This is a presentation that I gave at the annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) on 20 March 2002, in Chicago, Illinois. This is not a finished paper, but a rough sketch of ideas for further exploration and development. I am currently working on a longer, better analyzed version of this paper, even though it, too, will be a draft of ideas-in-development. However, you are most welcome to give it a read and share your ideas.

I invite all constructive comments and suggestions. Send them to Nancy Hoft at nhoft@world-ready.com.

Introductory remarks

In addressing our conference theme, Diversity in Technical Communication, I have found a space for my dissertation. This space is fun, huge, and complicated. It begins with my attempt to understand the "academic conversation in technical communication", and it is complimented by my 20 years of experience in industry as a technical communicator. This is a work-in-progress, and as I develop these ideas, albeit as sketches, I welcome and invite you to offer feedback. One last point: I have a vested interest in technical communication. The topic has a lot to do with my future in this field. What will it be, and more specifically, what could it become? What's its potential?

Understanding the academic conversation in technical communication

To begin, let me offer an anecdote for your consideration that characterizes my theoretical understanding and approach to the topic of diversity thus far. In the interest of time, I'm not going to develop this approach today, just show it to you.

Figure 1 Remote control device for a virtual reality headset

This remote control device, as I've stated, and the nature of its accompanying anecdote serves as a good background to focus of my talk today: the potentiality button. So, let me ask you to hold this thought as I attempt to develop my understanding of the potentiality button and our conference theme, diversity.

Mapping the elements of the profession of technical communication

In re-reading our call for papers, which I take to be an assessment of our current state of affairs, I was struck by the relationships among four key issues and how they affect the potentiality of our profession, technical communication. There is a symbiotic, dependent relationship among these issues, and they form a bit of a circular argument in a state of stasis that I keep wanting to get out of.

So, in considering these relationships, and in doing a cursory rhetorical analysis of our call for papers, I kept noticing that opportunity was consistently framed as a positive, but that identity was, at the least, framed as a negative, a problematic. Phrases such as "unifying definition" and "coherent identity" lead to this question in the call:

Without a fixed definition and identity, can they [technical communicators] hope to attain the stature and recognition they need in order to achieve their professional goals?

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnise beginnings, surrounding tem with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them.

Inclination speaks out: 'I don't want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck'. Institutions reply: 'But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it—a place which both honours and disarms it; and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power'.

Yet, maybe this institution and this inclination are but two converse responses to the same anxiety: anxiety as to just what discourse is, when it is manifested materially, as a written or spoken object; but also, uncertainty faced with a transitory existence, destined for oblivion—at any rate, not belonging to us; uncertainty at the suggestion of barely imaginable powers and dangers behind this activity, however humdrum and grey it may seem; uncertainty when we suspect the conflicts, triumphs, injuries, dominations and enslavements that lie behind these words, even when long use has chipped away their rough edges.

I began taking a closer look at our identity and did so through the metaphors we've used. Specifically, where is our identity located in these metaphors? What do these metaphors say about who we are and what we could be?

Table 1 Metaphors of identity for technical communicators

Review criteria, legacies, and current metaphors

Of interest here, and just as a parenthetical to my larger argument, is the last metaphor of midwife from Gerry Savage. The notion of "middleness" is an all-pervasive one in technical communication, and locates our identity in interesting ways with even more interesting consequences. But, again, this is only a parenthetical, albeit an important one for later development.

What struck me about these metaphors is that most if not all of are suggestive of spaces that I, at least, would feel comfortable occupying. They all meet my criteria for a positive metaphor for the role of a technical communicator that might balance my diversity circle nicely.

But what's missing from all of these metaphors is the answer to these questions:

How do I occupy these spaces?
How do I get there from here?

Okay, so far so good. I'm emerging out of the circular argument—or at least have set it in motion—but now, how do I surround identity with metis and potentiality?

And herein lies my connection to the ambassador as a possible metaphor to add to our collection.

Exploring ambassador as a metaphor for metis

Table 2 Criteria for a positive metaphor

Review criteria

To consider ambassador as a metaphor, I went to the WWW and looked at the Web sites for the Council of American Ambassadors, the US State Department, and the American Foreign Service Association. I was interested to see the "genealogy", if you will, of ambassadors as expressed in their early education, training, and selection.

Table 3 The education, training, and selection of ambassadors

Review slide content

Table 4 Written part of the Foreign Service Exam

Table 4 and Table 5 describe the Foreign Service Exam, what it expects, measures, and evaluates in the beginning of a career-long selection process, culminating in the messy political space of the Presidential appointment of an ambassador to a target country.

There are two parts to the Foreign Service exam. Table 4 summarizes the written exam. Of interest here is the breadth and depth of knowledge that is expected, tested, and evaluated. While a bit overwhelming in scope, it serves as the minimal requirement for entry into the ambassadorial role. And here I ask you to reflect on the breadth and depth of your curricula and its instantiations in your pedagogy.

Table 5 Oral assessment of the Foreign Service Exam

Table 5 summarizes the oral assessment part of the Foreign Service Exam. Where the written part of the exam focused on the content and scope of knowledge, this part of the exam focuses on its application, as well as the character of the individual as he or she is integrating and applying this knowledge in both simulated and real situations.

I can't help by reflect on Carolyn Miller's plenary speech today about trust. Issues of trust are clearly present here, in the Foreign Service Exam. What's interesting is that the 12 Dimensions identify the skills and qualities necessary for being an effective ambassador, trust-builder. To tie this into our disciplinary history, a technical communicator functioning in an ambassadorial role is a citizen of good will, a public servant for the greater good. Table 5, I suggest, offers us a laundry list for metis through the ambassador metaphor. The 12 Dimensions list the qualities that get you from here to there—spaces that our metaphors of identity suggest we can or could go.

Again, I ask you to reflect on your curricula and its pedagogical instantiations. Is there a place for this laundry list? How are you going about it? Is it a very visible aspect of your curricula and pedagogy? Is it implied? Or worse, is it invisible?

Hopefully my connections of the ambassador metaphor to identity, opportunity, diversity, and power, status, and legitimacy are clear at this point. To summarize:

Identity is our weak link in our professional commitment to diversity. Identity, I argue, may have more to do with issues of individual character, depth and breadth of knowledge, behavior, and action—all conduits, perhaps, of metis--than of definition.

So, where do we place the ambassador in the profession of technical communication? Figure 3 illustrates my current understanding of our profession. In order to "place" ambassador, we need to understand the broader, complex possibilities of locale and its relationship to other locales. I have here four spheres, or domains:

• The Lifeworld
• The Profession
• The Discipline
• The World

review the lifeworld

review the profession

Consider my use of "discipline". It is, I suggest, a womb, and it is here that I'd like to offer for your consideration a footnote to Donna Haraway's notions of gestation and pregnancy. What's cooking in here? How is this activity of gestation informing and constructing what I argue is the emerging mindset of disciplinarity that seems to be a prerequisite for my ambassador metaphor? And again we return to our original problem. Identity, through our approach to it, is limiting our opportunity, or diversity, our status, legitimacy, and power. Our circle of diversity is in a state of stasis, and it is of our own making.

Reflect on Carolyn Miller's argument about trust, Foucault's exploration of institutional power and discourse, potentiality and metis, the academe/industry binary, curricula and pedagogy, the career path of the technical communicator beginning with the student. Yes, I'm asking you to pull out that remote control device and don that virtual reality headset again. I'm asking you to reconsider our approach to today's conference theme of diversity, and I'm suggesting that we're perhaps too bound in our thinking to tradition and our institutions. We're caught in a static, circular argument of our own making.

And if you agree in any way with my argument so far, let me conclude by inviting you to bbe visible ambassadors—you've already passed the Foreign Service Exam with flying colors. I invite you to apply more metis in active, visible ways and with conscious awareness of the full breadth of interactions and connections to the lifeworld and to the profession-at-large. And with respect to the sphere of the world, I invite you to participate in the preservation of our diversity. With this invitation comes a professional concern with our approach to identity and its consequences for potentiality. In our curricula and pedagogy, let's try to launch an army of ambassadors who can occupy the spaces of our other metaphors.

Let's embrace the implications of trust and let's be loud about it.