Research Agenda
My current research interests are illustrated by my recent publications
included on my résumé. In the list below, I cite my
research interests and the relevant article:
• Rhetoric of Science—“The Missing Metaphor;”
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 31.5 (2001): 373-90.
• Technical Communication Pedagogy—“Creating
Community in the Technical Communication Classroom;” Internet-
Based Workplace Communication:
Industry
and Academic Perspectives. Ed. Kirk St. Amant and Pavel Zemliansky.
Herhsey, PA:
Idea Group, 2004. 88-106.
• Usability—“The Syntax of Readability.” (with Brian
Still). Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 35.1 (2005):
47-70.
Rhetoric of Science
Of these three, my greatest interest is in the rhetoric of
science. My currrent, book-length manuscript focuses on the
role of metaphor in scientific thinking, especially as it relates to
how scientific knowledge is created and then disseminated to various
audiences. In particular, I focus on how science has communicated
breakthroughs in cloning to a public skeptical of science’s ethical
allegiances. It is interesting to note, for example, how in his Origin
of the Species, Charles Darwin used the breeder metaphor to more
readily include his audience’s experience. Darwin, of course, was
classically educated. Such an education might include the memorization
of over 300 tropes and figures of speech and require the student to be
able to use them competently. While I do not argue that we should
return to the such an educational experience, I do posit that with
science’s greater reliance on quantification, there has grown a
distrust of natural language that can be traced back to Copernicus, who
created and then hid anagrams to record his theories, but to obscure
them from the Church.
Historically, an analogy or metaphor has heralded a scientific
breakthrough. For example, Rene Descartes described light as a wave.
After witnessing how a prism broke light into different colors, Isaac
Newton declared light to be a particle. When nineteenth-century
physicist Thomas Young noticed how the double-split experiment broke
light into bands, he reverted to the wave metaphor. Today, industry
understands light to have a particle-like and a wave-like structure.
When beams of light travel down a fiber optic cable, industry thinks of
light as a wave. When that beam of light arrives at your computer
screen and is broken into pixels, industry thinks of light as a
particle. Such a metaphoric understanding contributes to engineering as
well as to science, and of course, engineering is still largely the
practical application of science.
Technical Communication as a discipline is widely misunderstood in the
humanities as an instrument for engineering and business. True,
students with undergraduate degrees might get jobs writing software
manuals or chainsaw instructions, but technical communication as an
academic discipline ultimately concerns itself with science and
technology’s cultural implications, whether they are over issues such
as those I have described or they are focused on studying how people
make use of documents through empirical usability studies.
Technical Communication
Pedagogy
The fall semester that I began teaching college writing courses, it
seemed that all of my first-year composition students had read a
certain George Orwell novel during their senior year of high school. In
my 22 years of teaching since then, the most difficult course to teach,
and teach well, is the introductory technical communication course.
Students who take this course are usually majoring in some aspect of
engineering, and engineers are notorious for not thinking of themselves
as writers. I think it is partly the challenge of teaching these
courses that keeps me at it. From teaching technical communication
courses, I have gained a good deal of knowledge about computers,
especially how they can be used effectively (and not just as super
typewriters) in the technical communication classroom, which has
positively influenced ALL of my writing classes. Of course, students
expect computers to be used in college courses in general, and grading
electronically allows me to express myself more legibly than my
handwriting will allow, but what I find most valuable is the way that
computers can help to create a discourse community in the writing
classroom. The relevant essay I referred to in the introduction to this
document explains how I used a list serve to create community in a
technical communication class, though these techniques can applied to
any class. Since the essay was published, I have been using the message
board as a way of creating community. In all of my undergraduate
writing classes, there is a facet that requires students to post their
essays to the message board. Their classmates then download their
essays and respond to them, inserting comments in the text as well as
writing a summary comment at the end. Though I have not measured the
sense of community generated with this approach, my feeling is that it
does a better job of creating community in the classroom than simply
having them respond to list serve posts.
The essay itself reports on the application of a survey tool adapted
from community psychology research. For gathering data for measuring
the sense of community in a classroom, the tool is well-supported since
community psychology is a sub-discipline within the field of
psychology. However, community psychologists have paid little attention
to the classroom in general. This tool’s application could be quite
valuable for composition researchers.
Usability
Usability measures how people use documents to accomplish specific
goals. As a result, usability is quite empirical in terms of the way
data is gathered. My research in usability focuses on readability
formulas, the subject of my 1986 master’s degree thesis. More recently,
for 2001-02, I was chosen as the Medtronic Research Fellow from a
summary, basically, of my thesis research. Medtronic, which pioneered
the pacemaker for heart patients (the pacemaker prototype was created
in a north Minneapolis garage in the 1950’s) and manufactures other
medical technology devices, had named readability as a research
subject, and my application was chosen competitively. Like many
companies that interact with the government, an FDA office requires
that Medtronic’s product support literature (instructions and other
expository material) be written on an eighth-grade reading level. The
formula typically used is the Flesh Reading Ease since it is readily
available with Mircosoft Word, but the Flesh Reading Ease measures
prose according to the number of words per sentence and the number of
syllable per word. My research uncovered a formula, the Golub Syntactic
Density Scale, that evaluates prose according to the complexity of a
sentence at the clause and phrase level, a much more in-depth
examination. After I completed this research, I recruited Brian Still
of Texas Technical University to add his expertise on how this formula,
which was created and even computerized in the 1970’s, might be updated
for more contemporary computer applications. This research was
published in 2005 in the Journal of Technical Writing and
Communication.
Overall, I have a fully articulated research agenda, and I look forward
to many more productive years. Though I am currently most interested in
rhetoric of science, I will always be involved with technical
communication pedagogy, and I plan to pursue readability, a usability
issue, as long as it remains an issue for technical communicators.
--Tim Giles