Book Review

Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing

By Billie R. Erwin

The best way to approach this book is to put aside for a moment all the definitions you’ve read or heard that describe technical writing. Replace them with this:

Technical writing is the mechanism that controls systems of management and discipline, thereby organizing the operations of modern institutions and the people within them (Introduction, ix).

Or this:

Scientific knowledge becomes coinage within [an economy of knowledge and power] and technical writing mints this coin (Introduction, xii).

Feel better now about your work? I bet you never thought of yourself or your work as playing such an important role in our culture.

Longo posits that technical writing not only evolved along with the growth of scientific knowledge and methods, but also fed back into their development to influence their progress. She uses the language of economics quite frequently to explain the relationship between knowledge makers (she includes technical writers here), the means of producing knowledge (including technical writing), and the result of that production (more knowledge, and informed users/workers/citizens).

So, why write about the history of technical writing? Who cares? Longo clearly thinks we all should care. She believes that “technical communicators are positioned to develop knowledge that compensates for weaknesses in any single way of knowing the world,” (164) and that “the role of technical writing within our culture [is] to stabilize our culture’s system of knowledge and power based on scientific knowledge” (1). If knowledge really is power, then the person who controls the “production” of knowledge has the most power. In this scheme, technical writers clearly possess the “coin of the realm.” In Longo’s view, technical writers now control how knowledge will be valued, not the knowledge makers. The existence of the profession of technical writing is evidence of a shift in the balance of power.

The first textbook on technical writing was written by T. A. Rickard, a mining engineer, in 1908. In fact, until shortly after World War II, all technical writing was done by the engineers and scientists who produced the knowledge. They directly controlled the distribution of their knowledge, and by extension, power. However, when technical writing finally achieved legitimacy as a profession and became an appropriate subject to teach in college, it was presented as part of the liberal arts curriculum, not within the “hard” sciences. This shift meant that, for the first time, non-scientists controlled the output of scientific knowledge. It also set up the conflict between engineers and technical writers that many of us have experienced in the workplace.

Spurious Coin is not just a history of technical writing. More significantly, it is a call to action. In several places throughout the book, Longo poses questions to other academics that she thinks warrant further research. Answers to those questions would lead to a greater understanding, and hopefully a diminution, of the tensions that exist between the sciences and humanities; between those who have, or make, knowledge or power, and those who don’t. The very last sentence of the book reveals Longo’s mission:

But we must look within ourselves to remember what is human about technical writing in our scientific knowledge/power system and discover how we can reintroduce human complexity into that forgetful system (168).

Resource
Longo, Bernadette. Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Billie R. Erwin is currently underemployed and pursuing a Certificate in Technical and Professional Writing at Portland Community College. Contact her at broserwin@aol.com.