This bibliography contains seventy-five articles published in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication from 1981 through 1984 in the categories of The Profession, Education and Pedagogy, Preparation and Presentation of Technical Information, Applied Theory in Technical Communication, and Application of Technology to Technical Communication.

Though historical scholarship in technical writing has been sparse, what is available on Francis Bacon has tended to focus on Bacon's influence in directing scientific discourse toward the use of plain prose. This article shows that in many ways, Bacon's theory of rhetoric for specialized, knowledge-seeking fields directly conflicts with that of those who support plain prose for these fields. In addition, the rhetorical method Bacon utilized in presenting the theory has subverted the effect of much of his theory. Consequently, it is not surprising that Bacon's actual theory differs both from what was transferred to the Royal Society and from posterity's interpretation of it.

The status and standards of technical communication teaching in universities are much lower than in business and industry. The four main reasons—that scientists and engineers don't know that they have a problem; that they know and don't care; that professional technical communication teaching is confused with basic literacy skills teaching; and that technical communication is not regarded as a legitimate academic subject—have a circularity that is difficult to break. Awareness of the problem is the beginning of an answer, and some examples, gleaned from a sabbatical tour of universities, are given.

Although teachers of technical writing have long considered themselves as the vanguard, they too have shown considerable resistance to change, despite recent theoretical advances in composition theory. This author proposes that the technical writing community review its traditional views and attitudes toward the teaching of writing to incorporate insight derived from cross-disciplinary research.

Technical writing is one kind of creative writing. Using knowledge of facts, audience, and situation, the technical writer recreates reality in a technical report. Concepts of reality and creativity currently operative in philosophy, the physical sciences, cognitive and developmental psychology, history of science, rhetoric, and linguistics provide a theoretical basis for this creative approach to technical writing and confirm that imagining and reasoning are related rather than mutually exclusive thought processes.

Employers must frequently choose between hiring a professional writer or a technician to communicate high technology to the lay public. The professional writer may well be the better choice. Writers can develop their technical writing skills to meet this challenge by practicing Technical Communication Competency, by standardizing technical objectives, by learning to write readable and interesting technical documents, and by requesting diagrams that clearly show functions and relationships. At the same time, writers must keep up with the rapid changes in technology if they want to continue providing a valuable link between the lay public and this technology.

The lack of a scientific background of many of our technical writing students and the continual amalgamation of the sciences make a technical terminology course an important adjunct to the technical writing curriculum. This course consists of three distinct phases: a compilation of terms already known by the students, an expansion of that list into a comprehensive list of the major technical terms in approximately fifteen scientific fields, and an indepth study by each student into a particular field. This course would help to create scholars who were conversant in most major fields of study. This would make the students more flexible in their job searches. What is more important, it would help them understand the forces that shape our civilization and thereby broaden their control over those forces.

A rhetorical editing method can help the editor redesign technical reports, when necessary, to meet the needs of the intended audience. If the editor sees that the author has not selected and arranged the ideas to accord with the audience and purpose of the report, he or she must reselect the necessary and sufficient ideas and rearrange them. Rhetorical editing thus calls on the editor to edit at the scale of the entire report—not just at the scale of individual words and sentences. Although seemingly a bold departure from conventional editing, rhetorical editing merely applies the principles of rhetoric widely used in technical writing and composition.

Conceptual and empirical research were combined to develop information concerning the kinds of papers appropriate for lower-division technical writing in various kinds of institutions: the community college, the technical institute, the four-year college or small university, and the multi-purpose university. Relationships were studied between types of papers rated highly appropriate by teachers of technical writing and types of institutions as well as instructional aims. Also studied were those teachers' suggestions for specialized kinds of papers. The author discusses the implications of this research for determining instructional aims of lower-division technical writing courses in four-year institutions.

This article presents guidelines for improving coordination among authors, communicators and managers through 1) communication of technical information via the written word and visual aids, and 2) solutions to economic problems in technical communication for the benefit of research and development management.

Technical writing explains and, in contrast to other kinds of writing, insists on the visual. Explanation and visualization are mutually dependent, because explanation combines “description,” the observable facts, and “diagram,” the graphic paradigm of the relations that obtain among these facts. The technical writer's principal task, then, is to make explicit, by using appropriate spatial, temporal, and logical signals, one of three diagrams—schematic, flowchart, tree—that define the basic modes of explanation—object, process, and logical hierarchy. Where the novelist submerges the diagram in metaphoric layers, the technical writer strips them away and surfaces the diagram.

Technical communicators—both writers and editors—should know their inherent abilities, and how these abilities interface with related occupations. Publications supervisors and managers can also benefit from this knowledge by applying it to improve their units' functional efficiency. By using the Job and Talent Matrix—occupation blocks fitted into a lattice of aptitudes—we can define the general attributes of technical writers/editors, and establish their interrelationships with people from associated professions such as engineers.

Both the instructor and student of technical writing benefit from an individual conference held in the instructor's office. Scheduled at the beginning of the academic semester, these structured conferences allow for the exchange of information which may not surface in the traditional classroom setting.

Specialized publication of scientific and technical journals during the 1970's showed marked growth in Europe and North America, was measurably stable in Africa and the Middle East, but was rising somewhat in the Asian-Pacific and Latin American-Caribbean regions. The number of journals in the basic sciences, the medical sciences, and technology-related industries continues to climb, worldwide, but the universal data-base on scientific periodicals remains fragmentary and needs completion. Primary-source scientific journals are relatively few in number, in most languages, and current economic considerations suggest that this number will not rise significantly. Journals of popularization, on the other hand, continue to grow in number and variety. Audiovisual and electronic information technologies are making inroads into the domain long dominated by typography, but replacement of printed journals by electronic journals can be expected to remain problematic for reasons related to technology, budget, and distribution. Current specialization in primary- and secondary-source journals may gradually give way to consolidation of journals now serving highly focused, comparatively small audiences.

Traditionally, technical writing has been characterized by impersonal, mechanical, objective prose. However, this attempt to deanthropomorphize reality must ultimately fail because science cannot escape metaphorical language. There is a move in technical writing today toward a personalized, sometimes called “friendly,” writing style which is strikingly evident in many computer textbooks and instructional manuals.

Each semester, undergraduate technical writing students at The University of Texas at Arlington learn to adapt and present written material orally and visually by participating in a three-or four-day simulated professional meeting. Each student gives a ten-minute oral presentation, followed by a five-minute question-and-answer period. Presentations are grouped in panels of five papers; each panel is moderated by a session chairperson. Students receive copies of the schedule and presentation abstracts prior to the opening sessions. Presentations are evaluated by the students and the instructor for technical content, visuals, and delivery using a standardized evaluation checklist. Students learn to analyze and speak to a heterogeneous audience; to distinguish the strengths and weaknesses of presentations and visuals; and to convey assessments to others in a professional manner.

The use of quirk topics can help solve one of the technical writing instructor's hardest problems: selection of a challenging topic. A quirk topic derives from some paradox of science or technology which, upon reflection, calls for thought. The quirk topic challenges the technical writing student to focus on the reader, gather data, and interpret and report data convincingly. This article explains the use of quirk topics, suggests twenty such topics, and explains how to solve problems of their use.

Roman Jakobson's six-factored model of verbal communication provides the schema to generate formal definitions of business writing and technical writing. It also enables us to apply these definitions to communication in the world of work. The six factors—addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, and code—have six parallel functions—emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual. Each of these factor/function pairs is present to some degree in all types of writing, from technical writing to poetry. However, in certain types of written communication a few functions dominate the others. For instance, the referential or informational function is primary in technical and scientific writing. An examination of different binary functional relationships yields distinctions among various types of writing. For example, the inspection of the you versus it relationship yields the most substantive theoretical distinction between persuasive business writing and technical writing. From this single theoretical distinction emerge various practical aspects of communication, such as good will, the “you-attitude,” and the techniques of behavior modification applicable in business writing; and objectivity, clarity, and precision of meaning aimed for in technical writing.

This paper discusses crosscultural differences in audience analysis, using research conducted during a series of consulting trips in Japanese industries. The paper identifies problems implicit in the way technical writing is taught to nonnative speakers in this country and abroad, and shows how awareness of and experience with audiences in non-American and non-Western cultures can benefit instruction in technical communication classes for American students.

Rhetoric teachers often defer responsibility for technical-problem treatment to either the technical student or the technical instructor. But these technical persons are trained largely in academic problems and treatments, which are shown to differ profoundly from their professional counterparts. For engineering students are traditionally trained in a discipline dissociated from a professional base at its very origins, enrolled in a science-oriented curriculum, and taught by technical instructors lacking professional experience. Rhetoric instructors should not, therefore, consider engineering students experts in the articulation and treatment of typical problems addressed by professionals. This paper describes representative student difficulties in the selection and treatment of technical problems in simulated professional reports. Based on results obtained with questionnaires and in-depth interviews, these difficulties are traced to the use of academic materials as sources. Representative case histories are used to illustrate typical student pitfalls in adapting academic source materials. Pedagogical suggestions are offered.

This article emphasizes the growing need for good technical communication in application program development, and relates the usability of program documentation to the productivity of computer systems. It describes in detail the process involved and the human thinking that must accompany the generation of high quality computer user documentation. The methodology described in this paper has been exercised by the author on two major interactive IBM application programs. However, the methodology should not be interpreted as an IBM discipline, and views expressed in this paper are those of the author.

The author, a Briton, presents an informal case-study of two years as Publications Secretary at a Nigerian agricultural research institute. The difficulties and frustrations he faced are described. Staff, supply, and equipment problems are discussed. He suggests that such problems may be general to black Africa and are likely to be faced by technical communicators moving for the first time to this region and to some other parts of the Third World. He concludes that such posts demand more of their incumbents in terms of personality than in terms of qualifications. He questions whether potential Third World communicators are properly informed about or prepared for their posts, and criticizes the tendency of employers, particularly international organizations, to require applicants for communications posts to hold exalted formal qualifications.

A survey of technical communication students at North Carolina State University has revealed information about students' perceptions of their communication skills and abilities, their immediate and long-range career plans, and what should be offered in a technical communication course. This information complements information gathered from surveys of business and industrial employers and of technical graduates on the job. The results of the survey suggest the desirability of increased technical communication course emphasis on oral reports and simulating professional communication activities. The survey also suggests specific areas for emphasis in the teaching of organization, format, and style.

Native and international science, engineering, and humanities graduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington experience real-world communication situations in an interdisciplinary, projected-oriented technical communication course team-taught by a technical writer and a mechanical engineer. The course simulates the writing requirements of industry and helps students prepare theses and dissertations. A special feature for international students is a supplementary weekly laboratory session devoted to intensive review of writing fundamentals. The course, which has been offered three times since 1976 with enrollments of eleven, five, and nine students, has been received well by science and engineering students for whom it was initially designed and by humanities students who now also enroll. Even though in some cases the progress that a foreign student makes in one semester is limited, all students have found the course of great benefit. The interdisciplinary team approach is an effective way of teaching graduate-level technical communication, providing engineers an opportunity to learn to express ideas to humanists and providing humanists an opportunity to learn to communicate effectively with engineers and scientists.

The three technical writing workshops a colleague and I gave to Idaho eligibility examiners were especially challenging because of the discrepancy in education and writing ability within each group — as well as our own initial ignorance of what eligibility examiners do and write. The workshops gradually improved as we modified our material based on our increased knowledge of the examiners and their work, became increasingly problem oriented in our approach, and effectively implemented our inductive pedagogy.

This collection of thirty-six articles exposes the problem and the promise of historical research in technical writing. The central problem is that historical research in technical writing has too often been focused only on celebrated authors or scientists as technical writers. The central promise contained in some very recent essays is that historical research in technical communications is beginning to consider the slow evolution of technical communication taking place across a broad spectrum of both celebrated and uncelebrated writers. This historical approach, though more difficult to carry out, is immensely more accurate and meaningful.

Because in these days of economic troubles, all areas of science, social science, and industry must account for and justify more closely what they do and want to do, students of technical writing will receive immediate, practical benefit from learning the theory and practice of writing proposals. Proposals are also marvelously versatile for the teacher, because they can be taught in courses of varying length, and to both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups of students. The greatest advantage in teaching them is that through the various parts of a standard proposal, practically every theoretical and/or expository technique used in technical writing can be discussed and practiced. Indeed the proposal can become in itself a minicourse in technical writing, creating yet another possible avenue for work: private consulting.

Much has been written on and about technical communication. Most of this writing focuses on specific advice for practitioners (e.g., how to write better, typographical guidelines, proposed standards, how to produce more effective manuals, and the like). Also, considerable literature deals with the field theoretically. Often, this second category of literature is difficult to find because so much is buried under the welter of pragmatically oriented material and is interwoven with literature from related fields. Assemblage of this hard-to-find material reveals that within the context of the considerably broader area of human communication, generally technical communication occupies a unique position. Schematic models of related human communication disciplines are used to construct an overall theoretical model which locates this specialized niche occupied by technical communication. Contributions to the overall model come from such areas as empirical social research, general semantics, learning theory, and modern rhetoric. The overall model represents an attempt to provide a catalogue of perspectives from which technical communication might be studied profitably. It also is intended to provide a useful guide to specific actions in various pragmatic and occupational technical communication situations.

Only recently has anything been written about internships in technical writing; however, teachers interested in setting up internship programs can learn from papers written on the experience of teachers of journalism and from cooperative education programs. Internship programs vary widely–some offer academic credit, some do not. Students work from four to forty hours per week for credit of one to fifteen hours; some internships pay students; some provide them with samples of their work; some use contracts, some do not; some are located on campus, some off campus; some are part of cooperative education programs; different programs require different prerequisites; and students do a number of different types of jobs. Sourcebooks can provide information about how to locate employers, how to administer programs, how to evaluate programs, and what other people's solutions to common problems have been.

Teaching technical writing to non-native speakers of English is complicated by their special needs. Central to the discussion is the idea that expository writing ought to be a key element of any program purporting to teach English. The nature of proper preparatory training is discussed with specific reference to the language groups American trainers are likely to encounter working in the U.S. or abroad. The justification for specific practices is discussed and should enable instructors to develop further strategies for training. Once the preparatory work is completed, effective technical writing instruction for non-native trainees requires modification of a good program for native speakers. Training is most effective if material is presented in culturally familiar and intellectually compatible ways.

This article traces the history of technical writing instruction in American colleges, concentrating on the major figures in technical writing instruction, the most important textbooks, the forces that shaped courses in technical writing during the period 1900–1980, and the refinements and improvements in teaching and materials that led to the current growth and success of technical writing courses.

Borrowing from scientific logic, the technical writing teacher can demonstrate differences between the way researchers/writers problem solve and the way readers comprehend written reports that are roughly parallel to the differences between deductive and inductive logic. As three pyramid theories of writing and their application in university and industry classrooms demonstrate, learning both systems of logic and how to transpose one into the other enables students to understand and structure their information from their readers’ viewpoint. In this logical context, opening with the conclusion finally makes sense to most writers.

The laboratory notebook, traditionally a primary document in patent applications, has recently developed additional importance in the wake of federal regulations designed to insure more stringent record-keeping in the testing of drugs. Compression of procedural detail in published reports to save journal space has also changed the function of the laboratory notebook, which now serves as a receptacle for detailed information omitted from published accounts. These recent developments in laboratory notebooks are discussed with application to possible technical writing assignments.

Language study and literary criticism have for many years been separated. Modern developments in critical theory have stressed the study of texts. Structuralism developed a semiotic approach to texts using psychological and linguistic theory to support objective analysis. Poststructuralist theory has further developed these approaches investigating deep and surface significance in textual interpretation urging a deconstruction of texts to yield a full contemporary understanding. The relationship between writer, reader, text, and context is seen anew within the whole communication complex in an approach which regards texts as discourse. Advanced foreign language teaching unites literature and language in a new synthesis stressing communication and conceptualization through language. Technical communication should be aware of new interdisciplinary trends since it is itself at the center of the dominant theme of communication.

Procedures, instructions, and specifications demand precise and imaginative audience analysis. Although these three communications tasks ask an audience to participate in an operation, the specific purpose and audience of each is unique. Recognizing this uniqueness provides the technical communications teacher with challenging student assignments and the technical writer and editor with useful questions to ask in analyzing these audiences. This article describes the audiences that read procedures, instructions, and specifications, provides examples of each communication task, suggests assignments in each for technical communications teachers, and lists questions for technical writers and editors to ask about audiences of each task.

Poster sessions—also known as science markets—play an increasingly important part in the presentation of the results of scientific investigations at symposia and congresses. However, it often appears that scientists, technical communicators, and graphic designers have hardly any idea of the purpose of a poster session. This paper deals with several aspects of this fairly new phenomenon. The willingness of the visitor at a poster session to read a particular poster is determined by his interest in the subject, the structure and quantity of the scientific information involved, and the presentation as such. The person presenting the poster can influence only the last three factors. The poster can best be designed on Din A3 format (29.7 cm × 42 cm) and photographically enlarged to poster size (1 m × 1.5 m). A science market with posters may also contribute to improve scientific communication within a research institute, in combination with the conventional in-house presentations.

The practicing technical editor quickly realizes that regardless of author or subject, the same grammatical errors occur repeatedly in manuscripts. This can probably be blamed on a fundamental weakness in the training of technical writers, rather than on any lack of individual or collective ability on the writer's part. With this in mind, ten errors commonly found in technical manuscripts are collected and presented. It is hoped that the list will be helpful to teachers of technical writing and to technical writers who wish to improve their craft.

This article examines a little known, but superb piece of ancient technical writing, in fact the first technical writing in English on a complex scientific instrument: A Treatise on the Astrolabe by the medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. As late as 1932, Chaucer's treatise was still touted by a science historian as unsurpassed among English writings on the astrolabe; yet it has received little attention within the technical writing field. To gain deeper understanding of the strengths and enduring powers of this piece of technical writing, so we can apply these insights to modern efforts, this article examines Chaucer's treatise and also looks briefly at Chaucer's source, an eighth-century work by an Arabian astronomer, Messahala. This examination of historical descriptions and instructions shows that many of our current conventions and forms in handling these modes of writing were both natural and traditional in Chaucer's time, and some even in Messahala's.