The Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries

THE CYCLE OF TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION IN LARGE REGULATORY INDUSTRIES 

My research enabled me to develop a framework for understanding the Cycle of Technical Documentation in large regulatory industries. 

This framework enables us to identify Six Critical Moments of Rhetorical Transformation in large regulatory industries. At these moments, writers must extract information that is presented in one rhetorical modality (oral testimony, for example) and literally change the form so that the information can be re-represented for a different audience (1) when oral testimony and embodied experience are captured in writing (2) when the information in accident reports is re-represented in statistical records (3) when statistical accounts are re-represented as arguments for particular policies (4) when policies and standards are transformed into procedures (5) when written procedures are transformed into training and (6) when training is re-represented to workers at local sites. (Chapter 2 describes the cycle in detail.) 

The chapters that follow use this framework to examine how agencies attempt to reconcile diverse viewpoints to make sense of accidents (chapters 4 and 5) how embodied sensory experience is rendered invisible in writing (chapter 6) and how speakers gestures help them understand the temporal and spatial complexity of a hazardous environment (chapters 7 and 8). In chapter 9, I analyze 31 oral interviews with miners following the South-mountain disaster in Norton, Virginia (January, 1993), in order to show how embodied experience and gesture are documented in writing at one critical moment of transformation. 

As I argue in the chapters that follow, we cannot simply settle disputes by affirming that each individual s subject position constructs an alternative—if rhetorically incomplete—version of reality. What if individuals do not have sufficient rhetorical knowledge to document that experience in writing. What if they cannot interpret an individual s tone or gesture How can they draw upon that experience to warrant judgments about the health and safety of workers How can others evaluate that knowledge if it is not documented in conventional (written) forms  

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Moments of Transformation The Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries... 

FIG. 2.2. The cycle of technical documentation in large regulatory industries. 

The men and women who provide this training also stand at the rhetorical interface between agencies and local experience within the Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries, but trainers differ from investigators because they must reconstruct the local experience and observations that have been extracted and transformed in the process of creating standards. 

The Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries described in this chapter provides both a descriptive and inventional framework for investigating how this uncertain and dynamic material knowledge is cap-... 

Within the Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries, rhetorical choices can be strategic or habitual. As we have shown in previous chapters, interviewers can prompt miners to assume new viewpoints. Agencies can use these techniques to create the rhetorical conditions that evoke elaboration, demonstration, and redefinition. They can use gesture to explore, query, and co-construct a more adequate representation of risk. 

No single volume can answer all of these questions, but I hope I have answered some questions and mapped a new territory for future work investigating documentation practices throughout the Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries. 

If embodied information is not present in written communication, we might ask, where is it to be located In the following chapters, we show how miners deploy both speech and gesture to construct representations of risk that integrate theory and practice. These interviews allow us to examine the rhetorical transformations that occur outside of written communication at critical moments within the Cycle of Technical Documentation within Large Regulatory Industries. 

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