This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation on the role of cultural protocol in media choice in a Confucian virtual workplace, like those found in Far-East-Asian countries, such as Korea and Japan, which are heavily influenced by the Confucius tradition of emphasizing respect for the social order in all forms of social communication. A Confucian virtual workplace in Korea is studied regarding the role of cultural protocol in the use of email. The survey results show that use of email is significantly influenced by cultural protocol, such as showing respect for seniors, within a Confucian virtual workplace. When a worker is faced with media choices for communication in a workplace where showing respect is considered essential, media richness of the chosen media is found to be less important than the capability of providing features to convey cultural protocol.

Janet Rochester is a Senior Member of the Engineering Staff at Lockheed Martin in Moorestown, New Jersey. She is one of twelve engineer writers in the Engineering Documentation Department. Janet is one of the first four graduates from Drexel University's Masters program in Science and Technical Communication. She also has an MBA from Monmouth College as well as a degree in Botany from the University of London, England. The interview with Ms Rochester covers her work and professional duties.

Patrick Dean graduated from the University of Waterloo (in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) with an honors B.A. in Rhetoric and Professional Writing and has spent the past four and a half years working in the software industry as a technical writer. He is currently a Senior Technical Writer for the Bulldog Group, Inc., in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. During our interview, Patrick had a few words to say about his recent moonlighting: “A year ago my wife and I bought a 100-year-old house in Toronto, and since then I’ve spent precisely every free second either working on the house, or reading about how to work on the house.”

Within the classic information technology (IT) engineering disciplines (software and hardware engineering), there is sometimes skepticism about the status of technical writing. How can the manipulation of words and images compare with the rigors of producing efficient code or densely populated boards? Many technical writers don't have a degree with "science" in the title. To outsiders, their world seems an odd one, where trivial matters like the location of hyphens are intensely debated. The author addresses the question of whether technical writing is an engineering discipline by examining an authoritative set of criteria used to define systems engineering. This examination will take the form of worked examples from systems engineering and technical writing to see how each discipline matches these criteria. The conclusion is that technical writing, done correctly, meets the strict definition of an engineering discipline. Technical writing is not consistently accepted as such because of cultural differences, most specifically noted in the relative weight of academic qualifications.

The author suggests that minimal manuals don't appeal to everyone, and that these nonminimalists can be identified and catered to. He identifies different type of learners and how they learn. For example, dynamic learners would be impatient with direct instruction, would probably ignore the instruction, and just experiment. Focused learners are likely to be highly responsive to an authoritative coach. Contemplative learners insist that instructors provide evidence for their claims. Rigorous learners would respond well to thoroughly prepared instruction, but not to ad-hoc sessions. After instruction, they would want to be given a chance to work out the process by themselves. Finally, the author presents a list of techniques, based on learning style preferences, that might help writers engage their audience.

This article reports on a survey of 162 recent engineering graduates about their writing experiences during co-op. Specifically, the survey obtained data about how much time they spent writing, to what extent they engaged in collaborative writing, what kinds of documents they wrote, and the purposes and audiences for those documents, whether they believed their employers valued writing ability, and what strategies they perceived as most helpful in learning to write like engineers. Data were analyzed in terms of engineering specialty and gender. The findings are presented, along with implications for teaching and future research.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has enabled relaxation of temporal and geographical boundaries surrounding group tasks. A question is whether this opening is appropriate mainly for information exchange or whether it is also conducive to the interactive moves necessary for group knowledge production. This study examines knowledge production via email in a technology standardization working group. It notes the occurrence of interactive moves and discusses how they are and can be affected for producing group knowledge.

This study examines how students enrolled in two Web-based sections of a technical writing class performed compared to students enrolled in a conventional version of the class. Although no significant difference in student performance was found between the two learning conditions, our data reveal intriguing relationships between students' prior knowledge, attitudes, and learning styles and our Web-based writing environment. One finding that we focus on is that reflective, global learners performed significantly better online than active, sequential learners, whereas there was no difference between them in the conventional class. Our study highlights the complexity of effective teaching and the difficulty of making comparisons between the online and the classroom environments. In particular, we maintain that the transfer of active learning strategies to the Web is not straightforward and that interactivity as a goal of instructional Web site design requires significant elaboration.

Reports a study of virtual cross-functional teams located in a small southern US town and a northern US city. The authors interpret interviews with team members, suggesting that virtual teamwork requires them to devise practices for coordinating work.

Introduces a way of working with drug development teams that relies on writing as a key development activity. The authors argue that structured writing can help team members engage in substantive conflict and reach consensus on difficult issues.

The article describes how the role of an information architect increased in value and how that increased value changed the job description. It goes on to examine how blending knowledge occurs through shifts in terminology, imitation of another field, and selling new concepts.

We are pleased to bring you this joint issue of Technical communication and IEEE transactions on professional communication on communication in cross-functional teams. This special issue is a result of a collaborative effort between two leading organizations in the field of technical communication—the Society for Technical Communication and the IEEE Professional Communication Society. The topic of the special issue seems particularly appropriate given the nature of this joint venture.

The article analyzes the behaviors and mechanisms in aerospace proposals written by a company over 10 years. It asserts that persuasion and negotiation, schedule tracking, and designation of neutral project space all contributed to success.

Focuses on less formal approaches to implementing cross-functional teams in software development environments. The authors show that technical communicators are ideal candidates for initiating cross-functional approaches in their organizations.

Focuses on communication channels (or media) that technical writers uses to obtain and verify information and their reasons for selecting them. The author analyzes data from a survey of 30 technical communicators who responded to an e-mail questionnaire.

Vivian Cook, University of Essex, advises his fellow EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers to view their students as multicompetent language users rather than as deficient native speakers. The same advice can readily be given to technical writers and editors who may occasionally struggle to adapt the writing of nonnative speaking (NNS) engineers, researchers, and programmers to style book norms. This approach certainly applies to those of us who work with or manage NNS colleagues. Although addressed to language teachers, the author considers how Cook's observations have validity for many workplace interactions in the growing international community.

Although the usefulness of evaluating documents has become generally accepted among communication professionals, the supporting research that puts evaluation practices empirically to the test is only beginning to emerge. This article presents an overview of the available research on troubleshooting evaluation methods. Four lines of research are distinguished concerning the validity of evaluation methods, sample composition, sample size, and the implementation of evaluation results during revision.

The aim of the study is to analyze the process of document design in a multilingual setting. In order to evaluate translation quality, a theoretical perspective is formulated as a basis for criteria for a good translation. In this perspective, the target text is considered an autonomous document. Two sets of criteria are distinguished: correctness errors and functional errors. The tools that were used to assess translation quality were expert analysis and reader focused evaluation. For both tools, a multilingual evaluation team was formed with the highest possible expertise in the target languages, in linguistics, and in usability. In this case study, the process of evaluation and the results are described.

Techniques for observing selection and reading behavior in professional documents, such as the thinking-aloud and the click-and-read methods, may affect the reading process to be observed. Such so-called reactivity problems complicate the use of these instruments in experimental research and usability testing. If their influence is unknown, any experimental results obtained with these instruments may be caused by the testing method. One way to detect reactivity effects is to compare different instruments in a series of experimental studies. In this initial study, we compared the thinking-aloud method, the click-and-read method, a combination of these two methods and a silent reading condition. Subjects read and judged a 53-page policy document in one of these conditions. We investigated whether or not different observation instruments caused specific differences in information selection, judgment and knowledge. Thinking aloud did not cause any differences in the selection of information. Both the thinking-aloud method and the click-and-read method affected the judgment task outcome. Thinking aloud led to many positive and few negative judgments, whereas silent reading led to many negative and few positive judgments. The results for the click-and-read method showed a tendency toward the same effect. Neither method affected the knowledge test results.

Thinking-aloud protocols may be the most widely used method in usability testing, but the descriptions of this practice in the usability literature and the work habits of practitioners do not conform to the theoretical basis most often cited for it: K.A. Ericsson and H.A. Simon's (1984) seminal work. After reviewing Ericsson and Simon's theoretical basis for thinking aloud, we review the ways in which actual usability practice diverges from this model. We then explore the concept of speech genre as an alternative theoretical framework. We first consider uses of this new framework that are consistent with Ericsson and Simon's goal of eliciting a verbal report that is as undirected, undisturbed and constant as possible. We then go on to consider how the proposed new approach might handle problems that arise in usability testing that appear to require interventions not supported in the older model.

To test the theories that drive technical communication research, investigators may statistically analyze data gathered for descriptive or experimental studies. In such analyses, investigators often set a very small statistical risk of rejecting a true null hypothesis of no relationship between variables to avoid subsequently incorrectly accepting an alternative hypothesis that there is a relationship. By this normal procedure, investigators may unwittingly lower the statistical power to reject a false null hypothesis of no relationship, and, thereafter, they may incorrectly fail to accept the statistically alternative hypothesis that there is a relationship. Our purpose is to demonstrate how to use a statistical table for planning ahead to gain acceptable power and how to report the power fully in the results. Even after an experiment has been completed, investigators can still estimate and report the power. Careful attention to power contributes to more meaningful tests of theories, and good reporting gives readers a clearer picture of the meaning of the tests.

When students are also corporate employees, unique ethical and legal problems can arise in a technical communication classroom. To help instructors and employed students understand their situation, I review in this article several major approaches to normative ethics and define various legal terms. Next, I analyze two classroom incidents from the ethical and legal points of view. Finally, I provide guidelines that may help instructors address or forestall the potential consequences of classroom activities involving employed students.

Uses a qualitative methodology to examine how discourse norms and socialization processes affect the development of technical requirements. Our exploratory investigation of how government personnel develop and review technical requirements indicates that discourse norms and academic technical writing socialization processes affect the technical writing process. Technical writers perceived that requirements in work statements became less precise as more requirements were coordinated in team-based designs. In essence, we found that, in team-based designs, interpretation conflict and technical diffusion were important dimensions when writing and coordinating technical requirements. Our findings suggest that collaborative technical writing is a complex and difficult process in team-based designs where integration and persuasion skills dominate.

In the usability testing of Web sites, thinking aloud is a frequently-used method. A fundamental discussion, however, about the relation between the use of different variants of thinking aloud and the evaluation goals for this specific medium is still lacking. To lay a foundation for this discussion, I analyzed the results of three usability studies in which different thinking-aloud tasks were used: a simple searching task, an application task and a prediction task. In the task setting, the profile of the Web surfer, the communication goal of the Web site and other quality aspects are taken into account. The qualitative analysis of these studies shows that the task variation has some influence on the results of usability testing and that, consequently, tasks should be matched with the evaluation goals put forward.

Formulating design guidelines from research results can potentially offer two advantages: available empirical knowledge is distilled into a readily accessible form, and practitioners can judge the authority of those guidelines for themselves, but a case history demonstrates that challenges confront the developer of research-based guidelines for Web site design, First, few studies of people using the Web have yet been conducted. Second, when the process of guideline development is not systematic and designed to control bias and subjectivity, the resulting guidelines can be compromised. This paper describes the issues and problems that one guideline developer encountered and suggests a guideline development process that might resolve them.

When document designers in English-speaking countries localize documents for readers in other cultures, they should consider what text organization will best suit those readers. This study examines the effect of inductive versus deductive organizational patterns on Japanese readers so as to identify what pattern may best suit them. The study assessed Japanese readers' comprehension of and preference for expository text that contains a thesis and is organized either inductively or deductively. The results reveal that readers recall more information from inductively organized text. Preference results were less clear. The implications for native English speaking document designers are discussed at length.

Recent years have seen increased attention to the examination of the genres that people use in professional communication. C. Berkenkotter and T.N. Huckin's book "Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication" (1995) is an important contribution to this discussion. Their view of genre has important implications for the teaching of professional writing. Their view gives us an insight into the ways in which people both acquire and use genre knowledge as they participate in the knowledge-producing activities of their field or profession. It shows us how important the process of genre acquisition is in the learning of disciplinary genre knowledge. Linguistic knowledge is necessary for effective communication, but it is not sufficient for writers to achieve their goals. Just as important, writers need to understand the underlying views, assumptions and aims of a field. They need control of the rhetoric through which they are expressed. They also need to understand the history, knowledge and expectations of their particular area, and to locate their writing clearly within the context of this work. The notion of genre can provide students with the tools for both recognizing and adapting to the changing genre landscapes that their professional lives will travel across. While we cannot hope to predict all of our students' possible future genre needs, we can help them ask questions of texts, of contexts, and of themselves, so they can produce and understand the kinds of texts which they need to control in their professional lives.

Traditionally, many American technical communicators have tended to view translation as a "one-way" system in which they create English-language source text that is converted into another language. This singular perspective of translation can be seen in professional communication literature that tends to focus on how to better "write for translation" rather than exploring other ways in which technical communicators might be able to make use of translators or the translation process. While English is a key language used in international technical and scientific discourse, it is not the only language being used. Speakers of languages other than English are increasingly contributing to various scientific and technical fields. As a result of this factor, technical communicators should begin rethinking ways in which they view and use translation if they wish to remain effective communicators in the new global marketplace.

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.

Normand Croteau is a technical writer for Purkinje, Inc., in Montreal, Canada. He has been with Purkinje for approximately two years. Before Purkinje, Norm spent time working for Sapience, a small software company; Bell Sygma, a computer department of Bell Canada; and Bell Canada, a telecommunication company, for “a total of 13 years of experiences in the field.”