Writing in the Health Professions is one of the latest books in the very popular Allyn and Bacon Series in Technical Communication published by Pearson/Longman and is the first one in the series to...

Working from the premise that public input is essential to science policy deliberations, we analyze how two recent works of public communication about climate change (An Inconvenient Truth and Climate Change Show) draw on the rhetorical resource of apocalyptic narrative explanation to promote scientific fluency and inspire citizen engagement in the issues. By weaving together the proofs of ethos, logos, and pathos within a framework of cultural rationality, these narratives illustrate available means of persuasion for stimulating the public's informed participation in science policy discussions.

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.

The questions are, by now, familiar in our technologically advanced society: How can or should ordinary citizens influence public policy decisions when the problems under consideration call for the...

Known to many for developing the concept of boundary objects, Susan Leigh Star has been a leading thinker in science and technology studies for more than a decade. With notable scholarly contributi...

Pedagogical and scholarly discussions of the process of usability tend to focus more on methods than on practices, or specific, tactical performances of and adjustments to these methods. Yet such practices shape students' learning and determine the success of their usability efforts. A teacher research study tracking students' understanding and enactment of usability and user-centered design over the course of a service-learning project illustrates the importance of practice-level struggles—and the thoughtful preparation for and facilitation of these struggles—to the development of students' flexible intelligence (metis) and rhetorical translation skills. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Telemedicine has been shown to be an effective means of managing follow-up care in chronic diseases such as depression. Exactly why telemedicine calls work, however, remains largely unknown because there are no adequate research tools to describe the complex communicative interactions in these encounters. We report here an ongoing project to investigate the efficacy of telemedicine in depression care, arguing that technical communication specialists have unique contributions to make to this kind of research.

Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional identities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two midwifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional consumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwifery's recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework.

Availability of online Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations is contributing to a shift in medical writers' organizational role from a peripheral to a central role where their responsibilities for the persuasiveness of documents and compliance with evolving regulations have increased dramatically. Therefore, curricula for medical writers should include instruction in persuasion, collaboration, strategic and project management, the drug development process, and the location and interpretation of FDA regulations.

Each year, more people search the Internet for health information. Through a case study conducted at a prominent health-information company, I will show that technical communicators are well-suited to contribute to the development of online health information. Like other technical communicators, online health-information developers must make rhetorical choices based on audience needs, function within specific social contexts, and work through challenges of writing, editing, and project management.

Abstract Early scholarly inquiries into online health information focused primarily on questions of accuracy and credibility. In recent research, however, we are seeing an expansion in this initial focus, to include issues such as the usability, design, and ethics of online health information. This special issue contains five articles that contribute to scholarly inquiry in these emerging areas of interest.

Viewing “informing” as a process to protect patients and support autonomy, we undertook a user-centered design process to develop online support for informed consent in pediatric Phase I research trials. Challenges included (a) delivering accurate information to people unfamiliar with medical terminology; (b) delivering this information humanely under time constraints and heightened emotions; (c) allowing users control over the information, while ensuring availability of legally required information. We addressed these challenges through analyses of audience, task, and information design.

Technical communicators, if you wonder what relevance this book has for you, or for the field of technical communication, please suspend judgment for a moment. The fact is, Nuechterlein and Weiser ...

In today's networked, technological context, the human being “consist[s] of a biological core surrounded by extended, constructed systems of boundaries and networks” (p. 7); our bodily senses are a...

Literate Lives in the Information Age profiles technological literacy autobiographies of boys, girls, men, and women of various ethnic, educational, social, economic, technological, and geographica...

Analogical reasoning has long been an important tool in the production of scientific knowledge, yet many scientists remain hesitant to fully endorse (or even admit) its use. As the teachers of scientific and technical writers, we have an opportunity and responsibility to teach them to use analogy without their writing becoming “overly inductive,” as Aristotle warned. To that end, I here offer an analysis of an example of the effective use of analogy in Rodney Brooks's “Intelligence Without Representation.” In this article, Brooks provides a model for incorporating these tools into an argument by building four of them into an enthymeme that clearly organizes his argument. This combination of inductive and deductive reasoning helped the article become a very influential piece of scholarship in artificial intelligence research, and it can help our students learn to use analogy in their own writing. Every one who effects persuasion through proof does in fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way. (Aristotle, 1984b Aristotle. 1984b. The rhetoric and the poetics of Aristotle, Edited by: Roberts, W. R. and Bywater, I. New York: The Modern Library. [Google Scholar], p. 26)

This article examines the role of the liquid drop analogy in George Gamow's theory of nuclear structure and his subsequent derivation of nuclear energy. It argues that the correspondences constituting the analogy served distinct but cooperative ends, requiring Gamow to posit a relatively simple nuclear geometry that set him apart from his contemporaries, mostly shell theorists, and led to his successful derivation of nuclear energy in the fall of 1928.

To understand how readers approach mechanical procedural instructions, this study tested surgical patient-education modules for the effectiveness of route and survey spatial perspectives in text. The results showed that subjects' ability to comprehend an intricate procedural action in surgery varies with learning styles and task approach along with different text-graphic perspectives. Overall, survey perspective worked better than route perspective in text. Readers' self-reporting of task difficulty and the effects of practicing did not notably affect their judgment.

This study explores the impact of institutionalized formulas in the creation of electronic mental health chart records. Through a qualitative analysis of client records obtained from a private organization that provides support and rehabilitation for at-risk youth, we explore the ways that structures imposed by the electronic charts limit cohesiveness and disrupt the communication of evaluative information. This disruption, which we argue is imposed by the format of the charts themselves and is reinforced by the institutional structures at work, is pivotal because it potentially impedes effective communication and understanding between the caregivers and providers who access this information.

To date, most of the research on usability and content management systems has focused on the end-user products of such systems rather than on the usability for technical communicators of the single-source authoring tools offered within these systems. While this latter research is undeniably important, attention needs to be paid to the plight of technical communicators attempting to use single-sourcing tools. Otherwise, technical communicators in workplaces risk becoming semi-skilled contingent labor rather than empowered knowledge workers. This essay, therefore, attempts to open a debate about the design of content management systems by turning to the rhetorical canon of memory as an appropriate source for insights into how stored information can be flexibly retrieved and used during composing activities.

This article lays out some of the key issues driving organizations' increasing interest in enterprise content management (ECM). It then problematizes both the rhetoric that technology developers are using to sell ECM technologies to business leaders and the assumptions on which business leaders are basing critical technology implementation decisions. Finally, it argues why technical communicators must take action—through direct participation in the ECM discourse—to shift the rhetoric that is structuring the ECM debate and thus shaping the potential of the field of technical communication.

Abstract Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organization's website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organization's current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content. Notes 1The list also sweeps up a lot of field knowledge in a compressed format. In making this list, we especially acknowledge the work of CitationAlbers (2000), CitationApplen (2002), CitationCarter (2003), CitationClark (2002), CitationPullman (2005), Rockley (2001; 2003), and Sapienza (2002; 2004; 2007).

Structured writing is a method for developing categories of information that can be single sourced, or reused, for various contexts. Creating distinct structures—such as concepts, procedures, and examples—prepares content for the application of XML markup elements that describe each category. A content management system identifies these structural elements, which facilitates reuse and repurposing. Students seeking positions in organizations that single source information must become proficient in structured writing and in writing collaboratively.

The importance of separating presentation from content is taken as a given in many kinds of publishing, despite the fact that the notion of separation has received little critical scrutiny. I provide a closer look at the separation, first by providing contemporary and historical context, then by laying out key distinctions in the ways the separation argument is used in Web design versus Web content management versus full-featured content management systems (CMSs). I suggest that these distinctions are critical in how we should view the separation and the implications of the separation for the work of technical communicators.

Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains is a testament to the pace of thought in new media studies. Published only 10 years after the launch of the Web, th...

While content management systems (CMSs) might be a new concept to many.people in our field, content management as a practice within our discipline is not; our field has been studying it and practicing it for years, though under different headings: single sourcing, knowledge management, and course management (such as in the form of WebCT and Blackboard). We started our work on this special issue with a rather ambitious mission-to bring together some diverse perspectives on content management and CMSs, to both theorize and operationalize the content management practice, and to rationalize our participation in the broad domain of content management discourse. Grounded on the premise that technical communication requires information and knowledge management, this special issue is one of the first systematic and deliberate attempts to extend our perspectives, both theoretical and practical, about technical communication from the relatively static sphere of document design to the more dynamic horizon of content (information/knowledge) management.

Abstract In the field of conservation, the distinction between academic research and advocacy appears to be undergoing a shift as the number of PhD-level researchers at conservation advocacy organizations grows. Drawing on my case study of one researcher at a prominent conservation nongovernmental organization (NGO), I have shown how this shift is manifested in the communication of NGO research. My study includes a discourse analysis of this researcher's publications from the forums of both scholarship and advocacy including, as a representation of discourse in the latter forum, gray literature (reports, books, and other texts produced and distributed outside the channels of the academic and publishing industry). I have also drawn on my interviews with this researcher about her publications. My study highlights specific features typical of her rhetoric that result from her occupying a hybridized cultural and professional space where research and advocacy overlap. Notes 1My study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the university where I completed this work. 2All quotes from Brandon are taken from an interview I conducted with her on March 5, 2005. 3Further examples illustrating my points here and elsewhere can be found in CitationLindeman (2006), the larger study that is the basis for this article.

A leading thinker in the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg is recognized by many as a preeminent voice in conversations about the role of technology in contemporary society. The author of s...

In Technical Communication and the World Wide Web, editors Carl Lipson and Michael Day attempt to present a realistic picture of the many-sided task of writing for the Web. All things considered, i...

This paper explores the growing popularity of animated software agents as a rapidly evolving technology for supporting website users and particularly the tendency among designers to figure them as young women. While designers claim that animated/personified interfaces are more intuitive and natural than the traditional point-and-click interfaces that users encounter, this paper aims to show how virtual humans can enact familiar scripts about women's work, circumscribe the range of possible roles and personalities for women, invoke service to others as the primary context for women's work, and objectify women through a not-so-subtle process of linking technology-as-tool to the idea that women are tools, fetishized instruments to be used in the service of accomplishing users' goals. In conclusion, this study develops our field's tools for critiquing technical communication texts and interfaces by focusing attention on the implications of how technologies for interacting with website users are designed.

This article reports the results of a survey of professional writers about the nature and importance of visual communication in their work. The results confirm the suggestions in the field's literature that visual communication is important to workplace practice and that the role of the professional writer has expanded beyond the domain of the verbal. Visual communication responsibilities are complex and varied, but the practitioners surveyed typically engage in substantial amounts of design-related work and value visual communication abilities. The data suggest that visual communication should be a curricular priority in professional writing programs.

When I teach a writing course to an interdisciplinary group of students, I find that the most difficult concept to get across is the contextual nature of writing. Writing, I always say to students,...

This past summer I spent three weeks at two different workshops, both of which explored the meaning, production, and pedagogical usefulness of new media. Our conversations, while fruitful, would al...

In 1974, the traffic-accident data archive maintained by the Department of Transportation for the state of Iowa was transferred from a primarily paper-based system to a mainframe computer. Data reg...

The Support Economy's appearance—its title, introduction, and blurbs—makes it seem as if this will be a management guidebook, one of those fast reads about Internet time or technical innovation tha...

The question of transfer has occupied researchers' minds for almost a century, starting from Thorndike's work in the 1920s up to the modern activity-theoretical studies. This discussion is particul...

This paper considers how veterinary students compose narratives of patient care. The author discusses the labor required to uncover narrative agents and actions, arrange them in time, posit causal connections, and assemble the elements into a coherent narrative. Students quickly learn how much of this effort can be effectively offloaded to a dedicated infrastructure of cognitive resources and how much must be offloaded to less suitable resources, the latter of which incurs important cognitive costs.

As distributed work begins to shift the nature of practice for technical communication professionals in the workplace, faculty need new frameworks to help prepare students for roles that involve negotiating, supporting, and facilitating virtual global collaboration. This paper identifies key areas of metaknowledge appropriate to these new frameworks by synthesizing a review of current scholarship on such collaborations and a case study of students participating in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural team project.

In this introduction, I review the topic of the special issue, distributed work: coordinative, polycontextual, cross-disciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives) and that enables the transformations of information and texts that characterize such work. After reviewing the literature on distributed work, I introduce the articles in this special issue.

Abstract This article presents findings from a recent study of mediated writing in a technical writing firm to examine distributed work conditions and how they affect the practices of individual technical writers. Distribution of labor, texts, and technologies for producing documentation creates complex information environments that writers must negotiate. In doing so, they practice two kinds of expertise central to technical writing as a profession—technological and rhetorical skill. This article examines how those skills are affected by distributed work.

In this article, we argue that mentoring of technical communication students must occur within the classroom. In our survey of students, we found that most students felt they had not been mentored. In our ethnography, we found that although students could define the term “mentor”, many were conflicted about its value. This confusion made students less likely to seek out or recognize mentoring opportunities. Students recognized mentoring practices that teachers implemented; however, they did not necessarily identify those practices as “mentoring”. We conclude that confusion arose from students' ambiguous views about mentoring and the lack of standard mentoring practices in the humanities. Therefore, teachers who intend to mentor in the classroom must (a) be more explicit in implementing elements that distinguish mentoring from teaching (e.g., intent and involvement), (b) extend an invitation to students to be mentored, and (c) help students develop a professional identity.