Abstract
Persuasion, over the decades, has found a place in technical communication as scholars have admitted the obvious: It has always been a part of technical communication. However, for many years, we labored under the misconception that various forms of writing about technology and science derived from the standards of Stet. Joe Friday, lead actor in the 1950s and 1960s television show, Dragnet: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Students in engineering writing courses were instructed to observe only, to be “objective” in their analyses, and to report their “findings” accordingly, without acknowledgment or perhaps even awareness that the mere act of selecting “facts” was to some degree subjective. This, naturally, replicated itself in industry, where during one of my early (1980s) consulting assignments, an aeronautics engineer told me, “Technical writing here is pretty easy: we just get the facts and let the facts speak for themselves.”
Now, several decades later, we understand how that has worked out—not well. I am sure it is the sign of a maturing, and now mature, discipline that the study of persuasion within the broad field of all forms of professional communication is standard fare. But more needs to be done—more research on how persuasion functions in our discipline, on the appropriate ways to apply it, and most importantly, on how to distinguish it from rigorous analysis that continues to be the hallmark of excellence in communicating about science and technology. As those endeavors continue, I am sure the results will often appear in JTWC … as they should.