The Language of Work

"We technical writers seem to think that our field started with the software industry or, if we have very long memories, with Grace Hopper's efforts for the U.S. Navy in the 1970s. However, as Carol Johnson points out in The Language of Work, technical writing has a much longer and richer history than that. By the 1800s, as apprenticeship systems with oral traditions gave way to mechanized systems run by professionals, information had to be written down. However, writing books that readers could understand and navigate easily didn't come automatically. The Language of Work shows how our predecessors eventually turned logs and notes into standardized texts and industry bibles, creating many of the types of information design that we use today." - Susan Fowler, FAST Consulting, Member of the Society for Technical Communication "This meticulously researched and well-documented scholarly analysis of technical communication in a major American steel company is written in a language accessible to the layperson. Johnson provides a wealth of visual documentation and opens up the equally impressive data resource hidden in historic business and technical communication. In Lukens Steel she has found the perfect institution to demonstrate how much more we can learn when we include the artifacts of technical communications in our studies of industries. This book will appeal to industrial archaeologists, historic preservationists, avocationals and professionals interested in the iron industry, and readers fascinated by the uses of language. A superb and readable study!" Edward J. Lenik, Registered Professional Archaeologist "Carcl Johnson opens a new field of scholarship with her study of how workers, managers, and customers exchanged information at the Lukens Company between 1810 and 1925. Communication within the works was verbal and personal when Lukens began making iron. Then, as a large twentieth-century steelmaker, Lukens ran on written, impersonal documents. Johnson has skillfully traced this transformation. She shows us how new writing technologies, from the letter press, which made copies before there was carbon paper, to typewriters, opened opportunities that eventually allowed managers working in their own office building to control the work going on in the shops of the Lukens mills. Eventually these new techniques allowed women to enter the all-male world of the steel industry, first as stenographers and later as secretaries with administrative responsibilities. Relations with customers changed from reliance on a firm's reputation established by experience and word-of-mouth to written product specifications that could be enforced by contracts. In this pioneering study, Johnson shows us how the complex, evolving relationships between staff, management, and customers were both driven and facilitated by the ever increasing presence of the written word in the workplace." - Robert Gordon, D. Eng., Senior Research Scientist, Geophysics and Mechanical Engineering, Yale University"