This article considers how users employ extraorganizational technical communication to reshape technologies, both materially and symbolically, even after these technologies enter into common use. Specifically, I analyze how women bicyclists of the 1890s authored instructional materials to complicate gendered and classed assumptions about users implicit in manufacturer-produced texts. I argue that technical communicators, in their teaching and research, should consider the role that extraorganizational technical communication plays in generating vital and lasting cultural changes.

In this study, I compared initial drafts of job application cover letters by nontraditional students in an introductory professional writing course with those by traditional students to determine if prior workplace experience improves rhetorical adaptability in students' writing. Although one might expect nontraditional students to display more rhetorical adaptability, this study reveals no difference. These results suggest that minor changes in pedagogy may help nontraditional students use their workplace experience to improve workplace-oriented writing in the classroom.

This article builds on scholarship in technical communication, medical rhetoric, and visual communication and represents a portion of a grounded study of one medical workplace setting's visualization practices. Specifically, the author explores how medical images—as technologically and rhetorically rendered artifacts—make “present” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969 Perelman , C. , & Olbrechts-Tyteca , L. ( 1969 ). The new rhetoric . Notre Dame , IN : University of Notre Dame Press . [Google Scholar]) the material characteristics of disease and thereby perceptually and argumentatively afford the construction of knowledge about future cancer-care action.

This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective—all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.

The field of technical communication has made notable progress in researching and teaching intercultural issues. Not enough discussion, however, is available on assessing students’ intercultural competence. This article attempts to start this discussion and invite further research. It suggests a working definition to conceptualize intercultural competence and draws upon diverse disciplines to review different assessment methods, including their strengths, drawbacks, and potential applications in technical communication classes.

User-generated tutorial videos are quickly emerging as a new form of technical communication, one that relies on text, images, video, and sound alike to convey a message. In this article, we present an approach—a rubric—for assessing the instructional content of tutorial videos that considers the specific roles of modal and multimodal content in effective delivery. The rubric is based on descriptive data derived from a constant comparative study of user-rated YouTube videos.

Wikis enable large, diverse groups of writers to effectively collaborate online. Although Wikipedia is the best-known wiki, businesses are increasingly using wikis to build documents and resources for internal use. Although many teachers of technical communication are interested in integrating wikis into their syllabi, assessment is difficult. Assessments based on traditional assignments fail because they do not focus on the social nature of wikis. This article introduces an “archaeological” assessment framework focused on this discourse.

Abstract Since the 1950s, technical communicators have been trying to predict future developments in technology, economics, pedagogy, and workplace roles. Prognosticators have included founders of the profession, academics, business leaders, and practitioners. This article examines their predictions to determine what they reveal about technical communication as a discipline. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Xiaoyan Huang, Jie Chen, Prasad Patankar, and the interlibrary loan staff at Missouri S&T. These people assisted by requesting, downloading, and photocopying articles and (in a few cases) correcting citations. The authors would also like to thank the journal's editors and copy editors for their contributions. Notes Full citations for in-text source references are either within the text as part of the annotated bibliographies (divided by publication years: 1952–1990, 1991–2000, or 2001–2010) or within the end-of-text list titled "Additional References." Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid Wright David Wright has a PhD in Technical Communication from Oklahoma State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Technical Communication in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Edward A. Malone Edward A. Malone is Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Director of Online Graduate Programs in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Gowri G. Saraf Gowri G. Saraf has a BE in Instrumentation Technology from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Tessa B. Long Tessa B. Long has a BA in Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Irangi K. Egodapitiya Irangi K. Egodapitiya has a BA with majors in English, sociology, and management from the University of Peradeniya, near Kandy, Sri Lanka, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Elizabeth M. Roberson Elizabeth M. Roberson has an AS in Business Administration, a BS in English, and a BS in Writing from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T.

Cognitive scientist Andy Clark (2008 Clark , A. ( 2008 ). Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension . New York : Oxford University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) has argued, “the study of mind might … need to embrace a variety of different explanatory paradigms whose point of convergence lies in the production of intelligent behavior” (p. 95). This article offers technical communication research as such a paradigm and describes technical communication research past and present to argue that our disciplinary knowledge of tools, work environments, and performance assessment is a necessary complement to a more robust science of the mind.

Component content management (CCM) is profoundly changing technical communication (TC) work, yet TC scholars have been largely absent from the CCM discourse that is shaping that work. This article explores the notion of reciprocity as a way for scholars to gain agency in the CCM discourse. The author argues that innovation diffusion studies can provide rich opportunities for enacting reciprocity. She offers her own CCM diffusion study to demonstrate the potential value of this model.

Following recent work to advocate a strongly social understanding of technological literacy, this article considers how networking technologies are reshaping our understanding of the social. In this context, technological literacy can be understood as a process of constructing the networks in which literate action is defined. I explore the role of technological literacy as a force of network building accomplished through a mechanism of translation. From the comments of experienced technical communicators, I make observations about how technical communicators are taught to be technologically literate.

This article reports my classroom-based qualitative research, conducted at a midwestern university, on the role of World Englishes in the ethos transformation of U.S. native English-speaking students. The 30 participants completed assignments that enhanced their understanding of how the English language affects discursive tasks in international audience adaptation. Efforts at internationalizing technical communication can benefit immensely from the inclusion of the World Englishes paradigm in training programs to account for students' language attitudes.

Freelance technical writers perform their work outside their clients' corporate culture, and this occurrence is becoming more and more common. It is important to understand the significance of the separation between technical writers and corporate culture, especially given that some freelance technical writers never meet their clients in person. Does corporate culture play a significant role for the freelance technical writing professional?

Abstract Relatively little is known about the politeness strategies used by technical communicators and designers in group settings, particularly in the decision-making, collaborative meetings of a real-world, naturally occurring group. This study explores the degree to which members of a well-established group linguistically express concern for their fellow collaborators and how that concern may be affected by the type and imminence of their deadlines. Notes In actuality, Brown and Levinson give a fifth strategy of not speaking the request at all. Henceforth, all discussions of "substrategies" will include the bald, on- record strategy as well. Additional informationNotes on contributorsErin Friess Erin Friess is an assistant professor of technical communication at the University of North Texas. Her research explores discursive strategies and user-centered design processes in workplace settings.

Abstract This article discusses the need for technical communicators to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between law and their work. The author reviews the discipline's literature regarding the relationship between law and technical communication and argues that technical communicators must learn to see themselves as coproducers of the law. To that end, the author offers pedagogical strategies for helping technical communication students develop skills for recognizing the legal implications of their work.

Before a jury begins deliberation, judges provide instructions to guide jury decision-making. Unfortunately, extant literature has demonstrated poor comprehension of these instructions. Although there have been attempts to simplify the language of these instructions, plain language may not be enough to ensure comprehension. Instead, the principles of technical communication advocate the adoption of a learner-centered perspective and suggest increased novice–expert interactions to assist jurors in comprehending the task assigned to them.

This special issue features articles that address legal issues as they relate to technical communication research, pedagogy, and practice. The articles will assist instructors who wish to engage classes in activities that allow students to understand, analyze, and respond to legal dilemmas related to workplace activities. The articles will also highlight contemporary subjects for research inquiry in technical communication, including the relationship between technical communication and civic engagement, which often depends on the study of legal processes. It is our hope that this special issue will generate interest in the intersection of technical communication and the law and that it will provide readers of TCQ with a valuable and unique foundation for teaching and research in this area.

This article explains the Constitution's intellectual property provision and its goals, then deconstructs the Supreme Court's decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft as a means to unravel the pieces in the complex relationship among the constitutional provision, the First Amendment, and copyright. The article then considers how an understanding of the relationship of these elements can be helpful for considering the positions of technical communicators as both users and producers of intellectual products.

Abstract This article explores the challenges and opportunities that the rising numbers of students with disabilities and the changing definition of disability pose to technical communication teachers and researchers. Specifically, in a teacher-researcher study that combines methods from disability studies, I report on the effectiveness of multimodal and universal design approaches to more comprehensively address disability and accessibility in the classroom and to revise traditional impairment-specific approaches to disability in technical communication. Notes 1. CitationCharlton (1998), in Nothing About Us Without Us, recalls hearing this slogan in South Africa in 1993 from two separate leaders of Disabled People of South Africa, Michael Masutha and William Rowland, and he writes, “The slogan's power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (p. 3). 2. Other principles include guidelines for equitable use, varieties of perceptible information, and appropriate size and space for approach and use. See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html for quoted guidelines. 3. CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It is a challenge-response test that usually visually distorts and warps letters, assuming that a human can decode the letters but a computer cannot. 4. For details on the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility, see CitationThatcher et al. (2006), pp. 26–28. Chapter 1, “Understanding Web Accessibility,” is useful for students to read and discuss during this segment of the class. 5. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by CitationThatcher et al. (2006) is also a useful resource for students to consult, particularly Chapter 1.

Abstract In this article, I argue that to understand technical communication instruction in non-Western countries, one has to pay close attention to the impacts of local cultural, educational, political, and economic contexts on technical communication practices. I identify two localized programs that share features of technical communication in China and review their programmatic positioning at national and local levels. I also suggest ways for U.S. technical communicators to start cross-cultural collaboration with local programs.

Do programs in technical communication thrive when administered in English departments or in other configurations of administrative units? This article examines the variations in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs at four universities across the north central U.S. The first three programs have histories that led them to be housed at increasing distances from their universities' English departments. The fourth is a nascent program emerging in its university's English department.

This article provides an account of the academic location of 142 technical communication programs as reported on program Web sites as well as in an online survey sent to technical communication program coordinators. According to the findings, most technical communication programs are located in departments of English, but programs outside of English are more likely to offer graduate degrees and a more technically oriented program focus.

Programs in technical and professional communication are continually challenged by issues of location and dislocation. Historic changes and interdisciplinary initiatives are in progress at colleges and universities worldwide. The five articles of this special issue will offer a portrait of the multiple ways that technical communication programs are positioning themselves to do innovative teaching and research.

The case of Lucille Pieti, a technical writer at Chrysler, serves as a discipline-specific illustration of some of Rossiter's (1995) generalizations about women scientists and engineers after World War II. Like other women with engineering degrees, Pieti emerged from college with high hopes, only to find herself consigned to one of the traditional ghettos for women scientists and engineers: technical communication. Her case is unusual, however, because she became a national celebrity.

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.

Composition and rhetoric's attention to writing as cultural performance is expanded to analyze writing as organizational performance. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse enables the diagnosis of a technical writer's annual performance appraisal as grounded in 20th-century Taylorized management principles. Tenets from posthumanism—including a discarding of the liberal humanist subject in knowledge production and a leveraging of distributed cognition for enhanced performance of humans acting in concert with intelligent machines—enable a theoretical framework for repurposing this genre.

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly brings posthuman perspectives to bear on the kinds of metarhetorical, organizational, and intertextual problems that are central to technical...

Technical communication pedagogy often uses two distinct processes to help students construct user-centered documents: audience analysis and invention. However, posthuman contexts, such as virtual reality, challenge traditional methods for audience analysis and invention. In virtual environments, knowledge is constructed by and through embodied interactions with people, technologies, spaces, and ideas—and the dual processes of analysis and invention are conflated. In this article, I present data from a semester-long comparative study between two technical communication courses. Students in both courses created instructions for filming in a virtual environment, but students from only one of these courses experienced the space/place of virtual reality. The data emphasize the importance of embodied experiences in technical communication pedagogy and practice.

The pages of Technical Communication Quarterly are devoted to exploring literacy activities and knowledge production in 21st-century organizations and to suggesting what technical communication edu...

Twelve currently popular technical communication textbooks are analyzed for their treatment and discussions of the types of writing that engineers produce. The analysis reveals a persistent bias toward humanities-based styles and genres and a failure to address the forms of argument and evidence that our science and engineering students most need to master to succeed as rhetoricians in their fields. The essay ends with recommendations and calls upon instructors to reenvision the service course in technical communication.

This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines 1 specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space.

“The study of activity ceases to be the psychology of an individual, but instead focuses on the interaction between an individual, systems of artifacts, and other individuals in historically developing institutional settings” (Miettinen, 1997). As teaching technical writing online becomes more widespread, teachers and scholars are identifying ways to increase teaching/learning efficacy. One way of accomplishing this goal is by continually reflecting on different types of student ethos being constructed in an online course. The changes that occur in the ethos development process can be contextualized through activity theory, which emphasizes the dynamic, evolving nature of social environments. Activity theory's focus on cultural history and tools makes it ideal for exploring active communication among multiple participants in an online technical communication environment. The triangle of human activity adapted and developed by Engeström (1987) Engeström, Y. 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental research., Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy. [Google Scholar] provides a framework for exploring ethos as an object within an online course's activity system.

This article sketches the significance of aurality in hypermedia, notes that the field of English studies is constructing the World Wide Web as a verbal and visual medium, and proposes a transtextual framework to aid technical communicators in designing musical hypermedia. Because the study of music on the World Wide Web is nascent, this article includes references to art and film music, whose theories and practices are substantially developed.

This article attempts to summarize the history of ATTW. It focuses on issues that led to the need for an organization devoted to technical writing, and the individuals who were leaders in ATTW, as well as in NCTE and CCCC, whose efforts provided the foundation for the presence of technical writing as a legitimate teaching and research discipline. We draw on existing historical pieces and the contributions provided by many of the first ATTW members to capture the history of ATTW. We describe the major changes in ATTW from 1973–2007 and conclude with our reflections, as well as important questions we believe to be critical to the future of ATTW

This article discusses the rise of conservation writing as a new field of technical communication, and it offers pedagogical strategies for teaching conservation writing and building curricula. Conservation writing is an umbrella term for a range of writing about ecology, biology, the outdoors, and environmental policies and ethics. It places the natural world at the center of readers' attention, often viewing sustainability as a core value. A course or curriculum in this kind of writing would likely need to help students master a variety of genres, while providing a working knowledge in environmental law, ethics, and politics.

This article analyzes the Web interfaces of two well-known national civic action groups, both related to genetics research: the Genetic Alliance and the Innocence Project. These two sites are excellent examples of interface design and information retrieval, and they also attempt to translate complex science to the general public, even those traditionally most underrepresented and marginalized by the complexities of science and technology. The Genetic Alliance and Innocence Project provide excellent case studies for technical communication courses about the necessity to marry factual scientific knowledge with cultural and emotional rhetorics while providing an interface for multiple stakeholders in public policy change.

In this interesting argument for the reintroduction of metaphor as a rhetorical strategy for technical communicators, Timothy Giles emphasizes the importance of the metaphor to convey complex conce...

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...

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.