An introduction, even a short one, makes audiences more willing to listen to a speech, think more highly of the speaker, and understand a speech better than when no introduction is given. Two experiments at Delft University of Technology support this conclusion. Subjects viewed videotapes of professional presentations on the topic of Sick Building Syndrome. In one experiment, subjects rated the effectiveness of three introductory or “exordial”; techniques in gaining audience attention: an anecdote, an ethical appeal, and a “your problem”; approach. Results indicate that audiences do respond to exordial techniques, and in a predictable manner. In the second experiment, two speeches with anecdotal openers were tested against one without any introduction. The anecdotes led to significantly higher ratings of the presentation's comprehensibility and interest, as well as the speaker's credibility. The presence of an anecdote also resulted in higher retention scores. Oddly enough, the relevance of the anecdote did not seem to make a difference in the ratings.

Dynamics in Document Design. Karen A. Schriver. New York: Wiley, 1997. 559 pages. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Edward R. Tufte. Cheshire, CT: Graphics P, 1997. 156 pages. The Computer and the Page: Publishing, Technology, and the Classroom. James R. Kalmbach. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 145 pages. The Communication Theory Reader. Ed. Paul Cobley. New York: Routledge, 1996. 506 pages. International Dimensions of Technical Communication. Ed. Deborah C. Andrews. Arlington, VA: STC, 1996. 135 pages.

The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. 803 pages.

The first books and the first technical books published by English women during the 1475–1700 period can be useful in teaching students about the emergence of technical style or “plain style.”; If we examine the style of these women writers, long ignored by canonical studies, we can see that plain English existed before Bacon and received its impetus not from science, but from the utilitarian attitude that pervaded the 1475–1700 period. These women writers provide a microcosm for studying the rise of modern English prose and what we now call technical (or plain) style. They also provide an efficient way to expose students to early published works by women and their contribution to the history of technical writing. Examining style from such a perspective helps students see that technical communication was a prevalent kind of writing before Bacon and the Royal Society. Thus, technical communication—and the style of technical communication—studied from this unique historical perspective deepens students’ awareness of the roots of technical communication as it contributed to the history of English discourse.

Despite being raised in a culture that denied her access to formal education and employment, Flora Annie Steel became an Inspector of Female Schools in the Punjab, India, in 1884. Her inspection reports for the occupying British government of India are the focus of this study, which examines texts within the context of British imperialism and late‐nineteenth century report conventions. The study concludes 1) that cultural expectations for women in imperialism influenced Steel's response to the genre and 2) that the report genre may have been fluid within imperialism, crossing boundaries between professional and government writing pertaining today. The study suggests that, historically, we need to study these genres of writing from the perspective of economic and political expansion as genres of imperialism.

We designed and piloted a technical communication course for software engineering majors to take concurrently with their capstone project course in software design. In the pilot, one third of the capstone design course students jointly enrolled in the writing class. One goal of the collaborative courses was to use writing to improve the usability of students’ software. We studied the effects of writing on students’ user‐centered beliefs and design practices and on the usability of their product, using surveys, document analyses, expert reviews, and user test results. When possible, we compared the usability processes and products of teams who did and did not take the writing class. Our findings suggest that the synergy of this interdisciplinary approach effectively sensitized students to user‐centered design, instilled in them a commitment to it, and helped them develop usable products.

The rhetorician Longinus advises writers to “transport”; their readers by aligning the readers’ perspective with the writer's. The methods for transport are five “fountains”;: high thought, emotional appeals, figures of speech, notable language, and arrangement. This essay develops a Longinian concept and methodology for technical communication by comparing his ideas to current scholarship and then applying them to two technical texts. It shows how and why technical writers employ stylistic elements to achieve transport.

Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Johndan Johnson‐Eilola. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 272 pages. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. Laura J. Gurak. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pages. Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology. A. D. Van Nostrand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. 241 pages. Rhetoric and Pedagogy, Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 337 pages. Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language. Michel Meyer. Trans. David Jamison, in collaboration with Allan Hart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 310 pages.

When the idea of culture is expanded to include institutional relationships extending beyond the walls of one organization, technical writing researchers can address relationships between our power/knowledge system and multiculturalism, postmodernism, gender, conflict, and ethics within professional communication. This article contrasts ideas of culture in social constructionist and cultural study research designs, addressing how each type of design impacts issues that can be analyzed in research studies. Implications for objectivity and validity in speculative cultural study research are also explored. Finally, since articulation of a coherent theoretical foundation is crucial to limiting a cultural study, this article suggests how technical writing can be constituted as an object of study according to five (of many possible) poststructural concepts: the object of inquiry as discursive, the object as practice within a cultural context, the object as practice within a historical context, the object as ordered by language, and the object in relationship with the one who studies it.

This article examines the critical perspective as an alternative to our current descriptive, explanatory research focus. The critical perspective aims at empowerment and emancipation. It reinterprets the relationship between researcher and participants as one of collaboration, where participants define research questions that matter to them and where social action is the desired goal. Examples of critical research include feminist, radical educational, and participatory action research. Adopting the critical perspective would require that scholars in professional communication rethink their choices of research questions and sites, their views of the ownership of research results, and the types of funding they seek for research initiatives.

Since the 1960s, attitudes toward empirical research on writing, including research on technical/professional writing, have shifted from encouragement to resistance. This essay traces these shifts in light of changes in writing research, psychology, and the rhetoric of science. In composition studies, an initial mild uneasiness about “scientism”; intensified with the rise of process models, suggesting a Romanticist defense of the mystique of creativity. More recent post‐modernist denunciations of scientific methods as immoral have other Romanticist overtones. In technical communication, a long‐standing interest in workplace writing practices allowed a smoother integration of empirical analysis with descriptive studies of writing contexts. However, as in composition, recent critiques in technical communication suggest that empirical methods should not be employed. These critiques too tightly circumscribe the values that may be considered humanist and cut off important avenues of inquiry and critique that historically have advanced both the sciences and humanities.

There is much for technical communicators to learn from the burgeoning field of technology studies. Technical communicators, however, have an obligation to exercise patience as they enter this arena of study. Using interdisciplinary theory, this article argues that technical communication must assume the "burden of comprehension";: the responsibility of understanding the ideologies, contexts, values, and histories of those disciplines from which we borrow before we begin using their methods and research findings. Three disciplines of technology study—history, sociology, and philosophy—are examined to investigate how these disciplines approach technology. The article concludes with speculation on how technical communicators, by virtue of their entrance into this interdisciplinary arena, might refashion both their practical roles and the scope of their ethical responsibilities.

This article examines selected texts by Ellen Swallow Richards, a nineteenth-century scientist who wrote for a variety of audiences. Her audience awareness anticipates modem technical communication practices and alerts us to examine gender, class, and other social issues in historical documents as well as current pragmatic discourse.

Researchers in technical communication have recently begun to take advantage of the interactions taking place via computer-mediated communication as a rich source for research. Yet, although research in cyberspace is growing, there are few guidelines for researchers to follow. This article reviews three forms of technical communication research methods (ethnography, rhetorical analysis, and surveys) and raises preliminary issues to consider when using such research methods in cyberspace. These issues include privacy and author permissions.

A project in writing-across-the curriculum was launched within a nationally ranked baccalaureate degree program in accountancy at a Boston area college. The project team, which comprised faculty from accountancy and technical communication, attempted to integrate technical communication skills, principally writing, into an accounting information systems course. To improve student writing in this way, the team had to determine what kinds of writing activities would successfully introduce accounting students to the discourse of their profession, and had to select, from all the communication skills that might be taught, only those that should be taught to complement the specialized content of the accounting information systems course. The team's collaborative process produced three critical planning decisions that greatly simplified the integration: 1) establishing Joseph Juran's TQM notion of fitness-for-use for evaluating the quality of student communications; 2) selecting only those forms of communication used in the profession's discourse community in assignments; and 3) teaching only those communication skills that support and enrich the principal technical skills taught in the accounting course. This strategy demonstrates that communication skills can be integrated within a technical course so as to enhance the students' understanding of technical content while improving the students' proficiency in written communication.

Crystal Eastman, Alice Hamilton, and the women who organized the Workers' Health Bureau helped shape the field of health and safety communication early in this century. In texts targeted to varied professional and popular audiences, they sought to prevent occupational accidents and disease by promoting voluntary efforts by employers, government regulation and compensation programs, and unions to incorporate health and safety standards in contracts. While both their approach to research and their argumentative strategies can be considered "feminine," this designation reflects a tendency to associate women with activities and behaviors that have been devalued.

This article explores how an understanding of the nature and purposes of reports may help women gain recognition for their accomplishments, both in conventional business settings and within feminized professions and spheres of activity. A case study of report writing in the North Carolina Canning Clubs (1912-1916) illustrates how reports of work can provide a vehicle for elevating the perceived value of women's work. Since reports also inscribe authorial identity, however, women—indeed all report writers—must consider the ethical implications of their reports.

This article considers why women have been absent from the history of technical communication. It discusses research from the history of technology suggesting that notions of technology, work, and workplace may be gendered terns. The piece concludes with several suggestions for defining technical communication so the significant works of women will not be excluded from the discipline's history.

The feminist approaches to technical communication that have emerged recently are largely liberal feminist or radical feminist in orientation. Liberal feminism arises out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and emphasizes equality and rights. It sees that women's opportunities to develop their intellects and talents and participate freely in the world of men have been thwarted by discriminatory practices. Radical feminism, in contrast, emphasizes differences between women and men, the limitations of patriarchal culture, and the characteristics of women's ways of communicating and knowing. The essays included in this issue, while multidimensional, primarily exhibit characteristics of both liberal and radical feminism.

The essays published in this special issue of TCQ are contextualited within historiographical traditions of inquiry in the western history of science and technology.

This article focuses on the botanical publications of two eighteenthcentury English women writers: Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal (l737-1739) and Priscilla Bell Wakefield's An Introduction to Botany (1796). A brief rhetorical description and analysis of these books indicates that they contribute several new perspectives and techniques to the historical tradition of botanical writing and illustrating, as well as exhibit many of today's techniques for effective technical communication. Several suggestions are offered for further research directions to establish the significance of these writers within the conceptual framework of the feminine "green" tradition.

Abstract In this study, experts from three different disciplines gave think aloud protocols as they revised mismatched text/illustration combinations from biology textbooks. Fourteen first-year college biology students also gave protocols as they read and interpreted the combinations. The study was designed to explore the problem solving strategies of the experts as they revised the combinations of visual and verbal information. The results of this study indicate that, despite differences, the experts from the different disciplines worked in similar ways. Nevertheless, many of the experts were not able to predict the misinterpretations that students had of the combinations. The results indicate that one of the sources of problems in text/illustration combinations in textbooks may be due to a lack of consensus among expert authors as well as to a lack of direct feedback from readers. The results suggest that practical changes in publishing practices may be useful.

Theories of ethics typically emphasize either good character (asking "Who will I be?") or right behavior (asking "What will I do?"). Studies of ethics in technical communication have typically focused on the analysis of behavior, offering heuristics for deciding ethical dilemmas. Interviews with 48 technical communicators, however, reveal little exercise of such analytical processes. In making moral choices on the job, the majority look to feelings, intuition, and conscience. Ethics might be more effectively taught through a narrative perspective, especially by identifying models of moral courage and integrity.

Medical rhetoric has long been characterized by a focus on disease and on the physician as healer. Now, in the era of managed health care, patients are increasingly being viewed as agents in the management of their own chronic diseases. This article examines the concept of patient agency from a rhetorical perspective in lay and professional medical discourse relating to diabetes care. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad is used as a tool to help uncover and analyze sites where values appear ambiguous. This study shows that patient agency is closely related to patient compliance in the language of biomedicine. The terms "compliance" and "adherence" operate as terrninistic screens in professional discourse and serve to limit discussion of patient agency. In managed health care, tension is evident between the trend toward greater patient agency and the constraints of biomedical text conventions concerning doctor and patient roles.

Abstract As publishers integrate international issues into professional writing textbooks, we must analyze how curricular globalization is presented to students. Textbooks examined here position international students as clients, consumers, and exotics who present barriers to effective communication. Furthermore, most of the textbooks contain catalogs of decontextualized cultural factoids rather than strategies for identifying and understanding cultural differences. To expand our notion of international issues, we might consider reading relevant English as a Second Language scholarship for insights. A limited annotated bibliography concludes this article.

This article employs aspects of Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action and his concept of a lifeworld, alongside composition theory's use of community, to examine the effectiveness of guilt as a rhetorical strategy in two national environmental publications. It finds that, ultimately, for long-term cdmmunicative action to occur, environmental groups should not rely on guilt as a rhetorical strategy because outside their "discourse communities," it will not lead to "dialogue, deliberation, and consensus-building."

The twelve-year long battle over the relicensure of the Kingsley Dam in western Nebraska is a representative anecdote of environmental regulation. Typical of regulatory discourse, the metaphor of "balance" determined the available fopoi. We argue that "balance" procedurally diminishes the public, cloaks the subjectivity of decision making, and reduces the reasonable rhetor to the role of umpire. Finally, we explore rhetorical strategies for undermining the appeal to "balance."

The geological surveys of the American West in the 1860s-80s are photographically illustrated scientific and technical documents that impose colonizing metaphors upon "natural" areas and resources-metaphors that continue to be contested today in Sierra Club calendar views of Yosemite peaks and in contemporary Congressional ddbates over mining rights and royalties on public Westem lands. Photographic images by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and others are central to the survey reports and are here read not so much as products of individual artistic or aesthetic sensibility, but more as thetoncat products of economic, ideological, and political forces in the decades after the American Civil War.

This article examines contributions of selected theories to technical communication's understanding of environmental discourse and uses a dialogical synthesis to construct a model of stakeholder analysis. The model, with its interactive variables of stakeholder knowledge, attitude, and desired behavior, is applied to a pollution prevention document and calls for an active research emphasis in determining effective communication strategies.