n Thursday, Sept. 19, Alan Houser visited the Bowers Writers House. His presentation, titled Professional Writing and Dynamic Communication, focused on technical writing as a profitable, in-demand profession. He also discussed the ways in which the flow of information changed with the advent of the printing press, and again with the advent of the World Wide Web. Houser’s presentation marks the start of an exciting season at Bowers this semester.
Houser was the immediate past president of the Society of Technical Communication (STC). He is also currently a fellow at STC with a bachelor of science in electrical engineering and holds a master’s degree in professional writing from Carnegie Mellon University. Houser presents for technical communication conferences all around the country.
“Certainly my message is geared toward technical communicators,” Houser said. “I’d like you to leave with a sense of the profession, a sense of the possibilities.” Technical communication, he explained, is currently a very viable first job because it is in demand. “If engineers are in demand, technical writers are in demand,” he said.
While his presentation featured technical communication, it covered several different subjects, beginning with the STC. He explained that early professional experience and connections can occur through affiliation with a program like the STC. Houser emphasized how useful such connections can be during the hiring process, saying “you like to work with people you know and you like to give opportunities to people you know if you’re in the position to do that.”
Houser further discussed the evolution of technical communication, using the Magna Carta as an example. One of the most important documents ever written, it forms the basis of the democratic rights we enjoy today. It is also, by today’s standards, very poorly written. “We have always throughout human history adjusted our communication based on the means that we had to communicate,” Houser said.
He explained that the Magna Carta was written with ink on animal skin, both of which would have been very expensive at the time. Written by hand, it would have also been very time-consuming. Because of this, Houser said, society had to adjust its writing to save time and material.
This adjustment ties into modern communication issues as well. According to Houser, many professionals worry that written text will eventually die away. He claims that this is not the case. “We’re still listening to the radio, even though that technology is over a hundred years old,” he said. “We just have a lot more things to choose from. It is the same with written text. With the advent of the internet, video is more prominent, but it has not overtaken the written word.”
Houser said that the main ways people communicate over the internet continue to be written by conversations and articles rather than by more advanced videos or voice recordings.
His final point was about the period in which the printing press dominated communication. “In the history of human communication, that’s an anomaly,” he said. ‘That’s a time when things were different.” Before the printing press, information was much freer. It was social and spread by word of mouth. The village storyteller did not own their stories.
After the printing press came along, the distribution of information became a monopoly. Only a few had access to it or could distribute it; it was no longer a social medium.
“You have this time for about 500 years where information is controlled,” Houser said. “The publishers had enormous power, because they were the gatekeepers to printing and disseminating information.” This period from 1500 to about the year 2000 is a kind of parenthesis in human history.
Now, we are just past the closing parenthesis of that age.
In the current era, with the advent of the internet, “information is once again social, it’s once again shared,” Houser said. The barriers to shared information are dropping away again.
Houser concluded on a positive note. “We are entering this new age. We have no idea what this will bring. But I think it’s going to be pretty amazing to find out.”
