While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923's English For Engineers, I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State. Her rural agricultural background and acquaintance with the engineering faculty, combined with her literature training, led to OSU's engineering faculty demanding successfully that English promote her without reference to her textbook. Harbarger is also a notable early example of navigating being a female professor teaching engineering writing in a male-dominated English literature department.

Research and writing often begin with a play of determinacy and indeterminacy, or “in-determinacy” Do. Other disciplinary levels include invention and presuppositions D1, formal findings D2, and technical and media products D3. This rhetorical approach leads, here, to identifying levels and relationships; tracing cross-disciplinary information and dominant influences; applying the results to specific cases in science, literary criticism, ethics, and technical writing; thus, suggesting a typology for furthering such dialogue.

Identifying problems in recent technical communication studies of historical medical text, this article suggests ways for researchers to overcome them. Its approach uses five steps for conducting sound historical research: establishing originality for historical textual analysis; adopting an authoritative text for analysis; understanding the genre or form of a historical text; understanding the intellectual or social context for a historical text; and understanding the publishing and readership context of a historical text. These steps are discussed within the context of related fields of inquiry, namely history of medicine, history of the book, literary criticism and historical linguistics, and analytical bibliography. The article concludes by exploring new directions for research in technical communication and history of medicine.

This article contains results from a literary analysis of fifty scientific papers selected from the top 100 most-cited papers appearing in the Science Citation Index for the period 1945–1988. Most papers are from the field of biochemistry and became citation superstars because their authors discovered a method or material that numerous others could use in their own research. The typical paper has two authors, two tables, six figures, and twenty-two references. It adheres to the conventional topical organization, with the topics distributed as follows: 2 percent abstract, 5 percent introduction, 25 percent methods and materials, 50 percent results, 10 percent discussion, 4 percent conclusion, and 4 percent reference list. Tables and figures occupy about 30 percent of the article. With respect to the writing style, the average sentence is somewhat long (24 words) but not unreasonably so, and the sentence structure is simple greater than half the time. Moreover, sentences tend to rely heavily on to be verbs (about 80% of sentences have at least one) and abstract nouns (0.66 per sentence). Explanations for the typical form and writing style in these papers are provided.

This compilation provides a comprehensive listing of all the known and available publications of Jay R. Gould including books, plays, short stories, articles, essays, papers. It also lists unpublished items such as papers and speeches, plays, and other items, including items about Jay Reid Gould.

Language study and literary criticism have for many years been separated. Modern developments in critical theory have stressed the study of texts. Structuralism developed a semiotic approach to texts using psychological and linguistic theory to support objective analysis. Poststructuralist theory has further developed these approaches investigating deep and surface significance in textual interpretation urging a deconstruction of texts to yield a full contemporary understanding. The relationship between writer, reader, text, and context is seen anew within the whole communication complex in an approach which regards texts as discourse. Advanced foreign language teaching unites literature and language in a new synthesis stressing communication and conceptualization through language. Technical communication should be aware of new interdisciplinary trends since it is itself at the center of the dominant theme of communication.

Moby-Dick is a classic of technical literature as well as a classic of American literature. But for the technical writing teacher, its relevance goes beyond this: Moby-Dick can also be a valuable teaching resource. It provides pertinent examples for teaching students the concepts of audience, purpose, research and sources, use of background experience, and thoroughness in compiling data. It also supplies ample models of technical definitions, descriptions, processes, and theories. Finally, Moby-Dick demonstrates the kind of energetic technical writing that is so needed today.