Is Technical Writing Particularly Objective?

Abstract

For most people the answer to the title question is obviously yes. Technical writing is writing about objective facts, they say, so technical writing is particularly objective. I think this reasoning is slippery; in this article I say why. In the first part of the article I argue that judgments about scientific or technical facts can't be more objective than any other judgments, because one can't speak of objectivity in comparative terms. All one can really say is that scientific and technical judgments have a certain kind of objectivity. In the rest of the article I try to characterize that kind of objectivity and explore the consequences of that characterization for the teaching of writing. For the most part, I conclude that objectivity is not particularly important in technical writing, but that our general concern with objectivity may be symptomatic of an attitude toward language which I deplore. Let me start by reminding you that, as far as this discussion is concerned, objectivity is something we predicate of judgments or expressions of judgments. (In other contexts we might say that things are objective because they are objects.) In common speech we say a judgment is objective when it is the same judgment other people in a group would come to, when it is shared by the group. People who believe that there is something particularly objective about technical writing think that the common speech account is wrong. Agreement doesn't make a judgment objective, an imaginary interlocutor might say, rather, at least in science and technology, an objective judgment is one that is determined by the facts. We could all agree that the moon is made of green cheese, but that wouldn't make the judgment objective. We all know the sources of my interlocutor's reasoning: the Cartesian philosophical tradition which culminates with logical positivism. The philosophers in this tradition believed that there was some simple, direct, almost mechanical connection between, for example, a pen, our perception of a pen, our thought of a pen, and our expression, Aha, pen! The pen, for instance, might reflect light waves, which impinge on our eyes, which send a signal and activate data banks in the brain, which produce a thought and then a word. The problem in science and technology is simply to make sure that events have followed their normal