Discourse theories frequently emphasize the importance of understanding audience but seldom delve into how writers form conceptions of their audiences, especially in organizations. This study examines computer documentation writers’ tactics for conceiving of their audiences. Based on two ethnographic case studies and insights from activity theory, the author describes and evaluates technical communicators’ tactics for understanding audiences, constrained and supported by their organizations. She discusses the advantages and limitations of each tactic, looking at how each tactic might answer questions about audience. This research should be useful to technical communication educators as they expand students’ options for audience research in nonacademic settings. In addition, the findings of this study can enhance theories about the ways writers create images of their audiences.

Ethnic and gender differences in classroom conversational styles are explored by comparing student involvement in face-to-face and computer-mediated discussions. The quantity of participation in these two environments is triangulated with student perceptions of the conversations in three undergraduate composition classrooms. White males participated more frequently than other groups in the face-to-face setting, and White women appeared to benefit more than other groups from conversations held in the computer-mediated setting. However, these gender-differentiated participation patterns did not apply to the discourse patterns of Hispanic males and females. Unlike their White female peers, the Hispanic women in this study participated frequently in the face-to-face conversations, spoke more than Hispanic males, and generally disliked the computer-mediated conversations.

This article explores the design choices for Network Earth, a museum exhibit that introduced the general public to computer networks and related issues. The exhibit was one of three studied in a larger research project to develop a grounded model of design for learn-ing in museums. Network Earth was developed by a team that had neither formal train-ing nor academic credentials usually associated with museum exhibits. Although the design process and some of the general goals were similar to those at other sites studied and in the literature, certain practices differed. The team excluded historical objects, let donors influence content, and used different terminology. These differences appear to be cultural. With a limited affiliation with the occupational culture of museum exhibit design, the Network Earth team made choices that were more consistent with the culture of high technology—the subject of the museum and the industry that provided most of its financial support.

A brief examination of the evolution of virtual reality devices illustrates how the development of this new medium is influenced not only by emerging technologies but also by marketing pressures. In a situation parallel to that of the earliest computers, both military and game applications seem to be the driving forces in virtual reality development. Understanding these influences may help us prepare for the role of technical communica-tors in building virtual reality applications for education and industry and aid us in pre-dicting and influencing both the technology and the ways we prepare communicators for the future.

Though scholars have begun to explore how texts mediate design, little is known about rhetorical invention in design. To investigate how heuristics used for rhetorical invention and design might be related, the author analyzed how one disciplinary design heuristic, the information system cliché, influenced the production of both a computer system and a specification text for the system. The cliché was used to generate design proposals, which designers evaluated using at least three criteria: projected context of use, correspondence between the proposals and their textual inscriptions, and system coherence. Results indicate that disciplinary heuristics and rhetorical topics overlap in design; however, the rhetorical character of disciplinary heuristics is obscured in textual representations of the design. Both types of heuristic serve as interpretive instruments and are used dialogically to develop the parts of a design or text within the context of the whole.

In virtual teams, members are physically distributed and often have not met each other in person. They work together and share information via electronic communication. To address business problems in a timely way, virtual teams must quickly become effective upon formation. However, prior studies have found that virtual teams are ineffective initially because electronic communication does not facilitate building of shared understanding among team members. This study proposes a dialogue technique that facilitates building of shared understanding in virtual teams. Results from an experiment showed that virtual teams which used this technique had better relational development and decision outcome than those which did not. Moreover these differences remained over time. Therefore, the dialogue technique appears to be useful for helping virtual teams become effective quickly so as to address business problems without unnecessary delays.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has enabled relaxation of temporal and geographical boundaries surrounding group tasks. A question is whether this opening is appropriate mainly for information exchange or whether it is also conducive to the interactive moves necessary for group knowledge production. This study examines knowledge production via email in a technology standardization working group. It notes the occurrence of interactive moves and discusses how they are and can be affected for producing group knowledge.

This study examines how students enrolled in two Web-based sections of a technical writing class performed compared to students enrolled in a conventional version of the class. Although no significant difference in student performance was found between the two learning conditions, our data reveal intriguing relationships between students' prior knowledge, attitudes, and learning styles and our Web-based writing environment. One finding that we focus on is that reflective, global learners performed significantly better online than active, sequential learners, whereas there was no difference between them in the conventional class. Our study highlights the complexity of effective teaching and the difficulty of making comparisons between the online and the classroom environments. In particular, we maintain that the transfer of active learning strategies to the Web is not straightforward and that interactivity as a goal of instructional Web site design requires significant elaboration.

Examines how a shift to an online writing course affected underprepared students. Finds the guided writing environment enhanced instruction and improved student retention and pass rates.

Suggests teachers helping older students in computer-aided classrooms should (1) expect these students to perform more slowly and to make more errors; (2) avoid comparisons that cause confusion due to students’ prior knowledge; (3) be aware of the danger of overload from information clutter; and (4) sequence assignments based on scaffolding concepts and on building skills through repetition.

Focuses on communication channels (or media) that technical writers uses to obtain and verify information and their reasons for selecting them. The author analyzes data from a survey of 30 technical communicators who responded to an e-mail questionnaire.

In the usability testing of Web sites, thinking aloud is a frequently-used method. A fundamental discussion, however, about the relation between the use of different variants of thinking aloud and the evaluation goals for this specific medium is still lacking. To lay a foundation for this discussion, I analyzed the results of three usability studies in which different thinking-aloud tasks were used: a simple searching task, an application task and a prediction task. In the task setting, the profile of the Web surfer, the communication goal of the Web site and other quality aspects are taken into account. The qualitative analysis of these studies shows that the task variation has some influence on the results of usability testing and that, consequently, tasks should be matched with the evaluation goals put forward.

Reviews 113 are able to do so with a useful vocabulary, specific examples, and an assessment of the landscape of rhetorical practice that sets a new pace. Her title, then, "We Are Coming", gains increasing significance. Indeed, African American women are coming onto the rhetorical scene, and this analysis contributes greatly to our ability to take into account in interesting ways what their presence means. JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER The Ohio State University Lynette Hunter, Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Critiques of Knowing is a disarmingly accurate title for Lynette Hunter's most recent book, a study of the relevance of rhetoric to critical theories of language in several fields. Standpoint theory, Hunter proposes, integrated with rhetorical understandings of ethos, topos, and audience, can both illuminate, and exemplify the need for a rhetorical critique of "critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The discussion moves patiently and informatively through discourses about ideology and the nation state, agency, the subject, recent studies of artificial intelligence and computing, hypertext models of literary texts, "scientific" discourse studies and linguistic poetics, feminist critiques of science, and feminist aesthetics. Hunter weaves rhetoric into the methods and languages of these disciplines with subtlety and common sense; readers will find in each chapter an up to date review of current critical theory in the fields reviewed. Another major accomplishment of the study as a whole is a collateral appraisal of the languages and epistemologies, stated and unstated, that each field employs. The comparison is no easy task, particularly since the fields under scrutiny have been prominent advocates of critiquing knowledge, understood as comprehension of the "real" 114 RHETORICA by subjects capable of knowing, and of representing their knowledge in representational, informative texts. This relentless critique of knowledge and language in recent theory, Hunter asserts, has resulted in a barrage of pluralisms and relativisms, each with its own canonical ideology. Hunter teases out different versions of an "essentialist-relativist" standoff that has emerged again and again among recent ideological constructions of plurality (pp. 6-7). In characterizing many of these problems Hunter is not alone; she will find readers welcoming her positions. What makes her discussion original and especially valuable is the way in which she brings to this impasse several richly drawn definitions of rhetoric. Because of its historical and conceptual self awareness as "inexorably different to the real world" in any literal or scientific sense, rhetoric can help construct an analysis of stance which will position the discourses of the disciplines historically, politically, and socially (p. 6). The prospect that rhetoric may be able to integrate and amplify a number of critical discourses about language that are currently bogged down in confessing their own impossibility and meaninglessness is a welcome vision. Hunter's exposition of the ethical and epistemological adjustments rhetoric could provide to contemporary critical discourses is also an anatomy of the past and present wealth that resides in rhetorical studies that continue to be marginalized by so many fields. The chapters are arranged by discipline: contemporary studies of the ideologies of nation-states, studies of artificial intelligence and computing applications within the humanities, hypertext methodologies, feminist critiques of science, and feminist critiques of aesthetics. Hunter's analysis establishes an important parallelism: a lack of rhetorical self awareness has hampered the discussion of the subject and of agency, of intelligence and knowledge, of the ethics of critical discourses visa -vis their contexts and audiences. Hunter defines her overall goal as "a critique of critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The essentialistrelativist standoff that Hunter seeks to redress has locked many branches of discourse studies, including linguistics, artificial intelligence, computing, rhetoric and poetics, into methodologies that, somewhat oddly, base social and political tolerance for all Reviews 115 discursive practices upon scientific models of neutral description and quantitative analysis. Somehow, according to many of these models, discourses are produced by "the culture" or by "language". Alternatively, we find accusations of "essentialism" or "enlightenment humanism" hurled at any and all references to the subject, to agency, to an ethnic...

The Presentation of Technical Information. 3rd ed. Reginald Kapp. Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK: The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, 1998. 136 pages. User‐Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. Robert R. Johnson. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 195 pages. Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray. Lori Allen and Dan Voss. New York: Wiley, 1997. 410 pages. The Dynamics of Writing Review: Opportunities for Growth and Change in the Workplace. Susan M. Katz. Vol. 5 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1998. 134 pages. Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy. Ed. John T. Battalio. Vol. 6 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. 264 pages. Outlining Goes Electronic. Jonathan Price. Vol. 9 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1999. 177 pages (including bibliography and indexes). Wiring the Writing Center. Ed. Eric H. Hobson. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 1998. 254 pages. Inventing the Internet. Janet Abbate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 264 pages.

Like many in our field, I rose up “through the ranks” to my present position as a director of the Writing Center at a small, private college of pharmacy and health sciences. My career path started while I was pursuing an M.A. in English, where I tutored in the university’s Writing Center. Then, when I was back in school to complete a doctorate in education, I once again was given the opportunity to tutor in the university’s Writing Center, and, eventually, to study that Center as the subject of my dissertation. I graduated in the spring of 1996, and by the fall of that year I was hired by my current college to start its Writing Center. Four years later, I am a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences and hold administrative responsibility for the entire writing program, as well as for a new initiative on first-year student experience. What a smooth path that narrative above seems to indicate, a path of increasing professional opportunities, from “novice” to “expert,” from tutor to director, from student to faculty member, a “transformation” of sorts that is easily the script that we would write for many in our field. But here is another way of telling that story: My first writing center job came during my second semester of pursuing an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and a high school teaching credential. I would have preferred to be a TA and teach composition in the classroom, but most of my fellow graduate students were experienced teachers and gained the coveted TA positions. Instead, I tutored in the university’s Writing Center for $7 per hour, a rate that did not change in the three years that I worked there. I worked primarily with basic writing students, who came to the Writing Center as a course requirement and who were made to sift through a grammar/usage workbook, completing exercises on modals and subject/verb agreement and nouns and antecedents (which still happens, though now these exercises are computer Sherwood, Steve. “How to Survive the Hard Times.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 17.10 (1993): 4-8.

Normand Croteau is a technical writer for Purkinje, Inc., in Montreal, Canada. He has been with Purkinje for approximately two years. Before Purkinje, Norm spent time working for Sapience, a small software company; Bell Sygma, a computer department of Bell Canada; and Bell Canada, a telecommunication company, for “a total of 13 years of experiences in the field.”

Computers and Technical Communication: Pedagogical and Programmatic Perspectives. Ed. Stuart Selber. Greenwich, CT: Ablex. 415 pages.

I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing

Richard Marback. Plato's Dream of Sophistry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 163 pages. Gregory Crane. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 348 pages. Josiah Ober. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiv + 417 pages. Harvey Yunis. Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. xv + 316 pages. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson, eds. Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998. 332 pages. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. Pages viii + 452. $29.95 paper. Tharon Howard. A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. Pages xii + 203. $24.95 paper. James Porter. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. Pages xiv + 203. $24.95 paper. Russel K. Durst. Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1999. 189 pages. $22.95 paper. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Pages, xl + 627. Richard E. Miller. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. 249 pages. Lynn Z. Bloom. Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Logan: Utah UP, 1998. 288 pages. $19.95 paper. Duane H. Roen, Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 233 pages. $22.50 paper. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, ed. Women/Writing/Teaching. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 294 pages. $19.95 paper. Peter Dimock. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. 118 pages. $12.95 paper.

Composition (at its best) and feminism work against the grain of conventional institutional practices. Both challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.

Explores how new media technologies might converge with the leveling between “story” and “archive,” and how that convergence will shape the future of English Studies, focusing on electronic archives of literary and historical materials. Concludes that the central challenge in using new media with students, particularly hypertext pedagogies, is in finding the right synthesis of disciplinary design and disciplined design.

From the Publisher: An unforgettable journey into the dark heart of the Information Age, Escape Velocity explores the high-tech subcultures that both celebrate and critique our wired world: cyberpunks, cyberhippies, technopagans, and rogue technologists, to name a few. The computer revolution has given rise to a digital underground - an Information Age counterculture whose members are utilizing cutting-edge technology in ways never intended by its manufacturers. Poised, at the end of the century, between technological rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, fringe computer culture poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology liberate or enslave us in the coming millennium? Mark Dery takes us on an electrifying tour of the high-tech underground. Exploring the shadowy byways of cyberculture, we meet would-be cyborgs who believe the body is obsolete and dream of downloading their minds into computers, cyberhippies who boost their brainpower with smart drugs and mind machines, on-line swingers seeking cybersex on electronic bulletin boards, techno-primitives who sport biomechanical tattoos of computer circuitry, and cyberpunk roboticists whose Mad Max contraptions duel to the death before howling crowds. Most cyber- titles are a breathless mix of New Age futurism and gadget-happy cyberhype. Escape Velocity stands alone as the first truly critical inquiry into cyberculture. Shifting the focus of our conversation about technology from the corridors of power to disparate voices on the cultural fringes, Dery wires it into the power politics and social issues of the moment. Timely, trenchant, and provocative, Escape Velocity is essential reading for everyone interested in computer culture and the shape of things to come.

How well do you understand copyright law? How about the doctrine of fair use? If a recent study reported in the Business Communication Quarterly is any indication, IEEE members may not have a very solid understanding of either. J.V. Arn, R. Gatlin, and W. Kordsmeier reported the results of a questionnaire survey of the membership of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) (see Bus. Commun. Quart., vol.61, no.4, p.32-9, 1998). The survey was designed to test the understanding of ABC members of various parts of copyright law including the sections cited in the fair use guidelines for educational multimedia. In their brief description of fair use, the authors explain: "fair use is a possible defense to copyright infringement in an educational or nonprofit environment but not in a commercial application" (p. 36). This difference has long been recognized in differing fees for use. Nonprofit institutions who publish newsletters, monographs, and books routinely pay nominal fees to use copyrighted materials, but what about more limited uses such as in the classroom or in a presentation at a professional meeting? Defining multimedia as "a single, computer-controlled product that integrates text, audio, graphic, still image, and moving pictures", J.V. Arn et al., note that such a "variety of sources requires the producer to understand a wide variety of legal constraints" (p. 33). Their study showed that ABC members often underestimated their rights to use copyrighted material.

From the Publisher: The essays collected in this volume address the full range of pedagogical and programmatic issues specifically facing technical communication teachers and program directors in the computer age. The authors locate computers and computing activities within the richly textured cultural contexts of a technological society, focusing on the technical communication instructional issues that remain most important as old versions of hardware and software are endlessly replaced by new ones.

From the Publisher: The great divide between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the people problems associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. This book is the first to address directly the problem of how to bridge the divide. It offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory, and will constitute a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics.

The aim of the study was to map the influence of reading task and text format on reading results with an online text. To this purpose, an experiment performed by S. Gordon et al. (1988) was replicated and enhanced. In four conditions, subjects were given a reading task (summarize or answer specific questions) and an online text (linear or hypertext format). In all conditions, both text and task were administered through the World Wide Web, After the subjects had completed their reading, all were given the same assignment: make a summary and answer specific questions. No significant main effects of the independent variables (format and task) were found on the performance of the subjects. There proved to be a significant interaction effect, however, on the completeness of the summaries. The most thorough summaries were written by subjects who were told before the experiment that they would have to summarize the text, and who were presented with the text in a linear version. As far as reading time was concerned, there was a significant difference between the format conditions: reading the text in linear format took more time than reading the text in hypertext format.

Technical writers, for the most part, write user documentation of some kind. However, they also have skills that might enable them to also serve as user-advocates on product development teams and testers of prototype systems. In the computer hardware and software industry, they have the additional skills needed to develop online help tools, to design user interfaces, and to write system and error messages (J. Fisher, 1998). Fisher's recent survey of (Australian) technical communicators showed that some are employed in such tasks, but not widely so. She reports, for instance, that only 38% were consulted by developers about error messages, only 32% actually wrote error messages, and only 13% reported that they had some role in system testing (J. Fisher, 1998). A question emerges out of such results: is there really any necessary and supportive connection between the process of explaining a product to a user and the original process of developing that product? As technical writers looking to expand our roles [and salaries], we would like to say yes. But, in fairness, we have to admit our bias. We need to check such biases against other, independent evidence. The article interfaces this question with a parallel question in the philosophy of science: is there any connection between experimental test results used to "sell" a theory to a scientific audience and the original process of developing that theory?.

For small and mid‐sized universities, the 200‐level technical writing service course often represents the primary writing experience for students after their freshman year. Our “service” should help students develop the tools for analyzing language and understanding writing in complex ways. Assignment sequences should engage students in active research to develop four primary literacies: rhetorical, visual, information, and computer. This article focuses on disciplinarity and underlying pedagogical goals in technical writing classrooms by describing a search engine assignment sequence which promotes literate practices in three short reports: 1) A preview/instructions report, 2) An analysis/ evaluation report, and 3) A narrative review of a research activity. This article concludes with implications for these types of classroom practices.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of presenting Web‐based assignments within the technical communication service course. Current research on using the World Wide Web (Web) and Internet as a teaching resource investigates online writing courses, Distance Education (DE), and hypertext authoring. The literature indicates good reasons for moving instruction to the Web, but there is little description of why this migration is needed in terms of the kinds of learning achieved through Web‐based writing, nor is there much specific discussion of what type of useful instructional space can be built with the Web. This study is intended to provide support for centering more instruction within the environment of the Web. This article describes a study using a Web site designed for technical communication instruction. It defines the types of learning students experienced when using the site and presents samples of student work representing a wide range of skill development, both traditional and digital, that support moving instruction to the Web in immediately useful ways.