Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.

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.

As technology continues to become more ubiquitous and touches almost every aspect of the composing process, students and teachers are faced with new means to make writing a multimodal experience. This article embraces the emerging sector of wearable technology, presenting wearable writing strategies that would reimagine composition pedagogy. Specifically, the article introduces Google Glass and explores its affordances in reframing student peer-review activities. To do so, the author presents a brief overview of wearables and writing technology, a case study of how the author deployed Google Glass in a first-year writing course, and a set of tips for using wearable technology in general and technical writing courses.

This article analyzes literature on university–workplace partnerships and professional writing pedagogy to suggest best practices for workplace mentors to mentor new employees and their writing. The article suggests that new employees often experience cultural confusion due to (a) the transfer of education-based writing strategies and (b) the employees' lack of cultural knowledge of the new workplace. The article then outlines implied mentoring strategies based upon this transfer and lack of cultural knowledge. The article also analyzes the literature on discourse community theory, activity theory, service learning, and internships, each of which also imply potential mentoring practices. These comprehensive best practices are also contextualized through social cognitive, community–cultural, and motivational–attitudinal components that writing mentors should consider when mentoring writing in the workplace.

The present article describes and evaluates collaborative interdisciplinary group projects initiated by content lecturers and an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instructor for the purpose of teaching technical writing skills in an aeronautical engineering degree program. The proposed technical writing model is assessed against the results of a learner survey and refined accordingly. The survey showed that learners appreciated the cross-disciplinary collaboration in projects, and it delivered important insights into learning effects and student progress in both language and content matters. The article concludes with a list of recommendations for the implementation of project-based collaborative technical writing instruction, which may support or complement academic writing courses in similar contexts. The proposed model considers the circumstances of students in workload-intensive tertiary settings and synthesizes approaches such as problem-based learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, a guided product approach to collaborative writing, and learner autonomy.

Writing is common skill for many whose job requires them to communicate through business documents. But there are many professionals who seemingly have difficulty with writing. Many engineers are required to write proposals and reports yet have received little formal writing instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine if writing apprehension, their composition process, or the presence of deadlines affects the production of documents. The hypothesis was that engineers have high writing apprehension, generally use a product-based approach, and tight deadlines negatively affect the end quality. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with civil engineers to gauge their level of apprehension, learn their personal composition process and determine how deadlines affect their writing. While the hypothesis was not conclusively supported, the study revealed six key themes into how engineers structure their writing tasks and found that the writing environment of engineers significantly impacts the composition process.

By emphasizing the negative meanings of words, ignoring variations in translations, and quoting out of context, Steven B. Katz has argued in an influential article that an “ethic of expediency … underlies technical communication and deliberative rhetoric, and by extension writing pedagogy and practice based on it.” Katz's assertion misrepresents the motive of technical communication and its pedagogy, and it brings discredit to the professions of technical communication and the teaching of technical communication. His attempt to discredit the motive of technical communication is part of a two-millennia-long contest for status between intellectuals and the working classes, and it creates unnecessary mistrust at a time in history when people must focus even more on cooperating socially in order to sustain democratic cultures and our physical environment for future generations.

Service learning, an expanding pedagogical movement, educates students to volunteer their expertise for the benefit of society. Teachers of business and technical writing can apply this pedagogy by assigning students to write for nonprofits. Such assignments prepare students for both workplace writing and responsible citizenship. To help our profession consider the appropriateness of this pedagogy, this article describes the origins of the movement and proposes a rationale for it in our field. This article then explains sequential projects and teaching methods intended to reduce problems related to collaborative writing for nonprofits. Last, resources are identified to help prepare grant proposals, perhaps the most beneficial kind of document for nonprofits.

Many current technical writing handbooks still advise writers to avoid the passive voice except in certain limited situations, primarily when the agent is unknown, understood, unimportant, or better left unnamed. However, a growing body of research indicates that the passive voice has a broader array of rhetorical functions. To identify some of the functions of the passive, as well as the active, voice, the frequencies of active and passive verbs were determined in 185 documents written by twenty-eight civilian and military members of the U.S. Air Force. The frequencies were similar to those in similar types of documents written by nonacademic writers in previous studies. In addition, writers were queried about their reasons for choosing active or passive verbs. While the results of the study confirmed the importance of agency in the choice of active or passive, they also revealed numerous other factors that were significant in writers' choices. The most significant reasons for choosing one type of verb over another were the voice of the verb, organizational requirements, audience awareness, efficiency, genre, euphony, personal preference, agency, emphasis, and topic-comment flow. These results suggest that technical writing instruction and handbooks should promote general principles for the use of both active and passive verbs rather than advising against the use of passive verbs.

Engineering students, faculty, and administration all agree that instruction in writing is an important component of engineering education. And since engineering students will take up technical matters in their careers, it seems only natural that a writing class will require them to write papers about technology, that is, to practice technical writing. While this approach may indeed be of value, the following article presents an alternative to the teaching of technical writing per se. The author suggests that if students learn how to approach an issue they care about, form an arguable idea from this issue, then logically prove it in subsequent paragraphs, that this deep level of writing and thinking comprehension can then be used to enhance any piece of writing, especially the technical document.

In 1917 Frank Aydelotte, an English professor at MIT, became AT&T's first outside writing consultant. Because many of its older, better-educated male employees had been mobilized to fight World War I, the company found itself with numerous young, poorly-educated employees. Drawing on the humanistic approach to writing instruction that he had developed at MIT in his book English and Engineering, Aydelotte created a year-long program at AT&T that taught employees to think and write about issues important to their work. The course is important for two reasons: first, it offers insight into the kinds of early consulting work that English professors did, and, second, it shows that Aydelotte's humanistic approach to technical communication worked as well in business as it did in academic settings.

Twenty years ago I had no idea what a computer was. Ten years ago I knew what computers were, but I had never sat at a terminal. I just assumed that computers were machines used in those “other” disciplines, certainly not in English courses. Today, I teach my technical writing classes in a collaborative computer classroom. The classroom consists of twelve networked computers which my twenty-four students per class use in tandem. Despite my original ignorance of computers, I'm now happily ensconced in a computer classroom. In fact, computers are so important, I've concluded, that teaching writing without the aid of computers does our students a disservice. How did I make such a complete turn-around in attitude? I realized that far from being anathema, computers helped to create a perfect marriage for teaching and writing. First, computers let students write more effectively because computers are compatible with the writing process (writing and rewriting). Next, teaching students to write in a collaborative computer environment prepares our students for business and industry where they will be asked to work on group projects and to communicate electronically. Despite the values of computerizing our instruction, however, computers in the classroom present problems. Do the benefits outweigh the deficits? My answer is yes.

Although research in composition and in instructional design suggests that film and video can be useful pedagogic tools in writing instruction, little research has been directed toward discovering how film and video can be used to teach the kinds of documents produced in professional-writing courses. Because of important similarities in written instructional materials and training videos—the expository and “how-to” tapes being produced for business and industry—training videos can help developing professional writers learn how to write effective instructions. These videos provide writers with a visual model of certain information-processing strategies, cultural themes, and learning objectives important to written instructions. Professional-writing instructors interested in using these training videos will find many sources for appropriate videos, both on and off the university campus.

This article first reviews the role of oral and written discourse within social constructionist theory. The author discusses both the differences and the similarities between oral and written discourse and suggests that writers emphasize the similarities rather than the differences since the implicit rules of conversation have much to offer to the technical writer. In order to apply these conversational principles, however, technical writers need to alter their attitudes toward their audiences. The article concludes with an example of how the principles of conversation can be applied to the process of writing instructions.

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.

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.

Teaching technical writing to non-native speakers of English is complicated by their special needs. Central to the discussion is the idea that expository writing ought to be a key element of any program purporting to teach English. The nature of proper preparatory training is discussed with specific reference to the language groups American trainers are likely to encounter working in the U.S. or abroad. The justification for specific practices is discussed and should enable instructors to develop further strategies for training. Once the preparatory work is completed, effective technical writing instruction for non-native trainees requires modification of a good program for native speakers. Training is most effective if material is presented in culturally familiar and intellectually compatible ways.

This article traces the history of technical writing instruction in American colleges, concentrating on the major figures in technical writing instruction, the most important textbooks, the forces that shaped courses in technical writing during the period 1900–1980, and the refinements and improvements in teaching and materials that led to the current growth and success of technical writing courses.

Instruction in the writing of abstracts is of growing importance for technical writers, both as a valuable skill in its own right and for the beneficial side effects on other writing competencies. A proposed unit on abstract writing includes activities relevant to the abstract as a distinct writing form and assignments on writing an effective informative abstract.