From my various sources I learned about the difficulties of trying to address social justice in technical writing and the many problems that can be faced from the lack of social justice. Ableism, lack of diversity and inclusion, biases, are all problems that are apart of technical communication even if it doesn't seem like it on the surface. These issues affect all of us and its in our best interest to improve the actual writing by including diverse thought and opinions and improving the accessibility of writing and technical communication as a whole. Through addressing these issues technical communicators can not only improve there own work but make real world social impact through the vast impact of the technical writing field. Focusing to much on efficiency and not enough on accessibility is a clear downfall for many technical writers, but this means it can also be a solution if we increase our focus. Globalization is ever increasing in our world and even with some benefits this hurts the most marginalized communities most and just raises the barriers for entry into technical writing. This means we need an ever increasing focus on localizing communities and stretching out to listen to the voices of these marginalized communities. After reading all of these different sources about social justice in technical communication it really shows that there are clear problems that need to be addressed, but also some solutions that make the future possibly bright. Clearly we need an increased focus on scholarship, listening to marginalized communities and then addressing our own personal biases. With we accomplish these or start focusing more this can prove essential to improving social justice not only in technical writing but the world.
Jones, N., Moore, K., & Walton, R. (2016) talks about their heuristic based around finding the relative power and privilege in technical communication. They have also found that certain focus's on innovation and efficiency has led to ableism in some cases (pg. 218). This shows that even though many think of technical writing as based on having efficient writing based in user accessibility this is still far from the case for many groups. There is still tons of work that still needs to be done, and uniquely as technical communicators this is possible to change. This means that through certain heuristics, scholarships, and focuses on accessibility along with efficiency can lead to a much more inclusive work.
With more and more work being done with a global audience having writers versed in these localized communities is essential to accessibility for these marginalized groups. Shivers-McNair, A. (2017) write about how with more globalization this can also lead to ever increasing pushing away of marginalized communities. This means that there is a higher barrier to entry for the internet and technical communication and if we want more social justice we have to address these issues (pg. 98). This means that we need a focus on localizing communities if we ever want to insure equality for everyone accessing technical communication.
Here Jones (2016) talks about how even though there is a lot more of the realization that there needs to be more diverse thinking and more inclusion in technical communication that this is merely just the first step and there are actual frameworks and ideas that can be implemented to improve this (pg. 343). Jones focuses a lot of this article around needing to involve more diverse thinking and involve marginalized people in the writing itself. As she mentions "decolonial approaches" this means that we should be approaching technical writing through different lenses and especially around the actual research themselves. To not fall into thinking you already know what is best for marginalized communities, we should instead be listening to there ideas and including the actual marginalized communities in the research and writing processes.
Miller (1979) approaches technical writing in a different approach then many other people did at that time. Her argument bases around that technical writing has alot more of a humanistic approach then people realize and this then shows true in our writing (pg. 1). Many people like to think that all writing is objective and is based more in scientific positivism then humanism, but to her this is wrong. She argues that we have our own touch on our writing which should be built up more even in the academic world. She focuses alot on how we shouldn't be thinking of technical writing as scientific based skills writing but instead reason the hand that people have in science and writing as a whole. This is impactful for social justice as we aren't objective people. No matter the writing we do there will be some kind of bias that will seep through.