Borrowing from rhetorically based theories of usability, this article offers an invention tactic designed to help students understand how mundane features of everyday dwelling places have significant impacts on their educational experiences. Additionally, the offered tactic helps students understand how to craft rhetorical critiques in contexts inside and outside academia.

This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. Ipresent a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and pedagogical attention.

In the technical communication classroom, the received wisdom is that good instructions should “stay out of the way” of the users’ engagement with technological systems.This article draws on Burke’s concept of perspective by incongruity and on examples of instructions produced during the Women’s Health Movement to demonstrate that sometimes instructions can—and should—take on a more critical, system-disrupting stance.

When examined rhetorically, Savannah River Site Community Preparedness Information calendars from 1994, 2004, and 2008 represent living rhetorical practices aimed at changing the public mind. My technical communication classroom at USC Aiken is uniquely situated for us to examine documents constantly generated by the site’s Public Affairs Department.

Beverly Sauer has spent a decade in the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa analyzing the ways in which the hazards of coal mining are documented and, consequently, the ways in which these hazards are or might be reduced.

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Richards on Rhetoric, Ann E. Berthoff W. Ross Winterowd Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher , Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley-Meissner, and Chris Anderson Sam Watson A Sense of Audience in Written Communication, Gesa Kirsch and Duane H. Roen Chris M. Anson Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw Sandra Stotsky The Writing Center: New Directions, Ray Wallace and Jeanne Simpson Muriel Harris Writer’s Craft, Teacher’s Art: Teaching What We Know, Mimi Schwartz Wendy Bishop Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How, Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams Richard Jenseth Textbooks in Focus: Creative Writing: Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley Released into Language,Wendy Bishop Writing Poems, Robert Wallace What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter The College Handbook of Creative Writing, Robert DeMaria Chuck Guilford Textbooks in Focus: Technical WritingTechnical Writing: A Reader-Centered Approach, Paul V. Anderson Designing Technical Reports: Writing for Audiencesin Organizations, J. C. Mathes and Dwight W. StevensonTechnical Writing and Professional Communication, Leslie A. Olsen and Thomas N. Huckin Technical Writing: A Practical Approach, William S. Pfeiffer Technical Writing: Principles,Strategies, and Readings, Diana C.Reep Design of Business Communications: The Process and the Product, Elizabeth Tebeaux Carolyn R. Miller

Best Collection of Essays, NCTE Awards for Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication.Effective a major sourcebook that offers technical writers, editors, teachers, and students of technical communication a wide variety of practical guidelines based on often hard to find research in the usability of printed and electronic media.The book's eighteen chapters provide a wealth of material on such topics of current interest as the writing of design manuals, research in cognitive psychology as applied to the design of user manuals, and the organizing of manuals for hierarchical software systems. Included are chapters by such well known scholars in the field as Philip Rubens, Robert Krull, Judith Ramey, and John Carroll.Effective reviews the advice offered by other to produce usable documentation books, describing the different types of usability research and explaining the inherent biases of each type. It goes beyond the actual design of textual and/or electronic media to look at these designs in context, giving advice on effective management (good management is a requisite of good writing), on the relationship between document design and product design, and on how to find out who one's readers really are. Advances in the presentation of textual information are explained, with suggestions on how to improve the usability of individual sentences and the design of entire books.The concluding chapters discuss advances in the design and use of online information and offer valuable insights into the use of graphic information and the development and design of information communicated via electronic media.Stephen Doheny Farina is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Clarkson University. Effective Documentation is included in the Information Systems series, edited by Michael Lesk.

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In 1980-1981, a new requirement of a junior course in went into force at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. The course was created by the University to ensure that future UM graduates would be more literate and more articulate than recent graduates. The staff of the new course chose to meet the University's goal by giving the course a strong technical writing or professional writing emphasis. The course is taught (with English Department supervision) by professors from every division of the University, and by professionals in many fields (from law to veterinary medicine) from the Washington, D.C. area. Students write papers using subject matter from their intended professions, and they are graded on their ability to make that subject matter clear to students (semi-professionals) in other disciplines. This new junior course has led those of us who teach the freshman course to seriously reconsider what we are teaching. Since our course has shifted from independent to sequential status, we naturally feel some anxiety about possible new restrictions, but we also see the change as an opportunity to think through, more systematically, some crucial issues-what to teach, where to begin and end, and what theories should be guiding our discussion and analysis. We have decided that setting limits on content in the freshman course on the grounds that what we teach might be repeated in the later course would be counter-productive. Students, especially at the college level, should be tested, prodded, and stretched to their limits. Moreover, we-and the students-ought to be able to see a second course not as repetition, but as welcome practice. William Irmscher has reminded us (in Teaching Expository Writing) that better is largely a matter of better-educated intuition, and that better-educated intuition comes from repeated practice in reading and writing. We all know studies like the Dartmouth study reported by Albert Kitzhaber in Themes, Theories, and Therapy (p. 109), which show that

Chapters on doing research in the library are the backwater of English handbooks and rhetorics. Even a cursory survey of the contents of these chapters reveals a strange combination of intimidating lists of indexes, vague-if hopeful-advice about the uses of the card catalogue, and caveats about choosing books carefully and remembering not to steal them. After reading through seventeen introductions to research in twelve currently marketed handbooks, a recently issued guide to the research paper, two popular textbooks, and two widely used technical writing handbooks, I am led to ask 1) what relation exists between what professional researchers do and what the handbooks recommend and describe? 2) what should be the pedagogical goals of these chapters? and 3) how might research writing be taught more effectively ? Professional researchers start with an hypothesis or an observation, not with a topic; they look for answers, not for an exercise in debate; and when they seek out information, professionals scope. They look for every conceivable way to save time and cut through the literature by finding a few trustworthy guides. First, of course, they turn to the telephone to network, to make contact with people who can recommend either experts or publications that present the most recent information. Second, researchers send letters of inquiry to concerned individuals and organizations, a strategy that recognizes that we live and work by committees, institutes, centers, associations, and lobbies that produce thousands of publications, many of which may never appear in traditional bibliographies. Professionals also use automated bibliographic searching, with all of the methods now available for selecting review articles and limiting the field in other ways. Finally, and most important for the purposes of composition teachers, professionals use selected bibliographic tools to find 1) recent studies, 2) review articles, and 3) recent publications that include annotated bibliographies. Here I would emphasize the word selected. It takes time to use

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