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.

Finding a method to determine terrestrial longitude was critical in the early seventeenth century as countries attempted to establish territorial boundaries. The magistrate and natural philosopher Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) spent much of his life working on a solution to this problem. As an early technical communicator, he was concerned with the criteria of acceptable observations, the standardization of materials and methods, and the communication of results. He refined a variety of strategies to obtain these observations and ensure their accuracy. He persuaded missionary priests to make observations throughout the Levant by promising patronage and gifts or stressing practical applications in the solution to the problem of longitude and church calendar reform. Although Peiresc did not resolve the issue of determining longitude, his efforts did provide the basis for work by later astronomers.

This review identifies technical communication programs outside the United States and comments on such features as their location in the university structure, links with public relations, the inclusion of internships or practicums, the balance of theory and practice, and typical course offerings. It also provides a listing (including Web addresses) of a dozen major programs in seven countries. The review concludes that programs abroad share many features and goals with programs in the United States and suggests how international programs can illustrate the value of technical communication in the global marketplace.

This article proposes a postmodern reconceptualization of technical communication pedagogy to make student and professional agency a major concern, especially because technical communicators must compete in a global economy that rewards flexibility and penalizes inflexibility. Postmodern mapping metaphors and Robert Reich's methodology for training “symbolic-analytic” workers are used to suggest ways in which a postmodern approach to technical communication could be taught.

Discourse theories frequently emphasize the importance of understanding audience but seldom delve into how writers form conceptions of their audiences, especially in organizations. This study examines computer documentation writers’ tactics for conceiving of their audiences. Based on two ethnographic case studies and insights from activity theory, the author describes and evaluates technical communicators’ tactics for understanding audiences, constrained and supported by their organizations. She discusses the advantages and limitations of each tactic, looking at how each tactic might answer questions about audience. This research should be useful to technical communication educators as they expand students’ options for audience research in nonacademic settings. In addition, the findings of this study can enhance theories about the ways writers create images of their audiences.

Technology is commonly described in magical terms, not only in advertising but also in journalism and technical communication. This article provides some background on the use of magical language in technical contexts, gives examples of magical discourse in technology advertisements and newsmagazine articles, and proposes a technical communication pedagogy of media analysis. The proposed pedagogy involves students in conducting diagnostic critiques of media texts and affords them the opportunity to examine critically their own unwitting use of magical language in technical discourse.

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.

More than 1,600 serials from across the disciplines were identified as sources for technical communication scholars. The 99 most frequently cited serials are described. This citation analysis is distinguished from others by the size of the database (25,000+ citations), the 10-year review of articles published in five technical communication journals between 1988 and 1997, the number of serials cited and reviewed, and the focus on technical communication as a discipline. The analysis yielded two observations. First, five technical communication journals have grown in strength as forums for discussions of technical communication. Second, the serials cited illustrate the diversity of resources referred to from business, education, psychology, science, and technology-related sources. As a discipline, technical communication has developed depth and rigor through building the base of its research and theory while integrating the research and theory gathered from a number of disciplines.

This article examines the Work for Hire Doctrine and its importance to technical communication instructors who prepare students to create intellectual products in workplace settings. The author explains how the Work for Hire Doctrine operates in practice, charts the progressive legal treatment of work for hire through case law, and calls attention to the developing trend in the courts to support a more protectionist stance regarding creative products.

To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, we should add multiculturalism to the widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction, thus transforming the classroom into a contact zone (Pratt). The practical necessity of intercultural communication in a global marketplace necessitates internationalization. The international perspective, accounting for the heterogeneity of the technical communication audience, focuses on audience analysis and leads us to encourage students to learn about the multiple, cultural layers of audience. A multicultural perspective, however, can teach students of professional communication about the complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language. Multiculturalism's critical component provides insights into the structures and ideologies of domination/subordination and provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting fear and prejudices. Likewise, the international perspective in professional communication can inform issues of audience analysis in composition.

The work for hire doctrine in intellectual property law is important to academics in rhetoric and technical communication. In this article, the author explains the doctrine and the way in which it works, explicates related case law, and suggests treatment of work for hire by instructors and administrators in rhetoric and technical communication.

This qualitative content analysis identifies 40 articles about women and feminism published in five technical communication journals in a period of nine years, beginning with the publication of Mary Lay's award-winning “Interpersonal Conflict in Collaborative Writing” in 1989. Along with numeric trends about the frequency of articles about women and feminism in technical communication journals, this study also identifies major themes, all of which concern inclusion: through eliminating sexist language, providing equal opportunity in the workplace, valuing gender differences, recovering women's historical contributions to technical communication, and critiquing previously uncontested terms and concepts. The study concludes that although research about women and feminism has been accepted as part of the scholarly purview of technical communication, the ways in which this research has influenced workplace or classroom practice are unclear.

Not only do students of technical writing courses need to learn how to prepare documents for translation properly, but students of translation need to learn technical and academic writing. This article gives the example of such a course taught at the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. The course covers writing instructions and manuals, documents for scholarly and professional societies and scientific conferences, scientific papers, reports, and abstracts.

This article examines the value added to the United States Lighthouse Service by the operator's manuals, which were issued to the lighthouse keepers by the Light-House Board in 1852. Subsequent reports of the board to Congress conclusively show that the manuals resulted in a significant savings in the operating costs of the service. In addition, annual reports of district superintendents show that the instructional information improved the appearance and reliability of the lights. Furthermore, the manuals helped to reduce significantly the number of marine disasters along America's shores in the years following the board's decision.

Revising instructions for clients of health care facilities provides students with valuable practice in good technical communication techniques: organizing information for maximum accessibility, analyzing the audience's needs, using formatting and graphics to enhance communication, and clarifying sentence structure and diction. Suitable for both individual and team work, the project offers experience in both revising instructions for a lay audience and writing persuasively. It also emphasizes the accountability of technical writers to the users of their documents.

This article suggests a perspective on rhetoric of technology as discursive exploitation of the margins of indeterminacy affecting the development of technologies and technical artifacts. It examines such margins by examining the development of an aircraft auxiliary engine in a California aerospace company, focusing especially on how engines are tested. It examines technical documents associated with testing as arenas for rhetorical transactions involving various factors and interests vested in a technology and as residua of compliance and negotiation. It suggests that margins of indeterminacy in technology development provide critical rhetorical spaces for agency and decision making, spaces that engineers and technical communicators must be trained to appreciate and exploit appropriately.

Technical communication, to be more effective in international business, must attempt to be culture free (without cultural impediments and irrelevancies) and culture fair (adjusted to meet local cultural expectations and communication styles). Both requirements raise serious philosophical questions of strategy and style: (1) Are the principles associated with North American-style technical writing in any sense universal? (2) Is it possible to write natural English documents that are univocal and reliably translatable? (3) Does the characterization of cultural differences lead inevitably to stereotyping and condescending tolerance? (4) Does the business motivation driving much international communication promote situations that may be exploitative of, and disadvantageous to, the targeted cultures? and (5) Does a postmodern approach to technical communication undervalue Western methods and the English language?

In this article, the review process is described as a method of formative evaluation of texts. The description is based on three empirical studies of professional writing practices. It includes the goals of review, the actors involved in the process, the moments in the text production process that review is taking place, and the procedures followed. The studies make clear that review serves more goals than just improving the text. For improving the text, other methods than review probably produce better and more reliable results, especially when the goal is to improve the usability of the text. But review also has the function of having the information checked by experts and of building consensus and commitment in the organization. Because in most organizations review is taking place anyway, all remarks about the quality and acceptability of the document that are collected in the review process can be considered additional information that writers could use—with caution.

The global marketplace and the Information Age have combined to extend documentation across national borders. To date, however, few programs in scientific and technical communication have taken steps to accustom their students to the translation procedures they must undertake and the mind-set they must adopt to ready documents for translation. This article argues that technical communication courses, particularly introductory courses in technical writing, must include a translation component if they are to prepare students for the kind of work they are now likely to encounter as technical communicators.

This article argues for the long-term value of client-based group projects in an introductory technical communication course. Survey results are presented from 73 former technical communication students with two to seven years of workplace experience. Lasting five to six weeks, these projects are a compromise between a briefer conventional case method and a more lengthy individualized internship or cooperative education experience. The projects reinforce research, analysis, and reporting skills, such as interviewing specialists and conducting survey research, that graduates continue to value highly even after years of workplace writing. When framed as such, client-based projects also encourage students to define and debate public policy issues.

Carolyn Miller's “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing” serves as an example of text that has influenced the knowledge-making activities within technical communication. The 68 references, or intertextual connections, to “Humanistic Rationale” between 1979 and 1995 demonstrate its influence and show the evolution of technical communication and the issues important to technical communication professionals. The authors respond to questions of the purpose of technical communication, the influence of the canons of rhetoric, the importance of audience, and the impact of social constructionism on technical communication. This analysis of the academic prose surrounding “Humanistic Rationale” reveals part of the discipline's discussions and the “communal rationality” (617) that shapes the activities of its members.

This article considers on-line documentation's place in a two-year college's technical communication program. Such a course can be successful if instructors (1) emphasize design principles rather than a particular software package; (2) build on rhetorical skills students already possess, while developing the new skills necessary for authoring documents for the computer screen; and (3) acknowledge the need for their own professional development.

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.

Because of our increasingly litigious workplace, it is theoretically, educationally, and pragmatically imperative that business and technical communicators become familiar with and informed about the legal issues surrounding products liability. This article explains the products liability theories of negligence, breach of warranty, and strict liability in relation to the publication of defective product information. It also examines the legal implications of printed media and written communications (such as safety, instructional, and promotional information) as integral parts of marketed products. Finally, it cautions all professional communicators concerning their personal legal responsibility for the accuracy and effectiveness of product documentation from the perspective of the ordinary, uninformed consumer, and it offers several guidelines for writing and organizing to avoid products liability lawsuits.

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).

Computer-mediated communication on the Internet offers new challenges and opportunities for technical communication. The cases of Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper chip illustrate the specialized nature of technical communities on the Internet and suggest that when technical messages are not overly complex, the process of reposting may widen community appeal but also promote inaccurate information. Yet, when technical messages are highly complex, audiences may not repost such messages; this preserves accuracy of information but at the same time limits how many people will read the information. Finally, these cases strengthen recent arguments that rhetorical delivery is an increasingly important component of technical communication.

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.

Formal classroom instruction and literature in the field never replace the learning that occurs from actual experience in the workplace. Recognizing this, the authors—two senior technical communicators—identify several typical, but not predictable, organizational problems that involve technical communicators and present them in a how-to, anecdotal fashion.

The value of formal writing conventions has been diminished in mainstream composition scholarship; although research on occupational writing suggests that formal conventions are important, these findings are hard to generalize. This study, a content analysis of 12 professional style manuals, achieves generalizability by elucidating the institutional norms of disciplinary writing (a subset of occupational writing to which much scientific and technical writing belongs). Formal conventions prove to be highly valued. More important, the use of formal conventions often is justified on rhetorical grounds, suggesting that the dichotomy between formalist and rhetorical axiologies posited in composition scholarship is false.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.