Human-centered design expands the context and reach of the work of technical communicators and provides an opportunity to investigate and advocate for the needs of vulnerable populations. This article summarizes and contributes to the conversation about social justice occurring in both technical communication and design. Using a variety of qualitative methods as a type of design ethnography, this article shares findings from a study that investigated the experiences of homeless bus riders. The study findings provide an opportunity to examine the design of information and communication technologies and changes to policies that impact vulnerable populations. The article discusses the implications of an advocacy perspective for technical communicators practicing human-centered design and their role and opportunity to bring about socially responsible design.

In this article, I argue that remote technical communicators increasingly encounter problems with making their work visible to others. This article offers a methodology to help remote workers and technical communication researchers locate how problems of visibility emerge from complex and local relations among people, places, and things.

This article argues for the need for a social justice approach to technical communication research and pedagogy. Given previous calls by scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) for an attention to diversity, inclusion, and equality, the author examines the place and purpose of social justice in TPC and provides useful approaches for promoting a more genuine and critical interrogation of how work in TPC impacts the human experience.

This article considers how issues of power and legitimacy in technical communication are connected to clearly defining what a technical communicator does. An articulation of what technical communicators do can grant the field power in presenting a united front to employers with respect to the value technical communicators bring to the workplace. So as to leverage the power and legitimacy associated with articulating what technical communicators do, this article reviews and revises the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH)’s definition of technical communicator. To effectively revise the OOH’s definition, this article reviews academic and practitioner scholarship in technical communication and the administration of technical and professional writing programs. It demonstrates that concerns about practical skills, conceptual skills, and flexibility are related to legitimacy and power. These concerns can be used as criteria to evaluate and revise the OOH’s definition of technical communicator. In closing, the article discusses the benefits associated with the revised definition and how these benefits are related to issues of power and legitimacy in the field.

This article examines illustrations in two medical texts written in China’s Northern Song dynasty. Compared with medical books produced in previous dynasties, these two texts incorporated more illustrations with enhanced beauty and usability. These visual features, I argue, carried rhetorical attributes that helped these texts negotiate their way into printing, circulation, and becoming canonical in their own genres. At the same time, they also facilitated efficient and accurate reading through reduced visual clutter and enhanced accuracy, and thus appealed to both the elite and the public readership. The article reviews these visual strategies and their implication for technical communication today.

Drawing from the author’s experience teaching online technical communication courses with an embedded service-learning component, this essay opens the discussion to the potential problems involved in designing online service-learning courses and provides practical approaches to integrating service learning into online coursework. The essay addresses specifically those classrooms where students may be required to develop or find their own service opportunities, whether those opportunities are within their community, on the college or university campus, or in another community. The essay argues by implementing service learning into online classrooms and requiring students to locate their own agencies, students not only build a greater sense of civic engagement because they are working with agencies whose missions they support, but also they develop a greater sense of responsibility for their own education and the coursework they undertake.

This article describes how a special kind of academe–industry collaboration—based on a joint appointment agreement between a university and an industry site—was set up, promoted, and experienced by a professor of technical communication and his student interns. To illustrate the nature and value of this kind of collaboration, the article discusses several of the professor’s research projects, and the teaching scenario connected with this collaboration, as well as the experience of the student interns. The keys to success for such an exchange are to (a) create a clearly structured agreement that is easy for both parties to implement within their respective institutions, (b) promote the agreement to administrators and employees at both institutions, and (c) launch into the exchange with enthusiasm for learning, networking, and finding research projects.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

This article introduces Speculative Usability. Whereas traditional models of usability rely on the salient features of an object–user relationship focused around the uses for which the object was designed, the goal of Speculative Usability is to notice an object as it interacts with other objects (in addition to but including human users) and to be vulnerable to an object’s unintended effects. The payoff of this speculative approach is an increased inventional capacity for usability testing.

A field’s identity and sustainability depend on its research as well as on programs, practice, and infrastructure. Research and practice have a reciprocal relationship, with practice identifying research questions and researchers answering those questions to improve practice. Technical communication research also has an exploratory purpose, using the knowledge and methods of the field to explain how texts work in a variety of contexts. A gap between research and practice developed in the 1990s. Defining explicitly how the parts of our research and our practice connect to form a whole will give the field a stronger identity

In my half century as a technical communicator, I have seen many changes. The profession has evolved from one that supported the work of engineers and programers to one that stands on its own, providing important tools and capabilities to audiences. I too have evolved within the profession—from someone who had little idea what technical communication was, to a practitioner, to an educator. The changing nature of the profession and my participation in it has made for an exciting time—our profession is anything but dull.

Teaching technical writing without formal training can be daunting. However, there are many resources available that can provide background and materials for teaching. My approach involved reading textbooks and articles not only on approaches to technical writing but also on what students can expect once they complete their education and are hired. Journals both in the field and in similar fields, working as a technical editor or writer, and attending conferences and talking with both other academics and those in the field offer help. This article, therefore, describes my approach from the day I was hired to teach two technical writing courses to my retirement 37 years later.

Quad charts are a genre frequently used in scientific and technical environments, yet little prior work has evaluated their potential for reinforcing technical communication fundamentals. This article provides background information about quad charts and notes the benefits of implementing quad charts in the classroom. In particular, introducing engineering students to this genre appeals to their tendency to outline information and incorporate visuals in the planning stages of the composing process. The authors share their approach for integrating quad charts within a collaborative project in a fluid dynamics course and note the ways in which the genre facilitated effective project planning and communication within student teams.

Ethics and technical communication have a long history. Much of the discussion has ignored, though, the evil in language—overnaming. We see clearest this evil in what some have called “administrative evil.” Technical communicators, like all good rhetoricians, need to understand how to respond to it. Overnaming as part of “administrative evil” is that evil which grounds all other evils. It is a certain understanding of language and what naming can do. When we overname, we try to control words to mean one thing eternally. Rhetoric is a move of renaming those words that have been overnamed. Such invention is needed as part of any rhetorical education for technical communicators.

Culture as a research site and tool has been well established in the field of intercultural business and technical communication. In recent years, the perspective of culture as an ongoing process responding to contextual forces has been widely embraced in the field. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of culture helps communicators make contextual evaluations in intercultural business communication practices. While researchers strive to examine the dynamic nature of culture and contextual factors’ influence on culture and communication, little efforts has been made to examine the process of a cultural element’s generation, development, and transmission. To understand the notion of culture as a dynamic process for effective intercultural business and technical practices, it is necessary to conceptualize or describe how a cultural element or unit originates and develops along an evolutionary path. In this study, we focus on how the online meme serves as an empirically useful unit of culture, explore an online meme’s evolution process when it successfully transfers from an online marketplace to cultural space, and identify the qualities that constitute the success of the online meme.

When games are approached as a pedagogical methodology, the homologies between games and technical communication are highlighted: pedagogy that teaches people to play and succeed within certain confines; classroom assessment that provides meaningful feedback to encourage self-improvement; instructional design that incorporates gaming theory and game design principles; and usability to ensure optimum success. This article provides an overview of these topics for instructors to consider when designing a technical writing course as a game.

This article establishes traits of adaptable communicators in the 21st century, explains why adaptability should be a goal of technical communication educators, and shows how multimodal pedagogy supports adaptability. Three examples of scalable, multimodal assignments (infographics, research interviews, and software demonstrations) that evidence this philosophy are discussed in detail. Asking students to communicate multimodally drives them to effectively filter information, remix modes, and remake practices that are core characteristics of adaptable communicators. Beyond teaching students how to teach themselves as an essential part of living in an information society, contending with new and unfamiliar tools also prepares students for their roles as empathic mediators in the workplace.

This article examines the historical professional project that created the Institute of Radio Engineers’ Professional Group on Engineering Writing an Speech (IRE PGEWS)—now called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Professional Communication Society (IEEE PCS)—and recounts the group’s early history in detail. It also traces the career and recovers the professional contributions of the main organizer of PGEWS: Eleanor M. McElwee (1924–2008). The formation of PGEWS in 1957 was an intraoccupational strategy of inclusionary usurpation by “publications people” seeking to elevate their status within the engineering profession rather than attempting to build a separate profession of technical communication.

Building on work by Dubinsky, Haskins, and Simmons and Grabill, this article explains how a technical communication instructor used Isocrates and informal usability testing to help guide a service-learning project involving the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 notebook. For the project, engineering students received feedback from peers and elementary school teachers to determine the feasibility of using the XO-1 with at-risk children aged 6 to 9. Despite initial positive impressions, the service-learning students discovered that the XO-1 was not suitable in this situation. This article discusses Isocratean theory and how his ideas can inform a pedagogy of civic engagement in technical communication.

Although storytelling research is rarely applied to technical communication, I approach it as one way of technical communication practitioners and teachers might account for the social, creative, knowledge-intensive ways technical service work gets done. In particular, I look to the technical service work of automotive technicians at a repair shop in the Northwest. These technicians not only tell each other stories, but they also write stories about their diagnostic practices, or what they do to determine problems, and about their processes for addressing those problems—their actual repair work. But writing stories is more than instrumental. I argue that acts of storytelling are inseparably entangled with acts of accessing technical breakdowns, determining possible problems, and then producing acceptable solutions. For these technicians, writing stories and fixing cars intertwine. My central question, then, is how can technical communication researchers and teachers approach acts of storytelling in ways that offer us richer, more precise articulations of the relationship between writing and technical service work like that of fixing cars?

Visual sign systems have become an essential means of communication in places where large numbers of people of different nationalities gather, such as at international airports and the Olympic Games. That they can effectively increase accessibility among users not necessarily sharing a common language speaks to their potential usefulness in other situations. A homeless shelter in a western North Carolina community received funding to build a new facility. With the clientele's widely diverse communication abilities, including those who are illiterate or have limited reading skills, those who are non-native speakers knowing little to no English, and those who are coming from different cultural contexts, a visual sign system was designed to facilitate navigation for all visitors. Using Peirce's theory of signs, Neurath's ISOTYPE, and the least action principle borrowed from physics as a framework, this case study shows how the signs were designed and usability tested to ensure increased accessibility.

Technical communication's attempt to prioritize theories of scholarship and pedagogy has resulted in several authors contributing a three-dimensional framework to approach technology: the instrumental perspective, the critical humanist perspective, and the user-centered perspective [1–3]. This article traces connections between this framework for technical communication and the philosophies of Michel de Certeau [4] and Andrew Feenberg [5], suggesting that the primary connection is a turn toward “rhetoric” as a mediator between scientific and philosophical communication. The article concludes that the current paradigm for understanding technology can be best understood by exploring three conjoined, yet competing, mentalities between a scientific, philosophical, and rhetorical worldview. While this three-dimensional approach provides a strong foundation for technical communication pedagogy and scholarship, it should continue to be re-examined for potential anomalies as the field continues to develop an identity.

This article argues that many methodological approaches used in intercultural technical communication research are limited in addressing emerging social justice challenges in many post-colonial, developing, and unenfranchised/disenfranchised cultural sites, where professional communicators have begun conducting research. It offers decolonial approaches as an alternative by highlighting how these approaches are used in an intercultural research that investigates attempts to localize communication that accompanies sexuo-pharmaceuticals from one cultural context to another. The article also discusses some the challenges and benefits of such approaches. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remain a powerfully remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity [1, p. 1]. Global research raises many methodological and ethical challenges for technical communicators … because of the cross-cultural, international, and transnational nature of the work [2, p. 283].

This article argues for developing linked courses in technical communication where the instructor facilitates a service-learning curriculum and then serves as faculty advisor within subsequent internships. In these linked courses, students write technical documents before moving into internships where they write similar documents. Specifically, the article examines the results from one such class and offers both theoretical and practical advice for collaborating with nonprofit and creating internships that are beneficial for both the students and the nonprofit. In addition, the discussion highlights students' preparedness to enter the field of technical communication, as evidenced through their internship work and their final reflections. Through careful consideration of the nonprofit' responses, I suggest making changes to professional and technical communication curricula for linked courses and internships, including the addition of an objective of professionalism that teaches students to not only write in a professional manner, but to also consider their actions and responsibilities within the context of an organizational culture.

While Engineering values direct communication, indirect communication produces a kind of literacy salient for engineers that direct communication may not offer in the way indirect communication does. This article emphasizes the inadequacies of overly emphasizing direct communication for Engineering majors and explains how teaching indirect communication in the form of literature has the potential to cover some of the inadequacies one can encounter if one were to overly emphasize direct communication.

Between 1884 and 1926, such publishers of technological information as Henley Publishing, Audel Publishing, John Wiley, Van Nostrand, McGraw-Hill, and Practical Publications put out dozens and dozens of technical catechisms on a wide variety of technical subjects. Then, around 1926, these publishers ceased releasing texts called catechisms. What made the genre so popular? Did it disappear? The answers to these questions provide a case study of genre adaptation, genre change, and genre persistence within technical communication.

This article presents data from a two-part study of student perceptions of research. Fifty-one research proposals are analyzed in order to understand perceptions of research, and results from a survey are analyzed to better understand how students both perceive and articulate their understanding of research. The data show that students assign multiple definitions to the concept of research, and suggest that increased attention to clarifying terminology and identifying student perceptions would facilitate better work.

This article develops a framework for rhetorical inquiry that builds on the concept of wicked problems as conceptualized through social policy and design studies research. Responding to technical communication scholarship that calls for increased engagement with public issues and controversies, the author specifically discusses a writing course that used the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a basis for teaching problem-based rhetorical invention, document production, interdisciplinary collaboration, and professional development. The framework described in this article ultimately offers a heuristic for students to research and write about ill-defined problems that must be addressed in time but that demand sustained engagement over time—activities that begin in the classroom but ideally continue to develop throughout their personal and professional lives.

Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, China's first comprehensive medical book, served as the key link between Yi Jing, which initiated China's high-context culture, and the high-context style of modern Chinese technical communication. In the form of dialogues between Yellow Emperor and his minister, its 24 fascicles cover four major topics of the organs, diagnosis, diseases, and treatments. While examining the body and discussing various diseases and treatments, the book expands on Yi Jing's philosophy through integrating three interrelated concepts: Tao, Yin and Yang, and Five Elements (word, fire, soil, metal, and water). In this way, the book, for the first time in Chinese history, explicitly treated humans and their behaviors as individual events conditioned by the natural context, emphasizing context as the conditioning force. This emphasis on context is manifest in modern Chinese technical communication as two textual devices of establishing personal relationships and creating ideal physical environments.

The effects of globalization on communication products and processes have resulted in document features and interactional practices that are sometimes difficult to describe within current theoretical frameworks of inter/transcultural technical communication. Although it has been recognized in our field that the old theoretical frameworks and assumptions are no longer adequate by themselves in the global workplace, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework has been suggested that is capable of encompassing hybrid characteristics of transcultural technical communication that emerge as a result of increased contact and connectivity. This article provides an interdisciplinary overview of Cosmopolitan theory and suggests that applying the cosmopolitan framework of Ulrich Beck to our research and the Dialogical Cosmopolitanism approach of Suresh Canagarajah to our pedagogical practices can move us towards a deeper understanding of global phenomena.

This article examines the influential Chinese science book Brush Talks from Dream Brook, written by Shen Kuo in the 11th century. I suggest that Brush Talks reveals a tension between institutionalized science and science in the public, and a gap between the making of scientific knowledge and the communication of such knowledge to the general public. In writing Brush Talks, Shen preserved and popularized grassroots science and technology in the most respected medium of his time—the printed book. In the article, I ask what formal elements of this book reveal about the choices Shen made as a literati author to connect to his primary readers, most of which were middle and lower class lay audiences. As I will argue, he used three approaches that aided him in speaking to the public about science and technology—an ethnographic approach to knowledge, innovative uses of genre, and a straightforward writing style.

Over the last 2 decades, the nations that once comprised the Soviet Union have begun to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. As a result, today's technical and professional communicators could find themselves interacting with co-workers, colleagues, and clients in these nations. Being successful in such contexts, however, requires an understanding of the cultural, historic, educational, and economic factors that have affected and continue to shape technical and professional communication practices in these countries. This article provides an overview of the literature that has been published on technical and professional communication practices in the former USSR as well as reviews educational factors that have contributed to such practices. Through such an examination, the article provides readers with a foundation they can use to engage in future research relating to technical and professional communication practices in post-Soviet states.

This article brings together the communication needs and positioning of women in technical areas, and asks “how can technical communication classes contribute to the mentoring of young women engineers at a time when many of those women want to be identified as engineers instead of being spotlighted as women in engineering?” Incorporating research into mentoring for women in engineering, and feminist approaches to mentoring in general, we adopt Heath and Heath's strategy in Switch, instituting small changes in technical communication classes (and sometimes their infrastructures) that target a mentoring problem—i.e., talk about time—with the hope of flipping a switch toward larger changes. Thus, the article demonstrates two tactics that we can use to deliver improvement in managing the discourse surrounding time and its deadlines. Our approach both mentors undergraduate women in more actively and effectively discussing and scheduling their work without singling them out as women and also integrates good mentoring practice into the infrastructure of technical communication service classes.

This study traces Renaissance and post-Renaissance technical writers' use of classical rhetoric in English instruction manuals on the sport of falconry. A study of the period's five prominent falconry manuals written by four authors—George Turberville, Simon Latham, Edmund Bert, and Richard Blome—reveals these technical writers' conscious use of classical rhetoric as an important technique to persuade readers to accept these authors' authority and trust the information they were disseminating. These manuals employed several classical rhetorical techniques: invention by using ethos and several classical topics, classical arrangement, the plain style, and adaptation of the orator's duties. The explanation for this classical influence rests in the authors' own knowledge of classical rhetoric derived from sources such as Thomas Wilson, as well as the sources from whom these authors obtained their knowledge of falconry. The article ends by suggesting the origins through which these classical rhetorical techniques influenced the writing of the manuals.

Elsie Ray, a research librarian at Anaconda Copper Mining Company, was the prime mover in the effort to organize the Association of Technical Writers and Editors (TWE), one of the organizations that eventually became the Society for Technical Communication (STC). This article seeks to recover Ray's professional contributions and memorialize her as a significant figure in the history of the technical communication profession.

This mixed-methods experimental study examined the effect of service learning in a distance education technical writing course. Quantitative analysis of data found evidence for a positive relationship between participation in service learning and technical writing learning outcomes. Additionally, qualitative analysis suggests that service learning in online technical writing courses helps students to make connections to the “real world,” encourages students to connect with their audience(s) and develop a sense of purpose for writing tasks, connects students to future employment, and develops deep learning with course materials. It is hypothesized that these factors support the development of learning outcomes in distance education students.

Scholars in business and technical communication have continuously made efforts to look for effective teaching approaches for cross-cultural business and technical communication; however, little research has been conducted to study the process by which students develop intercultural competence; fewer studies have been conducted to assess learners' needs for gaining intercultural competence in the globalization age. To assess students' level of intercultural competence and understand whether they are likely to change in response to teaching, I first introduce a two-part framework for teaching and learning intercultural business and technical communication: the DMIS model—Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and the related instrument to assess intercultural sensitivity—the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Then I report the results of using the framework to assess and develop students' intercultural competence, and conclude the study by emphasizing the significance of the current empirical research and discuss the framework's limitations.

Within a Technical Communication classroom, policywork has been used to teach students the vital discursive and conceptual skills valued by technical fields. However, given the move of technical communicators into the public sphere, these skills can and should be expanded to include diverse practices and modes of thought. As such, this article suggests that storytelling can be used as a pedagogical tool to help students think more critically about the (sometimes hidden) relationships that policywork inheres. This article articulates relational work as a target skills set for students and suggests specific activities and handouts for developing these skills.

The author uses game theoretical models to identify technical communication breakdowns encountered during the notoriously confusing Texas Two-Step voting and caucusing process. Specifically, the author uses narrative theory and game theory to highlight areas where caucus participants needed instructions to better understand the rules of the game and user analysis to better anticipate participants' motives and strategies. As a central tool of analysis, the author uses Nobel Laureate John C. Harsanyi's work on “incomplete game” or Bayesian games. The article demonstrates opportunities for technical communication scholars and teachers to use interdisciplinary approaches to discover layers of technical communication in small group negotiations and to evaluate the layers of instructions and technologies needed to facilitate effective and ethical decision making in political caucusing.

Recent scholarship on global online courses points to the need to examine the issue of social context in an online global learning environment. To explore global learners' cultural perspectives on the social climate of an online class, we first review the social presence theory—which can be used to examine the social climate in an online classroom, and explain factors that contribute to learners' social presence. Then we report findings of a survey conducted among a group of Chinese business students and discuss specific aspects of an online business communication class which might contribute to enhancing global learners' sense of social presence in an online environment. We conclude the study by explaining the present study's implications for delivering effective online business and technical communication courses with global learners and recommending strategies for increasing global audiences' social presence in an online class created by the instructor and the online community.

Although scholars have acknowledged technical texts written during the Middle-Ages, there is no mention of “technical writer” as a profession except for Geoffrey Chaucer, and historically absent is the accreditation of medieval female writers who pioneered the field of medical-technical communication. In an era dominated by identifiable medieval male technical writers, this article analyzes the medical texts of Hildegard von Bingen, which should be recognized as significant scientific and medical contributions to the field of medical-technical writing. Because the term “technical writing” or “technical writer” did not exist during the Middle Ages, accrediting female medieval scientific and medical writers as technical writers requires the application of modern thought and definition. Primarily known as a mystic and writer of poetry and music, Hildegard's technological and medical texts have slowly gained interest within the medical community. Her texts Physica and Causae Curae, written in the style of modern-day patient history and physicals, outline patient symptoms, causes and effects, preceded by a treatment plan. This article examines Hildegard von Bingen's medical works, identifying her as a scientific or medical technical writer within the same context from which scholars assign Chaucer the same title, and from which all medical and scientific writers of medical texts can be professionally accredited as technical communicator or writer.

This article argues for the establishment of a usability process that incorporates the study of “words” and “word phrases.” It demonstrates how semantically mapping a navigational taxonomy can help the developers of digital environments establish a more focused sense of functional meaning for the users of their digital designs.

The present article describes and evaluates collaborative interdisciplinary group projects initiated by content lecturers and an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instructor for the purpose of teaching technical writing skills in an aeronautical engineering degree program. The proposed technical writing model is assessed against the results of a learner survey and refined accordingly. The survey showed that learners appreciated the cross-disciplinary collaboration in projects, and it delivered important insights into learning effects and student progress in both language and content matters. The article concludes with a list of recommendations for the implementation of project-based collaborative technical writing instruction, which may support or complement academic writing courses in similar contexts. The proposed model considers the circumstances of students in workload-intensive tertiary settings and synthesizes approaches such as problem-based learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, a guided product approach to collaborative writing, and learner autonomy.

The self-service nature of today's society means that technical communicators are needed more than ever before since users may find themselves struggling to make sense of online documentation with minimal support from the institutions that provide it. Certain demographics within the user population (older adults, disabled persons, non-native speakers) may face serious challenges when trying to use self-service documentation. Technical communication educators should prepare students to function as user advocates for members of these groups. Technical communication students need a thorough understanding of the challenges that may interfere with an audience's ability to use websites and other online documentation. This article suggests ways to help students gain this understanding through course content and by structuring service-learning and virtual team projects in which students can put their newly-developed understanding into practice.