By wedding a historical materialist understanding of class formation to pedagogical efforts at teaching ethics in the professional writing classroom, language-arts instructors can intervene at an important postindustrial juncture between culture and economics. They can take a vital role in the formation and political developmentof elite and influential knowledge workers, making them more critical of the links between diachronic economic developments and locally experienced institutions such as communication practices and organizational constructions.

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

Recent scandals in the business community have alerted professional writing teachers to the importance of highlighting ethics in the curriculum. From former experiences in teaching courses emphasizing ethics, the authors have adapted the curriculum to include a limited discussion of ethical approaches and terms and assigned group writing projects that consider the effects of business on the broader community. As a result of the integration of this ethical component into the entire course, students learn major ethical approaches; gain a vocabulary of ethical terms they can apply in the business world; interrogate the larger questions of business and its interactions with the local, national, and international community; and engage in the kind of dialectical discussions that require critical thinking.

In courses within technical disciplines, students are often asked to give oral presentations that simulate a professional context. Yet learning to speak like a professional in this academic context is a process often laden with complications. Using activity theory and situated learning as theoretical frameworks, this article explores the teaching and learning of one of the most common oral genres in technical fields—the design presentation. A study of the teaching and learning of this oral genre in three sequential engineering design courses reveals critical academic and workplace contradictions regarding audience, identity, and structure. Results of this study show that in the teaching and learning of design presentations, audience and identity contradictions were managed by a primary deference to the academic context whereas structural contradictions were addressed by invoking both workplace and academic activity systems.

Professional communication is a growing component of English departments and other communication programs. Yet, in most cases, the term professional communication is used as a catchall term for various types of workplace and occupational writing. As such, professional communication, as it is currently framed, seems to have little to do with professionals or the process of professionalization. This article calls for a more thorough examination of the concept of professional communication by reviewing (1) the ways in which researchers have used this term to describe the rhetoric of professionals who communicate, (2) the democratic and knowledge-based contradictions between rhetorical scholarship and professional powers, and (3) the current challenges facing professional workers, including deprofessionalization and proletarianization. The author argues that if professional communication research and teaching are to remain prominent parts of academic programs, researchers, theorists, teachers, and students must become more aware of conceptual issues that inform and define professional work.

Professional communication is a growing component of English departments and other communication programs. Yet, in most cases, the term professional communication is used as a catchall term for various types of workplace and occupational writing. As such, professional communication, as it is currently framed, seems to have little to do with professionals or the process of professionalization. This article calls for a more thorough examination of the concept of professional communication by reviewing (1) the ways in which researchers have used this term to describe the rhetoric of professionals who communicate, (2) the democratic and knowledge-based contradictions between rhetorical scholarship and professional powers, and (3) the current challenges facing professional workers, including deprofessionalization and proletarianization. The author argues that if professional communication research and teaching are to remain prominent parts of academic programs, researchers, theorists, teachers, and students must become more aware of conceptual issues that inform and define professional work.

Within an increasingly global marketplace, discussions of intercultural communication are important in business and technical communication classrooms. Although many business and technical communication textbooks integrate discussions of intercultural communication, they do not go far enough in engaging the complicated nature of this issue. This article summarizes recent literature about the importance of paying attention to intercultural communication and analyzes the productive approaches in popular business and technical communication textbooks. It presents five challenges for business and technical communication teachers to consider and includes teaching modules that address these challenges. Although the article focuses on classroom practice, such intercultural explorations are also of value to authors of business and technical communication textbooks, who might consider integrating modules such as these into their textbooks.

Although usability testing and research have become critical tasks for technical communicators in the workplace, little discussion in technical communication focuses on teaching usability in technical communication programs. This article asserts that technical communication programs are particularly well positioned to adopt usability testing and research in their curricula because of inherent connections between usability and technical communication, such as their mutual emphases on audience analysis, technology, and information design. Approaches to implementation of usability courses at three universities are described, and the authors share suggestions for adopting usability in the areas of curriculum, equipment, and facilities needed for conducting usability.

Research activity is an integral component in the formation of professions. Evidence shows that business and technical communication specialists conduct research in both academic and practitioner career fields. In other disciplines, course work has been recognized as the primary means for preparing students to conduct and consume research. Yet, no publications document the status of research methods course work for U.S. students specializing in business and technical communication. This study provides a descriptive basis for assessing three areas in those courses: research methods topics, required readings, and teaching or assessment methods. An analysis of the results leads to a proposed agenda for preparing students specializing in business and technical communication for their future work roles in both academe and industry.

Teaching business communication in Russia involves operating in a high-context, oral culture where few documents are created. However, this article analyzes two Russian teaching contracts, rhetorically comparing purpose and audience, culture, gender, and the role of the individual versus the state. For historical, political, and economic reasons, less documentation is used in business transactions in Russia than is used in the United States. Subsequently, communication scholars have been afforded little opportunity to analyze Russian business documents. This study uses anecdotal episodes as a framework for examining Russian culture and analyzing university teaching contracts, concluding that the contracts are not only brief and factual but also reflect a more oral, less litigious environment than Western countries like the United States.

What is the primary focus of business communication teachers in classrooms in which English is not the native language of students? Do they concentrate on strategies for improved professional and interpersonal communication skills, or do they direct most attention to purely language issues? These questions have become more important because the number of nonnative English students in business communication classrooms in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and so forth is increasing and because English is becoming more important for business and education in many Asian and African countries. This article outlines some of the language-related problems that occur when teaching nonnative speakers business communication and calls for a drive to address the issue of acceptable language usage in this context.

This article challenges the conventional approach to cross-cultural communication teaching that instructs students to adapt their communication styles to different cultures by providing them with details about the particular practices of these cultures. It argues for an approach that focuses on common principles of effective communication by pointing out some limitations of the current culture-specific approach and presenting a pilot study that indicates the commonality of communication needs. It suggests some ways to find a different approach for studying international communication and shows that some current research is, in fact, moving in that direction.

Carolyn Miller's definition of genre as “social action” has become widely accepted in writing studies; this acceptance has prompted troubling questions about the teaching of professional genres. Because current research emphasizes Miller's reconceptualization of “exigence” as a socially construed need for particular kinds of writing and talk (155-58), some researchers now suggest that unless a genre's social exigence can be fully replicated in the classroom, the genre cannot be taught effectively. Genres, however, entail several kinds of exigence: social exigence that prompts generic writing; social exigence that is reflected in the generic text; textual exigence that shapes the rhetorical situation; and what I call educational exigence, an exigence that prompts writers to learn explicitly how to compose generic texts. Educational exigence was evident in the writing processes of two technical translators who composed in a variety of genres, both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The translators not only responded to educational exigence but also followed a well-considered strategy for gathering information about generic texts.

The purpose of this study is primarily twofold: (1) to determine what factors, if any, are predictors of computer anxiety among business communication students and (2) to explore alternative teaching strategies suggested by the literature to effectively reduce computer anxiety in business communication classrooms. Participants consisted of 431 students enrolled in business communication courses during the 1995 spring semester at three state-supported universities in three southern states. Statistical analyses revealed that gender, keyboarding skill, age, socioeconomic status, and self-directedness are adequate predictors of computer anxiety in business communication students. Teaching strategies for reducing or eliminating computer anxiety in business communication classrooms are discussed.

This article describes the writer's experiences teaching American business writing in Russia and attempting to find documents for comparison of Russian and American approaches to business communication. She discovered that most documents common in the United States are rare or nonexistent in Karelia, where in many ways organizational culture is oral culture; documents exist largely to show to officials rather than to communicate with customers, clients, superiors, or subordinates. Although Hall's model of high-context communication accounts for some cultural differences between Americans and Russians, it is important to note the differences between Russians operating in official mode and in personal mode to understand the amount of explicitness and directness appropriate in various situations.

This article uses the cross-cultural concepts of context and time to examine the rhetoric of German university students in an English business writing course. This participant-observer account, which includes numerous student examples and observations, provides a fresh perspective for American teachers in increasingly multinational, multicultural classrooms. It also suggests how Aristotle's concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos together with the case method and group work can help teachers respond to the challenges in such classrooms. The article concludes by suggesting that understanding the rhetoric of culture is an important step in accepting and negotiating cultural differences.

The international strategies of an organization—ethnocentric, polycentric, geocentric, heterarchic—are reflected in its international communication. The discussion presented here, based on Hedlund's application of Perlmutter's categorization of management strategies, focuses on the alignment of an organization's goals and market positions with its international communication approaches. The categorization implies that an organization's global management strategies should be aligned with its international communication practices. As such, an organization that seeks a larger role in the international market yet takes an ethnocentric stance in its communication strategies may be less successful than one with a more polycentric, geocentric, or heterarchic approach to international communication. Thinking about international communication within such a framework enhances not only consulting practice but teaching as well.

This article argues that researchers can benefit as scholars and teachers by conducting studies in the history of business and technical writing within the framework of the new historicism. It discusses the problems and features of the historical studies literature, explains the legitimizing effects of treating studies as the new historicism, and advocates teaching students to conduct new historical analyses of business and technical texts.

Many technical writing programs across the country have their students go out into the community and do writing projects for local businesses, campus organizations, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. Few, however, take advantage of the increasingly popular pedagogy known as service learning. This article describes how to set up such service-learning courses and how to anticipate certain types of problems. Also discussed are some of the many benefits, both pedagogical and civic/humanitarian, that this truly real-world approach brings to the teaching of technical writing and, potentially, to the teaching of other forms of professional writing.

Computer-based instruction (CBI) using multimedia and hypermedia is a new approach to teaching that is becoming increasingly popular in academic and nonacademic settings. Because the technical communication profession has developed a disciplinary culture uniquely suited to evolve along with communication technology, technical communicators experienced in creating instructional materials for technical products are well-positioned to become effective designers of this innovative form of instruction. However, as designers, they must become proficient in the early design stages of audience analysis, goals analysis, and control analysis to master multimedia and hypermedia CBI. In this article, the authors review findings from several fields to help technical communication teachers and practitioners (a) explain the value of audience analysis, goals analysis, and control analysis; (b) accomplish those analyses effectively; (c) use the results of their analyses to create effective multimedia or hypermedia CBI; and (d) set priorities for further related research.

Victor W. Pagé was either the first or one of the first to make a living primarily as a technical communicator in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. His 33 automotive and aviation books published by the Norman W. Henley Company were popular with both the public and critics because they contained timely, comprehensive coverage of novel technology; profuse illustrations; occasional analogies; easy-to-access information; well-established expertise; and sophisticated employment of task orientation. Pagé was able to publish many books quickly because he reused manufacturers' and his own material and methods of organization. He was also able to communicate his novel information effectively because he had both extensive firsthand experience with early automobiles and planes and because he was continually involved in teaching. Victor Pagé's early twentieth-century work demonstrates both what have become mainstream techniques in technical communication and a number of unique rhetorical strategies.

In the study of law, postmodernism's interpretive turn has given rise to a wealth of scholarship analyzing the relationship of law's rhetoric to its social, cultural, and political contexts. This shift has influenced some teaching of “substantive” law school courses. At the university level, the interpretive turn has prompted composition scholars to reconsider how the teaching of writing is implicated, but no similar shift has occurred in legal writing pedagogy. Instead, those teaching legal writing largely teach as they were taught, emphasizing the use of rhetoric as a tool for successful lawyering. Legal writing professors must move beyond this narrow conception of rhetoric to help students become adept at the discourse of the legal community and capable of critically evaluating it.

This study uses qualitative content analysis to discuss current perspectives in technical communication pedagogy. It examines the 1990-94 issues of five major scholarly journals—a collection of 563 articles—to identify 98 articles mentioning teaching in undergraduate technical communication courses. Influenced by differing theoretical and practical approaches, the 98 articles were classified according to four pedagogical perspectives: (1) the functional perspective, based on empirical research and workplace experience; (2) the rhetorical perspective, based on scholarship in the humanities and influenced by rhetorical theory; (3) the ideological perspective, also based on scholarship in the humanities but influenced by critical theory; and (4) the intercultural and feminist perspective, a bridging perspective based on both empirical research and critical theory. This article discusses the four perspectives in terms of the educational goals of communicative competence (the ability to use language to succeed in the workplace) and social critique (the ability to question existing social structures and to envision cultural change).

An MA student in professional writing and editing undertook ethnographic research on ghostwriting in the military headquarters where he has worked as a civilian writer for 18 years. He investigated the ways in which the military's review process (or “chop chain”) influences writer psychology and the final written product. His findings shed light on writer psychology and on bureaucratese as a cultural discursive product and lead him to propose changes in local writing and reviewing practices. To suggest innovations in teaching and curriculum, this article traces the MA student's academic authorship as he drew on the disciplines of ethnography, folklore, social psychology, and composition and as he used cultural theory from Foucault and textual theory from narratology.

Instructors of business and technical communication courses continually search for ways to improve their classroom and professional training exercises. Toward that end, this investigation examines two methods of conducting an employment interviewing training exercise for interviewees. Specifically, instructor-facilitated and peer-facilitated interviewing exercises are compared. Data collected from interviewing classes show that students preferred the instructor-facilitated over the peer-facilitated training exercise. Advantages and disadvantages of the instructor-facilitated exercise are discussed, and suggestions for further examination are offered.

In teaching a technical communication course, I introduced document design principles before discussing traditional verbal rhetoric. A comparison of the writing of two students—a competent writer and a weak one—before and after the design discussion indicates that a basic understanding of design principles helped them improve document macrostructure. They saw the need to involve the audience, to provide an introduction and a forecast, and to organize and highlight information using headings. The design discussion, however, appears to have had little effect on document microstructure. Although more research needs to be conducted to better understand the relationship between verbal and visual rhetoric in technical communication, integrating document design principles early appears to be a promising pedagogical technique.

This study describes the roles and responsibilities of three editors employed in the publications unit of a large government agency. Along with the story of each editor, the article presents generalizations about the editing process in this particular organization. The description suggests that editing is a complex, meaning-making process. The three editors seem to make changes in the documents they edit based on their expert knowledge of writing, their empathy for readers, and their assumption of authority over a document. Although they all make rule-based changes that rely on external authorities, such as style manuals, they vary greatly in their readiness to use their personal authority in interpreting the needs of an audience. The editors gain the authority they need to make reader-based changes by assuming the role of language specialists and by enhancing the teaching role important in their organization.

The recent addition of a writing performance assessment to the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) means that many students now enter business school with a writing assessment score and perhaps even a heightened awareness that writing matters in some way to the successful completion of an MBA degree. This situation presents teachers of business and managerial writing with a new opportunity and pressure to provide students with writing tools that are directly relevant to their business studies and professional careers. The Analysis of Argument Measure and the Persuasive Adaptiveness Measure introduced here are assessment tools that may be used to explain holistic assessment scores (which students receive on the GMAT writing component) and may assist students in understanding and evaluating their writing, both in school and in the workplace. Designed to evaluate managerial documents that are persuasive and directorial in nature, these measures were developed through a series of pilots and used to assess a selected sample of managerial memorandums that were also scored holistically. Correlating the holistic and analytic scores revealed a positive association, and interrater reliability achieved good agreement beyond chance. These results suggest that the measures may be reliably employed to assess characteristics valued in managerial writing. Examples of how these analytic measures may be employed for teaching and research are also described.

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.

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.

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.

As more business writing instructors begin implementing collaborative writing and learning in their classrooms, few descriptions exist that show how collaboration might work in the context of an entire course. This article describes a course that integrates individual and collaborative group assignments while requiring students to work through multiple drafting processes involving teacher and peer intervention. The course was designed to encourage students to become self-reflective, flexible writers who can make themselves aware of their writing processes and then adapt them to both individual and collaborative writing tasks. Along with outlining specific assignments and the rationales behind them, we address issues such as establishing collaborative groups, analyzing group dynamics and writing processes, and the roles teachers might play in a collaborative classroom.

Many teachers believe that lecture combined with individual writing assignments is the best method for teaching written business communication. In contrast, a second teaching method is the random assignment of students in written communication classes to cooperative learning groups. The author recently completed a study at Oklahoma State University comparing the effectiveness of straight lecture and cooperative learning group methods of teaching junior and senior college-level written business communication. Comments on diary sheets by students in cooperative learning groups indicated maturation in the area of interpersonal relationship skills—an unanticipated aspect of the study. The cooperative learning group method is recommended for teaching written business communication because it provides students an opportunity to learn to work cooperatively and share ideas in groups. No attempt is made to present the study, but suggestions and procedures for effectively structuring and implementing cooperative learning groups, including copies of handouts, are provided to encourage instructors to foster cooperative learning in written business communication.

Developing a course in desktop publishing is a technological, as much as a pedagogical, undertaking. Although a background in layout, document design, and typography is necessary, teaching these subjects with computers inevitably means teaching a particular combination of hardware and software. Students with little prior experience using computers must receive training in computer basics. Thus considerable familiarity, not only with desktop publishing software but also with personal computers, is necessary to teach a desktop publishing course.

During the 1980s, studies about stress in academia and business indicated that jobrelated stress is a serious problem. The purpose of this exploratory, correlational study was to examine the nature and extent of job-related stress among collegiate business-and professional-writing faculty members in the United States. The stress scale developed by the author was consistent with the framework on stress and burnout suggested by Pines and Aronson. Results indicate that job-related stress is associated with faculty members' rank, type of institution, and sex. Job-related stress tends to increase with greater expectations of publication and service, the total number of courses taught, and the number of writing courses taught. Job-related stress tends to decrease with increased maturity—age, years of teaching, years postdegree, and years teaching business and professional writing. Analysis of two open-ended questions indicates that paper grading is a significant stressor.

This article describes an innovative method of teaching business communica tion. This method, which involves integrating business research methods and communication skills, has been employed and favorably received at the MBA level, especially by managers of technical and scientific personnel and by stu dents who anticipate careers in managing such personnel. This article offers a theoretical justification for such an integration, discusses the premises and benefits of a course based on this integration, and describes this course in de tail. The article also evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the course and suggests when and why this course might be offered to undergraduates.

Our survey of women who graduated in engineering from Kansas State Uni versity indicates that sexist language persists in the workplace, that women react to it in various ways, and that such language can engender sexist atti tudes which often have deleterious effects on the company and its employees. We believe technical-writing teachers have some of the responsibility to sensi tize students to exclusionary language. We show how that language violates professional ethical practices, demonstrate that some technical-writing texts trivialize the issue of sexist language, and suggest methods and resources for teachers to use in the classroom.

Patent specifications have heuristic benefits as structural models for teaching technical description. Once taught how to read patents, students can use the specification's four main sections for writing assignments, structurally adapt ing a single topic-an invention-to different rhetorical contexts: (1) Back ground of the Invention describes the context into which the invention fits; (2) Summary of the Invention explains what makes the invention special; (3) Brief Description of the Drawings focuses on pictorial description; (4) Best Mode of Carrying Out the Invention explains how to make the invention work. Parts 1 and 2 correspond to Aristotelian definition, while part 3 can work as physical description and part 4 as functional description or even performance instructions.

While demand for business- and technical-writing courses at colleges and uni versities has increased, genuinely qualified teachers are not always available. This article describes an extended program for training graduate assistants to teach business and technical writing. The three-semester program includes a semester of apprenticeship teaching, followed by two semesters in which the graduate assistants teach their own classes. During the graduate assistants' first two semesters, they attend preparatory seminars on the teaching of pro fessional writing. The program emphasizes providing guidance and support for new teachers throughout their assistantship period, while encouraging the graduate assistants to develop their own teaching styles.

This article describes a course design that resulted from an academic and in dustrial collaboration. Unlike most simulation courses, the one described here was developed and taught by university professors and business professionals. One aim of designing the course was to find a way of teaching students that would better prepare them for writing in the workplace. A second aim was for the design-team members, through the experience of planning and teaching, to learn more about writing in the workplace and the teaching of writing. This article gives background on the development of the collaboration and on the decision to design and teach a simulation course, then describes the course and its results.

A growing concern about ethical behavior in business suggests that profes sional communicators, often major players in the business community, ought to be aware of the ethical dimensions of their writing. Teachers can prepare fu ture professional communicators to consider the ethical dimension of their writing activities by using Lawrence Kohlberg's hierarchy of moral develop ment. When Kohlberg's hierarchy is applied to fictional business settings, stu dents have the opportunity to investigate the relationship between action morality and agent morality. This type of investigation is an essential part of teaching professional communication because the written language used in business transmits values.

If the in-basket assignment is to be the "real- world" training that we claim it to be, the entire in-basket environment must be not just assigned, but taught. In- basket items do not appear in a vacuum; they are part of office routine. Fur thermore, there is a method of determining priorities for the items that must be answered—a method based on deadlines, degrees of complexity and im portance, and even one's own working habits—while other items simply can be discarded, or noted and filed. Only when the background and method have been taught can we expect students to approach the actual exercise as a real- world in-basket instead of as discrete additional assignments.