Commentary 19 An alternative interpretation of technical communicationg role in democracy Technical Writing and the Authority of Expertise Gregory Clark English Department Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602-6280 gregory_clark@byu.edu In his analysis of documents surrounding the resolution against the Cassini project passed by the Marin County Board of Supervisors, Valentino argues-and laments-that in matters of technology, at least, authority is located in the scientific experts' interpretion of the data at hand. Clearly, in this case, the interpretations of the elected officials--however carefully developed and however sound they may be--are dismissed by the NASAand JPL experts as misinterpretations, and eventually the interpretations of those experts seem to be accepted by the larger public almost automatically as authoritative. Valentino seems to be getting at that point in his paper, but he does so using terms that, for me, blur that insight. Blurred as it is by the terms that he uses, that insight confuses rather than clarifies for me the definition of technical writing he provides and the definitional argument he offers about social interaction of technology transfer that is, from his perspective, the function of such writing. We need to understand the insight developed here with greater precision and
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Technical writing and the authority of expertise
Clark, Gregory
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 23 (1)
Association for Computing Machinery – Feb 1, 1999
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