Spurious coin: Science, management, and the history of technical writing in the 20th century United State

Technical writing gives scientific knowledge a material existence without which it could not be accessible to large numbers of people. Thus, technical writing gives power to scientific knowledge, yet it is not itself a science. It bears the stamp of science, as a metal coin bears the King's stamp, giving it value as currency within our culture. But technical writing is spurious scientific coin because it transforms liberal arts knowledge of language into scientific knowledge of the world. Scientific knowledge, therefore, rests on a fragile base of ideas constructed through language and transformed into science. This dangerous knowledge of language threatens to destabilize a cultural system built on scientific knowledge and power.;This dissertation constructs a cultural history of technical communication as it relates to the development of the system of knowledge and power that technical writing controls. It investigates problems inherent in the tension between scientific knowledge-making and liberal arts knowledge-making that render technical communication both the genuine and counterfeit coin of dominant scientific knowledge within our contemporary culture. This history is constructed around a framework of five intellectual trends running through centuries of Western civilization: the use of clear, correct English; maximum efficiency of production and operation; the need to contribute to a general fund of scientific knowledge for the betterment of the human condition; tensions between the roles of science and art; and a redemptive urge to purify language and standardize practice. This history explores cultural contexts and influences on the development of technical writing at three crucial moments in the 20th century: 1908, when one of the first textbooks appeared; immediately after World War II, when changes in technology, industry, and mass education altered the role of technology in American culture; and the late 1970s, when tensions surfaced between liberal arts and scientific traditions within technical writing. Technical writing textbooks are examined as depositories of codified professional practice, revealing historically and culturally specific theories of science, technology, and pedagogy. These textbooks also reveal genealogies of contested cultural practices that are retrospectively codified into these authoritative compilations of dominant knowledge.