Most discussions of disciplinarity start by claiming an emerging group as constituting a discipline or a profession and authorizing that group by locating appropriate research foci, programs for graduate education and undergraduate certification, professional societies, and central professional meetings. Our discussion examines the field of professional writing, focusing not so much on defining it as a discipline as on working out its curricular geography, an activity that will affect its status in both academy and industry. To that end, we explore the status of professional writing within the department of English by (a) briefly examining the problem of defining professional writing; (b) reviewing several theoretical positions within English that have provided a status for professional writing—literature, rhetoric/composition, business and technical writing—to expose the competition for control of the term and to surface the implications of accepting these various groups on their own terms; and (c) considering the curricular status to which professional writing might aspire by sketching a geography that positions professional writing in a new space within English.

Through language and presentation of information, technical writers have the power to influence the perceptions and values of others. However, our students may not know how to wield this power with full awareness of its ethical implications. They may not understand that they have considerable control over how a reader perceives the writer, the message, or the context of the message. Learning how to use language and information ethically should be the focus of discussions of language choices and presentation of information in technical communication classrooms. By studying the power of communication to affect values and judgements, our students will realize the fundamental ethical responsibilities they bear as writers. This essay discusses current research on ethics and technical communication, examines specific methods that writers may use to manipulate language and to present information unethically, and suggests questions designed to teach students how to analyze situations that may involve such manipulation and misrepresentation. The essay closes with two case studies to illustrate such situations.

Researchers have frequently examined the effects of sentence combining (SC) practice upon writing and found positive results. Researchersh ave also investigatedt he effects of writing practice on reading comprehension. But these results have been mixed because of problems in design, the measures used, instructional variables, and the lack of a theoretical base to explain divergent outcomes. The purpose of the current study was to identify effects of SC practice upon reading comprehension and to determine whether cohesion knowledge would be augmented and, if so, whether enhanced cohesion knowledge would affect comprehension. Sixty- five grade 4 students met with a researcherf or 16 instructional sessions. Students in the experimental group devised narratives from sets of cued and uncued kernel sentences, while the control group read compiled narratives developed by the experimental group and then completed crossword puzzles, a “placebo” treatment. The study found statistically significant results on the Stanford Reading Test, positive results approaching significance on cloze passages with structure /function word deletions, but no positive results on passages with content word deletions. These results indicate that SC practice may have enhanced cohesion knowledge and general comprehension. They also suggest that children may effectively learn to attend to semantic and syntactic repetitions that form “chains of cohesion” following SC practice but not after merely reading the same texts.

Academic engineers must write frequently on the job. But unlike others in academe, academic engineers have some writing problems that justify their receiving various kinds of writing support. The writing problems unique to academic engineers are that they often have little knowledge and experience in writing; they must produce a variety of documents, some of which affect not only their professional standing but also the academic standings of their engineering colleges; and some lack fluency and confidence in their writing because English is not their native language. The best solution for addressing the writing problems of academic engineers is to provide adequate writing training for engineering students. But given the already compacted curricula of engineering colleges, this solution is not realistic. The author presents some second-best solutions that can ease the writing problems of academic engineers.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Although collaboration in technical communication is not a recent phenomenon, the attention it is receiving is new. This recent attention has generated an increasing number of well‐designed and provocative studies that are concerned with collaboration in technical communication contexts as well as with the processes of collaboratively conceptualizing, creating, and producing technical texts. Much of this research, which is forcing a reexamination of theories that affect the pedagogy and practice of collaboration, draws on a broad interdisciplinary foundation and utilizes an array of multi‐methodological approaches, both quantitative and qualitative.

Let me take as a point of departure from this relative certainty Rose's concluding remark that from our students' can learn much of what we want to know about the ways cultural realities such as gender influence literacy practices-if we learn to read those stories (257). Let us grant that we want to know about these cultural realities, the traces of which our student texts bear, against their writers' intentions. Let us also grant the reason for wanting to know about these realities: the world we respond to is the world that our literacy practices represent to us, so that how we symbolize ourselves in the world with others can significantly affect our living in that world. Rose's conclusion still

The author examines three of the most important factors that affect readers' and writers' perceptions of clarity: precision, document accessibility, and corporate language context. Each factor is defined and examined in terms of its influence on clarity. The result is a better understanding of the multiple factors that need to be considered before one passes judgment on a document's clarity.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Electronic communication systems, such as a fiber-optic and telephone-delivered videotext service a videoconferencing capability, and a fax network, that have been used to improve the speed and quality of communication to 15000 employees dispersed throughout the state of Florida are described. The ways in which foreseeable changes in the state's demographics, the company's business environment, and emerging media technologies will interact to affect the evolution of the company's employee communication are described.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

In analyzing audiences for software manuals, documentation developers need to move past a strictly cognitive vision of users' needs and examine the social and organizational factors that influence task performance and instructional needs. In order to discover the ways in which social and organizational factors affect users' tasks and their acquisition of knowledge and skills, I conducted a survey of 25 people who use databases at work. All survey respondents use database programs as tools for conducting job tasks that involve complex analyses and reporting of data. I examined the relationship between people's technical proficiency and task complexity and their job roles, professional responsibilities, flexibility in work arrangements and modes of workplace learning. Findings show that learning to use databases for complex tasks in work contexts entails more than merely learning concepts and procedures for executing program functions. Users need to learn ways of manipulating a program, integrating and combining its functions in inventive ways to serve the purposes of various types of job tasks and to support professional approaches to these tasks.

My contribution to this issue of RSQ relates my thoughts and conclusions about the value of some of Bakhtin's ideas to conversations about reading and feminism, and in that respect it resembles a traditional academic essay., But what began as a traditional essay that presented and defended a thesis is now informed by an overt narration of the development of my thinking and reading. I make this statement not to disclaim but to explain my approach to writing as a woman about Bakhtin. To read or write about reading and writing processes is a difficult undertaking; as readers and writers in the academy we are hyperaware of the claims made by an author and the degree to which her text adheres to or embodies her claims. What follows is as much an attempt to recreate and relate the changing relationship between Bakhtin's work and my own thought as it is to outline and review feminist interpretations of Bakhtin's work. At some point after first reading Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and The Dialogic Imagination, when composing the first draft of my dissertation, I felt compelled to stop and consider my reading process because I was having trouble writing about what I had read. When stumbling through writing the section of my dissertation that explicated some of Bakhtin's concepts, I thought I was facing a case of writer's block, and when I questioned the cause of the block, I attributed it to lack of comprehension. So I began rereading, secretly hoping that careful reading-noting important concepts and topic sentences and underlining and looking up unfamiliar words as my elementary and high school teachers had suggested-would bring me better understanding. I found as I reread Bakhtin that my trouble wasn't lack of comprehension; I could reel off neat definitions and thorough explanationsthat's what passing my Ph.D orals was all about. The trouble was, I wasn't contributing anything. My writing was empty. Paragraph after paragraph did nothing but paraphrase and quote Bakhtin and his commentators, allowing them a monologue in my text. Some writing teachers would argue that I began writing too soon or that I hadn't spent enough time prewriting and formulating my own opinions about the material, and this is probably true to some extent. But more than a matter of the writing process, my difficulties resulted from my sense of myself as a reader and novice theorist and Bakhtin as a writer, master theorist, and authority. What I was encountering in my reading process is what I believe many students (particularly those designated developmental) experience. Teachers, textbook authors, counselors, administrators, parents-by virtue of

As feminism has sought to contest patriarchy in ever more diverse sites of culture and increasingly to interrogate power/knowledge relations in a variety of disciplines, its languages have become more complex and difficult. This creates the paradox of a feminism much more capable of reunderstanding reality-and thus changing it-in profoundly different ways and yet much less accessible and understandable to those whose lives it seeks to affect. In other words, a widening gap is developing between the advanced languages and discourses of feminism-especially feminist theory-and its main constituency: those women (and men) who rely on its insights and the movement it articulates to orient their lives in more egalitarian and non-exploitative ways-in sexual relations, in raising children, in the politics of the work place and domestic arrangements. In fact, the difficulty of recent (postmodern) feminist theory has led many to reject it altogether as too remote and politically ineffective. But I believe that feminist theory is necessary for social change and that, rather than abandon it as too abstract, we need to reunderstand it in more social and political terms. I have thus attempted in this essay to rearticulate some of the main theoretical concepts of contemporary feminism in a more available language and, more important, to offer a political rewriting of these concepts. My text, therefore, is a series of explanatory speculations on feminist theory, its main concepts and the way these concepts enable a feminist rewriting of patriarchy. In doing so, it points to the emergence of what I call materialist feminist theory. In feminism, as elsewhere, postmodern has become a loaded and politically volatile word. Many feminists are opposed to it, worried that such a term may trivialize the serious import of feminism, which is intervention and social change. Underlying such mistrust is the common misunderstanding of postmodernism as a fad based on passing desires and trivial pursuits. This may be true of some aspects of postmodernism, but it is not at all characteristic of postmodernism in general; it is a significant political, cultural, and historical development. Teresa L. Ebert teaches critical theory and feminism at the State University of New York at Albany. She has completed a book on materialist feminism called Patriarchal Narratives and is at work on another on feminist theory and politics. In 1990 she organized and directed the conference on Rewriting the (Post)modern: (Post)colonialism/Feminism/Late Capitalism at the University of Utah where she was a Fellow in the Humanities Center.

This article presents an overview of research and unanswered questions related to gender issues in technical communication. Specific issues affecting our profession, our research, and our pedagogical philosophies and assignments are presented. The article addresses the consequences of the feminization of technical communication, the avenues for research on gender differences in communication—specifically those differences that affect technical communicators—and the means for encouraging a more gender-balanced view of business and industry within our technical communication classrooms by giving students a chance to practice writing about gender-related issues.

These studies investigated the degree to which prompts and topic types affect the writing performance of college freshmen. The students (N = 3,452) taking the 1989 and 1990 Manoa Writing Placement Examination (MWPE) were required to write in response to two types of topics (for a total of 6,904 essays): one in response to a reading passage and another in response to a question based on personal experience. Ten such prompt sets were used in this study. Study 1 indicated that the MWPE testing procedures were reasonably reliable and consistent across semesters but that student responses to individual prompts and prompt sets were significantly different from each other. Study 2 showed that if two topic types and a large number of prompts are involved, the differences that arise in the performance on prompts or topic types can be minimized by examining the students' mean scores and changing the pairings so that the prompt sets are more equitable in subsequent administrations.

This article reports a study of the writing experience of 40 eleventh-grade writers and examines the social and pedagogical circumstances that contributed to limited concentration and limited motivation for their writing. Methodology included in-depth phenomenological interviewing, composing aloud exercises, and classroom observation; the data were analyzed using qualitative procedures. The study (a) defines and describes four different ways in which emotion disrupts cognition to intrude on concentration in writing, (b) investigates social issues and contextual events that precipitate this struggle with concentration, and (c) explores the effect that this struggle has on writing motivation. Pedagogy is discussed as it was experienced by the participants and as it related to concentration and motivation.

Business communicators today risk legal liability as courts are increasingly holding writers and their employing organizations responsible for reasonable—although often unintended—interpretations of their routine writing. Research and pedagogy have not kept abreast of this change. Rhetorical theory, particularly a social perspective, provides a useful foundation for understanding judicial resolution of claims arising out of writing; however, theory must also account for factors not encompassed within extended audience analysis. Current texts offer general descriptions of the laws most likely to affect business writers; in addition, writing pedagogy must provide specific strategies for avoiding liability-prone prose.

This study investigates the impact of task definition on students’ revising strategies. Our primary aim was to determine if freshman students could revise globally if instructed to do so and if those global revisions would result in improved texts. We asked two groups of freshmen to revise a text provided by the experimenters; one group was given eight minutes of instruction on how to revise globally, and the other was simply asked to make the text better. The texts written by students who received the instruction were judged both to be of significantly better quality and to have included significantly more global revision. Further, the improvement appears to affect the treated population generally rather than just a small part of that population.

Labor-management negotiations present a complex situation for mediators and negotiators. To a considerable extent, the complexities stem from the fact that at least four different types of negotiations are occurring simultaneously: distributive bargaining; integrative bargaining; intra-organizational bargaining; and attitude structuring. If the negotiations are in a public employment situation, the political environment may be a factor causing additional complexities. Mediators in such situations must fill a number of roles, all of which are related to the communication process. The authors will show how the cited factors complicate labor-management negotiations and, concomitantly, affect the mediation process. This article concentrates on the role of the mediator as a communicator in the labor-management context.

This article describes an audience analysis exercise that offers a striking series of examples of how one business communication textbook has been adapted over the years by its authors to accommodate these authors' changing perceptions of their audience. The exercise also attempts to make students aware of their own involvement in various discourse communities by means of a letter-writing activity and subsequent classroom discussion. Additionally, this article argues for the need to help students become aware of how the values and presuppositions of discourse communities affect communications within those communities.

This article surveys and critiques the literature on using style checkers and the text-editing capabilities of the computer to assist in revising technical writing. The literature on text-editing capabilities is inconclusive because it is largely anecdotal and methodologically flawed. The literature on style checkers is similarly inconclusive. To better assess the value of the computer, we need to examine the basic premise of the research on revising and word processing: that more revising leads to higher-quality writing. We need to be sure that our evaluative techniques for measuring writing improvement are valid; to focus our attention not only on computer novices but also on computer-experienced writers; to examine other factors that affect how writers use word processing and that in turn might affect writing quality; and to examine more carefully the differences among word processors and among the different style checkers to determine their effects on writing behavior and writing quality.

When Edward P. J. Corbett was editor of College Composition and Communication, his fairly rigid standards for article length undoubtedly had the effect of forcing some loose thinking to a fairly sharp point. It also had the effect of pushing some discussions into an awesome degree of compression that made them less available to casual readers than they might have been otherwise. On the other hand, they offer a rewarding read now, if one is willing to commit the mental energy to put them together with the world. To my mind, a classic illustration of this sort of essay is George Yoos' An Identity of Roles in Writing and Reading from the fall, 1979 issue. In that paper, Yoos provided a model for reading and writing processes that finds reciprocity between writing and reading strategies at four different levels-at the level of objective expression or of content, at the level of face-adjustment or ethical appeal, at the level of audience, and at the level of logic or truth. Under this system, both writer and reader perform in roles defined by these four topics, and if one is generally accentuated in any specific situation, it is pretty clear that accommodation or sensitivity to all roles can provide a highly enriched perspective on writing. However, any conceptualizing like this, anchored in Collingwood, Croce, and George Herbert Meade (the names cited here) is probably going to seem rather alien and have some apparently rough points for present day readers. One of these is Yoos' flat assumption-deriving from Collingwood and Croce-that Kinneavy's effort to see expression as a mode of communication is wrong, and that the need to keep expression separate from communication is basic to an understanding of the writing process. Our present pedagogical tendency of using personal expression as a way to develop fluency and authenticity will tend to make readers unreceptive to the basic truth that writing will always be writing, that is, texts in which expression can be found, but which should never be confused with expression. To ignore this fact is to run a far graver risk of creating writing anxiety than would be possible by framing writing as an impersonal formalistic game. Another rough point would have to be Yoos' notion of the faceadjustment role, which he identifies with ethical appeal as a matter of clear about what one is doing. Yoos draws a clear distinction between this and the audience role which involves a strategic awareness and management of how different audiences will react, and, from the reading point of view, a reader's awareness of how these audiences are being managed. These are very subtle distinctions that take us quite a way back to a classical view of rhetorical operations (pace Knoblauch and Brannon). More generally, Yoos makes it clear that the relation between writing and reading is much deeper than writing scholars tend to acknowledge, in spite of the years of research into reading and writing connections. Certainly the kind of mirror-imaging that his essay provides-in which, say, an objective-expressive is one the writer plays by getting what he or she knows down into words, and that the reader reads for to see what the writer really knows, as a ground to be comprehended before processing rhetorical and logical acts-involves a complex conceptualizing of the communication process that promises a very rich critical

It is pointed out that many organizations have decentralized their operations to respond more quickly to rapid changes in markets and technologies. Decentralization has legitimized crossfunctional communication and decision making at relatively low levels in these organizations as a means of improving the quantity and timeliness of information. However, decentralization can adversely affect an organization's communications unless a new communication system is designed as part of the altered communication process. It is suggested that working within a new approach to organizational change, called sociotechnical design, technical communicators can help define performance standards for new communication systems, including those integrated with computer-mediated information systems. The objectives of sociotechnical design are consistent with the language-action perspective of the modern office. That perspective asserts that language organizes work relationships and actions by means of conversations (or transactions) in which requests and promises are made among individuals and groups. These conversations are structured by procedures, policy guides, handbooks, training materials, and a host of other communications.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Gender-studies scholars describe the ways relationships within the family in fluence the gender identity of males and females, while composition special ists study the social nature of writing. In the areas of self-disclosure, control, trust, perceptions ofgroup and ofconflict, congruence, and reward, these gen der roles affect the abilities of men and women to collaborate successfully and determine their responses to interpersonal conflict. Through classroom activi ties and journal keeping, students can learn the limits ofgender roles and have access to a full range of collaborative strategies.

This article reviews previous research on the effects of certain structural cues, called signals, that affect a reader's comprehension of expository prose. It concludes that the inconsistent results of many studies may be due to inadequate methodologies that have failed to control for confounding variables, such as text length and difficulty, reader familiarity with the topic, and timing of comprehension tests. Further, accepted signal types (headings, logical connectives, and previews) have not been sufficiently examined for their individual effects, perhaps creating unidentified disordinal interactions that could preclude the possibility of researchers identifying significant effects. This article concludes with recommendations for more valid research methodology to be used in prose assessment studies. The next issue of this journal will present Part II of this article, which details a new study of signaling effects for readers of expository prose, a study that is based on the refined methodology suggested in this article.

Most research on writing has focussed on the work of single authors working by hand on prose texts. However, much professional work is collaborative, computer-based, not exclusively prose, and not well studied. Some preliminary research suggests that the use of computers will affect the cognitive activities of individual authors in several domains of immediate relevance to composition and technical communication practitioners: planning activities, editing activities, the writing of novice computer users or poor typists, and writing for electronic mail and other electronic communication. Research reported here suggests that the rapidly increasing capability of computer-based writing systems will force communication researchers to 1) broaden their basic conception of and methods of studying “author” to include authoring teams, 2) broaden the type of material studied from that which is purely or largely textual to that which much more frequently includes other types of information, and 3) track changes in “genre conventions” resulting from the increased capabilities of computer-based systems—in short, to assess the impacts of the medium on the message.

This program evaluation was undertaken to assess the broad, measurable effects of using computers to teach introductory college composition. In total, 24 classes were studied—12 control classes and 12 experimental—with the experimental computer classes meeting in the lab for half of their instructional time. Data on the success of the program were collected from a range of sources: pre- and posttests of student writing under both impromptu and take-home conditions; pre- and posttests of writing anxiety; records on attendance, tardiness, withdrawals, and homework and essay assignment completion; end-of-term course evaluation by both teachers and students; and self-report data collected from teacher meetings and teacher logs. Results favored the use of computers, with computer students revising and improving their posttest essays (especially discourse-level features) at levels significantly better than those of regular students. Those students in experimental sections who chose to compose on computers at the end of the term outperformed the group as a whole and performed significantly better than those experimental students who chose to compose with pen and paper. Attitudinal data from both students and teachers also favored the use of computers.

The author maintains that oral presentations by a company's representatives affect its reputation and competitive position, and typically exhibit certain shortcomings. He describes these shortcomings and how they can be overcome by the application of good developmental techniques. He notes that many companies are providing their employees with professional help in developing oral presentations and recommends that all companies address this issue.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Correction of errors is a major part of the editor's task. However, the definition of what is an error, and what is correct, is not clearcut; rule transformations and reader context can affect the dividing line between the two. The author examines the concept of error from phenomenological and rhetorical perspectives, and suggests a model based on communication economics.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

This study examines three dimensions of paragraph topic sentence use in a corpus of scientific writing made up of research articles in biochemistry, geology, psychology, and sociology: 1. frequency of topic sentence use; 2. variation of topic sentence frequency in five rhetorical divisions; 3. variation of topic sentence types in these rhetorical divisions. Although the scientific writers used topic sentences in 55 percent of their paragraphs, differences existed among rhetorical divisions as to topic sentence frequency: writers used topic sentences quite often in results, results/discussion, and discussion, but quite seldom in methodology. Furthermore, topic sentence types differed across the divisions. In methodology, the topic announcement predominated; in discussion and introduction, the propositional occurred most often; in results and results/discussion, there was a balance of the two types. All these variations are thought to be related to differences in function (reporting facts versus interpreting) and texture (attributive versus logical text) across the rhetorical divisions. These variations may also affect ways of teaching paragraph skills in scientific writing.

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

The teaching of paragraphs needs a revolution. Classroom instruction offers patterns and precepts which cannot be applied to the ordinary process of writing and which, moreover, are unsupported by current resg arch. Researchers English like Braddock, Meade and Ellis, and Knoblauch report findings which directly contradict the textbooks' platitudes:' paragraphs admired professional writing do not necessarily contain topic sentences, they rarely follow prescribed patterns, and they seem essentially accidental, invented as the writer composes. We have found that textbooks do not heed these warnings. Students perceive a strange disjunction between the paragraphs they read and those they are asked to write class. Too often the latter are miniature five-element themes-introductory and concluding sentences, with three intervening sentences connected by therefore and in addition. We believe that paragraphing is best presented to student writers as an important signaling system, based on signals of two sorts, visual and substantive. To readers, the strip of indented white space separating paragraphs indicates both connection and discontinuity. It heightens their attention. To the writer, marking paragraphs offers opportunity for manipulating the reader's focus. Strategically paragraphed prose not only streamlines a message but also molds and shapes it to achieve the writer's purpose. We shall argue for a reader-oriented theory of the paragraph.2 In order to paragraph effectively, a writer needs to know, not the five, ten, fifteen, or twenty most common paragraph patterns that current theories enumerate, but how indentions affect the reader's perception of prose discourse. Knowing how readers perceive prose, the writer can arrange his text to mesh with their perception. Our argument proposes (and, we hope, proves) two main theses: 1. Paragraphs depend for their effectiveness on the exploitation of psycho-

Abstract This study examines applications for two professorial positions in English. Applicants’ responses to advertised requirements reveal three major issues: reading transformation, writing anxiety, and arithmetical paralysis. Scores based upon the author's formula, in itself a process of discovery, may assist in filling these positions. Appropriate tables are appended.

Complicated documents often affect readers the way computer programs affect computers; technical writers are prone to many of the same serious errors that plague programmers. Among the many principles that writers can learn from programming are: 1) Models save money: it is far more economical to develop detailed outlines and mockups than to improvise from a vague outline. 2) Quality demands maintainability: every complicated document will need frequent revision, and only documents designed for ease of change will be kept current. 3) The trouble is in the interfaces: the procedures and tasks in a manual are not as error-prone as the rules for moving from part to part of the book itself. 4) Readers are subject to the laws of physics: many publication economies produce documents that defy the physical powers of the reader. 5) Communication is control: readers must be prevented from getting lost.

Despite the fact that technical writers try to maintain an objective outlook, they cannot ignore the psychological states of consciousness that influence their writing. Arthur J. Deikman's theory of bimodal consciousness outlines two psychological states: active and emotive (or receptive). Writers must maintain a balance between the receptive state and the active, striving state to prevent writer's block and to enhance creativity, just as scientists balance mathematical (i.e., lexical or verbal) thinking with physics-related thinking. This article describes Deikman's model and shows its application in the technical writing classroom.

Recent psycholinguistic research has challenged the view that English speakers interpret the male pronouns and the generic man as words that refer to both males and females. The suggested ambiguity of these terms is of concern to technical communicators because it can affect the accuracy of their messages. Since guidelines for avoiding sex ambiguity in language are not generally available in technical writing or speech manuals, this article offers simple devices for eliminating the generic use of male pronouns and man. It also provides alternate terms for common sex-biased expressions.

You don t know what it is, wrote Flaubert, to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Writer s block is more than a mere matter of discomfort and missed deadlines; sustained experiences of writer s block may influence career choices. Writers in the business world, professional writers, and students all have known this most common and least studied dysfunction of the composition process. Rose, however, sees it as a limitable problem that can be precisely analyzed and remedied through instruction and tutorial programs. Rose defines writer s block as an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of skill or commitment, which is measured by passage of time with limited functional/ productive involvement in the writing task. He applies the information processing models of cognitive psychology to reveal dimensions of the problem never before examined.In his three-faceted approach, Rose develops and administers a questionnaire to identify blockers and nonblockers; through simulated recall, he selects and examines writers experiencing both high and low degrees of blocking; and he proposes a cognitive conceptualization of writer s block and of the composition process.In drawing up his model, Rose delineates many cognitive errors that cause blocking, such as inflexible or conflicting planning strategies. He also discusses the practice and strategies that promote effective composition.

At least seven types of summaries have emerged in common usage, especially during the past 250 years. They may be classified as either sequential summaries that retain the original order in which information was presented or synthesizing summaries that alter this sequence to achieve specific objectives. Each type of summary developed in response to challenges facing professions, government, business, and ordinary citizens-all of whom have sought to absorb increasing quantities of information being generated in a society that is becoming more complex. This taxonomy offers a definition and brief history for each of the seven techniques, describes the growth of corporations or other organizations that can be considered leading practitioners, and comments on the potential continuing role for each type of summary. The article also focuses on several contemporary issues that will affect future research, classroom writing instruction, and information management in modern computerized offices.

In sentences with validity markers in the syntactic subject and adjacent positions, the frequent correspondence between syntactic subject and sentence topic in English sentences is broken. Because this correspondence has been shown to have substantial and positive effects upon readers' processing of and perceptions about texts, breaking the correspondence might have significant negative effects on readers. This study begins to explore how such syntactic subjects affect readers. It shows that readers recall such subjects very poorly, but it also suggests that in order to discover more precisely how readers represent such subjects in memory, new and rich models of language and of possible domains in texts will be needed.

It is argued that, with today's growing emphasis on audience analysis in technical communication, there needs to be a sharper focus on the informational needs of various audiences; much empirical study is needed to provide a fuller definition and understanding of the nature of these informational needs and how they directly affect the writing done. Effective upward management communication is directly dependent on the quality of communication moving downward in the organization to the staff, and on how staff is made to understand the decision-making role and informational needs of the management reader. Of all the people involved in technical communications, the manager of the writers may be best equipped to determine the informational needs of readers, especially those of upper management. A brief review of two empirical studies conducted by the author demonstrates the value of such studies and encourages others to undertake similar studies.

To determine how certain cohesion elements - the given-new contract, pronouns, synonyms, and topic sentences – affect the readability of technical paragraphs, six alternative paragraphs were composed, two “models” and four others carefully varied to feature the four factors under consideration. Then each passage was tested for its readability when subjects were administered a cloze procedure and a recall exercise for each paragraph. The results show that violations of the given-new contract make technical paragraphs more difficult to read; that changing repeated words to pronouns makes passages more difficult to follow; that using synonyms (instead of repetitions) makes prose harder to read; and that deleting a topic sentence may impede a reader's comprehension. Writing teachers, then, might consider these results when they direct students in the production of connected discourse. And researchers might use this methodology to investigate other influences on the readability of connected discourse.

The communication process has three main elements: the sender, the message, and the receiver. The sender's credibility and background relative to the message can affect the receiver. Differences between sender's and receiver's experiences and attitudes are also important in how a message is received. The words that comprise messages and the tones used to express them can vary the meaning and interpretation of messages. People differ in their susceptibility to persuasion. Emotion has an effect in persuasion but more important are the order of presentation and the believability and effectiveness of the sender. Those who know how to listen and pay attention not only stand out as beacons of courtesy but also have an advantage — by understanding what is expected of them — in preparing their messages for others.

Word processing is being adopted by an increasing number of companies and government agencies because it offers a method for coping with the increasing costs of administrative services. While word processing will not affect the technical aspects of an engineer's job, it will definitely influence the way engineering communications are produced. The author describes several specific areas of engineering communications that will be impacted by word processing. In addition, general information regarding the history of word processing, its principal applications, the basic types of systems being used, a typical system configuration, and some projected developments are included. A supplementary reading list is also provided.

Ruth will labor over the first paragraph of an essay for hours. She'll write a sentence, then erase it. Try another, then scratch part of it out. Finally, as the evening winds on toward ten o'clock and Ruth, anxious about tomorrow's deadline, begins to wind into herself, she'll compose that first paragraph only to sit back and level her favorite exasperated interdiction at herself and her page: No. You can't say that. You'll bore them to death. Ruth is one of ten UCLA undergraduates with whom I discussed writer's block, that frustrating, self-defeating inability to generate the next line, the right phrase, the sentence that will release the flow of words once again. These ten people represented a fair cross-section of the UCLA student community: lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class backgrounds and high schools, third-world and Caucasian origins, biology to fine arts majors, C+ to Agrade point averages, enthusiastic to blase attitudes toward school. They were set off from the community by the twin facts that all ten could write competently, and all were currently enrolled in at least one course that required a significant amount of writing. They were set off among themselves by the fact that five of them wrote with relative to enviable ease while the other five experienced moderate to nearly immobilizing writer's block. This blocking usually resulted in rushed, often late papers and resultant grades that did not truly reflect these students' writing ability. And then, of course, there were other less measurable but probably more serious results: a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the composing process itself. What separated the five students who blocked from those who didn't? It wasn't skill; that was held fairly constant. The answer could have rested in the emotional realm-anxiety, fear of evaluation, insecurity, etc. Or perhaps blocking in some way resulted from variation in cognitive style. Perhaps, too, blocking originated in and typified a melding of emotion and cognition not unlike the relationship posited by Shapiro between neurotic feeling and

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Students at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan participated in an experiment to determine if different affective responses would result from exposure to three different forms of media, each presenting the same content. One group of students viewed a videotape, another listened to an audiotape, and a third read a printed transcript. A semantic differential was used to measure affective response, and an objective test was administered to measure cognitive learning. Results showed the video group to be perceiving the presentation less favorably than were the other two groups; however, they were perceiving two of the participants more favorably than were the others. An analysis of covariance between pre- and posttest scores of cognitive learning showed that subjects receiving the audiotape version had learned significantly less than those receiving the other treatments.

Seven mathematical expressions are presented, with comments, for the guidance of technical writing by engineers and scientists. They determine when to write an interim report, when to write the final report, when to inform the higher echelons, how many extra readers could result from one more revision, what grade to give a revised version, how much reading time increases with increasing article length, and how various factors affect the science-world communication gap. The formulas stem from analogies between communication problems and solved problems in science and are intended to stimulate bread-boarding in technical writing.

This article offers specific guidelines to effective report writing: (1) It discusses the key issues in which top corporate personnel are most interested and explains how to present these issues in an informative manner; (2) it gives an organizational structure designed to facilitate report writing and to maximize reader interest by grouping ideas and concepts in a logical sequence; and (3) it details basic techniques on how to overcome writer's block, reinforce major points, and use charts, graphs, and illustrations to make a report visually appealing as well as easily readable.

Referees often disagree as to whether to accept or reject a manuscript for publication. Recent investigations have often focused on the study of standard rating forms that ask for appraisal of specified attributes of a manuscript. Scott asked reviewers to rate, on seven criteria, manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. There was some agreement on most of the criteria; correlations were often significant but never large. Importance of the problem and adequacy of design and analysis seemed to affect evaluation most strongly. Whether the use of such a rating form will lead to greater reliability of referees' recommendations is an open question. There are many reasons why referees disagree, of course, and research in this area should be broadly based. The decision-making process of the editor is also very complex and should be the focus of empirical investigation.

The already existing and future economic atmosphere will significantly affect scientific publishing during the next several years. Distributors and retailers are joining what was essentially a one-component (i.e., the publisher-manufacturer) industry. The original product (the journal or book) is spawning a wide variety of secondary, derivative, and aftermarket information products. It is becoming possible to deal in machine-readable information equivalents, e.g., a scientist's current workbook entries, rather than with a post-experiment journal paper describing the research.

A hypothetical situation introduces the reader to the software consultant, an independent businessman who writes computer programs for others and who is a professional communicator. With the customer and a systems analyst to assist the customer, the consultant engages in a communication process which is the core of his business. Each of the three parties has different goals and abilities which affect the design and development of the computer programs. By the use of a simple communication model, a typical software development project is reviewed. Communication is seen as a composite for the project, with the process at each stage forming part of the whole. The paper is descriptive in nature, leaving development of a prescriptive model for the software consultant to future investigation.

The concept of copyright has greatly changed through the years, both in importance and definition. The conflict of personal right of ownership versus the public welfare has grown increasingly complex in recent times. A familiarity with the historical perspective is necessary to understand these developments. Even today, the Copyright Revision Bill lies before Congress and long-awaited decisions will be made to shape events in the immediate future. These decisions will affect the student and the professional alike by their effect on the availability of materials to everyone. The ease and availability of present-day photocopying necessarily will affect the nature of the decisions. This paper gives an overview of the historical background, and status of present law, and the possible future role of copyright.