Many current technical writing handbooks still advise writers to avoid the passive voice except in certain limited situations, primarily when the agent is unknown, understood, unimportant, or better left unnamed. However, a growing body of research indicates that the passive voice has a broader array of rhetorical functions. To identify some of the functions of the passive, as well as the active, voice, the frequencies of active and passive verbs were determined in 185 documents written by twenty-eight civilian and military members of the U.S. Air Force. The frequencies were similar to those in similar types of documents written by nonacademic writers in previous studies. In addition, writers were queried about their reasons for choosing active or passive verbs. While the results of the study confirmed the importance of agency in the choice of active or passive, they also revealed numerous other factors that were significant in writers' choices. The most significant reasons for choosing one type of verb over another were the voice of the verb, organizational requirements, audience awareness, efficiency, genre, euphony, personal preference, agency, emphasis, and topic-comment flow. These results suggest that technical writing instruction and handbooks should promote general principles for the use of both active and passive verbs rather than advising against the use of passive verbs.

This article shows problems in the communication process between preparers and users of financial reports. In Sweden as well as in other European countries, understandability of financial reports is a qualitative characteristic that is increasingly focused on. This is partly due to the growing significance of the stock market as a source for venture capital. Test techniques from linguistics and pedagogy have been used in accounting research to investigate the understandability of financial reports. The cloze technique is used in this study to investigate the understandability of messages in two Swedish annual reports related to small investors, and sophisticated preparers and users such as auditors and financial managers. The results show that important parts of the reports were not understood by small investors. The conclusion is that if small investors are continuingly to be considered as a target group for these financial reports, then there must be a large improvement of the text material. Otherwise the financial reports must be left to sophisticated users and interpreters.

Recent graduates of a degree program in professional and technical communication were surveyed to identify their current employment, their attitudes toward their academic preparation, and the professional courses they found most helpful. The history and curriculum of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT's) eleven-year-old program in Professional and Technical Communication (PTC) is described, as well as the program's “professional core,” its Liberal Arts core, and its cooperative education requirement. The survey was modeled after a previous survey the authors conducted with members of the Society for Technical Communication. The results of both surveys emphasized the basics of writing and computer skills. The degree program alumni also expressed the desire for a “more practical” curriculum that placed less emphasis on theory. Anecdotal responses from the alumni provided a unique view of the field through the eyes of its newest practitioners.

While we know that communication skills are needed to secure employment and to be successful in the business world, it is important to identify skills that accounting students will be most likely to need in their entry level accounting positions. The purpose of this study was to examine more closely the specific communication skills required of accounting professionals. Clear messages are vitally important so the client and the accountant understand each other and the content of discussions. Whatever method of communication used, accounting professionals represent their company every time they write a letter or make a personal contact with a client.

While technical writing continues to struggle for recognition as a legitimate academic discipline, English programs are increasingly perceived not only by nonacademics, but by academics in other fields as having little relevance in nonacademic professions. Internships are routine components of technical communication programs, but they can offer excellent professional opportunities to English majors who do not plan academic careers. A technical communication internship program expanded to encompass the nonacademic needs and interests of English majors has benefits for the English department, for English majors, and for the technical communication profession. First, it can enhance enrollments and retention in the English program. Second, it can build the credibility of the English curriculum in the nonacademic professional community. Finally, it can enhance the credibility of technical communication within the English department. It is to our advantage to do whatever we can to support our English department colleagues rather than to undermine their often precarious status in the academy and in society.

A well prepared Capture Plan can mean the difference between winning and losing an important procurement opportunity. The plan if properly prepared, becomes a tool for use while assembling a proposal team, obtaining sufficient Bid and Proposal dollars, and during proposal preparation to ensure that all facets of the procurement are understood and included in the proposal. This article provides information regarding the content of a typical Capture Plan—from the details needed for a basic program summary to the steps required to conduct post-proposal activities.

Cola Rienzi, the 14th century notary and usurper who briefly resurrected the Roman Republic during the Avignon Papacy, is an important figure in the history of professional writing. The son of an unlettered country innkeeper, Cola combined a passion for classical rhetoric and literature with extensive training in legal documentation to create and sustain a messianic regime. By imitating Ancient Roman memos and reports in his written edicts, Cola convinced the people that he was their tribune and savior. The aristocrats and clerics chafing under Cola's authority, however, considered these documents sortilegio, sheer witchcraft. When Rienzi's edicts became increasingly self-serving and grandiloquent, the mob, sickened by his megalomania, tore him to pieces. Although he was posthumously declared anathema by the Church—partly for having invented the fountain pen—Cola's legislative reforms, and his revolutionary use of the classics to reshape administrative writing, helped pave the way for Renaissance Humanism.

The process of academic peer review—i.e., students evaluating each other's work—can help instructors address a host of higher institutional objectives, not the least of which is the total quality management of collegiate teaching. But more is known about this process from the viewpoint of instructors than from the perspective of students. The purpose of this study was to formally examine student views of a specific peer-review system in which undergraduates assigned final grades to each other's term papers. A survey instrument revealed a high degree of comfort with the process, as well as some insights into why a few students were uncomfortable with it.

Although the passive voice may be overused in legal prose, warnings in legal writing guidebooks against the passive risk undervaluing its many uses. After briefly introducing the passive voice, and some possible reasons for its misuse, this article will outline the many situations when the passive is more appropriate than the active voice.

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning. This article examines that phenomenon—known as silent speech—based upon the published research of cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists. The author develops a phonological model of reading based upon published results of experimental investigators to determine the relationship between cognition and silent speech. The author then applies the model to technical communication. The applications include the use of punctuation, pronouns, and abbreviations, as well as introducing new words, writing to satisfy the speech instinct, cultivating a human voice, and revising technical documents.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the use of the Black communication style by African Americans in an organized environment. The research method which was used involved a multimethod approach of data collection in the field using direct observation, and obtrusive observations, as well as semi-structured interviews. This investigation has shown that although the Black employees in this organization felt, in general, as if they were changing their communication style to fit the organizational norms, they continued to rely on the cultural norms underlying the Black communication style. U.S. demographics are foretelling a future that will require innovative organizational communication strategies. According to Fine, two facts about the U.S. corporate environment which are uncovered by demographic trends are that the workforce will be comprised of a “greater diversity of gender, race, age, culture, and language” and that the demand for qualified workers will exceed the supply thereby “creating intense competition among organizations for workers” [1]. These changing demographics are not going unnoticed by the U.S. corporate leaders. Specifically, the issues of most concern to organizational executives, according to Workforce 2000, center around linguistic and cultural differences. Most organizations have no innovative strategies for meeting the demands of a diverse workforce. Traditional programs, such as day-care provisions, flexible work times, and hiring and recruiting more people of color are being implemented by corporate America in an effort to meet the demand for diversity. However, organizations are often lacking in creative programs which will provide for this emerging diverse workforce an environment that will accept and nurture their diversity. Certainly these corporate executives are receiving little in the way of guidance from organizational researchers.

Over a quarter century ago, James W. Carey and John J. Quirk questioned the prevailing belief that technology would revolutionize communication. Now that we have begun traveling on the information superhighway, we are bombarded more often than ever by what Carey and Quirk called “the rhetoric of the electronic sublime.” Yet an exploration of some fifty award-winning health messages on the World Wide Web suggests that our well-worn maps—that is, the traditional concepts of source, content, purpose, audience, and presentation—can give us a sense of direction as we begin our fall down the rabbit-hole.

This article discusses the adequacy of two modes of presenting information on a computer screen, i.e., the alternating screen presentation in which information is presented “screen by screen” and the simultaneous screen presentation that shows different sources of information simultaneously on the same screen. Using a simultaneous or an alternating screen presentation, subjects had to perform short writing tasks, half of which required the use of one on-line document, the other half required two documents. The subjects' task performance as well as their appreciation of the task and the presentation mode were measured. The results show that performance and appreciation data do not run parallel. While all subjects clearly prefer a simultaneous mode of presenting information on the screen, performance data are much more varied and less clear cut: when reading, subjects performed significantly better in the alternating mode; when producing a text, subjects slightly benefited from simultaneous screens.

This article examines the genre of visual manuals by discussing the main forms and functions of two types in detail: step-by-step and guided tour manuals. Step-by-step manuals have a one-on-one correspondence between picture and text (explanations and instructions), reflecting the action-reaction mode in which users tend to interact with computers. Guided tour manuals give users a visual impression of the program. The pictures, mostly full-screen captures, are annotated with several paragraphs of text. An experiment is reported in which we examined whether a visual manual helps users realize tasks faster and more accurately than a non-visual manual. No effects on accuracy were found, but the visual manual did increase the speed of task execution with a significant and substantial gain of 35 percent. The conclusion draws attention to the fact that there is no single best type of visual manual, but that each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

With elderly people becoming an ever larger part of our society, the usability of modern technical products for these people is becoming an ever more important issue. Instructions that optimally fit the needs of this elderly audience could enhance the usability of the products they belong to. The study described in this article is aimed at an investigation of this gerontological research literature to find out what is already known about age deficiencies in cognitive processes which might adversely influence instructional text processing. On the basis of the findings from this research, tentative guidelines could be given on how such manuals could be designed and written. Moreover, we propose several kinds of follow-up research that still have to be carried out to gather more knowledge on the topic of manuals for the elderly.

Consulting engineering firms that produce reports for clients benefit from having engineers who can write clear, well-organized, grammatically correct descriptions of the work they perform. Despite the obvious value gained through engineers who can write well, universities and the firms themselves do not as a rule train engineers in business technical writing. A typical program a firm can institute to promote writing skills would include developing a house style guide as well as concise examples of writing engineers should emulate and screening and practice exercises. The ability to first organize material in an outline is critical to efficient composition. Engineers with limited English skills can be instructed in building clear, logical lists that can be efficiently converted into narrative form by an editor.

Can technical writing still be taught credibly by teachers with only academic experience? This article draws a distinction between courses designed for students expecting to be full-time technical communicators and general-purpose service courses designed for students in a variety of fields. The article then argues that teachers of service courses can teach credibly without having worked as writers in nonacademic workplaces if they fulfill these conditions: they should have a critical command of research into nonacademic writing, rhetorical theory, and reading theory; they should define technical writing broadly enough to see themselves as technical writers; they should seek and take advantage of everyday opportunities to practice technical writing and reading; and they should carefully consider the sense in which their courses reflect reality.

In learning how to write, one has to cope with many demands on language proficiency, organization skills, and intellectual ability. A checklist of what is required can help to clarify all these demands and to turn them into manageable items or units for practice, implementation, and evaluation. The skills involved in designing and applying checklists resemble those required for dealing with the writing tasks on campus and/or at work. The focus of this article is on using checklists to improve the skills of one kind of writing—the report, among students from two faculties in a tertiary institute. The reports are for different purposes, situations, and readers. The article will discuss the different approaches in adopting a checklist to facilitate the report-writing process. It will highlight using students' work or authentic materials as an input to their own learning and helping them to integrate the skills learned with their work on the campus and in the workplace.

Storyboarding, long associated with scriptwriting, advertising, and more recently with technical manuals, can be successfully applied to an even broader variety of technical documents. In this article, the application of storyboarding techniques to designing technical proposals suggests methods of incorporating more visuals into documents, as well as better meeting clients' needs.

Promotional writing for industrial and high-tech products, or technical copywriting, is gaining more and more attention in the profession of technical communication. In contrast, higher education has largely neglected to prepare students for this major form of written communication. One reason for this neglect may be that some academics do not well understand the role and importance of technical copywriting. Another reason may be the stigma of unethical writing associated with copywriting for consumer products. This article testifies to the significance of technical copywriting and suggests that dialogical audience analysis and an emphasis on the rational appeal will contribute to ethical writing performance. Also, resources are cited of common interest to instructors, beginning practitioners, and researchers. Last, these groups receive recommendations appropriate for their individual activities.

The textbook is the main teaching tool for instructors. Typically, teachers select a text based on how well it supports their views of and approach to the subject. Looking at texts suggests how the subject has been taught over the years and what assumptions are made about students. This informal look at pre-1970 textbooks characterizes the early teaching of technical writing by examining such features as author's background, contents, assumed reader, and focus.

Focusing only on the famous and celebrated has skewed military and political history; focusing only on Oliver Evans, Lauchlan McKay, John W. Griffiths, Joseph Crane, and John H. Patterson could similarly skew our sense of American technical communication in the nineteenth century. Exploring the written work of an ordinary American mechanician of the nineteenth century, William Stillman of Rhode Island, could help balance our appraisal of nineteenth-century American technical communication. Reviewing the writing and graphics in his 1851 Miscellaneous Compositions, as well as his 1839 lock patent and 1836 bank lock instructions, reveals Stillman's ambidextrous abilities in using both text and graphics to communicate; abilities similar to his more famous fellow citizens. However, the three-dimensional qualities of his 1839 patent graphic reveals an unusual ability to mimic the biological methods in which the human eye sees three dimensions.

Participants in a qualitative case study of nonacademic R&D authors were uncomfortable with the idea of persuasion in their writing. The participants thought their reports were more informative than persuasive. Three definitions for “persuasion” emerged: discourse intended to push a reader toward an action; discourse written in a clear, compelling style; and shady, manipulative discourse. When asked whether they owed a greater debt to their audience or to their subject matter, most participants chose subject matter. However, some participants argued that my question posed a false dichotomy, in that serving subject matter was the best way to serve audience.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that using a restricted language called Simplified English (SE) to write procedural documents is the best method to accommodate specific audiences. Providing empirical data to prove or disprove this hypothesis is the point of the experiment reported here. This study examined the effect of document type (SE versus non-SE), passage (Procedure A versus Procedure B), and native language (native versus non-native English speakers) on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion time of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. This research suggests that using SE significantly improves the comprehensibility of more complex documents. Further, readers of more complex SE documents can more easily locate and identify information within the document. For the documents tested in this experiment, the SE and non-SE documents took essentially the same amount of time for subjects to read and complete the test. Finally, while the difference between native and non-native English speakers could not be tested statistically because of extremely different cell sizes, the comprehensibility and content location scores for the native and non-native speakers appear to be quite different, with the non-native speakers benefiting from SE more than the native speakers.

Recently, a new operatorial perspective on language has emerged [1]. As a result, a specific, analogical solution within such an approach is being developed [2]. This article describes that position briefly and sketches how such a perspective can lead to a theoretical justification of selected elements of established technical writing practice.

In 1917 Frank Aydelotte, an English professor at MIT, became AT&T's first outside writing consultant. Because many of its older, better-educated male employees had been mobilized to fight World War I, the company found itself with numerous young, poorly-educated employees. Drawing on the humanistic approach to writing instruction that he had developed at MIT in his book English and Engineering, Aydelotte created a year-long program at AT&T that taught employees to think and write about issues important to their work. The course is important for two reasons: first, it offers insight into the kinds of early consulting work that English professors did, and, second, it shows that Aydelotte's humanistic approach to technical communication worked as well in business as it did in academic settings.

One of the primary objectives of studying theory and practice relating to technical reports is to define what constitutes report writing as genre and to place this genre within a social context. Report writing always involves the investigation of an ill-defined problem and occurs within the auspices of an organizational context. This investigative and reporting function implies a high degree of ethical and social responsibility on the investigator to interpret and report the significance of the facts, making the conclusions explicit, and forming the basis for additional interpretations. Drawing on Susan Wells' conventions for commissioned reports, this article analyzes how the Tailhook Report, which was commissioned to investigate the charges of sexual misconduct by naval aviators at the Tailhook Symposium, omits answering two of the three questions Wells establishes as necessary by precedence in the genre in order to avoid making conclusions that might necessitate actions that would alter the male-dominated power structure of the U.S. Navy.

Two groups of university students, approximately half with work experience, read one of two versions of the same case study narrative—a traditional, printed version or a computer version. Afterwards, both groups selected from a list of paragraphs to compose a memorandum needed to resolve the conflict in the case, and, two days later, completed a questionnaire to determine retention of the narrative. The researchers hypothesized that the subjects using the computer version would perform better and rate their version as more realistic because of this version's visuals and decision paths. The subjects using the computer version did perform somewhat better at selecting the correct final memo paragraph, but overall, the results did not show either method to be superior. The subject's previous off-campus work experience, however, did produce an impact on both the results and acceptability of the case method.

Designing a good quick reference guide is a complex rhetorical act. To motivate software users to read a quick reference guide, writers must “prove” to readers that it is not just an abbreviated user's manual in disguise, but a different rhetorical form entirely, one visually structured to allow readers to move about the text easily and effectively. Such a structure provides readers with a sense of progress: as they need fewer visual cues to find pertinent information, they demonstrate an “advance” in their skill and knowledge as users. Professional writers from Bell Northern Research, enrolled in the University of Waterloo's Language and Professional Writing Program, successfully attempted to meet this rhetorical challenge. They designed a quick reference guide for in-house use, and then provided a theoretical framework to ground and explain their visual design choices. This article is a teaching case: it offers a summary of the students' quick reference project, as well as the instructor's theoretical reflections on how visual design can motivate readers to read and use documentation.

La rédaction professionnelle en français au Canada n'ayant encore fait l'objet d'aucune étude approfondie, nous avons mené une enquête auprès de divers employeurs et rédacteurs indépendants du Canada pour savoir dans quelles conditions s'exerce cette profession. Nous présentons ici les résultats de cette enquête qui révèle certaines différences qu'explique le contexte géo-politique de la profession. Nous avons relevé, selon les employeurs et les secteurs (public et privé), des divergences significatives en ce qui a trait au profil du rédacteur, aux tâches qui lui sont assignées, à la documentation qui lui est fournie ainsi qu'aux compétences exigées au moment de son recrutement. Notre article fait enfin le lien entre les données fournies par l'enquête et la formation donnée actuellement au Canada francophone dans les établissements qui offrent des cours ou des programmes de rédaction.

As trade becomes global and technology allows more of the production of documentation to be done in-house, the difference between the roles of technical writers and translators is narrowing. The assumptions underlying the training of technical translators and notions of quality in technical language do not yet reflect this change. Quality implies standards, and that has recently come to mean international standards. The concluding part of this article will look at some of the implications of the standardization of text conventions for communicating procedures across languages and cultures.

In earlier centuries, authors of medical works intended for popular readers defended their use of the vernacular against potential criticism from their learned colleagues. Scholars have shown that by the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries such defence reflected rhetorical posturing more than political reality. This article examines self-help medical literature in 19th-century Canada, revealing that authors adopted a similar stance in writing for the public. Not only did this rhetorical convention continue, but it also did not assure adoption of the plain style advocated. Moreover, a comparison of their style with that of medical textbook authors reveals few real differences.

Why are technical writers needed to “translate” the work of technologists into accessible communication? This article looks briefly at the situation that creates the need for technical writers and then argues for a change in that situation so technologists can communicate for themselves. The argument is based on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of meaning, language, and communication. It recommends greater, active involvement of technologists with the “real world” in which their technology will be used, including involvement with people with whom and for whom the technology is being developed. Key concepts presented are that meaning lies in socially-agreed relations among things in the world, not in words or in the relations between words and things; that language actually manifests rather than represents reality; and that technical writers are incapable of fully appreciating and communicating the meaning of what technologists do because they come from a different discipline which constructs meaning differently. It argues that a change in technology practice will engender a new attitude and approach to technical communication that can make technical writers unnecessary except as communication teachers who help develop the communication skills of technologists.

This research project focuses on the nature of oral presentations given (and produced) by scientific, technical, and managerial professionals working in business and industry. Our findings are survey-based; they reflect responses to a range of “issues” about technical/professional presentations, including these: 1) frequency; 2) target audience(s); 3) objectives; 4) types; 5) lengths; 6) data/information base; 7) use of visuals; 8) equipment; 9) obstacles; and 10) training. Our results indicate that presentations are frequently used in business, industry, and government and involve a wide variety of managerial audiences within organizations. Primary objectives of presenters surveyed are to inform (“sharing information”) and instruct/train.

Evaluation of five editions of John M. Lannon's Technical Writing (1979–1991), one of the top-selling technical writing texts available to educators today, demonstrates not only where technical communication has been, but also where it is going. Lannon's book (and his comments in an interview) begins to shed some light on how one man's textbook on technical communication responded to social conditions in the 80s.

Not along ago, I received a call from a colleague who teaches technical writing, among other things, in the department and university which gave our field John Mitchell, one of the founders of the Society for Technical Communication and an early definer of our field. My colleague wanted to know how my former department would value, in terms of tenure and promotion, a book on Boston Harbor nautical matters. His department did not value it at all, and unfortunately, neither would have mine. It is this experience, which is too often common to technical communication scholars, that prompts the question in this article's title.

Computers and technology now enable the writer of a form letter to insert significant personal information about the individual recipient, the purpose of which is to induce compliance with the sender's purposes. This article is based on a project in producing medical advice letters tailored to individuals. Our evaluations, like other preliminary studies, suggest that individualizing such letters does improve compliance over the conventional (impersonal) form letter. In considering the inner logic of the individualized letter, different methods of forming personalized letters are presented: adding text, subtracting text, and rearranging text. It is shown how the requisite information can be represented by a questionnaire, a diagram, and the printed letter itself. These three components are logically connected so that the user can make various choices and letters can be quickly formulated. Finally, advice is offered to technical writers embarking on the development of an individualized form letter, with some general reflections about the future of this innovation.

This article analyzes Herbert C. Hoover's translation of the De Re Metallica (1956) in the context of the 1922 Mine Strikes. The De Re Metallica combines practical instruction in mining techniques with a philosophical justification of the practice of mining. In Book I of the De Re Metallica, Agricola consciously constructs a rationalized science of metallurgy and mineralogy to enable expert miners to profit in a risky enterprise. Analysis of the text thus reveals that Hoover's interest in Agricola's “intellectual achievements” may have been more than technical. The economical and political assumptions that drive Agricola's arguments—justification of mining as a profit-making enterprise, his notions that accidents occur because workers are careless, and his rhetorical use of the notion of scientific expertise—framed many of the early twentieth century debates between mine operators and union organizers. In revisioning Agricola's arguments in the context of Hoover's own Principles of Mining and his statements in the 1922 Mine Crisis, this article demonstrates how technical documents reflect the political ideologies of their writers and how political arguments presented as purely technical debates shape the uses and construction of future technologies.

Today many students learn how to use desktop programs such as PageMaker and Ventura in technical communication courses; however, few of those students are also learning the principles of graphic design underlying the production of mechanicals. The ability to use a desktop publishing program does not necessarily guarantee the ability to produce well-designed and effective documents. In fact, the growing use of desktop publishing software has led to a proliferation of documents that violate all the rules of good design. This article describes a technical publications course in which students gain a better understanding of the principles of design and layout by using mechanical paste up techniques. When required to use mechanical paste up in addition to desktop publishing software, students acquired a more thorough understanding of grids and white space as well as a greater confidence in their abilities to do page design.

Identifying problems in recent technical communication studies of historical medical text, this article suggests ways for researchers to overcome them. Its approach uses five steps for conducting sound historical research: establishing originality for historical textual analysis; adopting an authoritative text for analysis; understanding the genre or form of a historical text; understanding the intellectual or social context for a historical text; and understanding the publishing and readership context of a historical text. These steps are discussed within the context of related fields of inquiry, namely history of medicine, history of the book, literary criticism and historical linguistics, and analytical bibliography. The article concludes by exploring new directions for research in technical communication and history of medicine.

This article discusses two conflicts occurring during the first decade of the Royal Society (1660–1670). One conflict concerned the proper method of scientific experimentation, the other the proper writing style for communicating scientific knowledge. Following the method proposed by taxonomists, language would be a vehicle for representing the order of reality in its undisturbed state. Following the method proposed by conjecturalists, language would be a means for constructing a theory and arguing for its validity. Members of the Society were divided over these crucial questions, as evident in scientific documents of the period as well as in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society. Parallels to this division are present in contemporary issues in technical writing, and this article closes by discussing some implications for teaching, practice, and theory.

Research on the visual presentation of instructions (and other texts) tends to be repetitious, unsystematic, and overly complex. A simpler yet rich approach to analyzing the visual dimension of instructions is Gestalt theory. Gestalt principles of proximity, closure, symmetry, figure-ground segregation, good continuation, and similarity provide a powerful approach to making instructions more inviting and consistent, as well as easier to access, follow, and understand. This article applies six Gestalt principles to a badly designed instruction to show what improvements result when Gestalt theory is considered in instructional design.

The roles of physicians and nurses working in trauma centers are mirrored in their writing. Physicians must focus intensely on patients' injuries if lives are to be saved. Their professional prose is correspondingly, and appropriately, focused, with attention given to injuries and their repair. The doctors' partners in the admitting area, trauma nurses, adopt a holistic view, caring for patients' physiologic and psychologic stability. Nurses tend to be more comprehensive in their writing, describing patients as individuals, the families involved, and the threatening and encouraging events that emerge during recovery. Although the distance and impersonal nature of medical writing, as a subset of technical writing, is criticized by technical writing scholars, published works by trauma surgeons may require exactly those characteristics. Perhaps a reflection of that disparity, medical publishers give mixed messages regarding style to physicians and nurses who choose to be authors.

Advice for writers of business communication implies that certain stylistic conventions will contribute to the effectiveness of that communication. The case for improved readability and comprehension which arose from high-impact style is well made; however, a comprehensive review of the literature reveals little consideration as to the impact of the effect of writing style on behavior. To test the effect of writing style on compliance with instructions, the authors operationalized effectiveness as compliance with written instructions and conducted a field test involving 129 military officers. Instructions inviting subjects to obtain certain study materials were prepared in accordance with high-impact, low-impact, and high-impact with bottom line last prescriptions, and were provided to each of three randomly formed groups. Subjects in the group who received high-impact instructions complied with those instructions at a significantly higher rate than the group which received instructions in the low-impact style. Compliance data collected in the study also indicates that high-impact style elicits more timely compliance with instructions and that bottom-line first instructions may be more effective than other styles. The study generally validates the presumption that high-impact writing style is positively correlated with effectiveness in eliciting a desired behavioral response.

This article focuses on recruiters' perceptions of technical writers in terms of what information should be included in cover letters and resumes, as well as the roles of interviewees and interviewers in the employment interview. The results reveal that 1) the interviewee should include information in the cover letter that is not in the resume, that 2) employment history and educational background are the most important parts of the resume, that 3) communication skills, credibility, maturity and work experience are the most important dimensions of the interviewee, and that 4) the interviewer should present an overview of the position, job description, and short-and-long range department goals. Other results are discussed in the article.

Public relations writing has been neglected as a research topic in professional communication. This article uses rhetorical theory from a number of fields to examine a topic of recent concern—shared, or negotiated, meaning—in relation to two very different samples of public relations writing: the public relations texts produced by political-advocacy organizations involved in the midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s and an entry from an organizational newsletter. More specifically, the article studies the role of four rhetorical elements—exophoric and intertextual references, metaphors, and narratives—in generating a shared meaning. In doing so, the article develops the thesis that narratives were particularly important to this public relations writing because they provided a comprehensive, compelling framework for belief and thus contributed greatly to the shared meaning created by writers and readers.

Part I of this article, pp. 259–272, reviewed the relevant literature on advance organizers and suggested that methodological problems in previous advance organizer studies has not resolved the question of whether advance organizers facilitate the acquisition of subordinate information from text. This question is not an unimportant issue to technical communicators, whose readers often need to acquire factual information as well as more general concepts from the expository text they read. In two studies we investigated the influences of reader's background knowledge, advance organizers, relative importance of idea units, and idea units' position within a text structure on the recall of textual information. Subjects read introductory and text materials and subsequently were tested for their recognition of idea units that were structurally high and important, structurally high and unimportant, structurally low and important, or structurally low and unimportant. In the first study, forty-eight college students were randomly assigned to conditions consisting of relevant or irrelevant background, organizer or no organizer, and text or no text. There were significant main effects for having read a relevant text and for importance of idea units, and an interaction between structural level and importance. A significant organizer by text or no text interaction and absence of a significant main effect for the organizer indicated that the organizer influenced text processing rather than priming relevant prior knowledge, which is a previously undocumented requirement of advance organizer research. In the second study, conducted with eighty-eight college students, we substituted a purpose, no purpose condition for the text, no text condition of the first study. We observed a significant main effect for importance and a significant four-way interaction involving structure, importance, background, and organizer. The more relevant knowledge a reader had, the less dependent he or she was on text structure, and an advance organizer compensated for the absence of relevant prior knowledge.

This article reviews previous research on advance organizers, introductory text adjuncts intended to provide the reader of expository text with a meaningful context within which to process unfamiliar, or difficult, new information. Research conducted during the past thirty years well documents the fact that advance organizers do, indeed, inspire significant increases in comprehension among readers whose prior knowledge “subsumers” are inadequate to provide a necessary assimilative context. One issue on which theorists yet disagree, however, is the efficacy of advance organizers in facilitating the acquisition of subordinate text detail, or facts. Definitional inconsistencies and methodological deficiencies in previous research have clouded this issue. Subsequently in this journal, Part II of this article will present the results of two empirical studies that resolve these methodological problems and specifically address the question of the effects of advance organizers on the acquisition of text detail.

Products liability law requires manufacturers to supply adequate instructions with products when consumers need them to safely and effectively use the products. This article spells out what the courts say should go into directions and warnings to make them legally adequate. In a nutshell, the courts mandate that instructions contain complete, accurate, and tested directions that consumers can readily notice and follow. Further, instructions must meet government, industry, and company standards. And, for products that can cause harm, the instructions must warn of potential hazards.

This article tests the value of Kenneth Burke's methodology of placing screens before seemingly unproblematic objects to reveal their complex and often contradictory natures. The scientific article reporting experimental results is explored through three such “terministic screens”—the sermon, the playscript, and the blueprint. The result tells as much about Burke as a thinker as it does about the ways of thinking about the experimental article.