay “A humanistic rationale for technical writing”, scholars within the field of technical and professional communication have acknowledged that technical writing always happens in an institutional context, and therefore embodies “tacit commitments to bureaucratic hierarchies, corporate capitalism and high technology” (p. 616). This “humanistic” rationale for technical writing emphasizes that writing about technology is not an “objective” enterprise but a “communal” one: in Miller’s “reconceptualization” the field, scientific knowledge then becomes “the correspondence of ideas, not to the material world, but to other peoples’ ideas” (ibid).