The Social Language of Technical Communication

In his book Network, Clay Spinuzzi discusses the role “social languages” play inside of a network (p. 23-28) by introducing the reader to a Telecorp worker called Jeannie and her initial experience with social language.

            “And how bitter that discovery is: workers have worked hard to learn their own social language, and now they have to learn another.  “We are taken right off the streets with zero experience in this field,” Jeannie told me, “an it was like walking into a language course of Greek and it was taught all in Greek and you didn’t have a clue what they were saying. . . .They would plop you down with a book this big and say ‘read it’ but you can’t even understand the lingo and can’t even understand what you’re reading.” Jeannie eventually learned this Greek,” (p. 26)

Spinuzzi's discussion of social languages and Jeannie's experience in trying to learn how to speak one resulted in some serious thought about the social language of technical communication.  I have felt just like Jeannie this semester.  I am a student trying my hardest to learn a language (that of technical communication) but the class is taught in Greek and the book is written in Greek and I only speak English! This seemingly impossible task has been frustrating and left me feeling like I will never understand the material let alone be able to articulate it and then along comes Clay Spinuzzi and Network.

While I was reading this book, I began to make connections with the ideas and theories Dr. Moeller presented earlier in the semester.  Suddenly and strangely, concepts from A Thousand Plateaus’s began to make sense inside another text.  When Spinuzzi started discussing how networks are spliced, I actually thought of Delueze and Guittari and it made perfect sense to me that he referenced rhizome. I applauded his use of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in discussing strategies for dealing with the ruptures inside of the Telecorp network.  I even found myself physically nodding my head while reading because Spinuzzi's application of these ideologies made sense.  The semester came together for me in this one book.

As this phenomenon recurred during my reading, it became clear that technical communication has its own social language.  Learning and understanding how to speak this language is what will make me a successful scholar.  There is little doubt that next week I will find myself still reading Greek but hopefully I will be able to recognize a word here and there.  Just like the acquisition of any other language, fluency will take time but for me the key to understanding is recognizing that there is another language being spoken. While my fellow students probably understood this from the start, by finally being able to see it I am hopeful that I'm not too old or too tired to learn something new.