Back to Basics: An Apology for Economism in Technical Writing Scholarship

Convergence in the Rhetorical Pattern of Directness and Indirectness in Chinese and U.S. Business Letters

“…As Ehninger (1983) maintained, in various historical eras, a specific kind of discourse always emerges in response to the surrounding culture and politics. Longaker (2006) held that a strong relationship exists between the economy and the sociocultural institutions, and business communication styles or manners of technical writing often develop in dialectical response to the economic cycles (p. 10). Zhu (1999) echoed this perspective, pointing out the link between genre features and the economic structure in each historical period in Chinese business communication.…”

Cruel Theory? The Struggle for Prestige and its Consequences in Academic Technical Communication

“…One way they do that is develop something new. We will see this technique in the next section when I analyze works by Dragga and Voss [16] and Longaker [17]. These works have new analytical approaches that will create cultural capital for their authors.…”

“…Like Dragga and Voss's "Cruel Theory," Longaker's "Back to Basics" [17] describes scarcities and then presents a solution. But the scarcities that Longaker's essay defines involve both the material and the prestige economy.…”

“…The following section of this article discusses Fred Hirsch's distinction between the material and positional economies. Next I analyze two works by Dragga and Voss [16] and Longaker [17]. Before concluding, I suggest several approaches to coping with the limits on prestige, approaches that are less self-defeating and wasteful.…”