Design Discourse - Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing, 2010a

Reid
activities are those that allow us to “see the big picture,” to incorporate intuitive
or empathic understanding, to make connections between ideas that are logically
unrelated, and to process the complexities of embodied experiences without relying
upon abstractions. In terms of writing instruction, if the left-brain reflects
the emphases of technical writing (and to a lesser degree, composition), then the
right-brain connects to some of the traditional values of creative writing. One
might be tempted to go so far as to suggest that rhetoric is left-brain and poetics
is right-brain. However, while there may be some validity to that suggestion, at
least in terms of how these issues have played out within disciplinary politics, I
contend, following Pink at least this far, that successful writing requires a whole
mind, particularly as we prepare students for the demands of careers in the postknowledge
economy.
Jon Udell, writing for the O’Reilly Network, picks up on this shift in
the values relating to professional preparation and goes so far as to suggest that
the future of first-year composition will be characterized by the production of
multimedia documents, which he terms screencasts. 1 Udell sees screencasts as
being rhetorically different from traditional genres of professional writing related
to software development, which might be divided into technical or support
documents and marketing or sales materials. The purpose of the screencast will
be to connect end-users with the designers of new technologies and applications.
Udell writes, “the rate-limiting factor for software adoption is increasingly not
purchase, or installation, or training, but simply ‘getting it’… We haven’t always
seen the role of the writer and the role of the developer as deeply connected but,
as the context for understanding software shifts from computers and networks
to people and groups, I think we’ll find that they are” (2005). In short, as information
technologies become increasingly about social uses (e.g. wikipedia, del.
icio.us, flickr), there is an increasing need for writers who can communicate the
social dynamics of a technology; that is, someone who will be able to work with
developers in helping to articulate and communicate their vision. As Udell continues,
“The New York Times recently asked: ‘Is cinema studies the new MBA?’
I’ll go further and suggest that these methods ought to be part of the new freshman
comp. Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always
were, but we’ll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and
techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles—consistency
of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement—will
be familiar to programmers and writers alike.”
Udell’s vision may still sound very much, in principle, like the traditional
values of technical composition, plus the addition of new media, in that
he makes reference to values like consistency, clarity, economy, and refinement.
However, there is a deeper transformation taking place in the coming together
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