Research suggests that book reviews in academic journals tend to be positive but that readers prefer book reviews that include negative and positive evaluation. In this study, the author examines 48 books reviews from three business communication journals to determine whether these reviews are mainly positive. She counts compliments and criticisms, analyzing their location and topics. She also analyzes the force of the criticisms and strategies that reviewers use to mitigate criticism.

Borrowing from the ethnographic genre that Van Maanen (1988) called the confessional tale, this commentary reflects on the political, ethical, and professional concerns that arise when critical intellectuals work in a government installation that maintains the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The authors suggest that the future is, as Haraway (1997) argued, ineluctably technological and that the best way to engage this cultural formation is from within, eschewing the easy politics of the science wars and articulating critical projects with the hard work of science. The modernist ideal of unconflicted ideological positions and research—stories of good guys and bad guys—is a disabling illusion. Practicing rhetoricians face a kind of “worldliness” that Hall (1989) described as a necessary counterpart to the “clean air” of theory. The authors invite their colleagues to join them in grappling with political and ethical analyses in a world of impure identity in which knowledge and power circulate promiscuously.

Over the past two decades, studies have examined how social contexts influence the composition and production of workplace documents. But much remains to be known about what happens when writers move from one social context to another—from the academy to the workplace, for instance. This article demonstrates that students in scientific and technical communication classrooms learn what they are taught about composing. They take this knowledge with them to the workplace, where they apply it, practically and theoretically, and improve their understanding of it with repeated use.

Research on professional communication in the former Soviet republics and satellite countries was by and large closed to American scholars until recent years. This commentary offers a critical introduction to the forces of globalization, discourse, and democracy in that region, offering to U.S. readers a corrective lens that challenges the American view of the role of writing in regions where democratization is new, fragile, and even alien to the culture. A great part of our work as professional communicators rests on Western, particularly democratic, theoretical assumptions, mainly derived from Greco-Roman assumptions. Too often we do not confront the real otherness of practices that poach on Western assumptions or practices for nondemocratic ends, but we face increasing pressure to do so as our work is relentlessly internationalized.

This article demonstrates how students in a disciplinary writing study conducted at Miami University's business school failed to understand writing assignments based on the names of the assignments. It proposes effective writing-assignment names as prompts to connect students to previous writing experience and reinforce students' acquisition of disciplinary writing skills and genres. In addition, the article suggests that writing-assignment names offer a pedagogical tool for integrating learning across a discipline; that is, naming writing assignments encourages faculty to identify and define the types of disciplinary writing and critical-thinking skills that students should learn.

Technical communicators should be prepared to take on challenges that are beyond their daily tasks. The author took on such a challenge when she was asked to develop and implement a company's content-management system. This article addresses the different phases of designing and implementing a unified content-management system. The article also offers suggestions for any content developer faced with developing and implementing a content-management system or for any technical communication instructor who wishes to learn more about this process to help meet the academic needs of upcoming content developers.

For some time, writing teachers have used audio feedback to assess students' work. But previous methods using audiocassettes are now dated or impractical for online or distance classrooms. Voice commentary can still be used to evaluate students' writing, however, using Microsoft Word's commenting feature for embedding voice comments. This article explains why this method of commentary is used; discusses students' reactions to the method, tracked over a 2-year period; and provides detailed instructions for using the software.

A genre's continuing success after migrating to a new medium may be due in part to whether the genre secures a place within a viable genre system. To explore the role of genre systems, this study examined the well-established genre of the résumé in its new position on self-published Web sites. Results from surveying 100 authors of self-published Web résumés revealed that many respondents used their résumés for the previously overlooked purpose of attracting clients for their self-employment. These self-employed respondents rated their résumés as significantly more useful than did those who had not used their résumés for this purpose. The self-employed were more likely to publicize their sites through such business-related genres as business cards and advertising material, and in turn, their sites drew in communication from more socially distant populations. These alternative publicity measures and communication networks suggest that the self employed were able to situate their Web résumés within viable alternative genre systems.

The technology of movable type in early modern Europe created new communication challenges (e.g., typographical errors) for book producers. These challenges were greater with books written in learned or foreign languages or about scientific or technical subjects. Printers experimented with different strategies to ensure correctness, but the best solution came from delegating jobs to specialists. Freelance scholars were employed by authors, printers, and booksellers to correct books before publication, and some of these learned correctors were early versions of technical editors. Their history may offer insight into current communication concerns, such as the role of learned correctors in our present technological age.

This commentary serves as a sequel to and an update of the author's earlier article “Corporate Communication as a Discipline: Toward a Definition.” In addition to presenting new information about the field of corporate communication, the author discusses the particular effect that technology has had on the field as both a function in business and a discipline within the academy. He focuses specifically on the challenges and opportunities that new technologies have brought to the field and explores possibilities for teaching and research.

Intranets are fast and cost-effective channels for internal business communication. They are especially suitable for situations in which a company needs to offer the same information or news simultaneously to the entire staff at various company locations despite geographic distances and time differences. But, communication via intranet is not uncomplicated, and certain issues may be critical to the intranet's success within multinational companies, including access, language, and content. This article reports the results of a questionnaire surveying these critical areas and intranets' roles and functions within 25 of the largest multinational companies operating in Finland.

As technology changes business practices, it becomes even more important that our students—and we ourselves—think rhetorically. Our pedagogy should help students look at (not just through) new media to understand how new media reshape the rhetorical situation (audience, exigency, constraints) and to use them effectively. Furthermore, new digital technologies that capture and preserve business messages create opportunities and raise new research questions. Viewing business practices through the lens of rhetoric can provide a valuable perspective for research and emphasize the community-shaping aspects (and thus an ethical dimension) of business. Therefore, in this commentary, the authors call for a reorientation of the field of business communication.

This study explores social processes associated with e-mail overload, drawing on Sproull and Kiesler's first and second-order effects of communication technologies and Boden's theory of lamination. In a three-part study, the authors examined e-mail interactions from a government organization by logging e-mails, submitting an e-mail string to close textual analysis, and analyzing focus group data about e-mail overload. The results reveal three characteristics that contribute to e-mail overload— unstable requests, pressures to respond, and the delegation of tasks and shifting interactants—suggesting that e-mail talk, as social interaction, may both create and affect overload.

This commentary reflects on Mumby and Stohl's essay “Disciplining Organizational Communication Studies.” The author argues that Mumby and Stohl's desire to create a “birth” story for the discipline caused them to overlook two important trends among its scholars that may work to undermine the discipline's relevance: overvaluing theory relative to the empirical study of communication behavior and resisting technology both as a subject and a tool. Organizational communication scholars should work against tendencies to maintain the currency of their research enterprise.

Should instructional texts be purely technical, with a focus on effectiveness and efficiency, or should they also focus on satisfying and motivating users? Good arguments have been made for paying attention to motivational aspects. But only analyses of existing instructions have been published so far, and guidelines for making user instructions motivational have not yet been studied carefully. This article presents motivational strategies and an experiment to test their effects. The results show that motivational elements have little effect on users’ effectiveness and efficiency in performing tasks, their product appreciation, and their self-efficacy, but they do increase users’ appreciation for the instructions.

A brochure that had been revised on the basis of feedback from readers using the plus-minus evaluation method was evaluated again using the same method. This article compares the results of these two successive evaluation studies to examine the dynamics of evaluating and revising using a troubleshooting method based on verbal self-reports. The findings show that the plus-minus method does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the number of problems readers find in a revised document. But the types of problems readers find are significantly different. For example, after the brochure was revised, it had fewer clarity and structural problems, and readers could focus more on credibility issues.

The popularity of technical writing and communication has caused many colleges and universities to scramble to hire qualified tenure-track faculty members. So-called lone ranger candidates are often lured to workplaces in which they are the sole technical writing faculty members by promises of autonomy and the ability to develop programs in ways, and at a pace, that would not necessarily be possible at other institutions. This article explores challenges faced by several such lone ranger faculty members and outlines survival strategies that may help lone rangers sustain and build their technical writing programs.

In a pediatric teaching hospital, the authors examined 16 novice medical case presentations that were classified as instances of a hybrid apprenticeship genre. In contrast to strict school and workplace genres, an apprenticeship genre results from the sometimes competing activity systems of student education and patient care. The authors examined these novice case presentations for the amount and patterns of time devoted to student learning and expert teaching, the difficulties created for participants, the sometimes misunderstood implicit messages delivered by experts, and the opportunities to address educational objectives. This study offers professional communication researchers a model that combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess the effects of competing activity systems in the development of communication expertise.

This article investigates how Confucianism inspires an indirect style in professional communication in China. Particularly, the author examines two major philosophical principles of Confucianism, Li (rituals/rules) and Ren (love/benevolence), and discusses how they encourage individuals to establish proper human relationships, to humble themselves, and to shun pure personal profits. Dictated by Confucianism, Chinese writers often focus on interpersonal relationships, humble themselves, and avoid personal profits before discussing pertinent business issues. As a result, Chinese writers are indirect in their style. They often employ the indirect style to accommodate two pragmatic acts: (a) establishing their ethos that helps create a strong bond between individuals at a more personal level and (b) building a harmonious social structure at a more societal level. Such a style is conducive to successful business transactions. So, it should not be explained as ineffective or as mere digressions.

This article examines the authors’ arduous struggle to develop a professional communication program that would not only meet their students’ professional and intellectual needs but also achieve an identity consistent with their goals as scholars and teachers of composition. Ultimately, the authors argue that a professional communication program that combines in its teaching the ethos of a liberal arts tradition along with the practical skills needed by writers in the workplace is both desirable and possible but that it must be flexible enough to allow for ongoing curricular and philosophical negotiations to meet changing contextual demands.