This article theorizes the term infrastructure as a framework for articulating how writing products, activities, and processes underwrite organizational life in technical organizations. While this term has appeared broadly in writing studies scholarship, it has not been systematically theorized there as it has been in other fields such as economics, computing, and information science. This article argues for a four-part framework that incorporates and builds on Star and Ruhleder’s relational theory of infrastructure. Fieldwork from a federally funded supercomputing center for scientific research operationalizes the theory for its contributions to writing studies scholarship and its applications for industry and writing pedagogy.

This article reports the background, methods, and results of a 7-year project (2007–2013) that assessed the writing of undergraduate business majors at a business college. It describes specific issues with writing assessment and how this study attempted to overcome them, largely through a situated assessment approach. The authors provide the results of more than 3,700 assessments of nearly 2,000 documents during the course of the study, reporting on scores overall and for each rubric criterion and comparing the scores of English and business assessors. They also investigate how two curricular interventions were evaluated through this assessment project. Although overall, the writing of these business majors was assessed as good, results showed noteworthy differences between the scores of English and business assessors and a noteworthy impact for one of the curricular interventions, an effort to improve the material conditions of writing instruction. The authors conclude by discussing some next steps and implications of this project.

Student compositions traditionally are written for the teacher. Yet instructors of professional communication genres have discovered that students' motivation may be enhanced when they write assignments for audiences of peers within the classroom or professionals outside the campus. Yet client-based projects require writing students who have never yet written for an external audience to make a leap beyond the classroom. To bridge the gap between writing for classroom peers and writing for professional clients, this article describes a third and intermediate choice of audience, namely, external peers in cross-classroom collaborations that occur via telecommunication. The author places this intermediate-audience strategy within the larger conversation about the impact of audience on student writing outcomes, applies the strategy to professional writing pedagogy, and reports the results of a small pilot study that provide some preliminary support for the strategy.

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.

Teachers of professional writing should try to integrate legal literacy into undergraduate writing courses in order to provide students with the kinds of literacies that many instructors and researchers want to promote in classes today. On one level, the almost complete exclusion of legal writing from most undergraduate professional writing classes should be reconsidered. This practice fails to meet the needs of a significant number of students who are considering careers in the legal profession. This neglect allows the legal system to remain a mystery to our students. This article analyzes how current literacy theory supports the integration of legal writing into the undergraduate curriculum and examines some of the relationships between rhetoric and legal writing pedagogy.

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.

Most technical writing textbook assignments are artificial. They do not force students to deal with writing problems in the same way they will be called on to deal with them in the workplace. Technical writing instructors can provide their students with realistic writing alternatives. Alternatives for two assignments that are almost always artificial—writing instructions and definition—and the benefits of these a alternatives are discussed.

The study demonstrates the language skills value added by business writing instruction. Descriptive Tests of Language Skills of the College Board (DTLS) covering sentence structure and usage were administered as a pretest/posttest assessment to students enrolled in two business writing courses. Instruction in business writing resulted in improved language skills as measured by the DTLS.

Business communicators today risk legal liability as courts are increasingly holding writers and their employing organizations responsible for reasonable—although often unintended—interpretations of their routine writing. Research and pedagogy have not kept abreast of this change. Rhetorical theory, particularly a social perspective, provides a useful foundation for understanding judicial resolution of claims arising out of writing; however, theory must also account for factors not encompassed within extended audience analysis. Current texts offer general descriptions of the laws most likely to affect business writers; in addition, writing pedagogy must provide specific strategies for avoiding liability-prone prose.

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.