This article explores the dialogic negotiation processes that can enable professional communication academics and practitioners to collaborate in designing, implementing, and writing up research. Drawing on our experiences conducting a collaborative academic-practitioner case study of technical sales presentations in an executive briefing center, we outline the ways in which we dialogically negotiated research questions, data collection and analysis, theoretical frameworks, organizational contexts, identifications, and interpersonal connections. We then discuss potential limitations of academic-practitioner collaborations and conclude by offering a tentative, contextual list of "best practices" for facilitating successful collaboration across the academic-practitioner divide.

An increasing body of research relies on genre to analyze academic and professional communication and to describe how members of a community use language. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of genre-based research in technical communication and to describe the different approaches to genre and to genre teaching. While some research focuses on the textual analysis of genres, other studies focus on the analysis of the social context and the ideology and structure of the discourse community that owns the genre, and on the role of genres as social rhetorical actions of the community. These two perspectives are also reflected in the teaching of genre in technical communication.

This study contributes to a discussion on collaboration and technical/professional communication in indeterminate zones or less familiar sites for collaboration. The interdisciplinary group for this case study collaborated to write a project proposal to solicit funds from the US government for constructing a test bed for immune buildings as a tactic for combating potential biological and chemical terrorist incidents. Their approach to collaboration coincided with several approaches previously addressed in professional and technical communication research. Novel and creative approaches emerged as a result of this collaboration, but in some instances, disciplinary differences, as manifested by disputes over concepts and terminologies, posed obstacles to collaboration. Such challenges necessitated strong leadership, which was also critical for managing group process.

This special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION focuses on developing new case studies for use in technical and professional communication courses. The term “case study” used here refers to descriptions of real world events that illustrate particular communication problems through collections of primary documents and secondary materials. While case study pedagogy provides students with many benefits, such as concrete applications of technical communication theory, there are distinct challenges that may prevent instructors from developing case studies, such as collecting primary documents as they become available in the media. The case studies treated in the special issue focus on the following events: the crash of Air Midwest Flight 5481; the accounting scandals of the Enron corporation; the communication crisis at Brookhaven National Laboratory; the leaking of nuclear material at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant; the Texas A&M bonfire collapse; and airline press releases in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

The events of September 11, 2001, provide enough case material for hundreds of cases that are applicable in Technical and Professional Communication courses. I developed the case described in this article to give students a real-world look at how corporations communicate in a crisis-in this case, a crisis of extraordinary proportions. The foundation for the case is the public communication via press releases from American Airlines and United Airlines via their press releases within the 24 hours following the first plane's crash into the World Trade Center. The activities provided allow students to produce appropriate corporate communication, in this case, press releases, using the details of the situation. They also provide a variety of ways to use crisis-response strategies, such as Coombs', to analyze, critique, compare and contrast how each airline constructed the messages it conveyed on this fateful day. This case study demonstrates how crucial each word of a message can be and allows students to reach concrete decisions about why a crisis-response plan, along with the accompanying crisis-response strategies and the resulting communication products are essential for any corporation.

Results are presented from an assessment of student perceptions of collaborative writing practices before and after taking an upper division professional writing class. While most of the classes introduced students to these writing practices, several did not. The assessment was both quantitative and qualitative. Whether or not they had prior experience in the classroom, all students generally reported that they are likely to seek out opportunities to use both peer review and collaborative writing processes once they enter the workplace. However, students who are exposed to these practices in a classroom setting are more likely to report that they intend to continue these practices in the workplace.

The article examines the use of electronic cases which is characterized by the use of the Web to improve teaching and learning in professional communication techniques. The approach presented provides a learning environment (the case) in which students draw from and contribute to an interactive resource of artifacts, so as to become actively involved in the day-to-day practices of a group. Furthermore, students must (based on their understanding of the artifacts) identify, communicate, and justify a course of action for the continued development of the organization. In this sense, students move beyond analyzing and responding to a traditionally narrated, historical case and instead become immersed in the process of "making sense" and communicating in an effort to render the organization for a number of audiences. Because it is computer mediated, the case affords the opportunity for students to more readily interact with a greater volume and wider range of information than can be transmitted through traditional hard-copy case studies.

The article focuses on the use and misuse of models-both appropriate and inappropriate-in the report-writing practices of first year physics students, especially those from non-English speaking backgrounds. It analyzes the students' propensity to use any available text on a given topic as a source of model sentences. Examples of "copying" are provided and analyzed. It is argued that many forms of copying are legitimate learning strategies of novice writers, for the production of certain kinds of texts, but that this can become a problem when inappropriate models are used or when appropriate models are used inappropriately. Copying is discussed in relation to imitative learning and modeling as well as plagiarism, and some suggestions to improve teaching practice are made.

It is commonly accepted that writing instruction should meet the specific needs of writers and that students in scientific and technical fields benefit more by learning to write to match the requirements of their specific fields. A variety of models for writing classes have been proposed to meet these needs, from genre-based approaches to courses targeting specific disciplines to general courses serving a heterogeneous group of students from many disciplines. Although persuasive arguments can be made for discipline-specific writing courses, many writing courses for nonnative writers at U.S. universities operate with two key constraints. First, monetary and curricular limitations mean that students from a variety of disciplines are placed in the same course. Second, these courses are staffed by instructors who, while well-prepared in addressing language needs of nonnative writers, may know very little about the content and conventions of engineering and science. This paper discusses a writing course which works within these constraints and has been developed for graduate students who are early in their program of study. In the course, groups of students carry out an original research project as a vehicle to learn professional writing conventions common to research papers in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. In addition, students analyze written conventions in published articles within their fields to raise awareness of how general conventions are worked out in their individual disciplines. General principles for the course are discussed, and samples of successful research topics are provided.

Action research has been presented as a promising approach for academic inquiry because of its focus on real world problems and its ability to provide researchers with a rich body of field data for knowledge building. Published examples of action research, however, are hard to find in business communication literature. What are the reasons for this? I try to provide a basis for answering this question as well as helping other business communication researchers-particularly those interested in computer-mediated communication issues-to decide whether and when to employ action research. I offer a first-person, confessional tale-like account of an action research study of computer-mediated communication in groups. In order to focus on the lessons learned, my focus is on the process of conducting action research and not on empirical results. Some of the situations and related lessons discussed are somewhat surprising and illustrate the complex nature of action research. The doctoral research, conducted over four years in Brazil and New Zealand, highlights the challenges associated with action research's dual goal of serving practitioners and the research community.

The search for fundamental laws, unfortunately, has seldom, if ever, been applied to professional communication. Most how-to books on the subject seem content with long lists of phenomenological principles. Useful as each of these might be, a long list of them will always be hard to assimilate, at least without some perception of a simpler underlying logic. This article proposes three fundamental "laws of professional communication," on the model of Asimov's three laws of robotics. It motivates them on the basis of a simple premise, illustrates them with examples of oral, written. and graphical communication, and discusses their precedence and their subordination to a zeroth law.

Traditional in-class writing assignments often fail to engage students effectively. This problem may be compounded when students are forced into group projects, where a student may rightly feel that he or she could complete the entire assignment more effectively alone than the whole group could working together. In an attempt to alleviate these concerns, I assigned my university science writing class-half Professional Writing majors, half science majors and minors-the creation of an interactive, electronic murder mystery game. The students used PowerPoint to create linked slides in which the clues and cause of death were scientific information. While working on this assignment in class, a number of students forgot the time and kept working long after class was over. Several students reported losing track of time and place when working on the game at home.

Ask any specialist of professional communication how many items we can hold in short-term memory: almost certainly, he or she will answer seven (possibly, seven plus or minus two). Ask that person where this answer comes from: very likely, he or she will refer to an article published almost fifty years ago in Psychological Review (G.A. Miller, 1956). Equally likely, however, he or she will never have read this article and will happily go on quoting it out of context. The article denounces the seven-plus-or-minus-two myth. It first reviews George Miller's original paper, placing the limit of seven in a proper perspective and drawing other, possibly more useful lessons from the research presented. Next, it explores the guiding value of integers below seven and proposes other, equally magical, but more pragmatic limits for effective professional communication.