Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss how to design a course in technical communication that actively prepares students for subsequent internships with nonprofit agencies. In specific, I outline social development and social learning theories, service-learning pedagogies, and lesson plans and assignments that integrate these theories into practice. This project serves as a model that insists that the teacher first instructs students regarding not only rhetorical aspects of document design, including audience awareness and style, but also in placing the students in internships and designing assignments to be fulfilled in internship roles. The combination of classroom practices with an internship supports the idea that students learn the value of the process of writing, including the social embeddedness that can often influence their writing.

This study examines the controversy over alleged cannibalism in the prehistoric American Southwest as it played out in scholarly journals. It also examines the lessons those controversies provide technical communication. Data painstakingly collected from human remains at ancestral Pueblo sites have been interpreted as representing cannibalism and, alternatively, as indicating witchcraft, mutilation of the dead, and warfare. Three focal points of this study are the circular process of developing criteria for analysis in archaeology, the role of analogy in building hypotheses, and the role of gestalt in interpretation of the findings. This study also looks at the ways narratives contribute to knowledge building.

Community-based projects immerse technical writing students in intercultural communication, addressing local needs and shaping documents in human terms. Students at a South Texas university work to establish communication with clients in a city-county health department to create effective documents and disseminate family health legislation. To prepare students for interactions in multicultural settings, the teacher provides an instructional framework that highlights the concepts and values of intercultural communication and the principles for effective problem-solving. Students engaged in the Baby Moses ( el niño Moisés) project encounter misunderstandings, rhetorical challenges within the process of document creation, and cultural tensions that thwart their goal to disseminate information to the community. Students and the teacher learn that the classroom, like the city-county health department, is a fertile site for cultural disequilibrium, tensions, and potential cultural awareness. To insure a viable Technical and Professional Writing Program in a culturally diverse university and surrounding community, the teacher identifies opportunities that help students develop and enhance their identities as culturally-sensitive communicators and effective problem solvers.

To build upon user-centered design methods, we used a collaborative and multi-modal approach to involve users early in the design process for a website. This article presents our methods and results and addresses the benefits and limitations of the Collaborative Prototype Design Process (CPDP), including ways in which this new method can be implemented. The CPDP is an innovative approach to user-centered website design that emphasizes collaboration, iterative testing, and data-driven design. The CPDP balances the power and needs of users with those of designers and, thus, enables design teams to test more tasks and involve more users. We divided our initial team into three independent design teams to separately profile users, test usability of low-fidelity paper prototypes, and then create and test usability of resulting wireframes. After completing the user-centered design and usability testing, the three teams merged to analyze their diverse findings and create a final prototype.

Although contemporary writers on culture have argued for more dynamic approaches to culture in intercultural technical communication scholarship, much of the theoretical position on culture is still heavily based on “large culture” ideologies. Yet, not only do these ideologies fail to account for cultural practices and values within less comprehensive groups within culture, but they do not accommodate the inputs individuals make in specific communication contexts. This article draws from the existing body of work and the critical cultural perspectives on culture advocated by contemporary anthropologists and sociologists, mainly Arjun Appadurai (1996), to argue that we construct culture discursively to address cultural issues in intercultural technical communication. A discursive paradigm of culture sees culture as “socially constructed” in which culture is under construction and reconstruction by active cultural actors, who construct their identities and negotiate systems of knowledge and meaning that come to play during intercultural contacts.

This article traces the influences of hypertext theory throughout the various genres of online publication in technical communication. It begins with a look back at some of the important concepts and theorists writing about hypertext theory from the post-World War II era, to the early years of the World Wide Web 2.0, and the very differing notions of its potential. A significant challenge during this formative period was the fact that limitations in technology and infrastructure placed limitations on the potential envisioned by these scholars. The ways in which we look at early scholarship differ even a decade or more later, in terms of some of the information technologies and tools we use today. In the Web 2.0 era, we see a trend of blending and extension beyond principles found within hypertext theory in the tools we use and user experiences we create with them.

The software for a military command and control (C2) system presents an information space in which the C2 operator must manipulate a complex set of information in order to maintain the common tactical picture. A usability test of C2PC, a C2 system currently used by the U.S. Marine Corps, was performed with 13 Marines as participants. They were given problems designed to require actions similar to what they would encounter during real-world Combat Operations Center (COC) operation. The observations revealed an interesting disconnect between the underlying design assumptions and how beginner C2 operators interacted with the system. They were able to perform simple tasks, but could not combine those simple tasks into realistic tasks. These differences highlight the need for using complex scenarios when testing complex systems.

What is currently known about the history of the paragraph has relied on the work of the first English and American compositionists, humanists, and philologists of the late nineteenth century. Alexander Bain and his followers defined the requirements for the English paragraph and believed it had not existed prior to the eighteenth century. Their sole focus, on humanist and historical writing, yielded a distorted, if not an incorrect history of the paragraph. This article begins to correct that view, prevalent since 1866, by examining paragraphs of practical works, such as printed how-to books of the early English Renaissance until 1700. The variety and quantity of how-to documents increased with the growth of knowledge, advent of printing, and emergence and expansion of middle-class English readers eager for books written in an accessible, non-Latinate style. When we examine paragraphs from technical books printed as early as 1490, we find paragraphs that exemplify the qualities stipulated by Bain nearly 400 years later. The existence of well defined and formulated paragraphs throughout the English Renaissance and the seventeenth century in a wide variety of technical book—works ignored by literary scholars pursuing the history of English—suggests that the paragraph is clearly indigenous to the English composition, much more so than modern composition theory has acknowledged. This article explores example paragraphs of these first English printed technical works and begins to expand the history of the English paragraph. Further studies of later Middle English paragraphs in incunabula of practical, liturgical, and historical works will likely show the indigenous nature of the paragraph to English composition and allow scholars to see how the formation of the paragraph helped English writers over 500–700 years ago create complete texts.

The nuclear power industry is undergoing a renaissance, led by initiatives from the Obama administration and several states. In light of this development and the growing information economy, it is crucial that the public be well-informed, effective, and responsible regarding important technological issues. For this reason, undergraduate education, whether for technical or non-technical majors, must include an awareness of the complexity, ambiguity, and interestedness of the use of technical language and information. This is particularly important in communication involving public discourse and perceptions. I discuss here how I foster such awareness in my junior-level technical writing course for non-majors. We focus on the concept “safe” in relation to radiation and nuclear power. This is done in the overall context of making a recommendation for nuclear power as an energy source for the state of Florida for the next two decades, a realistic and urgent technical communication situation. Students see that standards and even the definitions of crucial terms shift depending on context and social circumstances, and that real-world choices involve trade-offs and balances between advantages and disadvantages.

This article presents follow-up information to a previous publication regarding ways to increase emphasis on research skills in undergraduate Technical Communication curricula. We detail the ways our undergraduate program highlights research by requiring majors to complete senior thesis projects that culminate in submission to an online peer-reviewed journal housed at our institution. This article also describes the roles our undergraduate students play in helping to manage the publication of that academic journal, an activity that further increases students' awareness of the research process and the value of writing for an academic audience beyond the classroom.

Professionals in the workplace are rarely asked to write autobiographical essays. Such essays, however, are an excellent tool for helping students explore their growth as professionals. This article explores the use of such essays in a technical writing class.

This article uses theories of technical communication and archives to advance a pedagogy that includes archival production in the technical communication classroom. By developing and maintaining local classroom archives, students directly engage in valuable processes of appraisal, selection, collaboration, and retention. The anticipated outcomes of this work are the critical practice of making connections, the decentering of the self, the ability to work through noise, and the ability to imagine future users of the archive. The authors conclude that local classroom archives are one new means of meaningful instruction in the technical communication classroom and the local archive concept has great potential for further development.

This article explores how the English language contributes to cross-boundary communication failure and establishes that there is an “English language problem” that has not been adequately addressed in preparing United States native English-speaking students for international technical communication tasks. For example, U.S. technical communication scholars are still grappling with the problems of using English in software internationalization and translating technical communication products across boundaries of national culture and language without privileging Western values and beliefs. The tendency is to assume American culture and American Standard English as the norm, and to identify cultural and linguistic differences as problems only when there is a communication failure or when non-native speakers of English translate product users' manuals and other documents for use by Americans. The article draws attention to the limitations of the current favored strategies for training native speakers in international audience analysis and calls for a revamping of the curriculum to allow for the integration of language-based methodologies. It suggests the incorporation of the World Englishes perspective into training programs to internationalize students' learning experiences.

Single sourcing through a content management system (CMS) is altering technical communication practices in many organizations, including institutions of higher education. Open source software (OSS) solutions are currently among the most popular content management platforms adopted by colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. The GPL license, ease of use, customizability, and the large, global user base of mature content management systems are among the reasons these organizations choose OSS to meet their CMS needs. This article reviews the literature on the effects of single sourcing on technical communication practice. It also explores issues of OSS adoption, both generally and in international contexts. Through a case study of an OSS CMS implementation at a mid-sized public college, the article examines important contributions technical communicators can make to the rollout of an OSS-based CMS.

By offering open-source software (OSS)-based networks as an affordable technology alternative, we partnered with a nonprofit community organization. In this article, we narrate the client-based experiences of this partnership, highlighting the ways in which OSS and open-source culture (OSC) transformed our students’ and our own expectations of traditional hierarchies\nin technical writing classes and work. The integration of OSS into technical communication classes shifted our work toward distributed symbolic-analytic issues and practices. Specifically, our engagements with OSS/OSC increased student awareness of the political and cultural significance of OSS and proprietary technology systems, and flattened traditional educational and client-student hierarchies. In this way, OSS/OSC offers ways to attune local pedagogy and practice to global developments in technical writing, and provide today’s technical communication students with the experiences needed to succeed in the workplace of tomorrow.

Although books in the For Dummies series and other similar series have found commercial success, the approach to information design they use has not received much attention in technical communication journals. This article reports on readers' responses to information presented in the magazine Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! and two other nursing journals. Three groups of readers (two groups of nursing students and one group of nursing faculty members) responded to three articles they read by completing questionnaires and participating in focus groups. Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! was regarded as easy to read and as a good starting point for less-experienced readers, but its tone and style elicited some strong objections as well. The article provides observations and recommendations about using an informal approach to information design.

This article argues that in spite of some attempts to expand the diversity of approaches in Technical Communication, the field remains rooted in an expedient, managerial, techno-rational discourse, where discourse is understood as the values that guide research, practice, and teaching. The article draws on approaches from Communication Studies, specifically discursive analysis and metaphor analysis, to ground this claim and to demonstrate what possible alternative discourses might be possible. The article then argues that moving toward an “interpretive” discourse will expand the values of Technical Communication, but in a way that both retains existing assumptions but also includes a new focus on the “complete person.” Interpretive discourse is theorized using Habermas' communicative rationality and User Experience Design and the article concludes with some implications about moving Technical Communication toward discursive diversity. Ultimately, the goal of the article is to encourage researchers, teachers, and professionals to embrace this discursive diversity that complicates our historical means-ends rationality.

The authors examine language from the perspective of models of empirical sciences, which discipline studies the relationship between reality, models, and formalisms. Such a perspective allows one to notice that linguistics approached within the classical framework share a number of problems with other experimental sciences studied initially exclusively within that framework because of making the same sort of assumptions. By examining solutions to some of these problems found in contemporary science, the authors point out alternative approaches, which could be relevant for linguistics research, and some of which have already been tested in language studies. In particular, Corpus Linguistics is presented as an especially promising approach, positioned to avoid many of the pitfalls of the classical framework. Consequently, it seems that the future of linguistics, from theoretical to applied, such as Technical Writing, must be embraced by Corpus Linguistics research.

Risk communication has been explored in technical communication for over 15 years, but it has been largely confined to communicating the risk of industrial activity, medical risks, or environmental threats to the public. Using the framework previous risk communication has provided, this article applies those ideas to research science, specifically to stem cell research, where government opposition until recently has limited this research, preventing it from potentially providing organs for those who need a replacement or more effective treatments for other diseases such as diabetes or Parkinson's disease. Risk communication in the United States and Europe is contrasted to delineate the greater effort being made in Europe to construct stem cell research socially for the researcher and the public.

Steven Katz's “The Ethic of Expediency” has become a reference point for discussions of ethics since its 1992 publication. Previously, this author assessed Katz's rhetorical analysis of Nazi technical communication against current research on the Holocaust and noted that scholarship suggests ideology rather than technological expediency as its motivating force. Yet implicit in the author's critique are two remaining questions, namely: What other rhetorical interpretations may be possible of the SS technical memo analyzed by Katz? And is Katz, who makes broad generalizations about Western rhetoric based on a single document, supported by examples of other Nazi technical communications? This article explores alternate interpretations of the SS memo suggested by the arguments of Rivers and Moore; presents the author's view that the Katz thesis decontextualizes the memo and that historical context argues for a primarily ideological ethos; and reviews sources for English translations of other Nazi documents.

Website localization is an important part of international technical communication. However, at present, few technical communication programs offer courses in localization. This article provides an overview of a course devised to familiarize students with ideas and approaches related to website localization. The course was based upon Robert Gagné's nine events of instruction—an approach that allowed students to move from the learning of abstract ideas to the application of knowledge to the website localization process.

2008 marked the 10-year Anniversary of the Open Source movement, which has had a substantial impact on not only software production and adoption, but also on the sharing and distribution of information. Technical communication as a discipline has taken some advantage of the movement or its derivative software, but this article argues not as much as it could or should. We have adopted Open Source Software (OSS) to manage courses or websites; we have, following the principles of Open Source, made some intellectual resources available; but we have not developed a truly open—open to access, open to use, and open to edit—pedagogical resource that teachers of technical and professional communication courses at every level can rely on to craft free offerings to their students. Now is the ideal time to consider developing OpenTechComm. This article makes the case for why and how it could be implemented.

On Technological Subjects, written and completed by Song Yingxing in 1628, is China's first comprehensive technical writing book intended for a general audience. Its 18 chapters cover nearly all the major technological subjects of its time, such as growing grains, weaving clothes, making sugar and salt, and building ships. The book accommodates various audiences' information needs by combining equipment and material descriptions, process explanations, and task instructions. To help audiences understand his descriptions and to follow his instructions more effectively, the author integrates 100 full-page detailed drawings. Another mechanism that the author uses to help his audiences complete the described tasks is using names (nouns) instead of action-oriented phrases for most of the chapter titles. Song's book embodies several important features in modern technical communication, especially in China's modern technical communication. The book should help international technical communicators understand China's modern technical communication from the perspectives of audience's awareness, organization of information, and use of visuals.

This article reports a study of internship requirements in technical communication programs compared with three established professions and one emerging profession that have certification or licensing requirements for practitioners. The study addresses three questions about technical communication internship programs: 1) Are internships offered as a way to fulfill program academic credit requirements? 2) If internships are offered, are they required or elective? 3) What are the minimum/maximum academic credits allowed for internships toward fulfillment of program requirements and the number of workplace hours of internship required? To answer these questions we focused on three elements of internship program management: academic credits, workplace hours per academic credit, and total workplace hours required. Our findings indicate that there is considerable disparity for these factors among programs in our field and that we lack criteria similar to those used in established professions for internships.

The tools and techniques utilized in the technical communications profession are constantly improving and changing. Information Technology (IT) organizations devote the necessary resources to equip and train engineering, marketing, and sales teams, but often fail to do so for technical documentation teams. Many IT organizations tend to view documentation as an afterthought; however, consumers of IT products frequently base their purchasing decisions on the end user documentation's content, layout, and presentation. Documentation teams play a unique role in IT organizations as they help to build and create a public identity through end user manuals and the corporate website, as well as maintain intellectual knowledge through knowledge sharing and management. The technical communicator “ makes sense” of complex engineering specifications by creating user-friendly manuals for the layman. The practitioner who compiles and records this complex information is a valuable resource to any IT organization. Therefore, on-going training for technical documentation teams is essential to stay competitive in the fast-paced technical market. Technical communicators in IT organizations who only write end user manuals are becoming a rarity. Research indicates a marked trend toward technical writers in multiple roles and varied responsibilities that include web design and development, and business systems analysis functions. Although these added roles and responsibilities require training on some of the newer software tools and more complex programming tools, technical communicators are experiencing difficulty keeping pace with these tools. This article discusses technical documentation teams in IT organizations and provides an on-going training assessment to help technical documentation managers identify their team's strengths and weaknesses. In addition, measures and results from a study conducted at eight IT organizations, are provided to show the effect of how the integration of on-going training for documentation teams enhances individual competency and improves team performance.

This article addresses previous arguments that call for increased emphasis on research in technical communication programs. Focusing on the value of scholarly-based research at the undergraduate level, we present New Mexico Tech's thesis model as an example of helping students develop familiarity with research skills and methods. This two-semester sequence serves as a capstone experience for students' writing, designing, editing, and presentation skills. It also involves members of our corporate advisory board and provides an opportunity to teach students to understand and apply research methods to unique projects, skills we argue will benefit students no matter what environments they enter upon graduation.

A significant problem for practitioners of technical communication is to gain the skills to compete in a global, multicultural work environment. Instructors of technical communication can provide future practitioners with the tools to compete and excel in this global environment by introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the service-level classroom. By practicing how to use these heuristics in “real-world” contexts, instructors can prepare students to function as both information architects and symbolic-analytic operators within this global work environment. In this article, I first examine common cultural heuristics as they pertain to business communication. Next, I articulate how technical communicators can benefit from incorporating these heuristics into the classroom. Finally, I offer a pedagogical approach to introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the service-level technical communication classroom.

Since 1992, Steven Katz's “The Ethic of Expediency” on the rhetoric of technical communication during the Holocaust has become a reference point for discussions of ethics. But how does his thesis compare to current understandings of the Holocaust? As this article describes, Katz was in step with the trend two decades ago to universalize the lessons of the genocide but his thesis presents key problems for Holocaust scholars today. Against his assertion that pure technological expediency was the ethos of Nazi Germany, current scholarship emphasizes the role of ideology. Does that invalidate his thesis? Katz's analysis of rhetoric and his universalizing application to the Holocaust are two claims that may be considered separately. Yet even if one does not agree that “expediency” is inherent in Western rhetoric, Katz has raised awareness that phronesis is socially constructed so that rhetoric can be unethically employed. Thus, rather than remain an uncritically accepted heuristic for technical communicators, “The Ethic of Expediency” can be a starting point for ongoing exploration into the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of the genre.

Although much has been written about the use of rhetoric in technical communication, the framing of technical documents often is overlooked. Framing differs from rhetoric chiefly in that it involves the use of content selection and structure to place information in a particular context. In this article, I will analyze the techniques used to frame a technical report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's “Summary for Policymakers,” and compare them to the techniques used to frame corporate news releases and newspaper articles written about the report. This framing analysis shows that writers of technical documents, news releases, and news articles frame their documents chiefly by choosing which facts to include or exclude, and by the positioning of information within the document.

This article investigates the status of orality in the history of technical communication. The article calls for orality as an integral part and driving force of technical writing. The article brings to light the misconceptions that have led to a diminished role of oral communication in technical writing. The article shows the implications of oral skills for improved effectiveness of technical communicators. The article outlines the challenges and promises of teaching oral communication in technical writing.

A recent British national intelligence-based Assessment (2002) illustrates how one government agency communicated science to serve its policy goals. This article analyzes some of the values that drive science, public policy, and national intelligence, and traces how those values affected the Assessment writers' goals and communication strategies. Through close reading of the Assessment's foreword and first section, this study shows how the writers shaped scientific and technical information to satisfy their disciplines' values and to naturalize their “proper perspective” on the policy case. Further analysis of similar documents will extend current research on scientific rhetoric, multidisciplinary collaborative writing, and public communication.

This research article reports the results of an online survey distributed among technical writing instructors in 2006. The survey aimed to examine how we teach intercultural communication in basic technical writing courses: our current practices and methods. The article discusses three major challenges that instructors may face when teaching about intercultural communication. These challenges concern teacher preparation, time and proposed goals and objectives, and teaching materials and methods. This article provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

Some struggles for prestige in academic technical communication are self-defeating and wasteful because of the clash between the material (or positive-sum) economy of the workplace and the positional (or zero-sum) economy of the academy. Some professors of technical communication create disrespect for themselves and their specialities because they create degrading representations of working people and their artifacts, they promote impossible standards, and they advance discredited or misleading theories. More profitable approaches to gaining prestige for academic technical communication include recognizing that not everyone can be the top person in the positional economy, studying works on the economics of prestige, and promoting the genuinely good works that already exist in academic technical communication.

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom.

Kaplan's framework of contrastive rhetoric has been widely accepted in the field of cross-cultural technical communication. However, in the last four decades, contextual factors such as economic globalization trend and the advances of communication technologies are changing our ways of interacting with others. As a result our understanding of culture and cultural differences need to be adjusted. In this research, I start by recommending a workable definition of culture in the present context—culture as a process, which establishes a foundation for cross-cultural rhetorical research in the new era when communication across cultures transcends national boundaries. Based on the critical perspective of culture, I continue to point out the limitations of contrastive rhetoric and argue that contrastive rhetoric's view of culture and its research purpose and methodology need to be modified to overcome its constraints and better meet the needs of the present social context.

Technical communication instructors want to help students, as well as professionals, design effective PowerPoint presentations. Toward this end, I compare the advice of academic and industry experts about effective PowerPoint presentation design to survey responses from university students about slide text, visual elements, animations, and other issues related to PowerPoint presentation design and delivery. Based on this comparison, I suggest some topics, such as PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view, that technical communication instructors and other presentation instructors might address when they cover presentations in their classes or seminars.

Describing the emergence of the first shipbuilding texts, particularly those in English provides another chapter in the story of the emergence of English technical writing. Shipwrightery texts did not appear in English until the middle decades of the seventeenth century because shipwrightery was a closed discourse community which shared knowledge via oral transmission. The shift from orality to textuality in shipwrightery did not occur until advancing navigation principles enabled ships to sail in open waters. Shipping rapidly became a commercial business, and shipwrightery was forced to move from closely-guarded simple design principles to mathematically-based designs too complex to be retained only in memory of shipwrights and shared via oral transmission. Textual transmission began to supplant oral instruction. The evolution of English shipwrightery provides rich research opportunities for historians tracking the development of technical writing.

The “steel bible” emerged in 1919 and went through 11 editions in 80 years. In its evolution we can see the shift from individual to group authorship, an increasing use of visual elements, and a physical change from a small, hand-held volume to a weighty desktop reference. In a textual analysis, we can see that it was essentially static, changing only by additions and deletions, as the industry evolved. The eventual closing of hundreds of plants and the migration of the industry to other countries can be seen in the change of publisher, the sudden absence of photography, and the international references. Originally, the steel bible came from the factory floor and the words of the plant managers, but by the 1990s, it was a highly-abstracted representation of knowledge. In the steel bible, we can see the history of the industry and the maturing of technical communication in the 20th century.

Content analysis is a powerful empirical method for analyzing text, a method that technical communicators can use on the job and in their research. Content analysis can expose hidden connections among concepts, reveal relationships among ideas that initially seem unconnected, and inform the decision-making processes associated with many technical communication practices. In this article, we explain the basics of content analysis methodology and dispel common misconceptions, report on a content analysis case study, reveal the most important objectives associated with conducting high quality content analyses, and summarize the implications of content analysis as a tool for technical communicators and researchers.

Teachers often test course materials by using them in class. Usability testing provides an alternative: teachers receive student feedback and revise materials before teaching a class. Case studies based on interviews and observations with two teaching assistants who usability tested materials before teaching introductory technical writing demonstrate how usability testing can make novice teachers more confident about and help them predict student experiences with their assignments. By helping to train teachers, usability testing can also help better serve students.

Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology is an underutilized, relatively unknown resource in technical communication which could be exploited not only for its potential clarification of large social issues that involve our discipline, but also specifically toward the development of a critical theory of illustrations. Applications of critical theory help strengthen our discipline by forcing us to delineate extant approaches and consider whether democratic goals are being achieved through those approaches. If a critical theory of illustrations can be built from Feenberg's critical theory of technology, it should be useful for classroom instructors and researchers as well as theorists.

This research article investigates new developments in the representation of the intercultural component in textbooks for a service technical writing course. Through textual analysis, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, I report discourse analysis of 15 technical writing textbooks published during 1993–2006. The theoretical and practical elements of intercultural teaching have been expanded in recent years, but this progress is quite slow. This article provides some directions in which the textbooks can be revised. Such an analysis may be of interest to textbook writers and educators.

Localization includes translating, explaining, and adapting a document for use in a specific culture. This article presents the case of a form for reporting the findings and decisions of pre-production meetings held during development of electronic products. The need to localize such a document may seem less obvious or critical than the need for sales documents like manuals, but this case demonstrates the same cultural requirements and, furthermore, the requirements of corporate differences. To meet local needs, the comprehensive preparation that localization requires should follow specific methods in each step of a process corresponding to the general writing process, like the stages defined in common technical writing texts. The deliberate use of an effective writing process to localize documents will improve results.

A common aphorism in the halls of education is that the writing skills of Americans decline over time. Compared to the “golden age of letters,” so the argument goes, each subsequent generation of writers is worse than the last. Although contemporary readers and educators commiserate over encounters with bad writing, a fair comparison of 18th century American exemplars to modern American exemplars reveals a significant advance in clarity, an advance that technical communicators can be proud of. To demonstrate the advances in expository writing over the past two centuries, the author compares what the authors of the U.S. Constitution did with their limited resources to what modern professional communicators do with their abundance of resources. Many of the communication problems that were pervasive when the U.S. Constitution was created have since been remedied by insights emerging from the fields of linguistics, human factors, and cognitive psychology, among others.