Theoretical studies in scientific and technical communication have begun to explore what they call discourse communities in the sciences and engineering on grounds that these communities provide the norms and practices for communication in these fields. The theoretical literature on which these studies are based develops two views of what a discourse community might be, an institutional and a social view. The first of these views has been the more influential, but both views may and should be brought to the study and the pedagogy of scientific and technical communication.

Amplification is the set of rhetorical techniques by which a discourse is elaborated and extended to enhance its appeal and information value. Even in the manual, long considered the most laconic of the genres of technical communication, amplification has its place. Drawing on the theory of classical and modern rhetoric, this article shows how amplification tends to increase and improve the coverage, rationale, warnings, behavioral alternatives, examples, previews, reviews, and general emphasis of technical manuals.

Modern professionals commonly write documents to be signed by superiors, but are seldom taught how to do this. If students are successfully to fulfill everyday organizational writing tasks, they must learn to master skills of impersonating viewpoint, style and even personality. To teach such skills, we can adapt the ancient exercise of prosopopoeia or impersonation, either by varying the personas of standard textbook exercises, or by making use of the technical writing case study, or by having students impersonate professionals who were involved in famous (or infamous) current events.

The history of Technical Writing closely parallels trends in the discipline of Computer Science. The early technical writers in the computer software industry were its own technicians (programmers and analysts), who used a variety of diagramming techniques to document computer systems. As a result of the widespread availability of computers and software which began in the 1970s, professional communicators joined the software industry and reinterpreted these diagramming techniques from technical source documents into user documentation. The impact of this assimilation process has influenced graphic representations in Technical Writing, as well as created the conceptual metaphors of the “user” and the “module” (which are emerging archetypes). In the past, Technical Writing's historical roots have been the result of reactions to Computer Science. However, the increasing presence of online documentation is now creating opportunities for technical writers to shape their own future by joining with computer scientists as influential equals.

Part-time technical writing teachers who responded to a 1986–87 survey of two-year college technical writing teachers were found to be committed to teaching, well-qualified, experienced, personally involved, and typically employed full time as technical writers or editors. This finding calls into question the unfavorable stereotypical view of part-timers held by individuals and professional organizations. Because of their unique position as full-time practitioners of the skills they teach, part-time technical writing teachers can serve as an important link between teaching technical writing and business/industry.

Technical writers need a historical perspective in order to distinguish between enduring and transitory writing standards, to understand the variety of past styles in building future styles, and to give the profession a better sense of self-identity. To overcome the problems in developing a historical perspective, such as a dearth of artifacts to examine and the peculiarities in rhetorical time and place which undercut attempts to generalize on historical information, the 200 year-old federal collection of patents is offered as a solution. This collection of patents is also very often the only remaining written work of the ordinary mechanic of the nineteenth century, and this collection truly reflects technical not legal, business, or science writing.

One lesson to be learned from the fatal decision to launch Challenger is that effective technical and group communication requires more than the fidelious exchange of information. This article examines testimony gathered by the Presidential Commission on the Challenger Accident and reveals communication failures in four dimensions of group differentiation—clarity, interrelatedness, centrality, and openness. The article illustrates all four dimensions with excerpts from the Commission Hearings and identifies communication problems peculiar to highly technical groups.

Linguistics has been largely misunderstood in writing pedagogy. After Chomsky's revolution, it was widely touted as a panacea; now it is widely flogged as a pariah. Both attitudes are extreme. It has a number of applications in the writing classroom, and it is particularly ripe for technical writing students, who have more sophistication with formalism than their humanities counterparts. Moreover, although few scholars outside of linguistics are aware of it, Transformational Grammar is virtually obsolete; most grammatical models are organized around principled aversions to the transformation, and even Chomsky has little use for his most famous innovation these days. Among the more recent developments is Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, a model with distinct formal and pedagogical advantages over Chomsky's early transformational work.

This article proposes a means of characterizing the difference between technical and literary writing, involving a theory of representation in which these distinct writing types are comparable to distinct types of visual representation. Any difference is only intelligible relative to a background of similarlity, but recent discussions of technical writing emphasize its similarity to literature and ignore significant differences. Distinct types of line drawings replicate the literary/technical contrast in a visual medium. This arises from two factors: 1) the way in which the drawing/text is perceived by the viewer/reader, as a substitute or as a standard; and 2) the predominant type of detail in the drawing/text, iterative or contrastive. Literature is most effective if perceived as a substitute for reality, predominated by iterative detail. Technical writing is most effective if perceived as a standard for evaluating reality, predominated by contrastive detail.

Increasing public involvement in science and technology suggests a new role for technical communication in which conventional skills of adapting technical content to audience needs may be replaced by skills that facilitate audiences' own information search activities. This article outlines the reasons for the emergence of this new role, and some of the practical implications.

Software documentation is a growing field in technical writing, yet no synthesis of current research exists to bring together findings on content, form, and the invoked relationship between reader and writer. Without such an overview writers are apt to follow discrete, context-free prescriptions instead of guiding principles that account for the multidimensional functions of language in the communication act of a user's manual. This article reviews findings from research in cognitive processing and text linguistics to derive such a set of principles. It then assesses a widely-used wordprocessing manual against these principles to find that the writers manipulate form (the textual function of language) to achieve comprehension better than they do content (the ideational function) or reader-writer relationships (the interpersonal function). However, comprehension is stymied without equal attention paid to ideational and interpersonal strategies.

This article describes a study of written communication on-the-job and reports writing practices found in seventeen agricultural and engineering firms and agencies in the authors' immediate geographical region. Information was gathered by questionnaire and on-site interviews. Data confirmed the importance of writing on-the-job. Our findings demonstrate the importance of context and reveal the variations in types and length of documents, rhetorical genres, and strategies. The study proved useful for designing instructional materials and strategies and for expanding our basic understanding of what on-the-job writing entails.

Findings from a comparison of undergraduate and on-the-job writers recommend some changes in traditional methods of teaching technical writing in college. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and “competent” writers in business and industry were given the same composing task. The writing of the employees showed telling and sometimes unexpected differences in a wide variety of areas, in length, vocabulary, organization, specificity, coherence, sentence formation, and surface error. Implied is increased attention to several general writing skills: compression of meaning, fluency of expression, efficiency in techniques of coherence, expandability of organization and syntax, and rhetorical maneuverability and adaptability.

One of the most neglected topics in Technical Communication textbooks and professional articles is the concept of criteria development. Most approaches to teaching criteria development tend to be prescriptive, overly superficial, and, at times, confusing and misleading. One can develop criteria for evaluating the relative merits of potential solutions to problems only after a thorough problem analysis. Criteria themselves derive from two sources: assumptions drawn from the conditions of the problem itself and external constraints that create additional barriers to problem solutions. This article provides a rationale for emphasizing methods of teaching criteria development and describes a heuristic for identifying relevant criteria. Such an approach also addresses national concerns that we develop teaching methods that allow students to think logically, systematically, and analytically.

Poetry has imparted technical information to workers for centuries. This article presents both literary examples of poetic technical literature, and traditional examples of rhyme and song which acted functionally to lead and instruct workers in specific tasks. In so doing, it illustrates the usefulness and time-honored acceptance of poetic devices in technical communication.

The changing relationship of humanist education and society may be traced through historical changes in the relationship of formal education to technical writing. Technical writing with its intrinsic social purposes provides a powerful metaphor for the needs of society, and the resistance of the modern English department to applied writing provides evidence of the growing separation of society and the humanities. From classical philosophies of education through the humanist movement of the Renaissance, education was committed to the development of ideal leadership. Both classical and Renaissance humanists were epistolographers and public orators, meeting the needs of their societies. Modern humanists focus on the individual and the text. While Western culture from ancient Greece to the Renaissance educated citizens to specific service in society, the modern humanities are failing to combine utility with the preservation and creation of knowledge. Teachers should emulate the humanities of the past and teach writing as a social force in technology, politics, and business.

Although engineers spend a substantial amount of their time writing or delivering oral presentations, the typical engineering curriculum segregates communications instruction from technical coursework. But out of an increasing sense of responsibility to provide more authentic professional training, engineering educators are developing programs which bring “real-life” contexts into the classroom. As a result, technical communications instruction is changing in significant ways. Writing clinics are tailoring their services to the precise needs of those they serve and expanding the range of professional support they offer. Furthermore, writing across the curriculum has significantly influenced engineering by linking composing and understanding. New communications courses parallel professional classes, and some redesigned engineering courses actually integrate verbal communication with “subject matter” instruction, Since these broad structural renovations are paradigmatic for other professional programs, technical writing teachers can and should facilitate and support such developments.

A current assumption is that “one best system” can be devised to develop and test user documentation. In-house documentation, however, demands approaches that do not fit into a generic system. Specifically, an in-house manual needs a special type of usability testing, one that measures if and how a manual is used to meet the goals of its organization. Along with quality testing, in-house writers must also run studies on how their manuals actually function in the workplace. This article describes a three-pronged design for actual use testing: user logs; observations; and surveys. In my case study, this testing revealed that users did not use their manuals for reasons other than quality — for instance, reliance on social interactions for acquiring information. My findings show that writing an effective manual requires more than composing skills; it demands writers' involvement in the organizational dynamics that motivate workers to use or not use their manuals.

Traditionally, technical communication courses have focused on the written transmission of information. Recent research, however, indicates that oral presentation and interpersonal exchange are as important as writing to on-the-job communication. This article reviews a research project conducted by the authors and students from their technical communication classes that offers important new insights into the rapidly changing environment of technical communication. Based on these insights, it also suggests some new strategies for teaching technical communication — strategies that place an equal emphasis on writing, oral presentation, and interpersonal communication.

Many engineers and other technical/managerial professionals continually generate writer-centered memos, letters, and brief reports. Because such documents often contain needless repetition, excessive detail, and chronology-based information, an approach for encouraging writers to produce clear, well organized, rhetorically sound prose was developed. Technical writing teachers and communication trainers must 1) make these prose “paladins” aware of the essential ingredients for generating reader-centered prose, 2) familiarize these writers with the major steps involved in the writing process, and 3) operationalize the process through face-to-face writer-editor collaboration — involving peer editorial review. Only through frequent drafting and rewriting and the regular sharing of peer editorial response (oral and written) will clear, rhetorically effective prose accrue value. And only then will technical/managerial writers routinely generate reader-centered documents that communicate.

Field study, using an ethnographic approach, offers a potentially powerful methodology for the technical communication researcher, a methodology that provides a useful balance to the strengths and weaknesses of experiments and surveys. Technical communication studies, however, exhibit not only the typical constraints of field research but several additional constraints inherent to research conducted on-the-job in business, industry, and government, which deserve consideration when designing research.

A review of recent research in the field of technical writing and communication indicated that although the methodologies employed were sound, they were not fully articulated. An attempt to use a double-blind research design in the writing classroom by dividing the students into competing teams that reviewed each other's work led to some interesting reactions by the students as well as to some the need to introduce more open-ended assignments in our classrooms. Asking our students to come up with competing solutions to the same problem and requiring them to design means of testing their effectiveness can develop their abilities in critical thinking and group dynamics. At the same time this approach will allow teachers to pursue their own research on various problems in technical communication. The result is a unit which has pedagogical effectiveness and suggests new directions for writing research.

One of the primary purposes of technical writing is to create memorable texts, especially when they involve large amounts of interrelated information or complicated step-by-step procedures. Epic poetry traditionally employs poetic devices which aided the poet in recalling as many as 27,000 lines of verse. These devices include not only familiar features such as rhyme and meter, but higher-order patterns of organization called formulae and themes. Recent research shows that these features also enable readers to recall the material. This article explores how these poetic forms work to enhance memory, explores some contemporary research in cognition which has confirmed their mnemonic value, and suggests ways that technical writers may apply them in their work.

Instructors in the field of technical writing must incorporate an ever increasing amount of information into their courses. They can save time and stretch the teaching potential of individual assignments by devising writing situations that combine different audiences and purposes. Such situations force students to perceive the writing activity as an integrated whole and make them evaluate different ways to present the same information. The lessons suggested in this article demonstrate the interrelationships between report types and rhetorical approaches, and they allow oral activities to arise naturally. The lessons do not interfere with the philosophical choices that an instructor has made about the proper approach to teaching report writing.

In spite of the recent proliferation of technical writing programs, textbooks, and professional associations, quantitative information on the people and work involved in technical writing is scant. This article reports the responses of 122 technical writers in the San Diego area to a questionnaire asking them about the tasks they perform, documents they produce, skills they consider significant, audiences they write to, working conditions, types of companies they work for, and education and training. The pilot survey also identified other demographic information such as salary and length of service as technical writers and in their present position.

Scientists and engineers have to present technical information effectively. But when they do it, they face language difficulties which are beyond formal grammar as taught at school. To overcome this problem, we designed a systematic course for technical writing aimed at breaking such language barriers by planned channeling of the scientific message. The course was designed to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers. In keeping with this goal effective writing criteria were defined and formal presentation conventions were described. Because Hebrew is the common language in Israel, problems of Hebrew structures were presented. The massive infiltration of vocabulary and syntactic elements from foreign languages into scientists' Hebrew style were addressed. An evaluation apparatus was also applied and future prospects of the course were discussed.

As communication teachers attempting to bridge the gap between school and industry, we need to give students a true understanding of what it means to be a professional. We may be spending too much time trying to get them to write and speak like professionals without also imbuing them with sufficient understanding of their responsibilities to behave as professionals. Students need to be practiced in the communication and decision-making situations they will encounter in their workplaces. These decisions involve ethical reasoning as well as technical problem solving. Teaching students to appreciate the consequences of their recommendations, through the use of fault-trees and cost/benefit analyses in realistic simulations, effectively bridges the gap between the classroom and boardroom. A sample situation is explained and analyzed for its use in any technical communications class.

Although engineering departments were dissatisfied with early twentieth-century technical writing teaching methods, those methods were not simply a result of “anti-science” attitudes. In fact, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composition teachers tried to accommodate the influx of applied science students by teaching correctness and clarity of style and stressing the expository modes of writing. Emphasis on “clarity” was a legacy of rhetoricians like Hugh Blair of the eighteenth century. Emphasis on expository modes was a legacy of the nineteenth-century rhetoricians' interest in the inductive methodology of “pure” science, a method which implied invention by “observation” and made conclusions “self-evident”: argument was unnecessary since observations and methods only need to be explained to “convince.” Applied science departments were, in reality, dissatisfied with teaching methods based on “pure” rather than “applied” science methodology.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.

The current job market favors young technical writers who are skilled in the way of the computer both as a subject of writing and as a production tool. In the technical writing classroom students can be exposed to this important technology through assignments that include computerized instruction, word processing, text analysis, artificial intelligence, and communications.

Well-selected metaphoric terminology can reduce the fear and ignorance that often dishearten first-time computer users and can help them grasp new concepts and procedures. Many people are amused by terms such as bit, byte, and mouse and are enlightened by terms such as menu and wild card. Some users of computers, however, are offended by the metaphoric terminology that is commonly used in writing about computers and computing. They bridle at words like memory and intelligence applied to computing machinery. They are annoyed by casual uses of interface and parameter or puzzled by words like spool, boot, and argument. With the concept of usability as their guiding principle, writers in the computer industry can assess the appropriateness of metaphoric terminology by applying seven criteria: 1) Is a metaphoric term needed? 2) Is the old word familiar? 3) Is the metaphoric relation close? 4) Is the usage of the word consistent? 5) Is the metaphoric word brief? 6) Is the metaphoric usage acceptable? 7) Is the metaphoric word memorable?

Despite the fact that technical writers try to maintain an objective outlook, they cannot ignore the psychological states of consciousness that influence their writing. Arthur J. Deikman's theory of bimodal consciousness outlines two psychological states: active and emotive (or receptive). Writers must maintain a balance between the receptive state and the active, striving state to prevent writer's block and to enhance creativity, just as scientists balance mathematical (i.e., lexical or verbal) thinking with physics-related thinking. This article describes Deikman's model and shows its application in the technical writing classroom.

Stylistic analysis of scientific and technical prose reveals that technical and non-technical expository prose share a number of common characteristics; consequently, common assumptions about a clear stylistic separation between scientific and literary writing are faulty. Technical prose, moreover, possesses a number of rhetorical features which further increase its likeness to literary writing. Both style and rhetoric of technical writing thus point toward non-referential functions in scientific discourse, including the operation of significant cultural codes.

This bibliography of thirty dissertations summarizes doctoral research in technical writing since 1975. It is intended as the first step in an on-going abstracting service to be performed by the ERIC system. The dissertations range widely, from theoretical pronouncements to classroom how-to's. The collection provides an overview of the kinds of research being done and the institutions sponsoring it.

Most technical writing texts contain grammar reviews, but few supply more than prescriptive rules to correct persistent examples of unclear writing. To provide a more progressive approach to grammatical analysis, this article applies the non-prescriptive constructs of modern grammar to the recurrent problem of faulty pronoun reference. Grammatical problems often arise because pronouns serve both as form-class and as structure-class words, because they often must agree in case, person, gender, and number with antecedents, and because the pronoun it is often misunderstood as an expletiv. The author suggests that small, problem-oriented doses of modern grammar may help students and professionals alike to better understand the intricacies of textual English.

Recent psycholinguistic research has challenged the view that English speakers interpret the male pronouns and the generic man as words that refer to both males and females. The suggested ambiguity of these terms is of concern to technical communicators because it can affect the accuracy of their messages. Since guidelines for avoiding sex ambiguity in language are not generally available in technical writing or speech manuals, this article offers simple devices for eliminating the generic use of male pronouns and man. It also provides alternate terms for common sex-biased expressions.

To evaluate Technical Communication faculty requires understanding of the distinctive nature of the research, teaching, and service performed by faculty in the field. This article documents the work situations and accomplishments of a cadre of twenty-four accomplished faculty members in Technical Communication. The study group, identified by a prior survey of 275 people in technical writing, composition, and rhetoric, provides an empirical basis for defining the kinds and quantities of work that currently can be expected in the field. The article thus helps to provide empirically-based guidelines and criteria for evaluation. Included also is a discussion of other relevant research on faculty evaluation.

This article interprets research in linguistics and psychology in order to revise and enlarge existing definitions of readability. It suggests instructional methods for teaching students to compose more coherent—and, hence, more readable—technical writing. For a text to be readable, it must be coherent. However, like readability, coherence is variable, depending on the writer and the reader as well as the text itself. The reader is able to understand a message by relying on his shared knowledge with the writer. A starting place for comprehension, cultural and professional knowledge and linguistic knowledge allow readers to set up expectations about a text and to read efficiently. Because accommodating shared knowledge is vital to readable writing, we should teach students how to assess typical audiences and compose in forms routinely used for technical documents. With practice in audience analysis, students learn to accommodate a reader's professional and cultural knowledge. With practice in traditional organizational patterns, stylistic imitation of readable writing, they learn to accommodate common expectations about language and form.

Extracts from technical advertising and new-product announcements are used as the basis for analysis of the structures and linguistic signaling of many forms of comparison. Based initially on descriptive texts, the analysis also explains problem-solving texts with and without comparison; and comparative texts are seen to include implicit differences or overt comparison as “knocking” copy. Comparative cohesion by co-hyponyms is shown to be the central feature of co-associative cohesion between separate features of competing products, and clause-relating matching relations are explained in these terms. The concept of improvement is discussed in terms of problem-solving, difference and the matching relations of comparative denial. Final notes are provided regarding the significance of this work to the developing paradigm of technical writing.

Writing in the computer industry most likely provides the greatest challenges for technical communicators. The technology changes rapidly, and there are few established models of how communication products should be written. There are even fewer established models of how communication departments should be run. This article looks at the frustrations, challenges, and rewards of writing in such an environment.

Many scholars call for systematic empirical research in technical writing. This article reviews the Westley-MacLean communication model and provides an example of the model within a technical communication context. The author suggests use of the Westley-MacLean model as a means to conceptualize the technical communication process, and illustrates how the model can be used as a technical writing paradigm.

Les techniques de redaction technique oscillent entre la forme de l'essai (ou les faits sont subordonnes aux idees developpees) et celle du rapport (ou les faits predominent). Elles s'apparentent a la fois aux techniques de redaction utilisees en sciences humaines et a celles pronees par le journalisme

By studying a selection of business and technical texts, one can determine the functions of and the interactions between passive voice, nominalizations, and expressions of agency. One discovers that the distinction between dynamic and stative uses of verbs is crucial for understanding the various functions of passive sentences and nominalizations in business and technical writing. Then the functions of passive sentences and nominalizations are enumerated and illustrated with sentences from business and technical texts before discussing the various devices for expressing agency in passive and nominalized sentences. Only by understanding the various functions of these sentence types can instructors of business and technical writing offer specific and practical advice.

Although George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” offers good advice to writers, the technical writer's situation and use of language are more effectively discussed in 1984 and its Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.” The technical writer must make use of some Newspeak principles, such as limiting vocabulary and narrowing the definition of words; conversely, the writer must try to keep his expression of a corporate point of view and his limitations on wording from finally serving to limit the range of thought itself. Orwell considers these points much more important than “good prose style.”

Consistency is the orderly treatment of a set of linked elements, and it is a necessary characteristic of polished, highly readable prose. Consistency is either “uniform” or “harmonious,” depending on whether a set of linked elements is indivisible or divisible into subsets. From the perspective of text characteristics, we can speak of semantic, syntactic, stylistic, spatial, and mechanical consistency. To deal successfully with consistency problems, technical communicators should establish patterns that are logical, evident, functional, resource efficient, and stable. Because of its importance, the concept of consistency should be more fully recognized. Indeed, consistency should be a component of any comprehensive rhetoric of technical communication.

Proponents of computerized text-analysis (CTA) systems like Bell Laboratories' Writer's Workbench contend that the computer's analysis of a text's surface features can help students become better writers and editors. Several colleges and universities have already integrated the new technology into their writing programs, and others will consider doing so in the future. Teachers of technical writing, however, ought to investigate carefully the capabilities and limitations of CTA before applying it to the technical writing classroom. Not even the most sophisticated of today's computers can detect the basic grammar and punctuation errors that bedevil student writers. Moreover, the computer's evaluation of a text's readability and style is untrustworthy and lacks a sound theoretical and pedagogical foundation; indeed, the machine's quantitative-based analysis of writing style might do some students more harm than good. Finally, there is no empirical evidence that CTA helps students become better writers.