The advent of technologies that enable virtual work arrangements brings with it a challenge to managers: do they trust their employees to work outside of their presence? A perceived loss of control and a sense of being taken advantage of, may be experienced by a manager as employees disappear from the manager's daily gaze. To enable the transition of employees to virtual work arrangements, managers who work in bureaucratic organizations that value a high degree of control and stability may need to change their management style to accommodate new methods of employee communication and interaction. Alternately, corporate cultures well suited for the transition value results and are characterized as having the atmosphere of trust (a shared emotional understanding about who is to be trustee based on compatible values and open communications/attitudes). Telecommuting, as one form of virtual work arrangement, provides a prime opportunity to look into the management attitudes and corporate cultures that may hinder the transition of workers into remote settings. The study of telecommuting among information technology (IT) professionals suggests that management trust of employees, the ability to secure the technology involved, a rational culture, and a group culture, which emphasizes human resources and member participation, facilitate telecommuting implementation. Thus the study offers strong support for the important role of trust, security, and culture in the implementation of virtual work arrangements.

Much knowledge work involves temporary work teams. Increasingly, these teams are not face-to-face but virtual teams. The paper explores the gender impact of virtual collaboration as compared to face-to-face teams. Descriptive statistics are used to show the different perceptions of the group experience based on gender and on face-to-face versus virtual team experiences. Women in the virtual groups perceived that the group stuck together more and helped each other more than did the men. Also, the women were more satisfied with the virtual group than men and felt that group conflict was readily resolved. In comparing the experience of women in the virtual groups to women in the face-to-face groups, the face-to-face women were less satisfied with the group experience than their virtual counterparts and perceived that conflict was smoothed over.

In his book Legal Drafting in a Nutshell, Haggard includes a useful chapter of nearly 50 pages in which he lists various lexical and structural elements and explains how these can lead to ambiguous writing. The kind of inventory approach that he presents is helpful and reveals that ambiguity doesn't just happen but often results from the careless use of identifiable structures or particular words.

This paper describes a methodology for testing the usability of a digital library. The paper also presents the results from using this methodology on a specific library of technical manuals. The testing process involves timing subjects while they look up facts in comparable libraries of online and paper documents. They are timed for both how long they take to find a desired manual in the library and how long they take to find a desired fact in a chosen manual. Next, the subjects fill out a questionnaire on which type library they prefer using and why. The objective time results and the subjective preferences are compared and analyzed.

When newcomers join an organization, one of the most challenging tasks that they face is learning to write the way that particular organization recognizes as appropriate. Supervisors who review the writing produced by those newcomers are often expected to ensure that the documents meet organizational standards. This article, based on an ethnographic study of newcomers in two organizations, describes what newcomers need to learn in order to write appropriately and suggests resources and strategies that can help guide employees through the maze of organizational discourse conventions. Part II of this article will describe how newcomers learn and will provide further suggestions for facilitating learning about writing in the workplace.

The University of Colorado at Denver's Internet Task Force has been conducting developmental research on the collaborative learning and participatory design process while creating and implementing the School of Education's Web page and mediated learning environment. We developed a design and learning process model that is appropriate for designers working in groups in academic or corporate environments. Critical features are authentic tasks, knowledge development, generating research questions and reflection.

One of the most difficult tasks for any professional communicator is identifying and negotiating the political shoals in an organization. In his essay "What is universal pragmatics?" Habermas (1979) describes a broad, universal concept of pragmatics (the study of language use in a specific situation), one that is useful for analyzing how power affects organizational communication. By exploiting the sociological aspect of Habermas' universal pragmatics, communicators can use his theory to understand how power affects communication in the workplace. I briefly describe Habermas' theory, modify his theory to relate more specifically to communication in an organization, and provide a brief example illustrating the theory's usefulness.

Media choice is an important topic in the field of organizational communication. With a plethora of media choices (e.g., letter, e-mail, voice mail, telephone, face-to-face meetings), the question of how and why individuals choose which medium to use in what situation takes on additional importance. This concern is also shared in professional communication. I present a summary of a paper (Kinney and Watson) that tests the applicability of a prominent theory of media choice, media richness theory (MRT), to both traditional and new electronic forms of communication. I summarize the findings and present some implications for professional communication.

Home pages and Web sites remind us that once, before the printed page was HOT in the McLuhan (1965) sense, there were also COOL, nonlinear, interactive pages. Interfaces and Web pages resemble Talmud folios in interesting ways. Moreover, HOT pages and COOL pages represent competing notions of communication: the Hellenistic model, in which the world is an information vacuum to be filled by the communicator, and the Talmudic model, in which the world is an information plenum, absolutely full of knowledge and requiring guides and navigators.

Because of the changing nature of today's corporations and their distributive information systems, editors are in the right place and time to influence the development and management of Web based publishing systems within their companies. Technical editors possess unique skills that could be adapted for editing and administering intranets-company wide information publishing systems relying on Internet technology. The article encourages editors to take an active role in developing intranet systems at their companies and suggests strategies for doing so. Editors will benefit from the discussion of the importance of intranet "publishing" in today's changing business climate.

Editors face ethical dilemmas when conflicts arise between their loyalties to readers, to authors, and to employers. They can systematically resolve such conflicts by applying an analytical decision-making process called "value analysis". This six-step process enables editors to take advantage of a model to rank core values and resolve the issue in favor of the more important value. An examination of codes of ethics of communication-related professional organizations identified ten core values to use in applying the model.

For technical editors accustomed to preparing manuscripts for print, editing in the new medium of the World Wide Web can prove challenging. The article suggests how technical editors can prepare themselves by adapting the levels of edit concept, long used in the technical editing of books, articles, and reports, to deal with the different requirements of this new medium.

Style guides, the primary tool of technical editors, are as important as ever; actually, their increased uses and benefits can redefine the activities of editors. Specifically, style guides can be used to train new employees, to generate buy-in of subject-matter experts, and to define the process flow of document and product generation. Additionally, because they have the potential to control many style decisions and to integrate a variety of skills, computer-driven styles and Web style guides reinforce these increased uses and benefits and suggest the emergence of even more. Thus technical editors' roles may be expanded to include additional training functions, new marketing dimensions, and innovative research in multimedia design and development.

The authors define international editing as editing documents for a multilingual readership or multinational distribution. They argue that international editing embodies and represents corporate global strategies, which directly affect editing choices. They describe three global strategies-ethnocentric, polycentric, or geocentric-and four categories of editing-linguistic, socio-cultural, political, and technical-on which editors can focus to produce business and technical documents that consistently align with corporate global strategies.

INSIGHTS about professional communication may come from odd and unexpected places. McCloud's Understanding Comics (hereafter UC) is a case in point. Despite the juvenile connotations evoked by any discussion of comic books, the theory of visual communication presented in UC arguably rivals the best of contemporary semiotics (that is, the study of how we make meaning out of gestures, words, paragraphs, pictures, and so on).

The principal obligation of the editor charged with editing visual media is to understand the strengths and the limitations of both text and visuals so as to make informed media choices. The paper compares and contrasts visual and verbal media in an effort to provide the reader with some practical guidance in making media choices. The paper also offers a set of practical guidelines for the use of visuals that is intended to ensure that the visuals chosen and their utilization result in both efficient and effective communication of the kinds of ideas best suited to presentation in pictorial form.

A short professional biography of Helen Constantinides is presented followed by an interview.

Does language reflect psychological reality, or does it form psychological reality? In other words, does the language we use to discuss something determine our attitudes toward that thing? Feminist literature has made much of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which asserts that linguistic bias is a cause rather than a symptom of social bias (F.W. Frank and P.A. Tretchler, 1989; F.J. Newmayer, 1986). However, conflicting views do exist on the direction of influence. The article discusses a recent study published by M.A. Dyrud illustrating a clear gender bias in computer clip art (see Business Commun. Quart., vol.60, no.4, p.30-51, 1997). Dyrud argues that if language, as a symbol system, both reflects and invents our reality, the same can be said of another symbol system, that of visual images. If the images are predominantly one gender, they may reflect cultural mores, but at the same time they help to sustain those beliefs by shaping our concept of what is real. Her study examines more than 14000 images in Windows based programs. She found that gender bias does exist in available visuals. In addition to a bias in presentation, clip art is also a man's world in terms of sheer numbers of images. Of 14108 images, there were three times as many male as female. The attitude of available images also differs: male figures-often of athletic build with full heads of hair-are usually in motion; female figures are usually standing, waiting, or even posing fashion-model style.

Change management, reengineering, repositioning, restructuring, or just doing things differently-the scope of change ranges from monumental cultural shifts of billion-dollar corporations to a local retailer's efforts to remain competitive in a town under siege by national mega-chains. Implementing change successfully, regardless of the scale, requires internal communication strategies that are interactive, dynamic, and even fun. Such strategies should train workers in the use of contemporary tools, while simultaneously entertaining them and providing positive re-enforcement through continuous recognition and reward. But above all, change management communication must be closely linked to business performance, pairing the needs of employees with the needs of the business. Doing so will result in greater employee support and ultimately lead to increased performance.

Campbell argues that the perception of unity in written discourse is part of a more general perceptual phenomenon and is, in fact, analogous to the perception of visual unity. Specifically, she argues that Grice's Maxim of Relation operates analogously to the Gestalt principle of Continuity in visual perception. However, she also concludes that Grice's other three maxims have no analogs in Gestalt theory. We believe Grice's other maxims actually do have analogs in principles of visual perception, but the relationship between the two is opaque because they are stated in domain-specific terms. We suggest meta-principles that connect the two domains.

For part I see ibid., June 1998. Part I focused on what newcomers need to learn in order to write appropriately on the job and suggested resources and strategies to help supervisors guide their new employees through the maze of organizational discourse conventions. This article, based on the same ethnographic study of newcomers in two organizations which provided the basis for Part I, will describe theories that explain how newcomers learn, show evidence of those theories in action, and provide further suggestions for facilitating learning about writing in the workplace.

There is a lot at stake when one submits an article for publication in a journal. The writer risks losing face by having the article rejected, but the writer's employment may also depend on publication. The writer is in a relatively powerless position; the editor who receives the article is in a more powerful position, making a judgement beyond which there is no appeal. The article is accompanied by a letter of submission in a stressful situation that might be expected to call for what V.K. Bhatia (1993) describes as a "promotional letter". These are letters written by people who hope to get some benefit from the recipient which the recipient is under no obligation to grant, e.g., unsolicited sales letters in business and letters of application. Bhatia characterizes promotional letters as having seven moves, which are listed. In contrast, actual letters of submission are rather short and cool and do not conform to Bhatia's model. The failure of submission letters to match the general "promotional" form that seems to be applicable to the power relations involved raises several questions. Is Bhatia's hypothesis that power relations and the purpose of the letter determine the content simply wrong, or is its operation suspended here by some subcultural convention? And if so, why? We carried out an investigation designed to resolve some of these questions and collected submission letters of four different types.

Instructions for operating a control panel were presented in five different formats: flowchart, logical tree, yes/no tree, decision table, and list. Subjects had to choose one out of eight buttons, depending on the settings of the control panel. The results show that the decision table resulted in more errors, and that both the decision table and the list took longer than the three other formats, which did not show mutual differences. It turned out that the subjects valued most the format they had been using, except for those who had worked with the list. It is suggested that the users' ease of orientation for a diagram's format, both during reading and after "switching" between equipment and instructional text, explains the differences between the formats.

To understand how strategies of containment operate in recall notices, a writer or reader must first consider two goals that these notices attempt to accomplish. The first of these goals is obvious: a well-constructed recall notice entices a consumer into returning a defective product to the manufacturer, allowing the manufacturer to repair or replace the product. The second goal, while somewhat less obvious, is equally important: the recall notice controls damage to the manufacturer's reputation. Faced with the unpleasant task of recalling a product, the manufacturer can use that recall notice to mitigate its responsibility for the defective product and to demonstrate its concern for the consumer.

This study focuses on people's choices between electronic mail and voice mail. We found that users generally preferred electronic mail over voice mail for most communication purposes. These results do not support a hypothesis derived from media richness theory that voice mail would be preferred to e-mail for ambiguous situations. A more important finding is that other medium features besides richness influence individuals' media choices, specifically, medium features useful for retrieving and preparing messages and for working In group settings. From this and other evidence, we conclude that a complex set of social factors governs organizational media use in ways that neither theory can fully explain. Our findings have some interesting implications for designers of multimedia communication systems and for people like human resources specialists who are concerned with improving the effectiveness of professional work and the quality of working life.

The profession of technical communication is difficult to define in scope, and the work performed by its members is even more difficult to quantify. The work crosses many disciplines and the skills needed to effectively undertake these tasks are broad. In the area of systems development, technical. Communicators have the skills to perform many tasks, especially those related to human factors, and yet much of their contribution goes unrecognized. A recent survey of Australian technical communicators sought to more clearly identify their work in the area of systems development; this paper presents and discusses the results of that survey.

Looks at the application of minimalist principles in technical documentation.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but if only a hundred words are needed, that nine hundred extra words may obscure communication rather than enhance it, This is the point of Manning (1998), who warns authors of instructional texts not to be too quick to scan a photograph into a document to avoid the trouble of making a line sketch. The author looks at the pitfalls of including photographs in presentations.

With the burgeoning in recent years of the service sector, emotion management by frontline employees is becoming an increasingly prevalent means of differentiating one service provider from its competitors. Chronic emotion management, however, is thought to have serious negative consequences on the health of the employee in terms of stress and stress-related disease. This study addresses for the first time the empirical question of whether there is a direct link between emotion management and stress, by using a new self-report tool aimed at measuring emotional suppression/faking among 137 frontline employees. The results suggest that high levels of emotion management occur In at least one third of all frontline communications, and that the more emotion management performed, the more stress experienced. The implications for technical communicators and researchers are outlined.