PHD in Tech writing?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Mark Baker opined: <<But understanding why it is so is not necessary to
playing the game. All that is necessary is to discover that it is so.>>

"Discovering it is so" without learning why leads to preprogrammed,
inflexible, stereotypical responses that work just fine until the situation
changes and that don't change when a better way is discovered. You can train
a monkey to repeat a procedure, but not to adopt a new procedure when the
situation calls for it. You certainly don't need a PhD to learn to think
about why you're doing something, but you do need to learn why you're doing
something. That's the only way to recognize when a traditional behavior
becomes unproductive or less effective than alternatives.

<<[Advance degreees] do nothing to improve writing skills.>>

While an advanced degree is no guarantee of improving your writing skills,
it certainly teaches you a different way of writing (and it's always a good
thing to increase one's mental flexibility by learning new styles). Claiming
that a degree does nothing to improve your skill is far too strong a
statement; for many people and many degree programs, the time spent
acquiring a degree really does teach better writing skills, along with
critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to support your opinions
strongly. All of which are useful in the "real world".

<<The critical faculty is valuable and worthy of study and development. But
the critical faculty is not the creative faculty and the development of the
critical faculty is not the development of the creative faculty. Life would
be much easier if it were, because then we could reliable train people to be
creative. But we can't. All we can do is educate them and let them go out
into the world, hoping for the best.>>

While your first point (making the distinction) is a good one, your followup
is weak. No, you can't turn someone who lacks the least scrap of creativity
into a creative genius, but just about anyone can be taught to solve
problems more effectively and to come up with a range of solutions. Like any
other skill, creativity is partially inborn, but can be improved by
practice. Plus, you can't apply different solutions if you don't know they
exist. A good academic program will (at a minimum) teach you several
different ways to solve a problem, and that alone lets you be more creative
than if you have only a single "that's the way it was always done" approach.

<<I didn't say that it was wrong to study technical communication at a PhD
level.>>

I think the more valid point is that if all you're going to do is document
what exists, there are more effective ways to learn those skills. Moreover,
a PhD won't be worth much if all you'll be doing is documenting Word's Print
function. But in a position like mine, where I do half a dozen different
genres of writing and spend a lot of time coming up with solutions to
specific communications problems, understanding the theory is vital.

<<In fact, you probably shouldn't train technical writers at all, except
perhaps by apprenticeship.>>

Are you saying there are no useful degree programs in technical
communication because, unlike the master-apprentice system, the
teacher-student relationship can't actually teach useful skills? I think
you'd have a hard time defending that point. Granted, a curriculum that
doesn't emphasize "best practices" and lots of actual writing practice won't
prove effective, but you'll find there are plenty of good curricula out
there that teach writing skills and make you put them to work.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"I don't read literary theory anymore; it makes my brain hurt... I have way
too much time on my hands and way too little to think about. In this
respect, the laundromat is not much different from the English department
office."--Tim Morris, U of Texas English professor ("Suds", in _The American
Scholar_)