Annotations: Week 13

Moore, P; Cruel Theory? The Struggle for Prestige and its Consequences in Academic Technical Communication.

Patrick Moore starts of with how the English professionals have a bias against the work world. There are multiple references to Carolyn Miller’s “A humanistic rationale to technical writing” throughout the article and Moore tends to agree with Miller more than disagree with her.

The positive-sum game that is the material economy is something I thoroughly disagreed with since a gain in the material economy means someone, somewhere is losing out. Everyone doesn’t gain all the time. That is not how the world works.

Moore focuses on material economy and positional economy throughout the article as a means of showing how futile the pursuit of prestige is, since the positional economy is a zero-sum game, which means that someone has to lose out.

The “Department of Useless Studies” tag was something that I liked from this article since it justifies what Moore is talking about, useless research and discredited studies.

The rest of the article discusses Dragga and Voss’ Cruel Pies and its positives and criticisms as also Longaker’s “Back to Basics” and its pros and drawbacks.

Moore draws parallels with these and the pursuit of prestige among academic technical communicators. Moore also references Blakeslee and Spilka’s article which laments the lack of relevance of academic research to workplace realities.”

The author suggests the following ways to the problem of prestige:

Ways suggested by the authors cited in the opening paragraph:

• Understanding “the social and political contexts of professional work and the ways professional activities play a role in the future development of their communities”
• Creating standards for academic programs and for practitioners.
• Improving relationships between academic and workplace specialists in technical communication.

Create an environment where we get along with each other

Studying Economic Theory as suggested by Longaker.

The author concludes with the fact that academic technical communicators need to give up the overarching craving for prestige and just focus on doing their job well.

I thought the article was overwritten, but focused on some good points, which academic technical communicators need to understand.

A lot of jobs around the world don’t have much prestige. Why the demand for so much prestige among academics?

Annotations: Week 13

MacNealy, M.S, Heaton, L.B; Can this Marriage be Saved: Is an English Department a good home for Technical Communication?

In this article, the authors perform an exploratory survey of technical communication faculty housed in English and non-English departments.

They start with how technical communication came into being and how the departments looked like, initially, when they were a part of the English departments.

Then they continue to the methodology, which is fairly simple, is a survey of tenured professors who teach technical writing in colleges all over the country. I thought that the sample size was too small and biased towards professors who have tenure. What about professors like Dr. Lam?

This research method uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis, which is a good way to combine research methodologies. Blakeslee and Spilka have talked about the benefits of either in their article we read in Week 10.

The article also discusses gender issues and educational background of the professors in the survey. I thought it was very sexist of Dragga and co. to say that technical communication loses its prestige when women start entering the industry. Sexual politics in academia also surprised me, since our Department Chair is a lady, and I didn’t think this happened any more.

The authors talk about how the participants complain about lack of support from English departments and how some of the participants would rather be housed in a different department altogether.

As many articles about technical communication do, this one also debates about what we should call ourselves, since many participants want a divorce from English. At this point, I thought Tebeaux would be proud of what the authors have to say, considering her scathing criticism of Miller’s article.

Some of the participants, however, were reluctant to move out of the English department to maintain the humanistic side of professional writing, which is exactly what Miller talks about in her article.

Considering that this study arose out of a simple question from Charles Side, I think the findings of this survey were very important back when this study was performed. I wondered, while reading this article, whether the title of our MA course actually pulled from the findings of this article: Professional and Technical Communication. Is this true?

Annotations: Week 11

Barnum, C; Palmer, L. More than a Feeling: Understanding the Desirability Factor in User Experience

In this article about their qualitative research method, Barnum and Palmer make use of Microsoft’s Product User cards to test customer satisfaction, which is hard to test through other means of usability testing.

Microsoft used to use the Faces Questionnaire, which recorded how much the users felt like the photo of the face in the card. These were later scrapped in favor of Product Reaction Cards.

Product Reaction Cards were those which the participants used to describe how they felt about the experience. The psychological influences described in Jones’ “The Science of Influence” might have been considered while designing these cards, since I took a look at these cards that Microsoft have uploaded on their site.

The complete set of 118 Product Reaction Cards
Accessible	Creative	Fast	Meaningful	Slow
Advanced	Customizable	Flexible	Motivating	Sophisticated
Annoying	Cutting edge	Fragile	Not Secure	Stable
Appealing	Dated	Fresh	Not Valuable	Sterile
Approachable	Desirable	Friendly	Novel	Stimulating
Attractive	Difficult	Frustrating	Old	Straight Forward
Boring	Disconnected	Fun	Optimistic	Stressful
Business-like	Disruptive	Gets in the way	Ordinary	Time-consuming
Busy	Distracting	Hard to Use	Organized	Time-Saving
Calm	Dull	Helpful	Overbearing	Too Technical
Clean	Easy to use	High quality	Overwhelming	Trustworthy
Clear	Effective	Impersonal	Patronizing	Unapproachable
Collaborative	Efficient	Impressive	Personal	Unattractive
Comfortable	Effortless	Incomprehensible	Poor quality	Uncontrollable
Compatible	Empowering	Inconsistent	Powerful	Unconventional
Compelling	Energetic	Ineffective	Predictable	Understandable
Complex	Engaging	Innovative	Professional	Undesirable
Comprehensive	Entertaining	Inspiring	Relevant	Unpredictable
Confident	Enthusiastic	Integrated	Reliable	Unrefined
Confusing	Essential	Intimidating	Responsive	Usable
Connected	Exceptional	Intuitive	Rigid	Useful
Consistent	Exciting	Inviting	Satisfying	Valuable
Controllable	Expected	Irrelevant	Secure
Convenient	Familiar	Low Maintenance	Simplistic

These cards helped immensely with determining the user reaction to MSN 9.

The authors discuss five case studies that they researched to justify the usefulness of these cards. I think the cards are very strategically designed.

According to me, Case Studies 4 and 5 were very thoroughly examined and were the most comprehensive with regards the use of these Product Reaction Cards.

The limitations for this study reflect the problems of most qualitative studies, which Blakeslee and Spilka talk about in their article “The State of Research in Technical Communication.” Time constraints might hamper such studies on a larger scale, which is why it is hard for these to be used for projects at the graduate level, in my opinion. The authors agree that such methods are better used in tandem with other satisfaction survey methods, to get a well-rounded picture.

I think the most useful part of this method is the development of themes. It can play a major role in usability testing. The methods suggested by Halvorson in his article “Content Strategy” can be used as a means of correcting problems found through this method.

Why aren’t the Production Reaction Cards used more often in the industry?

Annotations: Week 11

Reddish, J. Technical Communication & Usability: Intertwined Strands and Mutual Influences Commentary

In this article, Reddish talks about the history of interaction between usability and technical communication. Since the 1970s, technical communicators were concerned about the usability of written documents in general.

Reddish discusses her own experience with usability throughout the article. She says the 1980s brought many technical communicators into IT documentation. Usability tests have also been in use since the 1980s. These usability tests involved asking the user to analyze documents while actually using the product. The other usability test, where the user is asked to mark up the parts that they do not understand or might need clearing up, seems to be very useful and should be one that is used more nowadays, since the user knows what he wants and can clear that up for the technical communicators, in my opinion.

Usability testing led to clearer communication on interfaces of products and the generation of jobs like user advocates and user researchers. It was interesting to note how topic-based troubleshooting should have been evident in the 1980s itself, considering the doctoral research of Patricia Sullivan which concluded that users don’t consult the manuals unless they encounter a problem.

There were a lot more advances to the usability scene in the 1990s as many started moving to usability and content strategy full time.

Collaboration is very important for usability experts since it requires expertise in a diversity of fields. Usability considers Audience Analysis in its primary concerns, which reminds me of our Week 3 Audience Analysis readings. The article also talks about taking on roles in the managerial capacity, which is also talked about the Hart-Davidson article from our Digital Literacies class.

Reddish also discusses how shorter (and more precise) yet sweeter with regards documentation is always the best way to go. She also talks about how personas are used by usability experts to gauge user needs, which is what Cooper had talked about in “Designing For Pleasure”.

UX thinks about the future and the mistakes of the past, and the most important thing is that the practitioners also need to be adaptable.

Is the usability for written documents no longer practiced in the industry?