This article proposes that an examination and analysis of a company's overall communication network may provide some significant guidelines for increasing the organization's communication effectiveness. Through a review of literature in organization communication, this article explains network roles and considers their contributions to the communication climate. Managerial implications are also discussed.

With the vocabularies of their own disciplines, students majoring in technical subjects can access fresh insights into how writers write. For example, the symbols of computer flowcharts may bring insights when used to monitor rhetoric. Charts of organizational hierarchies, such as those that many corporate executives use, may illuminate equally well the shifting hierarchies of the characters in a work of fiction. Graphs and charts of syntactic and lexical networks may reveal the hidden structures of a narrative. An engineering major needs to see how a writer engineers words, a business major to see how a writer establishes hierarchies, a computer science major to see how a writer devises the flow of rhetoric. If we encourage students to explain literature with the professional vocabularies of their own disciplines, we can train them as lively apprentices, not as drudges. If we English teachers heed our students' special vocabularies, we may expect students to examine our own jargon more thoughtfully, such as the vocabulary by which we chart subordination and punctuation. Literature is everyone's heritage. No discipline monopolizes the critical insight or the vocabulary with which to articulate it.

Explanatory tools such as simple words, examples, and analogies are ineffective for overcoming an important obstacle to understanding science. This obstacle is that many fundamental scientific principles are counterintuitive (e.g., people resist wearing seat belts partly because scientific notions of inertia are counterintuitive). To assist science writers in presenting science news and concepts, this article identified 1) three major difficulties lay readers often have in understanding science, 2) the kinds of ideas readers find counterintuitive, 3) ineffective approaches for explaining these notions, and 4) effective strategies that help people understand these difficult ideas and their implications for health and safety.

To make informed decisions about ethical issues, technical communicators need to understand how to apply general ethical principles to the kinds of dilemmas they will face routinely, concerning such issues as plagiarism, trade secrets, and misrepresentation of text and graphics. This article reviews the controversy about the relationship between ethics and rhetoric among the Greeks, provides basic definitions of ethics, and applies the literature of business and professional ethics to the concerns of technical communicators and other professionals who communicate, showing how they must think through the conflicts of obligations to their employer, the public, and the environment. It provides a case study that can be used to reinforce a student's understanding of the relationship between technical communication and ethics.

Technical writing will become increasingly important to the nation's engineering interests in the 21st century. To meet a national agenda of competitiveness, writing program administrators must build courses and programs that are sensitive to unique institutional perceptions about writing. By means of a quantitative and qualitative methodology, the present study describes the perceptions of technical writing held by department heads at a technological university. Using a combined survey method and structured interview process, we investigate how department chairs felt about the contents, instruction, and assessment of a technical writing course. We also investigate perceptions about writing products and processes. Based on our experiences with the survey, we call for writing program administrators to study the institutional context for courses and programs in technical writing.

Reading theory is important because meaning is not located solely in texts, but instead results from an interaction between reader and text. Although guidelines for developing such consensual meaning have been derived for the informational level of communications, the arguments underlying this level are not well understood. Reading theory offers insights on this issue. Background is given on reading theory and on guidelines that have already been formulated. The inability of current guidelines to account for the reader impact of one type of persuasive business communication is demonstrated. Three aspects of reading—inferring, reasoning analogically, and learning—are discussed, and their role in building consensual meaning, for persuasive business communications, is demonstrated in sample texts. Four guidelines are proposed for persuasive business communications, to supplement those guidelines already developed.

Usability testing is now recognized as essential to quality documentation, but, unfortunately, the costs and the time required for fullblown testing are prohibitive for many projects. This article presents a set of very practical guidelines for a small documentation team to design and conduct its own usability study—including discussions of preparing task lists, recruiting participants, conducting the study, and analyzing the data.

This study investigated post-transaction communications to improve direct marketing effectiveness. It presents a survey of relevant literature along with an empirical field study. The research design employed five levels of the independent variable: no post-purchase communications (control condition), an impersonal form letter expressing appreciation for the customer's patronage (with and without a discount offer), and an identical letter, but personalized (with and without a discount offer). It was found personalized post-transaction communications significantly reduced the number of orders returned for a refund. However, only the personalized letter with the discount offer produced significant increases in reorders.

Although Halliday and Hasan claim that cohesion is a semantic relation, this paper suggests that cohesion might be better understood as a general perceptual phenomenon. Specifically, repetitions of both structural and semantic textual elements are analogous to repetitions of visual patterns in that both provide a uniform background against which distinctions are foregrounded and therefore more easily perceived. This article supplements Halliday and Hasan's categories of cohesive devices by discussing three types of structural cohesion based on an analysis of technical texts. First, cohesion produced through thematic progression (i.e., the repetition of topics and comments) is demonstrated; second, cohesion produced through parallelism (i.e., the repetition of syntactic structure) is illustrated; and finally cohesion produced with graphic devices (i.e., the repetition of typography, enumerators, and chart elements) is discussed.

Technical communicators are faced daily with digesting the results of research reports; however, many technical communicators do not have the training that would facilitate their comprehension of such reports, particularly the sections of research reports that cite statistical terminology. This article addresses the need of technical communicators to become critical readers of empirical research. Specifically, we present simple definitions of selected research designs and statistical concepts and accompany these definitions with concrete examples related to the field of technical communication research.

It has been shown that the language of some scientific disciplines is highly metaphorical, but there is probably no field that uses metaphor quite as pervasively and idiosyncratically as does computer science. One senses that this phenomenon results from a need to compensate for the exceedingly abstract nature of the discipline. The central metaphors do not exist singly. They exist in groups or families, suggesting a deep influence on the way people in computer science write and talk. Such a cluster of deep metaphors can be thought of as a paradigm of the discipline, a set of eyeglasses through which we see our world. This article examines some essential paradigms of computer science. These paradigms are so much a part of the way we think about and talk about computers that it is difficult to imagine computer discourse without them.

The characteristics of the classical art of memory and the history of its use suggest theoretical and practical applications for modern graphics which are illustrated in this article.

Although research in composition and in instructional design suggests that film and video can be useful pedagogic tools in writing instruction, little research has been directed toward discovering how film and video can be used to teach the kinds of documents produced in professional-writing courses. Because of important similarities in written instructional materials and training videos—the expository and “how-to” tapes being produced for business and industry—training videos can help developing professional writers learn how to write effective instructions. These videos provide writers with a visual model of certain information-processing strategies, cultural themes, and learning objectives important to written instructions. Professional-writing instructors interested in using these training videos will find many sources for appropriate videos, both on and off the university campus.

As analysts of scientific writing begin to modify their stance against the passive voice and explore the complexities of its use, more research is needed on the rhetorical functions it serves in scientific writing. An analysis of twelve articles reporting experimental studies in speech-language pathology revealed consistently higher percentages of passive structures in the Method and Results sections, with relatively lower percentages in the Introduction and Discussion sections. These findings suggest that passive structures are more appropriate for expository purposes, in those sections where the author's rhetorical role is to describe procedures and present data. In contrast, active structures are more appropriate for argumentative purposes, in those sections where the author is criticizing previous research or advocating a new thesis.

Recent research suggests that pragmatic emphasis on writing proficiency alone does not produce a good technical communicator. Attention must also be given to the technical communicator as liberally educated generalist who writes well and feels an affinity for science or technology. To this end, technical communication needs to be studied in the larger context of evolving science and technology, developing trends in technical education, and the oratorical tradition of broad learning applied to the active life. Recent studies of the collaborative culture of the workplace should be supplemented by increased attention to humanistic questions of what a person needs to be and know in order to cooperate effectively as a practicing technical communicator.

The student new to technical writing frequently has difficulty, on two counts, with technical definitions: grasping their essentiality and learning how to create them; matters are not made easier by some of the ways in which we approach the subject. Exercises centered around a term that is lapsing into obsolescence offer some productive solutions to this common instructional problem, particularly so if the term is even indirectly related to the student's field.

Researchers continue to miss useful references because of unsystematic methodology and because on-going efforts at systematic bibliography have not utilized some key resources. Although no combination of available resources guarantees comprehensive bibliographic coverage for technical communication, composition, or rhetoric, researchers can significantly improve their personal efforts by using citation indexes and a few other databases.

This article describes a report writing unit with a three-year language/communication course for second language engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. In this writing unit the students faced tasks designed to challenge them linguistically and cognitively within their technical disciplines. The tasks motivated the students to develop their report writing and oral skills.

Technical documents implicitly require readers to play out textually constructed roles in order to create meanings. Good technical writers create texts that motivate their readers by emplotting them in an attractive fabula, and, especially, in a role that not only achieves the ostensible purposes of the documentation but also allows the reader to function as the hero in a narrative of progress and improvement. Drawing on reader-response criticism and narratology, this article shows how a particular instructional software manual, the VP-Expert™ guide, instructs and motivates readers by using devices which resemble the conventions of heroic narrative.

Sales activities have been understood by some to be negative, one-sided rhetorical encounters. Teachers of technical communication will find it more helpful to view sales proposals as aimed toward the construction and maintenance of long-term relationships, a view held by far-thinking sales professionals. Hermeneutic theory, by offering a different conceptual relationship between means and ends than even new rhetoric suggests, can help clarify the process by which ethical know-how intersects with persuasion. Consequently, it can offer technical communication instructors a valuable perspective from which to teach sales proposal writing.

One approach to exploring context in technical communication is through the speech community. Composed of people who share the means and the need to communicate with each other, the speech community is essentially a social entity, its boundaries determined by feelings of commonality among the community's members. In considering the communication that occurs in a speech community, this article asks two general questions. First, what is the relationship among language, culture, and thought? Second, what knowledge is needed for effective communication? Answering the first question requires an exploration of the Whorfian hypothesis as it may apply to technical communication, while answering the second requires an expansion of Chomsky's grammatical competence to include language function and use and a broadening of Flower and Hayes's investigations of cognitive structures beyond the isolated experimental situation into the community.

Examining the limitations of some common metaphors for technical communication and exploring new alternatives lead to a new definition of technical communication. In current studies of the field, four metaphors appear dominant through explicit or implicit use: transmitter, channel, balance, and bridge. But each of these metaphors is limited in some way when used to describe the field. These limitations arise from complexity, directionality, or originality of the process. Some alternatives provide a new way of viewing the field: lock, translator, transformer, synthesizer, conductor, and orchestrator. The latter term leads to a tentative definition of the field: Technical communication is the process of orchestrating linguistic, visual, or auditory codes to accommodate information to the user.

Ironically, just doing the right thing is often easier than organizing one's thoughts and arguments concerning an ethical issue. This article examines a legalistic model for ethical argumentation proposed in this journal by T. M. Sawyer and finds it to have serious problems and limitations. Also illustrated is how argument from analogy is better suited to the task of discovering and presenting well-defended ethical positions.

Based on a 70,000-word sample of eight journal articles and four textbook chapters, this article examines the communicative value of anticipatory- it clauses in scientific and technical texts. The main discourse function of the 205 clauses appears to be to provide author comment, with the meaning of the verb or the meaning of the adjective determining the particular type of comment. Many of these comments are evidential; that is, they are concerned primarily with the reliability or source of knowledge. Anticipatory- it clauses are also used to mark the introduction of a topic, to forecast, to summarize, and to direct the reader in interpreting a graphic or recognizing the most salient points in an argument. Rather than being a structure to avoid, the anticipatory- it clause is probably one whose effective use indicates academic acculturation.

Labor-management negotiations present a complex situation for mediators and negotiators. To a considerable extent, the complexities stem from the fact that at least four different types of negotiations are occurring simultaneously: distributive bargaining; integrative bargaining; intra-organizational bargaining; and attitude structuring. If the negotiations are in a public employment situation, the political environment may be a factor causing additional complexities. Mediators in such situations must fill a number of roles, all of which are related to the communication process. The authors will show how the cited factors complicate labor-management negotiations and, concomitantly, affect the mediation process. This article concentrates on the role of the mediator as a communicator in the labor-management context.

One of the most effective communication links between corporate management and investors is the annual report. The letter to the shareholders in the report exemplifies the one-on-one communication attempt by chief executive officers and other high level executives with owners. This article examines thirty shareholder letters written by executives who are classified as highly successful based on their own annual salaries and/or the return to shareholders or company performance. The researchers found the letters written by these successful executives to fall within accepted readability levels. The letter writers adhere to convention in the use of numbers and the use of compound adjective. Section headings are not frequently used. The tone of the opening paragraph is usually equivocal or positive even though the first sentences frequently reflect a lack of “you attitude.” In general, the reports written by these successful executives conform to modern-day standards.

While several strategies have been credited for enhancing the rhetorical acceptability of important historical works in scientific and technical writing, little attention has been paid to William Harvey's On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. A close examination of his work shows his fear of publication (because of his contemporaries' long-held beliefs about the order of the body and its functions) and his strategies for reducing resistance to his ideas: appropriate circular references and metaphors and organizational techniques that clarify and enhance not only his thesis—that the blood circulates through the body—but also demonstrate the circular pattern as part of God's natural order for the universe.

Instructions should be illustrated so as to help users memorize steps as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Classical mnemonic theory provides an excellent description of how to create such illustrations. The most detailed description of how to form memorable images that function as cues to subject matter is contained in the ancient Roman treatise Rhetorica Ad Herennium. The basic principle is that one must form bizarre, striking pictures combining cue images with images representing the words or concepts that are to be remembered. Much modern research on memory and imagery bears out the ancient wisdom on this topic. Gordon Bower, Allan Paivio, and others have shown that subjects remember lists of items far better when they use paired associate methods of visual memorization that are based on the classical theories. Other researchers, such as Margaret Hagen, have found that the mind processes information faster and remembers it longer when it has to deal with only minimal cues (for example, a simple line drawing as opposed to a photograph or a detailed drawing). Combining insights from ancient theory and practice with those from modern research, I suggest that technical communicators use, where possible, a particular kind of image to illustrate instructions.

John White was England's first important ethnographic illustrator. Collaborating with one of the Renaissance's most innovative scientists, Thomas Hariot, while working as an expedition artist on Sir Walter Raleigh's 1585 attempt to colonize Virginia, White produced influential illustrations of American Indians that were published as etchings and widely distributed in Theodor de Bry's America (1590). Apprenticed as an artist in Elizabethan England, White redirected this traditional training as a limnist and a costume painter to scientific, ethnographic purposes.

The Edwin Smith Surgery Manual and the Ebers Manual are two of the oldest technical texts available for analysis; both illustrate the complex rhetorical dynamics characteristic of ancient Egypt. In both, the contents present or encourage substantive reformulation of medical practice and thinking within a strongly conservative, authoritarian culture. In both, we can see how ancient Egyptian rhetorical forms allowed for challenges to tradition, while simultaneously adhering to the value placed on tradition.

Students usually compose adequate descriptive abstracts, but many confuse summary abstracts with short paraphrases or descriptive abstracts. Textbooks define a summary abstract ambiguously, as a “mini-paper” and/or as a mere statement of an article's topic and conclusions; most textbooks maintain the conceptual distinction between summary and descriptive abstracts even though differences between the two types are blurred in practice. These irregularities are accounted for by a hypothesis: in all levels of discourse, from sentences to extended texts, general and specific components conserve the “shape” of information. Intermediate discourse components (e.g., sentential tense, the syllogistic middle term, or the body of a text) may be deleted to create a smaller equivalent discourse structure. The two polar abstract types represent polar (general vs. specific) text components. Common abstracting errors arise from two sources: failure to distinguish between an abstract as “mini-paper” and a short paraphrase from the body of a long text, but also failure to distinguish between general topical information and the specific claims of a text, attributed to students' usual lack of acquaintance with other literature on a topic, besides the article they attempt to abstract.

Harris argues that linguistic theory is useful for solving certain problems encountered in technical writing theory and pedagogy [1]. However, he undermines his purpose by introducing irrelevant distinctions between competing syntactic theories (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar) and by failing to exploit the full potential of the few applications he mentions. The passive rule is a case in point. It not only constitutes an operational test for identifying passive sentences, it also contributes to the flow of discourse by rearranging both thematic roles (e.g. agent and patient) and given/new information. The passive rule is only one of a class of noun phrase-moving operations that technical writing specialists may find useful.

This article surveys and critiques the literature on using style checkers and the text-editing capabilities of the computer to assist in revising technical writing. The literature on text-editing capabilities is inconclusive because it is largely anecdotal and methodologically flawed. The literature on style checkers is similarly inconclusive. To better assess the value of the computer, we need to examine the basic premise of the research on revising and word processing: that more revising leads to higher-quality writing. We need to be sure that our evaluative techniques for measuring writing improvement are valid; to focus our attention not only on computer novices but also on computer-experienced writers; to examine other factors that affect how writers use word processing and that in turn might affect writing quality; and to examine more carefully the differences among word processors and among the different style checkers to determine their effects on writing behavior and writing quality.

Studies show that products are often judged defective for one or more of the following reasons: 1) manufacturing defects, 2) design defects, 3) inadequate warnings, and 4) inadequate instructions [1, p. 127]. The last two reasons are of particular importance to technical communicators, for we function as the information specialists who link the companies that make the products to the people who use the products. This article examines the relationship between warranties and product liability. It includes a discussion of American National Standards Institute (ANSI) guidelines for safety labels in the workplace and an analysis of warnings and labels as they apply to the pharmaceutical industry. In its closing section, the article discusses some of the key references that technical communicators can consult for additional information on product liability and safety labels.

This article cautions technical writers to be aware of assumptions in their research and writing and suggests a pragmatic incentive for being aware of assumptions. Asserting that our weaknesses are merely our strengths turned inside out by altered circumstances, it compares the power of properly used assumptions with their weakness when improperly used. Its narrative style emphasizes its point with an extended dance metaphor and illustrative examples. “Inspired by the new assumptions, both parties join into a dance of every shifting awareness. Partners in this dance cue each other by tuning in on and accepting the other's assumptions. When the dance starts, communication flows and assumptions begin again. …”

The claim that Geoffrey Chaucer was “the first technical writer in English,” which appears several times in the recent literature on the history of technical writing in early English, misleads because numerous Middle English technical prose texts either precede Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe or are contemporaneous with it. In fact, an important tradition of technical writing exists in both Old and Middle English and extends through the English Renaissance. Historians of technical writing will find it more profitable to investigate the tradition of English practical prose than to find further firsts for their field.

Riley has recently applied some speech act strategies of indirectness to textbook instructions on being both clear and polite in professional letter writing. Based on results from two experiments with college senior students, the present project aims to account for those strategies and to discuss four principles generated from the experimental data about each strategy: 1) its value index, 2) its writer/addressee orientation, 3) its linguistic characterization, and 4) its location in a sentence. The professional writer can achieve the desired degree of indirectness by consulting those four features about any strategy used in any context.

Nassi-Schneiderman (NS) Charts are a form of flowcharting invented in the early 1970s to ensure that emerging computer programs would be structured, that is, organized into strings and nests of allowable programming constructs. These same constructs, however, are inherent in manual procedures as well. Using NS Charts to diagram human procedures eliminates prose ambiguities and provides most of the advantages of decision tables and trees. At the least, NS Charts can be used to test the logic and completeness of traditional procedures. At the most, they can replace many of the traditional publications.

Tables, graphs, and diagrams extend the expressive powers of language by exploiting the Euclidean possibilities that a system of writing suggests to the visually creative. Because the elements of graphic displays do not form a compatible natural set, because their value and visual elements are so decisively disparate, they are unlikely candidates for unitary theoretical description.

The visual dimension of meaning is widely accepted in technical communication. But theories (and pedagogies) that direct the making of visual meaning are still under development. A guidelines approach, a design decisions approach, and an information/reader model approach are applied as lenses for viewing the marking of meaning on an instructional page. A case study invokes these approaches to describe the visual markers students employ as they write descriptive and instructional text. Although neither group described marked their texts thoroughly, beginning technical writing majors enrolled in a writing class used fewer illustrations and visual markers than technical majors used. The difference in beginning students' performance may be due to prior reading patterns, since the difference is more pronounced in the descriptions than in the instructions. Thus, the paper proposes a longitudinal approach to sensitizing writing majors to visual cues.

Le style des publications scientifiques et techniques reflete la priorite accordee a la valeur scientifique sur la capacite de communication. Une enquete a ete realisee aupres de redacteurs en chef de periodiques techniques en agriculture et sciences biologiques pour analyser leurs demarches d'edition et leurs suggestions pour l'amelioration du style. Puis une analyse stylistiques des periodiques a ete effectuee

The results of a 1987 survey of seventy Canadian four-year colleges and universities indicate that approximately half of the thirty-five responding institutions offer some form of technical writing. While courses are well-received by students and have stable or growing enrollments, faculty attitudes toward professional writing courses are mixed, varying from enthusiastic to disapproving. The other half of the responding institutions do not offer professional writing courses and have no plans to do so. Faculties at these institutions are generally against establishing such courses because they do not see technical writing as a legitimate subject.

The author reviews recent articles from the technical writing literature focusing on the controversy surrounding the appropriateness of readability formulas for technical writing, an issue of immediate concern for many writers and editors. While some authorities recommend readability formulas—if the writer recognizes the formulas as a tool limited by the variables manipulated—overwhelming argument from other experts suggests that the formulas should be ignored because they can mislead writers by lulling them into a false sense of security or into writing stilted prose to fit the formula. The author suggests that further research should be conducted to study empirically how readability as a concept might be used to aid the technical writer since readability formulas are shaping computerized editing programs.

In trying to project a positive corporate image and financial health in their annual reports, companies too often confuse and alienate readers with rhetorical smoke and statistical mirrors. Through a more complete understanding of their audiences and by applying effective rhetorical principles to reach those audiences, corporations can both meet the informational needs of report readers and promote a positive and accurate corporate ethos.

Graduate engineers in the United Kingdom are frequently criticized for lacking communication skills. In undergraduate courses, such as civil engineering, which are mathematically and technically oriented, it is very difficult to find space within a full timetable for the development of communication skills. At Aston University this work has been integrated successfully into a course on Public Sector Planning. Lectures are complemented by a project which culminates in the students participating in a simulated Public Inquiry—part of the planning process intended to provide a forum for public debate. Not only do the students learn about the planning process, tangible and intangible aspects of a water resource development, but at the same time develop their written, oral, and decision-making skills.

Advice about how and when to implement the you-perspective is sometimes vague or contradictory. Many authorities simply advise writers to use the second person pronoun as often as possible, in either subject or object position; others suggest that the first person pronoun may be preferable for certain types of messages such as negative ones. Concepts from speech act theory can be used to clarify the most effective use of first and second person pronouns in two types of structures frequently found in professional communication: commissives and directives.

This article first reviews the role of oral and written discourse within social constructionist theory. The author discusses both the differences and the similarities between oral and written discourse and suggests that writers emphasize the similarities rather than the differences since the implicit rules of conversation have much to offer to the technical writer. In order to apply these conversational principles, however, technical writers need to alter their attitudes toward their audiences. The article concludes with an example of how the principles of conversation can be applied to the process of writing instructions.

Research on newsletters, a major form of organizational communication, has largely been practical rather than theoretical. Certain theories, such as those in organizational theory and mass communication, can be applied to newsletters as forms of organizational communication and as media. Rhetorical theory, however, has not been used to understand how newsletter writing achieves its effects. This study applies rhetorical theory to newsletters produced by two political-activist organizations. The newsletters and the organizations are described, as background for the study. Three aspects of rhetorical theory (schema theory, social construction, and theories about audience) are presented, and their application to the newsletters is illustrated with sample passages. An agenda is suggested for further research on rhetorical theory and newsletter writing.

Jay Reid Gould has had a formative influence on the development of technical and business communication in the twentieth century. In a career as student, teacher, consultant, and author and editor, including service as founding editor of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Jay has helped bridge the gap between technical subject matter and the human concern of communicating this subject matter. Thus he has helped synthesize the sciences and the humanities.

This compilation provides a comprehensive listing of all the known and available publications of Jay R. Gould including books, plays, short stories, articles, essays, papers. It also lists unpublished items such as papers and speeches, plays, and other items, including items about Jay Reid Gould.