Reading Response

As I was reading this week’s articles, specifically Herrington’s “Work for Hire for Nonacademic Creators,” I continually found myself trying to relate the discussions of technical communication to my limited related experience. Despite knowing that today’s authors were not writing about copy editors and newspaper columnists (my former jobs), I wanted to find ways to equate my work to their writings. Even though I don’t believe I could accurately call myself a technical communicator at any point in my history, the arguments that were made in this week’s reading, mainly that students need to be informed of their role in and knowledgeable of the applicable laws surrounding the technical communications profession, would have benefited me greatly in my former occupations.

Herrington illustrates the nonacademic applications of work-for-hire doctrine, individually showcasing each determining factor that courts use for deciding legal authorship and then relating each to the teaching of technical communication by suggesting why students should be aware of specifics of legal authorship. As I was reading her article, I was reminded of some writing I did will while employed as a copy editor for a veterinary organization.

Although my main job was to copy edit manuscripts to be published in a research journal, occasionally I was asked to write newspaper-type stories for the yearly conference newspaper. For last year’s conference, I wrote a series of ten-question trivia quizzes about Washington, D.C. Upon publication, I was quite upset to see that I was not given credit for writing the quizzes and that the quizzes had been heavily edited, something that as creative writing student, I was not used to. In school, I frequently participated in writing workshops and received much feedback and many suggestions from fellow students, but I was never told to change anything in my writing. To have my writing, even though it was a series of quizzes, edited without my knowledge and published before I was able to even see the edits, felt like a slap in the face.

As I was reading this past week and formulating ideas about technical communicators, I started to see how an understanding of this “different” authorship, as N. Nyl points out in a comment to June Cleaver’s plagiarism and PowerPoint post, would have prevented these hostile feelings I held towards my employer and would have prepared me for the workplace that I entered. What I wrote wasn’t mine, from a legal standpoint; I wrote as a representative of the organization I worked for, and as such, my writing could be edited by another representative without my knowledge, or as far as the organization was concerned, without me caring.

Many English and other majors will find themselves in jobs that they did not foresee while in school. Many of these jobs will require these students to write (or create) collaborative or technical projects for which they may or may not receive authorial credit (they will hopefully receive credit indirectly in terms of salary, bonuses, and promotions). Many, if not most, of these students, just as myself, will not have taken any technical communications courses before entering the workplace. Herrington and Reyman both call for an increased awareness by students of how their work will be used in an employment setting. But, not having foreseen their future occupations, where will these students come upon this insight into the ways of the technical communications profession? I would argue that students need to be exposed to these ideas of varying types of authorship early and repeatedly in college courses. Writing or composition classes can discuss these ideas as they apply to genre, and other classes in the students’ majors can illustrate more specific instances of how authorship applies to their discipline. By showing all students that our Western model of single authorship is not the only practicing model, we will prepare them for the corporate and collaborative author-role that they will likely encounter in their future employment.