This study investigated the extent to which lexical repetition in English passages developed in a content management system appeared to affect reading comprehension. Participants were 65 graduate students at a Midwestern public university, all of whom were native English readers. Instruments were two passages adjusted to maximize or minimize internal lexical repetition. Readers rated repetitive texts as significantly more cohesive than nonrepetitive texts, although repetition did not significantly affect the accuracy of task-based responses. Participants named lexical cues that had been repeated but also named nonrepeated, memorable cues, suggesting possible future research into managed content, lexical memorableness, and reader comprehension.

This article describes a graduate seminar on Content Strategy taught in the Fall of 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic. Students worked totally online with a real client to develop a content strategy plan. This class was noteworthy because, unlike most classes that end up designing a logo, identity package, and look-n-feel approach to content strategy, this course ended up focusing on the much-overlooked emphasis on governance in an already well-established content strategy plan. Students conducted a persona research study (using Redish's approach) and built a UX journey map (using Kalbach's approach). They conducted a content audit (using Halverson's approach) and then used the data to determine what problems in content development really needed to be solved. These analyses showed that the client's principal needs actually dealt with governance issues rather than logos, branding, and content, so students researched and recommended suitable governance systems (primarily following Welchman's approach). Finally, they produced templates, sample content, and a content development plan for PCLS based on the new governance model provided.

When writing journal articles, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their new articles routinely build directly on their own prior work. As a result, STEM authors often reuse material from their completed documents in producing new documents. While this practice, known as text recycling (or self-plagiarism), is a debated issue in publishing and research ethics, little is known about researchers’ beliefs about what constitutes appropriate practice. This article presents results of from an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and post docs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master’s students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate students who are studying multimedia production skills. The author piloted the collaborative project model during a recent academic term. Student response to the format was overwhelmingly positive from both graduates and undergraduates, and the resulting projects were of exceptional quality and well received by their respective clients.

This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center at Michigan State University and offers a stance on graduate student mentorship. It describes WIDE’s mentorship model as feminist and inclusive and as a means to invite researchers with different backgrounds to engage in knowledge-making activities and collaborate on projects. Additionally, the article explains how WIDE enables growth for its researchers, teachers, and leaders. To illustrate these ideas, the authors provide multiple perspectives across faculty mentors, former graduate students, and current graduate students in order to discuss how WIDE researchers practice mentorship and how this mentorship prepares students for future work as scholars and researchers. Finally, the article suggests ways other research centers can adapt WIDE’s approach to their own institutional context.

Gaining access to interdisciplinary research sites poses unique research challenges to technical and professional communication scholars and practitioners. Drawing on applied experiences in externally funded interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship about interdisciplinary research, this article describes a training protocol for preparing graduate students to understand the dynamic nature of access in interdisciplinary work as well as to develop a capacity for making a case about the value of their expertise in interdisciplinary research contexts. The authors situate the training protocol in the context of three distinct phases of case-making (individual, relational, and speculative) and note how the conditions for negotiating access vary within and across these phases. The authors conclude by describing implications to graduate students and faculty for theorizing access in this way and developing training to support graduate students’ negotiation of access in interdisciplinary work.

In an effort to expand the range of ways graduate programs prepare students to be scholars and practitioners in technical and professional communication, this article argues for a fresh direct reengagement with stories, storytelling, and narrative as valuable ways of studying and effectively producing the varied texts of the workplace. The previous call for acknowledging the value of narrative traces back almost 30 years, and story is still being used in a variety of compelling ways, even as an overt regard for narrative has not been sustained. What may be lacking is a systematic way to transform assumptions about stories as informal anecdotes into stories as data for rigorous analysis. David Boje’s antenarrative theory and method offers technical and professional communication graduate students, scholars, and practitioners just such a compelling and timely position from which to consider workplace processes and products.

To address graduate writing pedagogy in technical communication, this article reports on a study of 14 award-winning dissertations in the field. By treating dissertations as cultural artifacts constitutive of the educational contexts in which they are authored, this study reads dissertation methodology sections as research narratives to understand how we prepare new scholars and to examine the changing nature of what we value in the field.

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

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

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

Although there is much literature that describes collaborative writing projects in undergraduate courses, little is reported about such projects for graduate students. This article reports the results of a collaborative writing project in a graduate course in usability testing. Because the graduate students were sophisticated practitioners in career positions in technical and professional communication, the instructor made the assumption that the normal requirements of journal checks, conferences, and self- and group-assessment tools would not be needed. The results proved otherwise. An analysis of the two teams' efforts—both product and process—establishes the need for structure and guidance for graduate collaborative writing projects, regardless of the audience's professional experience.

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.

Native and international science, engineering, and humanities graduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington experience real-world communication situations in an interdisciplinary, projected-oriented technical communication course team-taught by a technical writer and a mechanical engineer. The course simulates the writing requirements of industry and helps students prepare theses and dissertations. A special feature for international students is a supplementary weekly laboratory session devoted to intensive review of writing fundamentals. The course, which has been offered three times since 1976 with enrollments of eleven, five, and nine students, has been received well by science and engineering students for whom it was initially designed and by humanities students who now also enroll. Even though in some cases the progress that a foreign student makes in one semester is limited, all students have found the course of great benefit. The interdisciplinary team approach is an effective way of teaching graduate-level technical communication, providing engineers an opportunity to learn to express ideas to humanists and providing humanists an opportunity to learn to communicate effectively with engineers and scientists.

Technical writing required of employees in business and industry has been investigated, but the writing demands on graduate students have not been systematically surveyed. To find out what kinds of writing are required of graduate engineering students, twenty-five engineering faculty members from the Engineering College at the University of Florida listed the kinds of writing assigned to graduate classes during the academic year 1979–80. Since the faculty members were asked to rank-order the writing kinds from most frequent to least frequent, the Friedman analysis of variance and the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test were used to test for differences in the rank ordering. The tests showed that faculty assigned examinations, quantitative problems, and reports most frequently, that they assigned homework and papers (term and publication) less frequently, and that they assigned progress reports and proposals least frequently.

As technical writing programs grow, English departments may alleviate the problems of the unprepared instructor by offering technical writing theory and pedagogy courses. Such courses should combine theory and pedagogy with assignments that are practical and introduce graduate students to the theoretical issues in the field. This article provides a syllabus and the reactions of students who completed such a course.

A summer program at the Naval Underwater Systems Center offers from two to four temporary positions each year, where graduate students in technical writing are introduced to a wide variety of assignments in technical communications. The program, now in its sixth year, provides practical professional training for technical writers and editors.

In the fall of 1972, the Department of Humanities of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan adopted a lecture-recitation format for its required course in scientific and technical communication. The recitations were conducted by graduate student teaching assistants of which I was one. Though I found my educational background, which was in electrical engineering, to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage in many ways, there were certain aspects of the department, the course, and the teaching techniques of my colleagues that I did not originally anticipate. This article presents some of these.