My undergraduate degree is in Political Science. Coming from a non-English background, I honestly had no idea what the heck I was doing when I arrived at this program. I probably hadn’t taken an English class since Sophomore year… which for me was more than ten years ago. I have never taken a rhetoric course until now, I hadn’t taken a writing class in actual decades (unless you count Creative Writing 101 at the learning annex), and in general had zero knowledge of rhetorical theory beyond the broadest of strokes. So when I had to figure out the boundaries around technical communication and the boundaries around the concepts in the vicinity of tech comm (such as plain language), some of those boundaries never quite solidified.

I honestly just did not understand what the dividing line between plain language and tech comm was. So to me, saying that the aims of plain language and the aims of tech comm intersect, that makes perfect sense. When I read “robust plain-language strategies overlap substantively with core aims of technical communication” it makes me go: “well…. Yea.” For me, it’s because I was too inexperienced to be able to tell the two apart. For Kira Dreher, it’s because she sees the logical connection between ‘care for audience analysis’ and ‘care for user needs.’

In her article “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom,” Kira Dreher makes a kind of ‘call to action.’ She argues that technical communication instructors should be more intentional in their engagement with plain language. She points out that they already do so, to an extent, as a social justice concern. However, Dreher is making the argument that this should be done as an exercise in user design.

She says that:

“Introducing even brief histories of plainness can reveal for students the idea that through plain language, we are promoting a conception of the term that embeds and conceals contemporary values within it.”

Another excellent quote on this topic is:

“Discussion of rhetorical audience can help students approach plain language as a highly contextualized, reflexive, and… dialogic strategy to prioritize audience… Framing plain language in the terms of persuasion can reveal more clearly the stakeholders, socio-political implications, and assumptions about language and clarity undergirding the movement.”

She’s successfully arguing that the aims of technical communication and the aims of plain language could and should converge, and that teaching plain language in tech comm contexts is one way to do so.

Dreher wrote:

“I argue that plain language is an important framework for technical communication teachers and students because it is an opportunity to see our field anchored to an established public movement, to use our disciplinary knowledge to critique and address the movement’s limitations, as well as to interrogate assumptions about social justice, ‘plainness,’ and access with our students.”

Both fields make it their entire goal to put the needs of the user first and foremost, and their whole “thing” is to design around the interests of users.

I had to learn about the importance of audience at the same time as I had to learn about the importance of the user, the boundaries around the two concepts are not at all clearly distinguished in my head. I have a very clear memory of talking to a professor of tech com, and bringing up something about plain language, and they said “well, we’re talking about tech com, and plain language is something else” and I just looked at them like

I don’t know, man, saying that the two fields have converging values and aims makes a lot of sense to me.