The customary approach to classifying multiple audiences for written discourse is to recognize primary, secondary, and immediate audiences, and, in some cases, gatekeeping audiences. Based on findings from an ethnographic case study of engineering authors in an R&D setting, this article suggests that authors should also attend to watchdog audiences as they write. A watchdog audience pays close attention to the written transaction between the author and the primary audience. Authors must direct their discourse toward the primary audience, but they must also keep the motives and purposes of the watchdog audience in mind as they write and revise. The watchdog audience in my case study, while it had no direct leverage or other organizational power over the authors, still influenced the authors extensively as they revised their text. Evidence indicates that, beyond the apparent and traditional sources of power, there are more contextual, hidden, socially mediated power relationships equally capable of shaping written discourse.

This article describes the design and evaluation of a formal writing assessment program within a technical writing course. Our purpose in this base-line study was to evaluate student writing at the conclusion of the course. In implementing this evaluation, we addressed fundamental issues of sound assessment: reliability and validity. Our program may encourage others seeking to assess educational outcomes in technical writing courses.

The case method of teaching is increasingly utilized as a tool for the teaching of business communication and technical writing. In addition to providing students with meaningful exposure to actual companies and written products, the use of cases challenge students to assume one or many various positions within an organization where effective communication with myriad publics is essential in meeting organizational goals and objectives.

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.

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.

Because of the recent emphasis on rhetorical context in business and technical writing (BTW) instruction, the problem-solving case has become a staple in BTW classrooms. However, a number of critics have voiced concerns about the use of the rhetorical case. These concerns recall an ancient debate among Roman rhetoricians over an early case-study method called declamation. For contemporary theorists, the debate over case study revolves around its value as a stimulant to problem-solving skills, its ability to imitate the realistic circumstances of professional BTW, and its emphasis on persona and audience along with its deemphasis of the teacher. A full spectrum of arguments on these and other issues in the case-study debate indicates that the discipline is entering a new phase in its deliberations over the role of problem-solving and pragmatics in the BTW classroom.

A qualitative study using reading protocols suggests that when readers of informative documents understand conveyed information satisfactorily, they make direct confirmations and positive comprehension evaluations. When readers are uncertain about the accuracy of their understanding, they guess, make assumptions, or render the text's language into their own words. When readers' understanding is impaired, they ask for more clearly established links or relationships in the text, or they pinpoint some ambiguity or lack of resolution. When readers' understanding is unsatisfactory but not impaired, they request additional information. In addition, readers make evaluative suggestions that introduce, focus, emphasize, or reiterate their other comprehension-related responses. The response patterns isolated in this qualitative study indicate the need for specific quantitative research and suggest some directions for developing reader-based heuristics for informative writing.

Modern professionals commonly write documents to be signed by superiors, but are seldom taught how to do this. If students are successfully to fulfill everyday organizational writing tasks, they must learn to master skills of impersonating viewpoint, style and even personality. To teach such skills, we can adapt the ancient exercise of prosopopoeia or impersonation, either by varying the personas of standard textbook exercises, or by making use of the technical writing case study, or by having students impersonate professionals who were involved in famous (or infamous) current events.

A current assumption is that “one best system” can be devised to develop and test user documentation. In-house documentation, however, demands approaches that do not fit into a generic system. Specifically, an in-house manual needs a special type of usability testing, one that measures if and how a manual is used to meet the goals of its organization. Along with quality testing, in-house writers must also run studies on how their manuals actually function in the workplace. This article describes a three-pronged design for actual use testing: user logs; observations; and surveys. In my case study, this testing revealed that users did not use their manuals for reasons other than quality — for instance, reliance on social interactions for acquiring information. My findings show that writing an effective manual requires more than composing skills; it demands writers' involvement in the organizational dynamics that motivate workers to use or not use their manuals.

Field study, using an ethnographic approach, offers a potentially powerful methodology for the technical communication researcher, a methodology that provides a useful balance to the strengths and weaknesses of experiments and surveys. Technical communication studies, however, exhibit not only the typical constraints of field research but several additional constraints inherent to research conducted on-the-job in business, industry, and government, which deserve consideration when designing research.

Government writing has often been called gobbledygook—vague, windy, and pretentious prose thrust on unwilling readers [1]. Nowhere, it seems would a writing course hold such rich promise as in a state or a federal agency. While many of these programs have been conducted [2], there is little in print on designing them or on dealing with the management or course development problems unique to them.1 This case study will document the effort to design and conduct such an in-house writing program. It will provide resource materials and strategies for those who, in the future, will be faced with developing and delivering such courses.

A brief overview of methods relating language education to psychological theories and models is provided. Strengths and weaknesses of behaviorist and mentalist approaches are surveyed, followed by an outline of a recently developing cognitive-process approach. The approach is then illustrated with an individual case study from the University of Florida writing program, with special consideration of the concerns of technical writing on the topic of automobile repair instructions. It is argued that specific tendencies carry over from speech habits that are partly supportive and partly contrary to success in learning the skills of technical writing. Consequently, appropriate training should be able to alleviate the contrary tendencies, provided we take into account the operations of writing.

Communication systems serving the needs of modern organizations are complex. In a bureaucratic, hierarchically structured organization, the typical communication system will be a closed one. In a democratic, egalitarian organization, the communication system will tend to be an open one.