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 article describes German correspondence styles in order to assist American managers. In the coming years, more and more American managers will find that they must correspond with their German counterparts either as colleagues within international organizations or as associates representing collaborative and competing businesses. The article explains typical conventions of both memo and letter formats, emphasizing the need to appreciate differences between formal and informal modes of communication. American managers who know and respect these differences can communicate more clearly and persuasively with their German contacts.

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 team-based project developed for undergraduate students in both business communication and business statistics classes in a small, midwestern college. More than 94% of the students endorsed the usefulness of the project, which was designed to help them develop communication competencies in multiple areas: working in teams, writing collaboratively, participating in meetings, and giving and receiving constructive criticism. The project presents a model of collaboration between instructors in business departments.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recommendations to the developer of an undergraduate desktop publishing course are given concerning scholastic level and prerequisites, purpose and objectives, instructional resources and methodology, assignments and evaluation, and a general course outline. By using desktop publishing, students gain experience in preparing documents that are professional in form and content. After students master the hardware and software, instructional emphasis shifts to page layout and graphic design principles that students apply to the development of documents commonly prepared in the workplace.

As in the fields of composition and technical writing, the emphasis on hierarchical organization of texts in business writing has led to a devaluation of narrative, perhaps because the kind of knowledge that narrative creates has been insufficiently understood. By elucidating the special properties of narrative as a mode of discourse and as a cognitive instrument, this article argues for the potential power of narrative in many common business writing situations.

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.

Business communication arose from the practical nature of the ars dictaminis and the merging of process-oriented humanistic epistolography with the medieval formulaic dictamen in writers such as Erasmus. Like the Italian church leaders and businessmen, medieval English gentry soon grasped the value of correspondence. English letter-writing guides and model books, which began to appear in 1568, mirror both Erasmus and the rigid models of the ars dictaminis. The increasingly utilitarian English commercial society of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries ultimately led to the demise of the rhetorical tradition that originally surrounded English letter-writing guides. Today's tendency to use a product (formulaic), rather than process (rhetorical), approach in developing business letters obscures the rich tradition surrounding the rise of epistolary method and reduces the effectiveness of the final product.

Modes of collaboration are gendered in the sense that they define power relationships among members of a group. In this study, the authors define three collaborative modes: dialogic, asymmetrical, and hierarchical. Dialogic and asymmetrical modes are emancipating and characterized by flexibility, open-ended inquiry, and concern for the growth and development of the individuals involved. Hierarchical modes are oppressive and are characterized by rigidity and suppression of the voices of others in the group. Two collaborative writing groups in a chemical engineering design course exemplify these modes. The first, composed of two women and two men, was primarily dialogic, and the second, composed of two women and three men, exhibited characteristics of all three modes.

People need clear, direct feedback about their performance if they are to improve their communication skills. This need is as true for students as it is for employees. Unfortunately, many evaluators—including classroom instructors—find it very difficult to provide such feedback. This article briefly discusses a performance appraisal system specifically designed for classroom use, including a discussion of communication techniques appropriate for providing feedback about students' performance.

Studies in the history of technical writing have only recently begun to study the development of technical writing. Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue, 1475-1640 contains a number of English Renaissance technical books that reveal that Renaissance printers and authors were aware of the need for readability and visual access in technical reference and information books. An examination of these books shows evolving use of many contemporary page design techniques: partition, clearly worded headings, visual aids, enumeration and listing devices, and choice of font for emphasis.

With the advent of electronic networking, writing pedagogy has moved into the arena of computer-supported collaborative writing, using collaborative writing as an instructional means to promote a more social view of the writing process. Therefore, as business and technical communication researchers and instructors, we need to ask the following questions: What kinds of software have been developed to aid computer-supported collaborative writing in the workplace and in the writing classroom? What benefits and problems have resulted from the design and use of this software? What research issues should be addressed as we approach the next decade of computer-supported collaborative writing? In this article the author explores these questions, highlighting five computer-supported collaborative writing systems from the workplace and five such systems from the writing classroom.

This research report examines the roles of convention, conflict, and conversation in the formation of audience constructs. One group of construction engineers and another group of design architects and engineers, both working in a bureaucratic setting, relied on disciplinary and institutional conventions while constructing, addressing, and invoking audiences. Incongruities among contextual conventions restricting audience analysis resulted in inappropriate textual features and necessitated conversation during corporate training. This conversation focused on redefining problems of audience analysis and accommodation. The problem solving associated with analyzing situational audiences during the composing process was possible only when writers understood the problem-posing conventions of their discourse communities.

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.

Previous research on the communication failures contributing to the Challenger's explosion tends to ask why it happened that various people in the organizations involved knew about the faulty O-rings but failed to pass on the information to decision makers. This is a faulty question, revealing assump tions many of us unconsciously share even when we consciously reject these as sumptions. This question implies a simplistic notion of knowledge and a conduit model of communication. Insights from the sociology of technology and the new rhetoricians can help us to form better questions about rhetoric in organizations.

Empirical studies of gender-based language differences have provided con flicting, discreet conclusions that have little relevance for business- communications instruction. This paper presents informally collected obser vations of male and female students in undergraduate and graduate business- and technical-communication courses. Calling for future formal studies to verify its findings, this study concludes that people-intensive work experience modifies gender-based language differences in written business communica tions of undergraduate and graduate students. However, instruction in audi ence analysis, tone, content design, and style also modify these gender differences. If formally supported, these observations would help teachers argue for the value of business-communications instruction in helping stu dents develop varied and androgynous communication styles important for job-related communications.

The technology of in-house publishing is radically shifting the responsibility for document design from the graphic specialist to the individual writer. To apply the new technology, professional communicators need to understand the principles underpinning typographical design and their origin in the functionalist aesthetics of modernism, particularly as articulated by the Bauhaus. While some of the key concepts of modernism—strict economy, uni versal objectivity, intuitive perception, and the unity ofform and purpose—are well-suited to business and technical documents, these concepts are bound to an historical and intellectual milieu. By understanding the influence ofmod ernism on typographical design, professional communicators equipped with the new technology can adapt design principles to the rhetorical context ofspe cific documents.

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.

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.

This essay analyzes business communication in order to generate an ap proach to ethics based in the rhetorical process of corporate life. Through a study of the role of language in creating and disseminating values, the essay first extends the Aristotelian paradigm for ethical communication to the rhet oric of business. Two case studies then show how this model works in practice, while a third case poses questions of ethics and communication for the read er's consideration.