In the pursuit of a clear and unifying definition of Technical Communication, the article analyzed the performance evaluation process of professional technical communicators in their respective fields of practice. By facilitating a review of expected work performance, the article provided this reader with a useful guide map for the reverse-engineering of the discipline, drawing particular attention to the concept of agency. Indeed, the authors’ stated intent is to prompt “a repurposing of the genre.” (p. 13)
The authors introduce the importance of “distributed cognition” to the modern industrialized world, focusing on the interaction between the workers, the artifact (technical communication) of their evaluations, and the work environment in which they were evaluated. Following the introductions, an analysis of the performance evaluation process via Foucault’s concept (note: not definition) of discourse. This approach leads the reader to formulate a definition of Technical Communication that deliberately includes the unwritten (human) components and interactions in the process of clearly transmitting messages as information. By examining Technical Communication simultaneously through the three “performances”: organizational, cultural, and technological, readers are lead to systematically and more thoroughly consider the intangible, harder-to-examine elements of discourse, particularly in Technical Communication. This approach is useful when evaluating Lay’s assertions on Feminism and Sullivan’s examination of social action.
Henry, J. (2010). (Re)Appraising the Performance of Technical Communicators From a Posthumanist Perspective. Technical Communication Quarterly, 19(1), 11-30. doi:10.1080/10572250903372975. Retrieved online Monday, September 13, 2010, from http://j.mp/tcappraisal.