Abstract

Negotiating Affect: Evaluating Website Writing as a Site of Struggle

Theory requires practice to prove its applicability, and practice requires theory to understand why it works and how to make it work better.  One practical application of theory, the analysis of a website, can be done many ways.  Using a multi-directional analysis such as the EUPARS model (an evaluation of “exigency, urgency, purpose, audience, rhetorical stance, and textual structures”), a technical writer can provide a convincing argument to negotiate change (Hailey, 2011).  The need for change is a source of conflict between team members or between writer and client.  This struggle can be understood by applying the theoretical lens provided by Doak et al., who propose a three-direction approach: the transmission view, the translation view, and the articulation view.  The articulation view in particular is useful to help us see ourselves as being “complicit in an ongoing articulation and rearticulation of relations of power” (p. 163).  This articulation is a Deleuzian territory, where the central issues are defined but the edges are slightly less concrete.  How do we define our regions of power?  How do we determine the extent of our authorship, our areas of responsibility?  This paper examines those territories and tries to provide a new lens through which to view our own theories in an effort to strengthen our practices.


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Here is the Doak article referenced above:

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority. Central Works in Technical Communication. Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola & Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 160-174. Print.

Originally published in

Slack, J. D., D. J. Miller, and J. Doak. The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7.1 (1993): 12-36.