The argument is presented that managerial writing is performed within a unique context; consequently, it is important to review the extant research within that context to understand managerial writing. The literature is reviewed within the framework of writing context, process, and outcome. The paucity of research and the heavy emphasis on survey methodology expose the need for extensive research on managerial writing. Six general research questions are presented to guide future research efforts.

What roles does writing play in larger communications also involving physically discrete but related texts of other media? How may the properties of what we normally consider writing be modified in such communications? The intermedial context of much workplace writing has been largely overlooked. This study of an insurance company's communication department describes how (a) three written products served as parts of larger messages in multiple media campaigns, (b) an attempt to combine composing processes for print and video failed, and (c) conflicting generic and stylistic properties of other media caused an intermedial graft to fail. The author's study shows that in the right circumstances, a multiple media “overtext” can override some of the rules that govern what and how one communicates in an individual medium. When a written text is involved, its nature may change as it forms symbiotic relationships with texts of other media.

Hypertext, an electronic communication medium in which information is structured and accessed according to the audience's needs and interests, is increasingly used in business and technical communication. That use may justify curricula expansion in the development of the ability to communicate in hypertext from specialty courses to a variety of business and technical courses, including the foundation course. This article provides a concise overview of hypertext for instructors who may be considering this expansion but who need to become more familiar with the medium. The basic information that is provided includes the definition, uses, and advantages of hypertext. In addition, the terminology, theoretical bases, and essential structure of hypertext are discussed. Of particular concern to business and technical communication instructors who may be considering adding hypertext to their courses are the problems that the medium presents. Discussion includes considerations of linguistic design, computer capabilities, and human performance. Finally, behaviors that business and technical communicators should exhibit to encourage the use of hypertext are presented.

Visual design has played an important role in the historical development of professional communication. The technology of laser printing has reestablished the importance of visual language in functional communication, transforming contemporary document design and redefining its relation to the traditions of handwritten, typewritten, and printed text. During this period of transition, three factors will shape the new visual language: (a) the development of a visual rhetoric that represents design as an integral part of the message rather than merely as external “dress,” (b) the rediscovery of aesthetics as a legitimate factor in text design, and (c) the use of empirical research—particularly context-specific research—to guide the document design process.

This article is a bibliographical essay on the history of business and technical writing based on a survey of over 200 articles and books that demonstrate not only the quality and quantity of recent publications in this field but also the wide opportunities it offers for future research. The studies in the article and bibliography are grouped into 13 categories according to historical period (from ancient and classical times through the twentieth century), national origin, and (for twentieth-century studies) subject of investigation. The article concludes with suggestions about further research in the history of business and technical writing.

Two widely disseminated approaches impose reductive boundaries on ethnographic research by privileging one context of meaning over other essential contexts. The first, emphasizing statistical validity, privileges the research community by recommending that the ethnographer's data analysis via coding agree with that of other raters from the research community. The second asserts that the ethnographer who comes closest to validity comes closest to presenting only the subject's point of view. Ethnography, however, comprises four essential, overlapping contexts: the phenomenal context (that which is observed/recorded), the site's cultural context (the subjects' outlook), the research community context, and the researcher's interior context, shaped by experience and education. Each of the four vantages has dominating tendencies, but if one does dominate to the exclusion of others, the reductive result is data-centered, thin description; subjects-centered groupthink; research community-centered groupthink; or researchercentered solipsism. Although all contexts of meaning are important, none should fully eclipse the others.

When the New York Sun reported that Thomas Edison had solved the problem of incandescent lighting, that purported invention generated immense excitement across many segments of the American population. The letters sent to Edison in the days following the September 16, 1878, story reveal the many discursive worlds that Edison's work touched on and had meaning for. They indicate how a technological accomplishment is also a multiple, complex social and communicative accomplishment, creating place and meaning for the new technology within the many discursive systems by which people assign value, identify uses, and create goals incorporating the technology. Edison's ability to connect with each of these meaning systems paved the way for the development of the technology, providing financial and social resources for Edison that his competitors did not enjoy.

This article reviews selected gender scholarship that informs the study of professional communication as well as some recent articles on professional communication that make use of gender studies. The article also suggests future research directions that include a merger of gender and professional communication scholarship. Topics covered include gender and communication and gender identity, along with gender and writing, reading, speaking language choice, visual communication, collaboration, content analysis, management, history and case studies.

What is the role of conventions in business writing? Too often, textbook samples of business writing are removed from their original contexts. If we invite students to analyze these models for specific textual features, we teach them methods of formalist evaluation, but we fail to teach them ways in which they can learn to analyze and respond to specific contexts, see the subtle ways in which texts are inflected with many voices, and actively participate in the cultural conversation of the business community. This article moves from a critique of conventions to theories of context and intertext; these theories are applied to case studies of both professional and student business writing practices to analyze how rhetorical exchanges shape conventions and communication.

Rhetorical voice is rarely discussed in business, professional, or technical communication textbooks, despite its strategic importance in aligning writer and audience so that persuasion can occur. This article identifies those aspects of the rhetorical situation that shape voice and presents a heuristic that writers can use to identify the components of voice and to construct their personae.

Preparing students for the behavioral description, or situational, job interview that is becoming common in business requires two components. In addition to (a) improving students' cognitive skills (learning about the company, preparing questions and answers) and affective skills (dress, composure, delivery), it requires (b) developing students' ability to answer behaviorally based questions. Most textbooks focus on the first component. This article suggests ways to take typical interview questions, translate them to behavioral questions, and prepare illustrative responses.

Most discussions of disciplinarity start by claiming an emerging group as constituting a discipline or a profession and authorizing that group by locating appropriate research foci, programs for graduate education and undergraduate certification, professional societies, and central professional meetings. Our discussion examines the field of professional writing, focusing not so much on defining it as a discipline as on working out its curricular geography, an activity that will affect its status in both academy and industry. To that end, we explore the status of professional writing within the department of English by (a) briefly examining the problem of defining professional writing; (b) reviewing several theoretical positions within English that have provided a status for professional writing—literature, rhetoric/composition, business and technical writing—to expose the competition for control of the term and to surface the implications of accepting these various groups on their own terms; and (c) considering the curricular status to which professional writing might aspire by sketching a geography that positions professional writing in a new space within English.

Experiential learning theory provides a theoretical foundation for studying technical communication internships. This study explores, through the perspective of the experiential learning cycle model developed by David Kolb, internships in technical communication. Participants in technical communication internship experiences were asked to provide, from their different perspectives, information that described the experience. Program directors, industrial supervisors, and student interns provided different views of what they had experienced, illustrating that most had entirely different perspectives on their level of participation in creating, supervising, and evaluating this form of educational experience. Besides describing technical communication programs in the United States more comprehensively, the results of this study raise questions about how the respondents perceived their experience and how the “reality” of these perceptions often conflict. When these findings are explored within the epistemology conceptualized by Kolb's experiential learning theory, a framework is established for more systemic procedures and standards that will enhance the internship as a credible learning experience.

A survey of English accounting, its origin, its development, and its first books (1553-1680) provides another insight into the shift from orality to textuality in English society. The shift to sophisticated textual expression of accounting occurred as a result of the confluence of the rising English Renaissance trade economy, increasing literacy, and improving typography—all of which made the need for extensive financial records necessary and possible. The shift to a highly sophisticated textual/spatial presentation was nurtured by Ramism, Renaissance Italian art, and the rise of capitalism. Ultimately, this spatial presentation destroyed the oral-aural aspect of accounting. Spatial presentation was essential to the development of accounting techniques for an expanding economy, but spatial, rather than verbal, display led to abstraction in presentation that today makes accounting difficult for the nonaccounting reader to understand and for the expert accountant to verbalize.

Despite the fact that letters and memos are the most prevalent forms of written discourse in the business community, there has been little theoretical study of professional correspondence as a distinct rhetorical genre. A theory of correspondence as a form of dialogue can, however, be constructed with the help of two very different scholars, Erasmus and Bakhtin. Erasmus, the Renaissance humanist, offers a pragmatic guide to the practice of dialogue in correspondence, and Bakhtin, the twentieth-century Russian philosopher of language, provides theoretical concepts that define the nature of dialogical communication. The present article combines the ideas of both scholars into a unified theory of business correspondence and then presents both a set of guidelines and a model for the practice of dialogical correspondence.

In the United States, the majority of technical writers and technical writing teachers are women. Their dominance of the profession has several causes, including the attractiveness of writing jobs for women, widespread associations of women and superior writing ability, the social acceptability of women in writing jobs, and occupational segregation. Women's dominance of the profession brings with it the risk of diminishing wages and prestige. To avoid this depreciation of the field, professional associations ought to equip technical writers and technical writing teachers with information regarding satisfactory salaries and working conditions, and teachers ought to communicate this information to their students.

Although the research has clearly established that reading comprehension improves when the writer forecasts the discussion in an introductory or transitional passage, technical writing textbooks offer little guidance on how to construct effective forecasts. The most common pattern, in which the items to be discussed are listed, is boring and can leave unanswered some critical questions that can prevent the reader from paying full attention. This article describes techniques, based on four of the journalistic prompts (what, where, why, and how), that can help writers create contexts for their readers, thereby improving readers' comprehension and enlisting them in the creation of the discourse.

Business and technical communication have conventionally been separated in academe—a separation that formalist rhetorical theory has supported. Epistemic rhetorical theory, however, suggests that this separation does not reflect the profession's current understanding of workplace discourse. This article demonstrates that the labels business and technical communication are not helpful in understanding two workplace documents: a memorandum and a report. The article then explores the increased explanatory power in two epistemic theoretical approaches, social construction and paralogic hermeneutics, after which the article discusses the radical implications of these approaches for a curricular dialogue concerning workplace writing. Finally, the article describes interests inside and outside academe that preserve the status quo and thus mitigate against curricular change, positing that such change would be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve.

Pedagogy and research in intercultural and international communication depend on an understanding of a framework of concepts: (a) the instability and ambiguity of cross-cultural signifiers, (b) culture as a changing construct, (c) culture as a plurality and mixture of cultures, and (d) cross-cultural communication as dialogic. We need to revise our notion of culture as acquisition, our transmission model of communication, and our pedagogy of presenting tips and fostering stereotypes about “foreign” peoples and places. We need to begin with concepts of intercultural/international communication and a discussion of faulty approaches and appraisals that engender miscommunication before taking a narrow focus on dos and don'ts in our exchanges with others.

This article describes a method for motivating second-language (L2) business communicators to increase their English proficiency through the use of double translation. The lesson is explained and illustrated in light of current research on both L2 pedagogy and intercultural communication theory. Examples of double translations are offered, along with anecdotal observations concerning the positive effects of the lesson. These data support the notion that teaching methods that empower L2 communicators while involving them in ideas are preferable to traditional grammar and syntax exercises.

Writing and speaking rhetorically means directing one's words to a particular audience for a particular effect; teaching rhetorically includes appealing to students' interests and experience. Writing teachers frequently use scenarios for that purpose. In this article, the author introduces the unified case method as an improvement on the traditional case method and reports on the use of this rhetorical method in a professional writing class. Specifically, the author used a single, complex scenario throughout the semester so that all the writing assignments were situated in the same fictional world. The students reacted enthusiastically to the method, and their writing was more successful.

Engineers and public relations writers must cooperate to write public relations releases in a manufacturing firm. These releases represent the firm rather than any individual writer. An ethnographic study shows, however, that both engineers and public relations writers see at least some aspects of the releases as representing themselves personally. They therefore try to control content, wording, and authorship of the documents. Despite the difficulties they have in achieving such control, writers invest in corporate texts just as they do in personal ones.

This article analyzes postaccident investigation reports from a feminist perspective to show (a) how the conventions of public discourse privilege the rational (male) objective voice and silence human suffering, (b) how the notion of expertise excludes women's experiential knowledge, (c) how the conventions of public discourse sanction the exclusion of alternative voices and thus perpetuate salient and silent power structures, and (d) how interpretation strategies that fail to consider unstated assumptions about gender, power, authority, and expertise seriously compromise the health, safety, and lives of miners—and in a broader sense—all of those who are dependent on technology for their personal safety.

Technical writing theory and research about communication in large organizations mostly ignore from-the-top control of rhetoric. The usual emphasis on an individual writer negotiating with a known audience and generally free to decide on matters of style, organization, and so on can hide the ways that power relations often silently control internal rhetoric. Conclusions are based on two case studies: In the later Middle Ages, professional letters had to conform to a rhetorical format that necessarily foregrounded unequal power relations. In a contemporary nuclear power station, similar power relations purposely obscure writer and audience while procedures dictate format and content.

Treating visuals as sites of power inscription, the authors advance a Foucauldian design model based on the Panopticon—Bentham's late-eighteenth-century architectural figure for empowerment based on bimodal surveillance. Numerous examples serve in demonstrating that maximum effectiveness results when visuals foster simultaneous viewing in the two panoptic modes, the synoptic and the analytic. The panoptic theory of visual design is shown to be compatible with many privilegings in the literature of visual design that have hitherto appeared ad hoc and undertheorized, with relations masked by the disparate terminologies employed. The limitations of panoptic theory are located in its neglect of oppositional practices—seen as the most compelling horizon for research on the empowerment of designer and viewer through visual design.

The authors explore the parallels to be found by comparing descriptions of the technical communicator with differing views of the communication process—the transmission, translation, and articulation views of communication. In each of these views, the place of the technical communicator and of technical discourse shifts with respect to the production of meaning and relations of power. The authors argue from the standpoint of the articulation view for a new conception of the technical communicator as author and of technical communication as a discourse that produces an author.

Peer Reviewed

The teaching of ethics in professional communication courses for non-English majors is problematic because teachers of those courses are usually trained in literary studies, a profession that has traditionally viewed with suspicion the ethical orientation of science, technology, and business professions. This article examines the history of this problematic, focusing on the “Engineering Publicity” program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1920s. The article suggests that students may be empowered to enter and transform their professions more through examining ethical critiques of science, technology, and business carried on within and among the professions they will enter than by examining ethical critiques from the profession of literary studies.

Technical-professional communication as praxis, or social action, is extended beyond skill or amoral art into the realm of phronesis, concerned with reasoning about ends rather than means. However, praxis and phronesis are sociologically constructed and, like social-epistemic rhetoric, ideologically defined in the political context by the ethic of expediency enabling deliberative rhetoric. Hitler's use of propaganda to construct praxis and define phronesis in Nazi Germany is examined in terms of the rational but open-ended nature of Aristotle's political-ethical thought, and the implications for our understanding of Aristotelian praxis is discussed. Finally, the failure of professional discourse surrounding the siting of a low-level nuclear waste facility to create a persuasive reality and yet ideologically construct praxis is examined, raising questions concerning the possibility of a deliberative technical rhetoric in U.S. democracy.

Mohan Limaye presents two important concerns in his insightful response to my article [“Categorizing Professional Discourse: Engineering, Administrative, and Technical/Professional Writing,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 6:1 (January 1992), pp. 5–37]. I wish to comment on these points and also to submit a correction to the text of the article.

Establishing a course in desktop publishing at the college level is an enterprise that requires important and sometimes difficult choices, such as selecting hardware and software, textbooks, and types of assignments. For faculty members who are involved in making those decisions, the need for information from people who have had experience in teaching desktop publishing is critical. Experience shows that a sound course in this area can be created with these elements: IBM-compatible computers, color monitors, mice, a scanner, one or two laser printers, Aldus PageMaker®, CorelDRAW™, Microsoft® Windows™, Harvard Graphics®, a couple of good textbooks, both practice and original projects, and an emphasis on principles of good design.

This article describes a dual grading process, initiated to expose students to collaborative evaluation and to verify instructor evaluation. Each group was assigned a case, with directions to print five copies of its response. I evaluated one copy, then distributed four blank copies to another group for evaluation. The group reviewed the paper and assigned a grade. I collected the graded responses, attached my graded copy, and returned the two graded copies to the composing group. Receiving feedback from both teacher and students reinforced the students' confidence in the evaluation process while teaching them important lessons on audience expectations.

Although communication is widely accepted as central to the construction of organizational culture, researchers in organizational theory and in rhetoric and professional communication have focused primarily on traditional spoken and written texts, overlooking the vital role that new technologies—especially film and video—are now playing in socializing members of organizations to organizational life. This article examines corporate videos as cultural texts and develops the claim that videos function as rites and ceremonials in modern organizations, facilitating organizational socialization. Drawing on videos produced by a major national financial services firm, the article defines and analyzes four types of rites: integration, passage, renewal, and enhancement.