Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.

Technical experts and writers often disagree about what constitutes accuracy in popular writings about science and technology, such as news media reports. In previous attempts to quantify accuracy in science news reporting, many of the sources' comments pointed to objective errors, but a sizable number dealt with lack of completeness or stylistic issues. There has been no consensus among communication researchers on the kind of scheme that should be used to code such information. We suggest a scheme for categorizing empirical information about the different kinds of perceived "errors" that technical sources identify in articles about their work by journalists and other writers. This study may lead to strategies for enhancing the accuracy of popular writings about science and technology.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Deep linking, the practice of linking to a subsidiary page rather than the home page of another organization's Web site, is the subject of considerable controversy. In several recent lawsuits, plaintiffs have alleged violations of copyright, trademark, and commercial laws. I review the legal and ethical issues regarding deep linking and comment on how the ethical conflict between rights and utility motivates the controversy. I conclude that protecting site owners' rights to control deep linking to their sites is a stronger value than enhancing the utility of the Web for users by allowing completely unrestricted deep linking. Finally, I recommend a collection of resources for Web developers interested in staying current with the evolving controversy.

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.

The role of the technical communication practitioner stems from the need for members from two distinct professions to connect; for example, engineers have created some new technology, and users who are (assumedly) unfamiliar with the technology want or need to understand that technology. The article presents an interface between the two professions which proposes a reconceptualization of the relationship between technicians/engineers and users. This reconceptualization can and should be provided by technical communicators who create a culture which encompasses both the technician and the user. In addition, this reconceptualization parallels the means originally proposed by C. P. Snow (1959) to mend the rift between the sciences and the humanities.

Previously, D. Leonard and J. Gilsdorf (1990) presented 45 instances of questionable usage, in full-paragraph contexts, to both academics and working business executives. These usage elements included sentence fragments, assorted punctuation problems, pronoun-antecedent (dis)agreement, and various examples of questionable word choice. Their intent was to assess the "botheration level" of each usage "error"; their conclusions were that: 1) academics are (nearly) always bothered by usage "errors" more than executives; and 2) usage elements that bothered survey respondents the least were evolving over time into acceptable English usage. Setting aside for now the problem of ongoing language change and its causes, the article focuses on the problem of predicting what will remain unchanged in language-usage rules and proposes an explanation for why certain rules will remain unchanged. This problem is critically important for anyone who is mentoring the writing of younger people, people whose primary audience will not follow our rules, but rather the rules of the next generation of readers.

The research study presented examined the effects of technological complexity on project group communication. The same project teams performed three separate projects involving the development of an HTML Website, the development of a local area network (LAN), and the development of blueprints for a wide-area network (WAN). Each of the projects exposed groups to a different level of complexity. The results of the study indicated differences in group information sharing, group communication focus, and group gatekeeping activities. In each of these cases, the groups had greater communication with the less complex project task, the HTML project. The study did not find significant differences in group communication concerned with member withdrawal or group conflict.

The study set out to validate the supportive role of screen captures for switching attention. Forty-two participants learned how to work with Microsoft Excel with a paper manual. There were three types of manuals: a textual manual, a visual manual with full-screen captures, and a visual manual with a mixture of partial- and full-screen captures. The findings show that participants in all conditions looked up from the manual to the screen on about 97% of the cases in which such a switch was called for rank order analyses showed that users of the visual manuals switched attention significantly more often than did users of the textual manual. No differences were found between conditions on learning effects and training time.

When document designers localize documents for readers in other cultures, they should consider what text organization will best suit those readers. The study presented examines American and Japanese readers' comprehension of and preference for expository text that contains a thesis and is organized either inductively or deductively. The results revealed that while Americans performed equally well with either organizational structure, Japanese readers recalled more information from inductively organized text. The implications for document designers in English and Japanese speaking countries are discussed.

The article provides a framework for organizing and structuring the research of historical researchers who analyze technical and scientific publications. Because historical research spans both decades and centuries, an effective research methodology is essential. The framework consists of a multifaceted 10-step method for studying the written discourse of scientific and technical communication, specifically for interpreting historical data obtained from articles published in technical and scientific journals. The method is a reliable means for making sense of the enormous body of data that awaits historical researchers in the volumes of scientific and technical discourse already published.

When it comes to graphing data, most professionals show little method or creativity. They typically limit themselves to a small repertoire of graph types and select from it on the basis of habit, if not sheer ease of production. Similarly, the many books on graphing devote much attention to graphical integrity and readability, but little or none to graph selection. We developed a methodology to help engineers, scientists, and managers choose the "right graph" on the basis of three criteria: the structure of the data set in terms of number and type of variables, the intended use of the graph, and the research question or intended message. The first and third criteria allow one to construct an effective two-entry selection table.

Thought, in the modern technical sense, is rather like travel. To travel without the aid of tools (cars, buses, and planes), that is, to walk, barely means travel at all in the modern sense. Likewise, to think in the modern sense means thought with tools. It is not enough to speak, or write with pen and paper, or even a typewriter. We have little choice, to be competitive, but to word-process, to send email, and to build hypertext. The thoughts we think we are having in the relative comfort of our own heads mean little, until they are written out, published to others, and subjected to natural-selection tests for validity. Beyond this, we must be keenly aware of the texts produced by others and the physical circumstances that produced them. These are simultaneously the best representation of a whole community's thought, and also the best tools that we can use to further advance our own thought.

The author presents a method for using C.S. Peirce's (1867) three conceptual categories to present a compact historical overview of major ethical theories to PEs (professional engineers) during professional ethics training seminars. The use of this method helps the seminar participant to easily grasp the "big picture" of ethical thought and to discover his or her own place within that picture. The benefit of this is that the participant is then more engaged when discussing codes of ethics and case studies.

The largest professional engineering organizations use English as their primary language; most of the world's engineering publications are written in English; and nearly all cooperative ventures with multinational participation choose English for their common language of communication. Unfortunately, most of the world's engineers are not native speakers of English. There are almost no reliable instruments for measuring competence in engineering English. Applying Douglas's Language for Specific Purposes test (2000) to engineering, gives not only a clearer overview of what kind of English and related content might be covered in an engineering English program, but also a clearer view of the knowledge that helps define what it means to be "professional" and this suggests what ought to be tested when evaluating an engineer's ability to use the English of his or her profession successfully.

Using a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, the article discusses some of the findings from a larger study on collaboration and the role of gender. We profile three student engineering teams as they participate in processes leading to the submission of a report for a team-based technical communication course. While some theorists suggest that gender can play a significant role in achieving a successful team dynamic, our study only partially supports that claim. A synopsis of two women from two predominantly male teams reveals glimpses of what the literature describes as traditional gender-linked behaviors by both men and women, but the all-female team does not conform to stereotypical patterns and their behaviors call into question the existence of these interactional styles. We suggest that factors other than gender and independent of a team's gender composition exert a greater impact on collaboration. Nevertheless, the study does caution against assigning women to predominantly male teams, since when a team's social structure is mostly male, traditional gender-linked interactional behaviors as well as manifestations of the culture of engineering are more likely to emerge. Overall, the study underlines the importance of examining specific face-to-face interactions to see how behavior is situationally produced in order to more fully understand the interactional strategies open to individuals.

Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.

Professionals involved in the creation of text-based communication face a number of challenges. These include overburdened and often uninterested users juxtaposed with the writer's desire to communicate relevant topical information. Uninvolved users are likely to ignore the message. This may be exacerbated by increases in text length designed to increase the amount and/or detail of information to be communicated. An experiment was conducted to examine the effect of rhetorical figures in text headings as to how users read and process the text (hereafter readership, as used in marketing). To the extent that higher levels of text readership increase user knowledge and skills, enhance topic-related attitudes, and facilitate beneficial topic-related behaviors, higher readership should yield desirable communication outcomes. Headings with rhetorical figures were hypothesized to enhance readership, particularly under conditions generally associated with relatively low readership, namely, lower perceived information relevance and longer text. Results generally support rhetorical figures' abilities to enhance readership, especially with longer texts.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Technical experts and writers often disagree about what constitutes accuracy in popular writings about science and technology, such as news media reports. In previous attempts to quantify accuracy in science news reporting, many of the sources' comments pointed to objective errors, but a sizable number dealt with lack of completeness or stylistic issues. There has been no consensus among communication researchers on the kind of scheme that should be used to code such information. We suggest a scheme for categorizing empirical information about the different kinds of perceived "errors" that technical sources identify in articles about their work by journalists and other writers. This study may lead to strategies for enhancing the accuracy of popular writings about science and technology.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under he primary entry in the Author Index.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under he primary entry in the Author Index.