Typeface personality impacts the rhetorical effect of students' documents, yet it receives little attention in textbooks. Technical writing students should stand the definition of “appropriate” in relation to typeface selection, the difference between type's functional and semantic properties, the difference between type family and personality, the effect of a typeface's history, and the contribution of a typeface's anatomy to its personality. Understanding these, students can make informed decisions about typeface appropriateness.

We employ an array of terms to denote the visual; however, we have not yet agreed on a clear framework for understanding the function and relationship between visual concepts. I propose a literacy approach to the visual so that as educators, researchers, students, and practitioners, we acquire more than skills that rely on changing definitions and technologies but an intellectual faculty that provides the knowledge, understanding, and abilities that the visual affords. Through an analysis of arguments for visual instruction, I present the wayS in which scholars justify their claims about the visual. These arguments uncover the breadth and depth of the visual and contribute to a taxonomy of visual terminology.

This study examines the skills that recent technical communication graduates and managers believe technical communication students need before entering business and industry as new technical communicators. Through questionnaires and interviews with recent graduates and managers of technical communication departments as well as an analysis of the participating schools' curricula, this study suggests areas where technical communication may need more preparation, including business operations, project management, problem-solving skills, and scientific and technical knowledge. Further research is needed at local, state, and national levels to analyze technical communication undergraduate curricula along with responses from recent graduates of technical communication programs and managers of technical communication programs. Only through continued research can we ensure that future technical communicators receive an education that eases their transition into the world of business and industry.

While research in international technical communication has flourished during the last 10 years, there has been little published on technical communication programs outside the United States. This article addresses this need by describing 12 representative academic technical communication programs in Germany, including Germany's first master's degree program. While there are no statistics on the number of technical communicators working in Germany, tekom (Gesellschaft für technische Kommunikation), the German professional society for technical communication, estimates roughly 4,400 members. While German academic programs in technical communication share many features with their counterparts in the United States, German academic programs do stress internships, foreign language study, and study abroad exchange programs more than technical communication programs in the United States.

To improve technical communication education, educators and internship providers need to find ways to revise internship experiences so that educators, internship providers, and students/interns can use internship experiences in a way that benefits all three parties. This article uses a stakeholder education approach to propose two new kinds of internship processes to benefit all three groups. The first approach—colloquia—allows all three parties to interact via the same scheduled event. The second approach—student publications groups—shifts internship from a workplace to a school activity. By including such approaches into their curricula, technical communication programs can both improve their relationships with local internship providers and improve the training received by their students.

As technical communication gains the technology to deliver dynamic custom documents, the importance of audience analysis increases. As a major factor in supporting dynamic adjustment of document content, the audience analysis must clearly capture the range of user goals and information needs in a flexible manner. Replacing a linear audience analysis model with a multidimensional model provides one method of achieving that flexibility. With a minimum of three separate dimensions to capture topic knowledge, detail required, and user cognitive ability, this model provides the writer a means of connecting content with information requirements and ensuring the dynamic document fits varying audience needs.

Scientific and technical jargon—specialized vocabulary, usually Latinate—plays a vital role in scientific and technical communication. But its proper use continues to be a point of discussion because of our concern with audience adaptation, rhetorical exigence, rhetorical purpose, and ethics. We've focused on teaching students—and on convincing scientists, engineers, and other writers/speakers—to gear their specialized language to the recipients of their communication, to the occasion calling for their communication, to what they wish to accomplish through their communication, and to the ethical goals of safety, helpfulness, empowerment, and truth. These are exactly the sorts of things we should be doing. My contribution to this conversation is a reinforce ment and, I hope, an extension of the argument that we should also be teaching and convincing students and professionals: 1) to fully appreciate what makes jargon either good or bad; 2) to carefully distinguish jargon usage from other aspects of scientific and technical style; and 3) to recognize that in every context, even in communication among experts, jargon should be used judiciously—that is, in the most helpful, least taxing way.

While debates continue over the effectiveness of innovative communication technologies to bring information and services to populations that have been underserved by such new technologies, a federally-funded program at the University of Vermont and Fletcher Allen Health Care (FAHC), Burlington, Vermont, has enabled trauma specialists to link with rural emergency room health care providers through a synchronous videoconferencing (telemedicine) network. Analysis of patient histories and surveys completed by the participating physicians after each use of the computer conferencing system as well as interviews and observations indicate that the FAHC consulting trauma specialists and the remotely located physicians felt the linkups do not interfere with standard ER procedures, that communication was at least adequate for all consultations, and that the consults improved the quality of care, for over half of the cases. Furthermore, interviews with rural ER physicians indicated that they saw the program operating as the first stage of FAHC's management of a patient to be transferred to that facility.

The article outlines the technical writing tutorial (TWT) that preceded an advanced ESL writing course for students of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University. Having assessed the English skills of those students at the end of the semester, we found a statistically significant increase in the performance of the students who had taken the TWT in comparison to the control group who spent the time of TWT doing more traditional exercises. This result indicates that technical writing books and journals should be considered as an important source of information for teachers of writing to ESL students.

Studying past examples of successful technical communication may offer insight into strategies that worked with technologies and audiences in an earlier time. This article examines the texts documenting a controversy before and during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Ellen Swallow Richards, chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bertha Honore Palmer, president of the Fair's Board of Lady Managers, had distinctly different visions of how cooking technology should be presented. Palmer invited Richards to create a Model Kitchen in the Woman's Building, but Richards wanted to avoid gendering the new knowledge of nutrition and she fought to control her exhibit. The multimedia Richards used in her resulting Rumford Kitchen exhibit reminds us that sometimes an entertaining but familiar atmosphere might be the best way to introduce threatening new knowledge and technology, particularly to our increasingly international and intergenerational audiences.

The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The article provides and defends four guidelines as a foundation to study ways to incorporate history into classroom lessons: 1) maintain a continued research interest in teaching history; 2) limit to technical rather than scientific discourse; 3) focus on English-language texts; and 4) focus on American texts, authors, and practices. The second part of the essay works within the guidelines to show a lesson that contrasts technical texts by Benjamin Franklin and Herbert Hoover. The lesson can help students see the difference in technical writing before and after the Industrial Revolution, a difference that mirrors their own transition from the university to the workforce.

Assessment continues to be an important issue for technical communicators in both practitioner and academic contexts. In this article, we investigate methods of program assessment used by corporate learning sites and we profile value add methods as a new way to both construct and evaluate academic programs in technical communication. Our goal is to introduce value added assessment methods as one way to supplement and expand current methods of program assessment. The article initially reviews Return on Investment (ROI) indicators as a widely used model for assessing programs. However, we are critical of these indicators, suggesting that they are biased against technical communication in both practitioner and academic contexts. The article then examines and critiques assessment methods from corporate training environments. These include methods employed by corporate universities and value added process-based assessment methods. The second half of the article profiles value added methods by applying them in a brief assessment of a technical communications certificate program. We conclude that while the program uses ROI indicators as a marketing device, the value the program brings and adds to its university is the “portal” it creates for university and business community collaboration. This value cannot be fully demonstrated solely through the use of ROI indicators. The article then discusses the kinds of programmatic negotiations value added processes require within university contexts that may impose non-value added activities on departments and programs. The article concludes by critically examining the appropriateness of corporate assessment methods for academic contexts.

In this article I argue that technical communicators are in the position to foster users' commonsense understanding of products. The notion that technical communicators can increase the common sense of users is absent in the field of technical communication literature. Reasons for not recognizing the legitimacy of common sense range from its unexamined nature to a belief that it cannot be taught. After discussing different definitions of common sense, I suggest that including scenarios, common metaphors, and language that promotes procedural knowledge in product information can strengthen users' commonsense understanding of the products they use. Moreover, in failing to make use of commonsense appeals, technical communicators are ignoring a sound persuasive strategy.

This article describes the influence that Extensible Markup Language (XML) will have on the software documentation process and subsequently on the curricula of advanced undergraduate and master's programs in technical communication. XML, an evolving set of standards for storing and displaying information, uses nine components that make up the XML development process. Grouped into content, formatting, and language specifications, these components enhance organizations' ability to manage information more efficiently and accurately. As the XML development process is adopted, the software documentation process will evolve from a self-contained procedure into a more flexible, interactive process in which software documenters must work closely with a wide range of specialists. The changes that XML will have on the software documentation process will likewise have implications for programs in technical communication in the need to address new kinds of job descriptions, skill sets, and career paths of future technical communicators. The article recommends adaptations to existing courses, as well as new elective and required courses.

XML is a recent Web design language that will enable technical communicators to produce documentation that can reuse information and present it across multiple types of media for diverse audiences. However, little is understood about how XML will impact technical communication in terms of theory, academic research, and pedagogy. In this article, I argue that XML requires more interdisciplinary approaches toward the teaching and research of technical communication, particularly with respect to the integration of technical and rhetorical knowledge.

Budget and time constraints often force technical communicators to produce manuals that are less than affective. One reason is the time they take to analyze their document's users. Normally, user analysis involves demographic, or organizational, or psychological approaches or combinations. Rarely will they evaluate the culture of the user and determine what that means for developing the document. Typically, localization will edit the document for cultural elements, but that is an expensive and time-consuming process. This article discusses the cultural elements in developing a document and shows, through a comparison of two mythical cultures, how the document will differ when organized for those two cultures.

The connection between language and empiricism is a central issue in technical writing and communication, more so than in other fields. Our field deals with technical and scientific knowledge which is oftentimes very definite and objective, yet there has been increasing recognition over the past few decades that this knowledge is socially constructed and rhetorically negotiated. Debates have ensued over the rhetoricity of technical communication in contrast to its empirical and instrumental aspects. W. V Quine, one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, however, rejected the distinction between empirical knowledge and knowledge stemming from language and social negotiation. Understanding technical writing and communication through the lens of Quine's theory ameliorates the tension between instrumental and rhetorical/humanistic views of technical discourse by recognizing the validity of both views and integrating the two. This understanding in turn will facilitate our pedagogical interactions with technical and scientific majors.

If you wish to start an undergraduate professional and technical writing program at a small liberal arts college, you will find good arguments for your project in the educational writings of Sir Francis Bacon. Unlike other Renaissance Humanists, Bacon located the New Learning (what we now call the humanities) within the related contexts of scientific discovery and invention and professional training and development. His treatise, The Advancement of Learning, proposes to draw knowledge from and apply knowledge to the natural and social world. Bacon's curricular ideas can benefit emerging PTW programs in the humanities in three ways: They make a convincing apologia for most English departments and writing programs, wed humanistic education to public service, and provide a rich but practical theoretical framework for program development and administration.

This article begins with an overview of cognitive psychology research on the effects of aging on literacy and suggests the additional complications facing older adults who consume and produce text within the frame of technology, particularly on-line usage. From an overview, the text moves to patterns corporations are using to target older adults, namely as consumers and as producers. The text then explores the use of philanthropy in the corporate literacy initiatives and suggests that there are complicated issues at hand in attempting to integrate the knowledge of aging and corporate strategies into our technical writing classrooms because we enter this discussion concerned about non-traditional students, older adults who are challenged to participate in contemporary literacy initiatives, and ourselves as aging participants as well. The article ends with suggestions of possible ways of addressing concerns regarding aging.

This article begins by arguing that the infinitive phrase has not been taken seriously in writing because writers have been too concerned with Bishop Robert Lowth's proscription against the split infinitive. However, careful examination of three types of technical prose (instructions, annual reports, and “junk mail”) reveals that more than one sentence in four contains an infinitive phrase. The article then argues that two linguistic theories do not adequately explain the overwhelming presence of infinitives in the three types of prose. The reason for the presence of infinitives seems to be that they fulfill several rhetorical purposes, including vigor, symmetry, emphasis, variety, economy, and depersonalization. Implications for writing and teaching are also discussed.

A survey of CEOs, corporate spokespersons, and media representatives suggests that the evolving roles and responsibilities of corporate spokespersons may result in greater opportunities for technical communicators in corporate public relations. However, these opportunities require communication principles and skills that have not traditionally played a strong role in technical communication education. This essay discusses these requisite considerations so they can be more explicitly addressed in the contemporary technical communication curriculum.

The profession of technical communication is in transition. While a few might argue that we are in danger of being swallowed up by large, institutional realignments, it seems more likely that the future workplace (as characterized by Senge, among others) will put communication, culture, and collaboration at the center of work. However, in order for the profession to exploit these opportunities, we must understand the impact of integrated information technology (IT) on organizations. I summarize the interaction of corporate culture, leadership/management, human resources, and advanced networking and web-based applications (more commonly called an Intranet) for the successful integration of new IT products into an established and well-defined organization. Background research for this paper was conducted as part of an Army Summer Faculty Research and Engineering grant.

This paper is a critique of current approaches to the development of computer graphing and graph visualization programs. Developers of these programs model the user as an individual problem solver who is reliant on perceptual skills to create and interpret graphed information. Such a model of graphing is ill-suited to meet the complex needs of real users, a supposition that is supported by work in two major areas of graphing theory and research: the sociology of science and the educational research of mathematics and scientific students. These areas have not been traditionally cited when planning computer graphing or visualization programs or when assessing their usability. A review of the literature in these fields reveals that an over-reliance on a user's perceptual skills is unlikely to result in successful graph practices.

Traditional models of usability assume that usability is a quality that can be designed into a particular artifact. Yet constructivist theory implies that usability cannot be located in a single artifact; rather, it must be conceived as a quality of the entire activity in which the artifact is used. This article describes a distributed approach to usability, based on activity theory and genre theory. It then illustrates the approach with a four-decade examination of a traffic accident location and analysis system (ALAS). Using the theoretical framework of genre ecologies, the article demonstrates how usability is distributed across the many official and unofficial (ad hoc) genres employed by ALAS users.

This study suggests that documentation is a complex technical communication genre, encompassing all the texts that mediate between complex human activities and computer processes. Drawing on a historical study, it demonstrates that the varied forms given to documentation have a long history, extending back at least to the early days of commercial mainframe computing. The data suggest that (1) early forms of documentation were borrowed from existing genres, and (2) official and unofficial documentation existed concurrently, despite efforts to consolidate these divergent texts. The study thus provides a glimpse into the early experimental nature of documentation as writers struggled to find a meaningful way to communicate information about their organization's developing computer technology.

In visual querying, users analyze data for their decisions and problems by interacting with graphics that are dynamic and linked. This querying paradigm is new, a dramatic break from the more familiar retrieving of data via search statements and displaying of it in static charts and graphs. For this new visual querying paradigm, analysts conceptually and operationally need to master new approaches. To discover salient relationships, they need to manipulate displays. To drill down for detail or causes, they have to select data of interest directly from a graph. And to draw inferences, they have to consider meanings across several dynamically linked graphics. With the aim of studying users' success in these new approaches, particularly focusing on the approach of directly selecting data from graphs, I conducted a scenario-based usability test with 10 data analysts. They interacted with visualizations to complete a realistic complex analysis—evaluating employee performance. Test findings reveal a range of difficulties in visual selection that, at times, gave rise to inaccurate selections, invalid conclusions, and misguided decisions. To overcome these difficulties, support for visual selection needs to be built into interfaces and help. Results and recommended improvements are presented.

Emphasis on page design, as an aid to visual accessibility, did not receive attention in modern technical writing until the 1970s. However, accounting documents and instructional texts utilized format and document design strategies as early as the twelfth century to enhance the organization of quantitative data and linear bookkeeping entries. Format in text was used to reflect the arrangement used in oral accounting practices and to produce uniform documents. Thus, format was integral to the rise of pragmatic literacy of the commercial reader. During the Renaissance, these early format strategies received impetus from Ramist method. The result was design strategies that attempted to capture the rigid principles of organization fundamental to commercial accounting. These early accounting documents also illustrate the plain style that would become the focus of the later decades of the seventeenth century. Clarity in language paralleled clarity in page design for the sole purpose of eliminating ambiguity on the page and on the sentence level. Plain style was thus nurtured by financial forces long before the advent of natural science.

Teachers at all levels of college instruction use service learning, a popular pedagogical tool since the mid-eighties, to teach students both social consciousness and pragmatic, real-world writing skills. This article explores the concept of service learning as rhetorical action in the field of technical communication in general, and the question of whether service learning is appropriate in beginning level technical writing courses. Using my experience through two years of service learning instruction in community college classes, I respond to the charge that students in lower-division courses may lack the maturity to successfully enact service learning assignments. I also analyze the appropriateness of the community college as a catalyst for community-based writing projects.

This article aims to expound the importance of a knowledge of linguistics and the theories of human language to a technical author. Linguistics is often seen as a specialised branch of language for language experts. When technical authors communicate, they do need the tools of linguistics to handle the rhetorical grammar and patterns of technical prose. The linguistic features and semanics involved in technical writing also become relevant, as is visual and graphic representation.

This article reports the results of a survey of thirty-one colleges of veterinary medicine in the United States and Canada to identify common writing, speaking, and reading tasks performed by veterinary medical students and practicing veterinarians. From the twenty-seven colleges that responded (87% response rate), we learned that writing, speaking, and reading tasks are assigned in almost every veterinary medical course and that the communication tasks assigned in veterinary medical courses accord well with the communication tasks expected to be performed by practicing veterinarians. Along with these learning-to-communicate tasks, veterinary medical students are also assigned communicating-to-learn tasks. Unlike many of the writing-to-learn tasks associated with writing-across-the-curriculum programs, communicating-to-learn tasks in veterinary medical courses seem concerned with teaching students to think like veterinary medical practitioners. The emphasis on communication in veterinary medical curricula is probably due to some extent to the emphasis on problem-based learning, a curricular innovation popular in veterinary medical education. Problem-based learning requires that instruction be designed around cases or problems to be solved rather than topics or information to be covered. This merging of research and practice in the education of veterinary medical students may offer lessons for the education of professional practitioners in technical communication.

This article supplements existing rhetorical scholarship by returning to the notion of invention as general preparation of the communicator. Although much scholarship about invention in technical communication exists, it consists mainly of heuristics, checklists, ethical considerations, and audience awareness. Part of invention is using basic strategies to prepare the communicator to assess any communication situation and its context and to generate the appropriate discourse. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke's theories of dialectic and rhetoric are a twentieth-century version of this; this article explains important Burkean strategies such as etymological extension, limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, translation or alembication, the four master tropes, and the pentad, and it shows how to apply these in technical communication. The article closes with a classroom assignment that uses Burkean invention strategies.

Ethics as a topic in technical communication has grown in interest in the past quarter century as the field itself has matured. We now understand technical communication as involved in communicating not only technical information but also values, ethics, and tacit assumptions represented in goals. It also is involved in accommodating the values and ethics of its many audiences. This understanding is linked to an awareness of the social nature of all discourse and the root interconnectedness of rhetoric and ethics. This article presents an introduction and annotated bibliography of articles from technical writing and communication journals over this period, arranged in categories of professional, academic, and systematic approaches. Ethics is broadly conceived to include not only particular theories but also systems of values and principles.

Despite claims for at least the past quarter century of mature professional status for the field of technical communication, studies in the history and sociology of the professions provide criteria that suggest we are not yet truly a profession. This article reviews economic, sociopolitical, and ideological factors that characterize the modern professions and argues that the technical communication field, at best, only partially meets the criteria. The prospects for professional status of technical communication might be improved by developing a critical consciousness of the processes of professionalization and concertedly acting in ways that facilitate those processes.

The redefinition of logos as an appeal to logic is a mistaken association found all too often in the technical communication classroom. Logic inheres in all three proofs of persuasion; moreover, Aristotle used logos within the context of classical rhetoric to refer to the argument or speech itself. In this light, the proofs of persuasion represent the set of all logical means whereby the speaker can lead a “right-thinking” audience to infer something. If that something is an emotion, the appeal is to pathos; if it is about the character of the speaker, the appeal is to ethos; and if it is about the argument or speech itself, the appeal is to logos. This interpretation reinstates all three proofs of persuasion as legitimate, logical means to different proximate ends and provides a coherent definition of logos, consonant with Aristotle's Rhetoric, to the next generation of technical communicators.

This philosophical article explores individuality and innovation (creating new technology) as they relate to the communication approaches of scientists, engineers, and technologists. I suggest that effective communication between technical and non-technical people is difficult because technical communication lacks humanity, a personal dimension. I also suggest that dimension is lacking because technical people give up their identity to be considered competent and I argue that a different approach to communication education for scientists, engineers, and technologists is required to equip them with requisite communication skills to make their personal contribution to successful innovation.

This study attempts to show how the purpose of three types of business and technical documents (instructions, annual reports, and sales promotional letters) affects the syntactical and rhetorical choices authors make in writing these documents. While the results of the examination rendered some predictable results, there were some surprises in the absence of many rhetorical schemes in sales promotional letters. Another value of this study is that it provides partial syntactical and rhetorical “fingerprints” of three important documents in business and technical writing to offer students norms they can go by in constructing such documents.

Classical rhetorical theory has been used for relatively discrete, practice-oriented purposes in its application to teaching Scientific and Technical Communication. However effective these appropriations are, they isolate these resources from a comprehensive framework and from that framework's role in shaping disciplinary practice. Because these theoretical assets are integral to each student's preparation to be an effective, responsible practitioner, I have developed and taught an upper level rhetorical theory course for STC majors that is grounded in Aristotle's On Rhetoric and in his understanding that effective communication is a systematic tekhne/art.

Some reading researchers and technical communicators assume the efficacy of readability formulas. Reading researchers use such formulas to equalize the reading difficulty of texts used in experiments. Results of an informal Internet survey indicate that some professional writers and editors use readability formulas that are integrated into word-processing software. This article proposes that readability formulas fail to predict text difficulty. The results of an experiment demonstrate that “text difficulty” is a perception of the reader and therefore cannot be objectively calculated by counting syllables, word length, sentence length, and other text characteristics.

English technical writing clearly emerged during the Renaissance and the first decades of printing, but during the 1641–1700 period technical writing gained credibility and prestige. It was a valued tool for achieving the utilitarian ends of an age in which practical goals were valued more than aesthetic ones. Technical writing can be found in a range of disciplines, such as agriculture, medicine, science, as well as the major English trades and crafts. As a valued form of discourse, it illuminates the world of work in seventeenth-century England and the problems faced by the early experimenters of the Royal Society who sought to use science to solve major human, military, and economic problems while seeking to expand understanding of nature. Studying technical writing of this period allows us to track the continued development of technical writing as a distinct form of discourse.

The ongoing antitrust battle between the U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft Corporation presents technical communicators with two ethical questions: 1) Is it right, good, or fair for Microsoft to give away its Internet Explorer browser? 2) If Microsoft gains monopoly control over the PC browser market, will this be good for us? In this article, I exam these questions using traditional rights-based ethical theory (Kant), utilitarianism, and John Rawls' principles of justice, concluding that it is neither good nor fair for a company having a near-monopoly over a market to sell products below fair market value, nor is it good that one company stands to gain monopoly control over the PC browser market. When the discussion turned to Netscape, one Intel executive, who asked not to be identified, recalled Martiz [Paul Martiz, Microsoft Group Vice President, Platforms & Application] saying: “We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free” [1]. “We're giving away a pretty good browser as part of the operating system. How long can they survive selling it?”—Statement by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft President and CEO [2]. “Our business model works even if all Internet software is free,” says Mr. Gates. “We are still selling operating systems.” Netscape, in contrast, is dependent upon its Internet software for profits, he points out.—Statements by Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman [3]. Only a monopolist could study a competitor and destroy its business by giving away products—Statement by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman [4].

Compelling arguments from researchers studying the rhetoric of science have convinced both scientists and humanists that technical writing involves invention, or discovery of the available means of argument. If we agree that inventio is crucial to technical writing, however, we encounter a problem: namely, that the rhetor engaged in invention as part of a technical writing process does not necessarily have expertise in the subject matter of the composition. What, then, is the expertise that the technical writer contributes to the invention process? Working from the notion that knowledge is an activity rather than a commodity [1], I argue that a technical writer's expertise in invention lies in an ability to adapt rhetorical heuristics to situations of interdisciplinary collaboration. This focus expands our understanding of how invention works when the goal of communication is producing knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, rather than winning an argument with persuasive techniques.1

In partial answer to the many questions that have been raised about the definition and location of technical writing programs, a random sample of full-time teachers of professional writing was conducted. The results indicate that those located in English departments do not receive the respect and support they need. Those located in other departments are significantly more satisfied. Some strategies for improving the situation are suggested.