The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it's important, and what we can do about it (Part II)
This is Part II of a two-part post. Read The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it’s important, and what we can do about it (Part I) if you haven’t already.
- The stakes are real and significant—and not just for academic technical communication
- There are opportunities to change things
- A forward-looking take
- Acknowledgement
- About Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt
The stakes are real and significant—and not just for academic technical communication
In a perfect world, the relationship between academic and industry technical communication would be complementary, mutually beneficial, even symbiotic. Practicing technical writers would attend the conferences that academic researchers do, both would read the same journals and publications, both would be in regular conversation with one another, the benefits of doing so would be obvious and well supported across different parts of the tech writing economy. In short, “Why should we do this?” or “How should we do this?” wouldn’t be central questions of engagement; rather, we’d be asking, “We’re already pursuing these connections as a matter of course; now, how can we grow them and make them even more valuable to everyone involved?”
For numerous reasons, many of which I’ve described in this column, that’s not where we are; as a collective field, we struggle to make the relationship consistent and mutually reinforcing. There are potential ways to enhance that relationship, and I’ll explain how. Before I do, let’s talk about the stakes today.
Academia’s unique pressures
Since the 1980s, higher education funding has changed dramatically. It’s complex, but the short version is this: State governments put in proportionally much less money per student at their institutions, tuition skyrocketed, student debt exploded, and conversations around what is a marketable degree (or not) and how higher ed is actually serving the larger public good became rampant. While I don’t want to get into the politics of all of it, suffice it to say we’re at a stage now where the humanities have seen historically low enrollments and reduced funding at the federal and state levels. While technical and professional writing is somewhat insulated from some of these effects, the field is not completely immune by any means, particularly when it comes to hiring new faculty.
Due to this combination of pressures, faculty members are having to rethink (almost daily) how to work in a financially leaner, sometimes more politically skeptical environment. Regardless of how one feels about the underlying dynamics, the challenges from those effects are real and far-reaching.
It’s also worth noting that even though academia has many hallmarks of a prestige economy with unique rewards and incentives, it’s still not above budgetary constraints. Funding cuts and budgetary shortfalls have impacted myriad colleges and universities, from smaller liberal arts colleges to flagship state institutions. And while those cuts and shortfalls have an effect on all academic disciplines and departments, the effect on the humanities—literature, language, writing (including technical writing), philosophy, history, and so on—tends to be particularly large as enrollments drop and funding decreases. This is a much larger discussion, but it’s worth bearing in mind.
AI: The disruptor
AI is disruptive, no doubt, and it’s a source of study and concern in technical communication. In my view, the conventional wisdom today generally holds that technical writing as a field is changing in fundamental ways, but not disappearing as a field of workplace practice. Without unpacking all of it here, the argument goes something like this: Technical writing was never “just” about writing, and that’s especially true now as AI platforms have shown their own utility in generating usable text when a user effectively prompts it. AI is changing technical writing workflows dramatically, and technical writers themselves are becoming more context curators and AI facilitators than mere content generators. Consequently, the strongest value play that technical communicators can make today is to strategically lean into those roles—a process that requires us to learn how to use AI effectively, incorporate it into our workflows, adjust our value propositions, and convey that value to stakeholders. As a principle, the value proposition part is not new; technical writers have been doing that for decades.
So what does this disruption have to do with higher education? A lot, actually. Let’s set aside the effects of AI on higher education itself (which are numerous) for a moment and focus specifically on how AI is affecting technical communication as an academic field. In short, there’s a mismatch in pacing and priorities. As I mentioned before, higher education as a social institution tends to move much more slowly than industry; that’s been a constant observation throughout my career in both. If we look at industry for a moment, there are companies who are early, middle, and late adopters of AI. An early-adopting company, for instance, may have encouraged employees to at least experiment with ChatGPT in early 2023 before formally implementing it in corporate processes within 6 months to a year. A late-adopting company may just now be forming a task force or hiring an outside subject matter expert to explore how to optimize their processes with AI. But those conversations are happening, and they’re moving forward deliberately, albeit with a lot of variation in context.
In higher education, those conversations are happening too, but in my experience, they look different, and they take much longer. They’re often committee-bound at the university, college, or department level (or a combination of those). There’s a tremendous amount of minutiae that enter those discussions—far more than would typically be the case at a small business or large corporation—surrounding ethics, logistics, student perceptions, values statements, and the list goes on. These conversations, while important and extremely valuable in principle, can become rather involved. And when I say “involved,” I don’t mean over the course of an hour or two; I mean over the course of weeks or months.
Then there’s the functional part of AI: how it works. How does an individual or a group of people in a university department get to the “here’s what AI can do” part of a conversation when we haven’t resolved the “should we be using AI to begin with, and if so, how?” question? Practically speaking, that part may matter just as much as the philosophical part—and not answering the question substantially limits our ability to move forward in any meaningful, long-term way.
Technical communication’s distinctive position
As a humanities field, academic technical communication is subject to some of the same pressures that our colleagues in fields like history and philosophy are: lower funding in our colleges and in some cases reduced faculty hiring. Yet there’s a critical edge to this that makes technical communication different from other humanities fields. For the past 70 years, technical communication has had what I call “one-to-one” transferability from academic path to career destination. While it’s true that technical writing as a field is often not well understood, there are dozens if not hundreds of jobs open at any one time that emphasize that skill set. Many of those jobs, not surprisingly, are simply called “technical writer” or a number of cognate terms like “documentation specialist.” Like other humanities fields, it is very adaptable. Despite having industry applicability comparable to fields like computer science or medicine, it lacks the depth of research-to-practice infrastructure those fields have developed.
Technical writing is also a very young field; this is true in industry, and it’s certainly true academically, too. The first academic programs in technical writing really didn’t exist until the early-to mid-1950s. There are classic discussions in scholarly literature about how technical and professional writing teachers and scholars have often felt “left out” or othered by other humanities disciplines that don’t really understand (or in some cases care) what their tech comm colleagues are teaching or studying. Even within the field, there are often spirited discussions about what it is that we should actually be teaching and what the nature of the field really is or should be. Imagine trying to have that discussion at a sales meeting in industry. Sure, they happen; obviously they do. But do they happen at conferences and in very niche publications for years or decades on end about a single mission statement or company philosophy or what the company’s relationship to its customers should be? If that was actually the case in industry, there would be a lot of products not being sold.
There are opportunities to change things
As Silvio Dante once said to Tony Soprano, “Here’s where the conversation gets … difficult.” The reason for that difficulty is threefold. For one, many of these ideas haven’t been tried on any broad scale; if anything, they’ve been tried at a few institutions or departments, and sometimes with limited success or over such a short amount of time that it’s hard to say what success would’ve looked like had the effort endured. For another reason, higher education as a social institution can be very equilibrium-sensitive. As I discussed earlier, change happens slowly, and resistance to change can at times be significant. Finally, the differences in industry and academic ecosystems create a frame of reference obstacle that can be challenging to overcome.
But if we set all of that aside for a moment and agree that meaningful change is possible, here is what change for the better may look like. To help contextualize the challenge involved in making each change happen, I’ll include an assessment of that difficulty. These suggestions grew out of my dissertation years ago, and in my view they still hold up today.
1. We need regular conversations between academics and practicing technical writers. This is the baseline and likely the most important of the recommendations I have. When the people teaching courses and doing research are talking to the people doing technical writing as a profession, those are potentially meaningful interactions. The major questions are:
- Where and when do those conversations take place?
- What do they look like? (Think about the “different vocabularies” I talked about earlier.)
- How do we make time for them and convince the stakeholders involved that it’s worth setting aside time for?
Efforts to promote such conversations aren’t unprecedented. Academic journals have run special issues on this relationship several times over the years. Before its disbanding, the Society for Technical Communication (STC) actively promoted academic-industry connections through its regional chapters, training programs, annual conference, and its flagship publication, Technical Communication. Organizations like Write the Docs and ACM SIGDOC work hard to include both technical writers and academics in their local meetups and conferences. In a very real sense, such efforts aren’t without success; they do bring both groups together, though with varying results and long-term engagement. Most academics and technical writers, however, do not “cross over,” and this is the recommendation where the structural incentive problem is most visible and least resolved. Practitioners have real value to offer in these conversations, but the current system gives them few built-in reasons to prioritize them. What those structural incentives might look like—consulting arrangements, formal advisory roles with meaningful compensation, recognized continuing education credits—is a conversation the field needs to have more deliberately than it has. For now, the honest answer is that this one depends more on individual commitment than any of the others.
Difficulty level: Moderate.
2. Academic research should include more direct interactions with workplace professionals: practicing technical writers and the people who work with them. This recommendation is similar in spirit to the first one, but more specific to planned research. To be fair, this kind of research has a strong precedent historically—many people have done it—and that kind of work continues today (Erin Friess at University of North Texas and Joanna Schreiber at Georgia Southern are very good examples). For others, lack of incentives and minimal if any training in workplace research methods present significant obstacles.
Difficulty level: Moderate to high. The research methods and workplace access required aren’t impossible to develop, but without institutional support and an existing practitioner network, the barriers are such that most faculty won’t pursue it on goodwill alone.
3. Academics in technical communication need more exposure to non-academic workplaces. This one is probably the “highest friction” of all. Sustained engagement with non-academic workplaces is relatively rare among academics in technical communication—a product of weak incentives, competing priorities, and in many cases limited familiarity with what that engagement would actually involve. The core question is a simple one: if there’s no obvious institutional reward for doing it, who’s going to do it?
Difficulty level: High.
4. Academic institutions and departments must support workplace research. This is huge. If academics have support to perform workplace research, they’re much more likely to do it, or at least pay more attention to the possibility of doing it. What do those supports look like? There are a number of possibilities:
- Research grants targeted specifically for workplace research.
- Time off from teaching (for example, a reduction in course teaching load) to pursue this kind of work.
- Seminars and workshops on doing workplace research.
- Structured opportunities to engage with workplace professionals and faculty members in other departments who do workplace research.
- Local, regional, and national conferences dedicated to focused workplace research (those kinds of conferences do exist in principle, yet their tie-in with actual workplaces is quite variable).
Difficulty level: Moderate. Many faculty and administrators could see the value; proposing and implementing the necessary supports is another matter.
5. Academic research programs (e.g., PhD programs) should provide training in workplace-applicable research methods. This is a tough one, and it may not always land well with many graduate faculty. At the same time, many of the challenges we face—internally speaking, that is, not those that come from funding and external perceptions—trace back to the training of early-career folks. This is not at all a statement of blame; it’s a systemic and structural statement, a reflection of self-perpetuating realities in an insular yet significant sector of the economy. Our research-focused graduate programs in the humanities are based on best practices in theory and research developed many decades ago. They adapt, sure, but incrementally and in ways that face internally: What gets traction at a conference? How do we position our work for journal editors and peer reviewers? In essence, what impresses other career academics? These are valid questions, but they’re not the only questions we have to answer if we want to make our work more relevant to stakeholders outside the academy—stakeholders that our students will work with as they necessarily move beyond our theoretical hallways. Learning how to conduct research in those non-academic spaces is a necessary and significant part of moving beyond the lore and calcified best practices that become outmoded as the world around us changes.
Difficulty level: Highly dependent on the program and faculty who teach there.
6. Technical communication courses should include client-based projects and guest speakers from industry whenever possible. Of these recommendations, this one is almost certainly the lowest-friction one. Why? It’s the one that academic programs have already implemented most often and most seamlessly over the years. Technical communication courses across dozens of universities already incorporate client-based projects and guest speakers from industry; my observation is that those efforts are growing rather than diminishing. This is both needed and promising for the future of the field. It’s also one of the most obvious pathways for cultivating connections to industry.
Difficulty level: Low.
7. Program assessment should include input from industry professionals. One of the keystone elements of any academic program—not just in technical communication, but in any discipline—is assessing that program. When an academic program is started, it’s not a “set it and forget it” scenario, nor should it be; programs are assessed and revised at least every few years, often by a combination of specific faculty members in a department and a group of three or four external auditors from other universities in the same field. This is not problematic in itself—faculty are very experienced at programmatic assessment—yet we still need industry input in order to align program outcomes with workplace realities. Practitioners who serve on advisory boards, participate in program reviews, or offer candid feedback on what new hires actually need are doing some of the highest-value work available to them in terms of shaping the next generation of technical communicators.
Difficulty level: Moderate.
These recommendations carry meaningful weight. If implemented, technical writing would develop a more robust research-to-practice pipeline than it has now, and practitioners and researchers alike would benefit. Yet there is an ironic caveat worth re-acknowledging: the structural incentive problem. Academics, at least in theory, have more built-in reasons to pursue these connections in their own jobs—publications, service credit, and curriculum relevance, among other things. The field hasn’t developed strong mechanisms to change that. In the current environment, many of the olive branches that get extended come from interested academics—teachers and researchers who see the value and prioritize those connections. Practicing technical writers aren’t necessarily disinterested, and they have extremely high value to offer in those connections; they simply may not have the same structural incentives to pursue them in the current environment.
A forward-looking take
Academic technical communication, at its best, is where the field’s future gets built—where the next generation of practitioners learns to think, where research surfaces what practice alone may not easily see. The fact that the stakes are so high now reinforces the potential of the academic field of technical communication and the urgency in pursuing that potential. The nuance here is not that technical writing will cease to exist if we don’t fill this gap, but more that we’re leaving an enormous potential benefit on the table if we don’t try to fill that gap in as many ways as we can. The future of that potential is uncertain, but it’s meaningful—and all of us in the field can be a part of it.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank some people who gave me important feedback as I was working on this: Hui Sian Richardson and Trisha Hanlon in industry, and Andrew Gordon, Barbara George, and Lora Anderson in the academic part of the field.
About Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt
Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt is an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University, where he teaches courses on technical communication in business, industry, and organizational contexts. In his research, he studies workplace communication, workplace dynamics (such as organizational climate), the application of technical communication across industries, and how professionals in different fields perceive technical communication. Jeremy was a practicing technical writer for 15 years in industries ranging from biopharmaceuticals to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and pneumatic tools manufacturing. He holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication (RSTC) from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Technical and Scientific Communication (MTSC) degree from Miami University (Ohio) and can be reached at [email protected].