Structured abstracts contain more information, are of higher quality, and are easier to search and read than are traditional abstracts. However, there is a bewildering variety of ways in which structured abstracts can be printed and little is known about how the typography of structured abstracts can affect their clarity. The aim of this article is to delineate some of these major typographic variables and to comment on their effects upon the layouts of structured abstracts.

This article examines the communicative categories and linguistic features of university textbook prefaces. The textbook preface is a highly interactive genre, with a double purpose: informative and promotional. The analysis of the genre moves and of their realization reveals that the preface is used by the author both to help the audience use the book and to convince them of the value of the book. This twofold purpose accounts for the most relevant features of prefaces: the frequent use of textual metadiscourse and the pervasive presence of evaluation. The criteria used in the preface to evaluate the textbook are related to the audience's expectations about introductory textbooks: novelty, usefulness, accessibility, comprehensiveness, importance, and interest.

Administrators and teachers for professional communication programs often are anxious to develop curricula that will teach “real world” practices of workplace practitioners. Many connections can and have been established in response to that concern. However, both practitioners and educators may mistakenly see such connections as a one-way exchange: practitioners with privileged knowledge sharing as a professional courtesy and with hopes of hiring graduates who may need less training on the job. However, the growth and sophistication of scholarship in professional communication, along with changes in the workplace that have led to more professional development needs among practitioners, have created new opportunities for two-way exchanges of expertise. Academics from professional communication programs now can and should use their programs' connections with the workplace to influence practices in the field. This article suggests ways to create more bi-directional educational exchanges.

One method of assessing the opinions that physicians hold about science writers is to examine the public record, represented by two periodicals: the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. The citations to the news media that appear in the indexes of the two journals during the last fifteen years yield thirty-four opinion pieces, consisting of editorials and letters to the editor. The timing and content of medical news are of particular concern to physicians. Specifically, they watch for violations of the Ingelfinger Rule and the press embargo system—policies designed to ensure that physicians have access to medical information before it becomes widely disseminated to the general public—as well as errors of medical fact.

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.

Extracts from technical advertising and new-product announcements are used as the basis for analysis of the structures and linguistic signaling of many forms of comparison. Based initially on descriptive texts, the analysis also explains problem-solving texts with and without comparison; and comparative texts are seen to include implicit differences or overt comparison as “knocking” copy. Comparative cohesion by co-hyponyms is shown to be the central feature of co-associative cohesion between separate features of competing products, and clause-relating matching relations are explained in these terms. The concept of improvement is discussed in terms of problem-solving, difference and the matching relations of comparative denial. Final notes are provided regarding the significance of this work to the developing paradigm of technical writing.

Writing in the computer industry most likely provides the greatest challenges for technical communicators. The technology changes rapidly, and there are few established models of how communication products should be written. There are even fewer established models of how communication departments should be run. This article looks at the frustrations, challenges, and rewards of writing in such an environment.

The author, a senior civil engineer with the National Capital Development Commission in Canberra, Australia, comments on communication problems in planning and development pertaining to his work with the Commission. Communication networks should be structured, with the project manager eliciting inputs from various disciplines. Engineering standards must be maintained and environmental, social, and economic factors incorporated. The author also comments on the consensus process, visual displays, and the proposal process. The concerns of minorities must be taken into consideration.

In response to a mail survey of the career opportunities they offer teachers of technical writing, twenty-four programs that prepare students for careers as technical writers and editors indicated that their technical writing faculty enjoy about the same teaching loads, salaries, and chances for promotion and tenure as do equally qualified and experienced teachers of literature at their schools. The programs also indicated that they have a growing number of openings on their faculties for teachers of technical writing. Finally, the programs ranked and rated seventeen qualifications that might be offered by applicants for those positions; the most significant conclusion drawn from the rankings and ratings is that the programs look more favorably upon experience — both in teaching and in working as a technical writer or editor — than they do upon formal study of technical writing or the teaching of it.

For a professional paper a figure of merit is defined on the basis of an assumed Markov chain of “yes!” and “no!” responses from the individual reader. With one initial probability (for the response to the title of the paper) and two constant transition probabilities, the average figure of merit for a reader population is calculated. For an “active” reader population—readers appreciating the inverse order, at sentence level, of conclusion before reasoning—the model suggests to maximize the initial probability. A triple title composed of spatially distributed answers to what-instrument, what-construction, and why-performance questions is recommended. Triple title and “inverse writing” together induce a constant level of appreciation during reading, at a maximum average figure of merit. Illustrative examples of a triple title and inverse writing are given.

Technical writing involves more than simply the “nuts and bolts” of preparing a good report. Good technical writing must be an effective communication, and in order for the writer (source) to obtain the desired response from the reader (receiver), he must have a clear conceptualization of the communication process. He must realize that the source, the message, the channel, and the receiver are important variables that influence the success of technical communication. The technical writer must be aware of the “filter” stages the receiver moves through before ultimately making a response to the message. The technical writer who creates a proper meld of the basics of good technical writing with an understanding of the communication process can produce an effective technical communication.

In this paper, the author briefly comments on the factors that influence interracial communication: physical characteristics, language and culture, social roles, and traditional values. He has indicated, primarily, that these differences between Whites and Blacks are not actually race-linked, yet, they tend to cloud most interracial communication.

Several primary journals in science and technology additionally contain news items, announcements, and related matters. A brief description is given of this category of papers and some general recommendations are made about their presentation. The inclusion of such information in primary journals should preferably remain limited in order not to affect the character of these journals.

Humor usually contains a great deal of common sense. So it is with this paper. Through a satiric approach, it comments on the proliferation of acronyms in business and industrial communication.