The role of literary and rhetorical tropes in scientific discourse is frequently overlooked, largely because “rhetoric” and “science” seem to be incompatible modes of expression. However, if we look closely at scientific explanations—especially those designed to inform a general public—we find that they are as reliant on, if not more so, than more “subjective” forms of public discourse. In A Grammar of Motive, Kenneth Burke posits that all forms of discourse rely heavily on the “four master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony to express ideas, and science is not an exception. This article outlines the processes behind the four master tropes and demonstrates instances where these tropes occur in the expression of scientific concepts found in such fields as biology, physics, and even mathematics. The purpose is to show that, contrary to what many members of the scientific (and lay) community suppose, rhetorical and literary tropes are necessary components to a linguistic understanding of complex scientific concepts; that such tropes do not hinder our understanding, but are in fact necessary to it.

Daniel Defoe, one of the pioneers of the English novel, primarily earned his living as a journalist, pamphleteer, proposal writer, and freelance business consultant. A born entrepreneur, Defoe's many projects included promoting and marketing the first practical diving bell, designing commercial fisheries and improving London's sewer system, producing a series of popular self-help manuals, and founding and editing the first English technical writing journal, The Projector. These were the products of Defoe's indefatigable pen, and the utilitarian simplicity of his business and technical writing has strongly influenced English prose ever since. This article will examine two major pieces of Defoe's professional writing: An Essay of Projects, (1698) a portfolio of his best proposals, and the landmark The Complete English Tradesman (1725), the first English business writing manual. These and similar texts would form the loam of Defoe's great novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1721), and A Journal of a Plague Year (1722). While Defoe's professional writing shaped his creative writing, his gifts as a novelist—his plain, demotic style, his knack for concise narrative and analytical summary, his ability to create convincing personas through textual documentation—shaped his business writing. Both forms of writing made him the premier spokesperson of a new social and economic order.

Noting that recent research in workplace writing tends toward description of contexts for writing, this study turns its attention to text itself, focusing on the nominal expressions in the discourse on management. Analysis shows that these nominals recursively delete not only agent roles but also those of experiencer, object, and goal, and at the same time conflate the interests of researchers and managers. Calling on pragmatic theories of politeness, Giddens' characterization of bureaucracy as reflexive system, and Foucault's concept of “governmentality,” this study suggests that management nominals are a particularly intense expression of modernity itself.

One function of language is to communicate substantive information, but that is not its only function—sometimes not even its primary function. The criminal and drug class adopt an argot unintelligible to law abiding citizens, and that cipher function is one of the purposes of that language. Teenagers of any era adopt a vocabulary that shows that they are hip or hep or with it or cool. Such languages are often rich in metaphor and at their root poetic. It is fascinating to investigate these elusive and protean sub-languages, because they demonstrate with modern instances how language has evolved and how it continues to evolve. Our present focus, with technical sub-languages reveals sociological functions of language that transcend mere transfer of substantive information. Technical language would seem to be at the opposite pole from criminals' argot or teenagers' cool slang. We might expect it to exhibit that so-called purer function of transferring information, little affected by sociological factors. Nonetheless, we find one sociological feature, the shibboleth, acting widely throughout technical fields. This is our current topic.

In the future, more and more technical writers across the discipline are likely to become involved in designing and developing multimedia products. Entering this new, challenging, and rewarding field requires retooling current skills used in the production of text-based information products to add knowledge of a wider range of media, including audio, video, computer graphics, digital photography, and authoring systems. This article presents an overview of the process of bringing a multimedia product to the point of sale.

Technical writers and editors assume that readers are generally helped when nominalizations and the weak verbs that accompany them are replaced with the verb form of the nominalization. The study discussed here tests that assumption. Specifically, the study assessed the effect of nominalizations, nominalization imageability, and idea importance on readers' recall of technical prose. The results indicate that denominalized text is most effective in helping native speakers focus on more important information. Yet for non-native speakers, nominalized text may work quite well. Conclusions and recommendations for further study are offered.

Now that intranets have become the new model for information technology systems, we can expect that more organizations will adopt online document review and editing procedures. This may be problematic for technical editors. Survey studies published in 1992 and 1995 found that most technical editors were still editing on paper most of the time even though an overwhelming percentage of them had access to computers and expressed a positive attitude toward using computers for editing-related tasks. In this article I review discussions of online editing in the technical communication literature to understand how online editing has been constructed within the discipline and why many technical editors remain loyal to traditional paper-based procedures. I discuss a recent call for emulating handwritten mark-up and author queries electronically and compare this “technical fix” with the collaborative online editing affordances of the latest word processors. I then discuss studies of online reading and composition whose results suggest that the materiality of hard-copy editing procedures may contribute to some inherent advantages over online emulations of such procedures, or at least foster the widespread perception that certain advantages exist for hard-copy editing. I conclude by urging an open-minded and flexible but also critical perspective toward online editing technology. Such a perspective should help make the move to online editing a more positive experience for technical editors. It might also help them define a higher-level role for editing in the information and document development process.

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

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.

As the speed of travel on the “Information Superhighway” accelerates, many small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) do not effectively keep pace. SME computer resistors include 1) the slow-plodding neophyte computer users in the far right hand lane, 2) the firms curious about computerization but who are yet to make a purchase decision, idling in neutral on the access ramps, and 3) the business that purchases improper equipment and/or software and ventures onto the “road” without proper training and support, being run over by the speeding industry. In the information high-tech world of the 1990s it seems amazing that an estimated quarter of all small businesses still do not have their first personal computer. This article calls upon the innovators of the communications field to look in the rear view mirror to see the businesses left behind in the information expansion race. A model utilizing social learning theory defines a framework for road service [1], getting the small business “resister” up to the information superhighway speed limit.

In “Professional Documentation,” a class designed to make Hungarian students of English translation familiar with written genres, that are not translation, abstracting plays an important role. Students get theoretical background to abstracting in a lecture and by analyzing the appropriate chapters of technical writing textbooks. The structure and objectivity of the abstract, the features of its informative variant receive special attention. Practical student activities include analyzing and writing abstracts in different settings. Many of the methods applied can be used in the education of translators in other languages and in technical writing classes in other countries.

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning, especially when they read scientific and technical texts. Many studies have explored how this “silent speech” affects the reading process. As a follow-up to a previous article about applying a phonological reading model to technical communication, this article proposes that educators and practitioners of technical communication would benefit greatly from a thorough understanding of the speech instinct. Therefore, the author explores the speech instinct, how humans developed it, and how it has been and still is fostered by reading behavior and pedagogy.

Formalization of cognitive grammar depends in an important way on modeling the process of assessing similarity. This article points out that such formalization is difficult to achieve within the present formulation [1] of the grammar and introduces a modification that will allow modeling the process of similarity. Next, it is suggested that the mechanism of assessing similarity in the modified analogical-operatorial version of cognitive grammar be that of analogical modeling presented in Skousen [2]. Finally, it indicates some consequences of the proposition for the practice of communication. The modification, the analogical-operatorial mode of language use, allows linguistic units, in addition to their function of representing the semantic meaning of these units, to serve as operators differentiating among semantic or other conceptual structures. This introduces inhomogeneity to the content purported with linguistic units and leads to preserving linguistic compositionality understood in a new sense. It also allows one to treat the pragmatic meaning in the same way as the semantic one, and accounts for a compact use of linguistic units. Using linguistic units to differentiate allows one to convey information not contained in the encoded meaning of these structures. This can be utilized to communicate more efficiently but also poses the danger of purporting unwanted meaning.

The 1995 appearance of Microsoft's Bob interface directly poses the question of how anthropomorphic the human computer interface design should be. A historical approach to the question offers three important observations to designers: 1) that the impulse to anthropomorphicize technology has been longstanding and has been employed with artifacts other than computers; 2) that the normal evolution of technologies proceeds through an introductory phase during which a culture becomes acclimatized to the new technology; moreover, one of the methods by which cultures have traditionally become acclimatized to new technologies is through anthropomorphization; and 3) the perception of anthropomorphism in the human computer interface has been complicated by the fact that “computers” were, in fact, first people not machines. An historical approach to answering the interface design question posed by Microsoft's Bob interface suggests that designers productively accommodate the longstanding human impulse to anthropomorphicize new technologies.

The two purposes of this article are: 1) to use metaphorical analysis to determine whether or not Max Planck invented the quantum postulate and 2) to demonstrate how metaphorical analysis can be used to analyze the rhetoric of revolutionary texts in science. Metaphors often serve as the basis of invention for scientific theories. When we identify these metaphors in Planck's original 1900 quantum paper, it is clear that Planck did consider the quantum postulate to be important. However, we also see that he does not consider the quantum postulate to be revolutionary.

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.

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.

Document designers who present procedural instructions can choose several formats: prose, table, logical tree, or flow chart. In all cases, however, it is essential that the instructions are ordered in a way that allows users to reach the outcome in as little time as possible. In this article two formal methods are discussed that help determine which order is most efficient. The first method is based on the selection principle. The second method is based on the principle of the average least effort.

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.

To test the relative efficiency and learning effect of text, pictures, and animation in on-line help systems, six versions of an on-line help system for telephones were designed. The operational information was presented in either text, pictures, or animation and presented either with or without spatial information (in pictures). Subjects were asked to perform thirteen tasks, using these six versions of the instructions and to do the same tasks again, using the same version of the instructions, one week later. The results show that only presenting the operational information via text is the most efficient. Subjects using instructions in animation needed significantly more time than those using the text or picture versions. Adding spatial information (in pictures) was counterproductive: without this information subjects performed better in all versions. Performing the same tasks with identical instructions one week later produced the same results, but the differences were much smaller. Therefore, it has been concluded that text remains the most efficient medium as long as users have to apply the instructions immediately. If the time needed to read/see the instructions is deducted, animation turns out to be the most efficient medium. It is therefore concluded that animation could be the best medium for learning how to operate a device.

This article is about the profession of technical writing in the Netherlands. The data are mainly based on two studies. The first was directed at technical writers who work as freelancers (external writers). It was done with the objective of learning about the characteristics and backgrounds of external technical writers and about their wishes concerning the development of the profession. The second study was directed at technical writers who work inside organizations (internal writers) and focused on questions about text quality and the writing problems that threaten this quality. We will focus on three issues. After the introduction in the first section and the description of the design of our studies in the second section, we will give a global profile of technical writers in the Netherlands. In the fourth section we will give an impression of the writing problems internal technical writers have to deal with. In the fifth section opinions concerning more professionalism in the field of technical writing are discussed. Also attention is paid to current developments in professionalism.

Beginning in the 1850s, authors of American and British scientific and technical publications began to integrate photographs into their texts. These chemical and photo-mechanically reproduced images often functioned as the basis for carefully defined claims for truth. In the natural sciences, in microscopy, in medicine, in the emerging studies of psychology and the social sciences, and in the dissemination and promotion of technological accomplishments, the verity of early published photographs led authors to claim that an image could be equal to its referent in nature, or even exceed its referent when conveying scientific and technical information. This article presents a technological, cultural, and rhetorical history of published photographs based upon twenty-three images selected from a review of forty photographically illustrated texts published between 1854 and 1900.

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.

This study concerns the relationship between agent, author, and matters of fact in the doctrine and practice of classical empiricism. More particularly, it aims to provide a tentative answer to the following questions: how were empirical facts originally considered the principal object of scientific research and communication? What were the images of human conduct and the ethical codes which accompanied the rise of the fact as the prime object of human understanding? What rhetorical sources were originally deployed for the purpose of the communication of scientific factual knowledge? The historical study of empiricism provides a critical perspective on positivism on the one hand, and social constructivism on the other. It yields important insights into the linkage between experience and intentionality and its role in establishing trust in collective processes of learning.

In using a community model of communication based on consensus, we adopt a double-edged notion that encompasses both harmony and coercion within the community. But the possibility that any one of us might engage in coercion and/or terror when we intend to create harmony is something we would rather not acknowledge. So we use the metaphor “community” only in its benign aspect, in its possibility of harmony, to describe communication. This article explores how ideas of harmony and coercion play out in the metaphor of community and suggests four dimensions as continua along which communities could be described: choice/chance, time/space, abstract/concrete, affinity/proximity. If we break up the clearly bounded, either/or approach to modeling community, we can better accommodate the ambiguity we intuitively understand as an important part of communication.

Acquaintance with the writing of nurses would help instructors design assignments for nursing students who enroll in basic technical writing courses. Based on secondary research, samples of nursing documentation, and interviews with seventy-six bedside nurses, thirty nurse managers, and five nurse consultants, this study discusses the importance of writing tasks for nurses and describes the most common documents nurses generate. Good writing skills for nurses improve healthcare delivery and promote empowerment in a predominantly female profession. However, most of the bedside nurses and all the nurse managers and consultants believe nurses have significant writing problems. This article suggests instruction in six communication principles and several types of assignments that would help prepare nursing students in technical writing courses for future writing activities.

Competent writers usually avoid ambiguity, but there are some types of writing tasks such as advertising in which a writer might actually want to create ambiguous wordplays. Among the most interesting of the wordplays are those which involve structural ambiguities. In the natural course of brainstorming, advertisers will occasionally generate structural ambiguities, but a more conscious understanding of the structure of a language could make the generation of such ambiguities easier. The English language contains some characteristics and patterns which contribute significantly toward creating structural ambiguities. And if ad writers know where to focus their attention, structurally ambiguous wordplays can be generated more from design than happenstance. This article examines some of the structural features of the language which could prove useful to advertisers who wish to create deliberate structural ambiguities.

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.

Several recent journal articles, especially the one by Charles Sides [1], have questioned the form and function of technical communication. Based on actual experience with three organizations in Oregon, this writer proposes a need to rethink what we teach our technical writing students and how we go about designing assignments that“… simulate the reality of a work environment” [2]. This article will explore the types of technical writing skills which are increasingly in demand and then will offer several strategies for teaching these skills at the college level.

Organizational values, as a subset of organizational culture, provide behavioral guidelines for employees in organizations. This article proposes that metaphorical imagery can heighten the usefulness of corporate values as guideposts for behavior. The concepts which govern thought also govern everyday action. Metaphor can dominate thought by positioning perception, causing individuals to see some things to the exclusion of others. Managerial implications for the implementation of change are noted, and a process for change is suggested.

This article reports the results of survey research designed to determine how students feel about peer assistance and group writing. In general, the results are quite favorable, although more problems surface regarding fully collaborative projects than peer criticism. Statistical analysis of both objective and open-ended items yields suggestions for design and management of collaborative projects in technical communication classes.

This study examines the effect on mail survey response rates of variations in questionnaire color and format. A follow-up mail survey to a corporate incentive program was sent to more than 3,500 participants. Monitoring response rates by questionnaire version showed that a user-friendly format, followed by a two-color design, significantly increased response rates. Question wording and sequencing remained the same across questionnaire versions while format and color varied. A literature review revealed three issues addressed by past studies—structural, functional, and incentive—that impact response rates. Previous studies have found no response rate increases due to altering the color of a questionnaire. However, this study found that a user-friendly format, and to some extent color, was valuable for increasing mail survey response rates. Implications for writers of all forms of communication are drawn.

For three years, the School of Business explored writing across the curriculum (WAC) approaches for developing written communication skills of undergraduate business majors. In selected classes, instructors stressed links between understanding concepts and being able to write clearly about them, improved design of assignments, and improved feedback to students. Instructors participating in this study concluded that a WAC approach improved the quality of student writing and the applications of course concepts. They also concluded that these improvements carried over to subsequent courses. Students reported using more care in revising drafts and more attention overall, to writing in certain settings. Their attention peaked when the instructor emphasized writing. A minority of students maintained, however, that writing should be evaluated only in writing classes taught by English faculty and that evaluation of writing should not be used to determine the grades they receive on assignments or for the course itself.

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.

Documentation can be designed specifically to help people perform physical tasks. Research in computing, motor learning and in music and sports instruction suggests that documentation is more effective when it takes into account how people think about physical tasks.

The results of our recent survey of the membership of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Associated Writing Programs, and the Council of Writing Program Administration indicate the relative health of undergraduate writing programs (major, concentration, or certificate programs, not service courses) in American four-year universities and colleges. During the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of undergraduate writing programs, including technical and professional writing. But responses to our survey also suggest that while undergraduate technical and professional writing programs comprise the second largest group of programs (behind creative writing) they are not increasing as rapidly as a new kind of undergraduate writing program—a broad-based program that students can complete by taking a wide range of creative writing, composition, journalism, and technical and professional writing courses. The future seems unclear for traditional undergraduate technical and professional writing programs, and faculties need to examine their options in designing or redesigning their programs.

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

This study investigates The Treatise on Fishing with an Angle from The Book of Saint Albans to determine how a fifteenth-century author approached the problem of writing accurate, technical prose on angling, a subject never before treated in a written work. The examination reveals that many of the rhetorical features are similar to the practices of modern technical writing. For example, the treatise makes a determined effort to relieve user stress about the new technology it introduces. It also makes its information easier to understand by forecasting its organization and by using common, concrete, and consistent terminology. Finally, the treatise includes illustrations that supplement the text in ways similar to modern illustrations.

The demand for help and hypertext systems has created a problem for many documentation departments, particularly those in smaller companies inexperienced in creating these forms of online documentation. The scarcity of existing literature compounds this problem. Literature that specifically addresses how to create such systems with limited resources and considerable time constraints would ease the burden faced by these companies. This article gives writers in small companies with limited resources some suggestions for undertaking a hypertext project. The writer views help text as a simple form of hypertext, and, as such, frequently refers to both simply as “hypertext.” This article is not concerned with describing in detail the various design features of hypertext.

During the creation and review process of software engineering specifications, developers seek to anticipate the design and development of a product before work on the product begins. Labor developers expend during early planning stages tends to substantially reduce rework during late stages. The people who write specifications can tremendously aid the development process if they employ basic iteration and prototyping techniques as they guide the document creation process. Software configuration management (SCM) practices provide ready models for iteration and prototyping. One model depicts a six-stage process in which developers see the product evolve from a scratch to a release condition. Use of such models will assist writers to guide document creation processes and will bring the documentation process itself into line with other software development management techniques.

This study investigated the need to include computer screens in documentation for software using a graphical user interface. Minimal manual principles emphasize the need to reduce verbiage. However, some suggest that depiction of screens in documentation can help the user coordinate documentation with computer screen displays. Documentation including button, icon, and screen information was varied with software designed for file transfers. College students used one of the three manuals designed along minimal manual principles. Students who used a manual with screens were significantly slower in transferring files and found it less helpful than students using either a manual with button and icon information or one with textual information only. Therefore, documentation for graphical user interfaces should include few, if any, screens. However, there appears to be a benefit for including icon and button information in the documentation.

Cues to text structure have been proposed to operate a number of different levels and it has been suggested that lower-level factors (e.g., word decoding) are more critical to reader performance than are higher-level factors (e.g., paragraph and text structure). The current study involved presenting texts in their base form and with cues to coherence at two levels—at the word and paragraph level—removed. These manipulations were performed on technical texts at two levels of familiarity and were presented to technical readers. Tests of recall, recognition, and problem-solving revealed that while removal of cues to local coherence did produce reliable decrements in reader performance, more dramatic effects occurred when both types of cues were removed. Results are discussed in terms of their relevance to questions of information design.

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.

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.

In recent years, a new pedagogical model has arisen in the teaching of technical writing, one of “technical writing as enculturation.” A close examination of this model reveals not only its relation to the workaday world of modern technology but also its roots in classical, especially Ciceronian, rhetoric. Our awareness that the model is both modern and classical may, in fact, enable us to carry its amplification and refinement even further.

This article discusses two communication issues associated with the development of an Executive Information System. The first issue examines the natural communication between systems designers and the executive end-user. The second issue addresses the human-computer interaction between the computer and the executive. Top executives constitute a unique group of end-users, and systems designers should exercise a wide range of skills in the process of identifying needs and presenting information to them.

Prescriptions for scientific writing about jargon and the passive voice are based on principles of writing presumed to be universal. They do not take into account that language varies with rhetorical setting, that scientists report their research to peer scientists, and that simplification of scientific language is more often translation than synonymy. Jargon, i.e., scientific terminology, is essential for designating new entities for which the language has no name. It makes for economy and for the accuracy and precision required in scientific research. The passive voice is unavoidable because scientists focus on the subject of their research as objects. The proscription of the passive voice and scientific jargon is rooted in the expectation that scientists write so as to be understood by the general reader.