Although most theorists agree that discourse creates meaning, they have not adequately described how this process emerges within the creation of procedural knowledge. This article explores how technical communicators in diverse settings based discourse decisions on their knowledge of (a) users, (b) organizational image and constraints, (c) software structure and features, and (d) genre conventions in order to create communication artifacts designed to help users develop procedural knowledge. The transformations in which they engaged indicated that these technical communicators were skilled in forming images in these four areas and then using these images as they created meaning in procedural discourse. In this process, they moved beyond merely translating or transmitting technical knowledge.

Many students see instructor commentary as not constructive but prescriptive directions that must be followed so that their grade, not necessarily their writing, can be improved. Research offering heuristics for improving such commentary is available for guidance, but the methods employed to comment on writing still have not changed significantly, primarily because we lack sufficient understanding of how students use feedback. Usability evaluation is ideally equipped for assessing how students use commentary and how instructors might adapt their comments to make them more usable. This article reports on usability testing of commentary provided to students in an introductory technical writing course.

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.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> A major challenge in engineering education is to prepare professionals for communicating well in writing and speaking, using appropriate technologies, within professional contexts. Communication in the global engineering world includes collaboration on cross-functional teams, virtual-project team management, and writing for multiple, complex audiences. This tutorial discusses how one small engineering school has integrated technical communication teaching and assessment throughout the curriculum with demonstrated success. The integrated curriculum, formative and summative assessments, and real-world contexts offer one model to address growing communication challenges. </para>

Assessing the quality of student efforts and products is a continual necessity for academics and practitioners in technical communication; however, the process of constructing valid and reliable rubrics remains an underexplored topic in the field. This paper first addresses some of the assessment concerns and then describes a case study that documents the development and implementation of one holistic and five analytic rubrics to evaluate undergraduate projects. The discussion focuses on identifying site-specific criteria and training effective raters and is intended to help academics respond to their required accreditation mandates and offer practitioners alternatives for evaluating products and services.

Technical communication consultants steeped in conventional academic notions of writing pedagogy may encounter different assumptions about the nature of writing and the significance of grammar in writing instruction when they consult with professional engineers. This paper examines historical, theoretical, and practical reasons for these sometimes contradictory beliefs and traces the authors' efforts to reconcile these differences while planning and conducting a writing seminar for an engineering firm. A strong emphasis on grammar and mechanics can lead to numerous benefits, including a stronger sense of shared purpose between consultants and engineers and a point of entry into additional conversations about institutional writing practices and writing environments.

This article reports a study of internship requirements in technical communication programs compared with three established professions and one emerging profession that have certification or licensing requirements for practitioners. The study addresses three questions about technical communication internship programs: 1) Are internships offered as a way to fulfill program academic credit requirements? 2) If internships are offered, are they required or elective? 3) What are the minimum/maximum academic credits allowed for internships toward fulfillment of program requirements and the number of workplace hours of internship required? To answer these questions we focused on three elements of internship program management: academic credits, workplace hours per academic credit, and total workplace hours required. Our findings indicate that there is considerable disparity for these factors among programs in our field and that we lack criteria similar to those used in established professions for internships.

The tools and techniques utilized in the technical communications profession are constantly improving and changing. Information Technology (IT) organizations devote the necessary resources to equip and train engineering, marketing, and sales teams, but often fail to do so for technical documentation teams. Many IT organizations tend to view documentation as an afterthought; however, consumers of IT products frequently base their purchasing decisions on the end user documentation's content, layout, and presentation. Documentation teams play a unique role in IT organizations as they help to build and create a public identity through end user manuals and the corporate website, as well as maintain intellectual knowledge through knowledge sharing and management. The technical communicator “ makes sense” of complex engineering specifications by creating user-friendly manuals for the layman. The practitioner who compiles and records this complex information is a valuable resource to any IT organization. Therefore, on-going training for technical documentation teams is essential to stay competitive in the fast-paced technical market. Technical communicators in IT organizations who only write end user manuals are becoming a rarity. Research indicates a marked trend toward technical writers in multiple roles and varied responsibilities that include web design and development, and business systems analysis functions. Although these added roles and responsibilities require training on some of the newer software tools and more complex programming tools, technical communicators are experiencing difficulty keeping pace with these tools. This article discusses technical documentation teams in IT organizations and provides an on-going training assessment to help technical documentation managers identify their team's strengths and weaknesses. In addition, measures and results from a study conducted at eight IT organizations, are provided to show the effect of how the integration of on-going training for documentation teams enhances individual competency and improves team performance.

Compared to ethics in technical writing, ethics in design has received less attention. This lack of attention grows more apparent as document design becomes ‘‘information design.’’ Since Katz discerned an ‘‘ethic of expediency’’ in Nazi technical writing, scholars have often framed technical communication ethics in categorical terms. Yet analyses of information design must consider why arrangements of text and graphics have symbolic potency for given cultures. An ‘‘ethic of exigence’’ can be seen in an example of Nazi information design, a 1935 racial-education poster that illustrates how designers and users co-constructed a communally validated meaning. This example supports the postmodern view that ethics must account for naturalized authority as well as individual actions.

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.

Business case studies have been a standard pedagogical tool in technical communication classrooms. However, the expansion of engineering practice-including the design and implementation of appropriate technology in the developing world-suggests the need to complement such studies. This paper analyzes three business and three humanitarian case studies. It highlights the complexities of audience and context that distinguish the humanitarian case studies, and it argues that incorporating humanitarian cases into technical communication courses would promote higher levels of learning, student engagement, and the global citizenship that will be requisite for all engineers in the twenty-first century.

In the technical communication classroom, the received wisdom is that good instructions should “stay out of the way” of the users’ engagement with technological systems.This article draws on Burke’s concept of perspective by incongruity and on examples of instructions produced during the Women’s Health Movement to demonstrate that sometimes instructions can—and should—take on a more critical, system-disrupting stance.

When examined rhetorically, Savannah River Site Community Preparedness Information calendars from 1994, 2004, and 2008 represent living rhetorical practices aimed at changing the public mind. My technical communication classroom at USC Aiken is uniquely situated for us to examine documents constantly generated by the site’s Public Affairs Department.

This article addresses previous arguments that call for increased emphasis on research in technical communication programs. Focusing on the value of scholarly-based research at the undergraduate level, we present New Mexico Tech's thesis model as an example of helping students develop familiarity with research skills and methods. This two-semester sequence serves as a capstone experience for students' writing, designing, editing, and presentation skills. It also involves members of our corporate advisory board and provides an opportunity to teach students to understand and apply research methods to unique projects, skills we argue will benefit students no matter what environments they enter upon graduation.

This article discusses public policy writing as a genre of technical communication and, specifically, public policy development as a technological process. It cites DeGregori’s theory of technology to demonstrate the shared invention processes of technology and public policy, the work of public policy scholars to describe the policy-development process, and the work of human—computer interaction scholars to identify cognitive models of public policy development as a technological process. The article concludes with a discussion of e-rulemaking Web sites and the role of technical communicators in creating these blended spaces.

Rensselaer’s Technical Writers’ Institute, the first program of its kind, had a profound impact on technical communication. It enabled technical communicators without formal education in the field to gain important knowledge, provided a forum for communicators from different industries to meet in order to solve mutual problems, played a key role in defining the field and its needs, encouraged recruitment (including the hiring of more women), promoted professional societies and formal degree programs, and seriously affected industry training programs by enabling them to use institute teaching materials. Knowledge gained through the Technical Writers’ Institute enabled Rensselaer to develop many other innovations.

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 tutorial explains and describes the use of several microformats, which make information marked up in HTML available for use in applications outside traditional Web browsers. Because microformats consist of minor additions to the HTML backbone of common Web pages, they represent a simple but significant move toward what Tim Berners-Lee has called the ldquosemantic Webrdquo-but without requiring the technical and practical shifts and time demands of a complete XML-based semantic-Web-development approach. Microformats also provide technical communicators with literacies and a conceptual foundation to approach more advanced semantic Web technologies and suggest ways to refine current Web design practice.

Technical and professional writing pedagogies have traditionally understood collaborative writing as an aggregate, cooperative venture between writers and subject matter experts. In contrast, this tutorial argues that Web 2.0 technologies offer technical and professional communication pedagogies more advantageous conceptions and practices of collaborative writing. The tutorial analyzes how new media technologies create a different collaborative writing environment and then discusses how these environments help collaborative writing methods create an alternative writing situation. The study concludes by examining the outcomes of student Web 2.0 research projects and by offering technical and professional writing instructors new pedagogical strategies for teaching collaborative writing.

This paper explores the extent to which technical communication businesses with Websites are attempting to reach an audience of prospective clients through an intermediary audience of search engines. It draws on a survey of 240 principals of these businesses, brief interviews with half of them, and an analysis of their sites. Results show that search engines are among the most helpful methods leading people to these business sites and that higher levels of such search engine helpfulness are strongly associated with higher percentages of clientele who originate through these sites. Most businesses take search engines into account at least minimally; however, meaningfully pursuing that audience requires ongoing investments that some technical communication businesses are reluctant to make.

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth in the areas of public rhetoric, cultural rhetoric, ethnography, research, and professional and technical communication. Central to all these areas is the fundamental understanding that writing matters; it can make a difference for peoples, organizations, and institutions. Depending on the purposes and exigencies for writing in these contexts, community-based writing can mobilize people, inform policy, seed new initiatives, draw audiences to events and forums, allow for greater participation in decision making, and make decision making transparent. For the last decade and half, scholars in rhetoric and composition have worked hard to define our roles in facilitating writing in the public interest, though we have not often done so in ways that create a synergy around shared research interests or theoretical projects.

A significant problem for practitioners of technical communication is to gain the skills to compete in a global, multicultural work environment. Instructors of technical communication can provide future practitioners with the tools to compete and excel in this global environment by introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the service-level classroom. By practicing how to use these heuristics in “real-world” contexts, instructors can prepare students to function as both information architects and symbolic-analytic operators within this global work environment. In this article, I first examine common cultural heuristics as they pertain to business communication. Next, I articulate how technical communicators can benefit from incorporating these heuristics into the classroom. Finally, I offer a pedagogical approach to introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the service-level technical communication classroom.

This article offers an example case of technical communicators integrating the social bookmarking site Delicious into existing work environments. Using activity theory to present conceptual foundations and concrete steps for integrating the functionalities of social media, the article builds on research within technical communication that argues for professional communicators to participate more fully in the design of communication systems and software. By examining the use of add-ons and tools created for Delicious, and the customized use of Rich Site Syndication (RSS) feeds that the site publishes, the author argues for addressing the context-sensitive needs of project teams by integrating the functionality of social media applications generally and repurposing their user-generated data.

This article examines the characteristics of collaborative work and overlapping activity systems in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Using genre theory and activity theory as frames to work out the genre ecology of gameplay, the article focuses on how players coordinate ad hoc grouping activity across and through genres. It articulates the related development of open systems in online gaming in a discussion of interface modifications (AddOns) and online information databases that players generate, drawing on De Certeau's formulation of strategies and tactics and Warner's discussion of publics and counterpublics. The article concludes by discussing implications of online gaming for an open-systems approach to information design in professional communication and for professional communication in general.

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.

This collection takes a broad look at the issue of outsourcing technical writing jobs and would help anyone who is interested in current themes and concerns to catch up on the conversation. The collection is organized into three parts: "Outsourcing Practices by Region"; "Management and Cross-Cultural Communication Issues"; and "Legal, Ethical, and Political Issues." The only drawback to the book is that some of the conclusions and references were already out of date when the book went to press. Overall, the book gives readers a well-rounded look at the history, perspectives, and issues that are important to the ongoing phenomenon of outsourcing in the technical communication field.

Since 1992, Steven Katz's “The Ethic of Expediency” on the rhetoric of technical communication during the Holocaust has become a reference point for discussions of ethics. But how does his thesis compare to current understandings of the Holocaust? As this article describes, Katz was in step with the trend two decades ago to universalize the lessons of the genocide but his thesis presents key problems for Holocaust scholars today. Against his assertion that pure technological expediency was the ethos of Nazi Germany, current scholarship emphasizes the role of ideology. Does that invalidate his thesis? Katz's analysis of rhetoric and his universalizing application to the Holocaust are two claims that may be considered separately. Yet even if one does not agree that “expediency” is inherent in Western rhetoric, Katz has raised awareness that phronesis is socially constructed so that rhetoric can be unethically employed. Thus, rather than remain an uncritically accepted heuristic for technical communicators, “The Ethic of Expediency” can be a starting point for ongoing exploration into the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of the genre.

Agreement about research questions can strengthen disciplinary identity and give direction to a field that is still maturing. The central research question this article poses foregrounds texts, broadly defined as verbal, visual, and multimedia, and the power of texts to mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of contexts. Related questions concern disciplinarity, pedagogy, practice, and social change. These questions overlap and inform each other. Any single study does not necessarily fall exclusively into one area. A mapping of a field's research questions is a political act, emphasizing some questions and marginalizing or excluding others. The emphases may change over time. This mapping illustrates reasons for the tensions between the academic and practitioner areas of the field. It also points out their shared research interests and opportunities for future research.

Most technical communication practitioners conduct research throughout their careers. Yet, a survey of the Web sites of 114 undergraduate technical communication programs between September 2006 and April 2007 revealed that 65% (about two thirds) of these programs are providing minimal or no exposure to research instruction and therefore are not sufficiently preparing students to handle the types of research they will encounter in their upcoming careers. Given the disconnect between the centrality of research in the work that technical communicators do and the low presence of research instruction at the undergraduate level, academics need to look for ways to overcome institutional and other constraints in order to give research training greater priority in their undergraduate programs.

This article reports data from questionnaires assessing the day-to-day experiences that members of the technical communication field have in carrying out their research. The data revealed that most members experience at least some frustration and numerous constraints that prevent them from doing the kinds and amounts of research that they want to do and that may affect the quality of their research. In short, technical communication scholars face an array of challenges. This article presents examples of these challenges and ideas that respondents had both for lessening the challenges scholars face and for better preparing graduate students. It suggests several practical initiatives for addressing these challenges along with realistic strategies for implementing those initiatives.

“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

Work is described on a National Science Foundation grant that supports the development, assessment, and dissemination of ldquomicro-insertionrdquo problems designed to integrate ethics into the graduate engineering curriculum. In contrast to traditional modular approaches to ethics pedagogy, micro-insertions introduce ethical issues by means of a ldquolow-doserdquo approach. Following a description of the micro-insertion approach, we outline the workshop structure being used to teach engineering faculty and graduate students how to write micro-insertions for graduate engineering courses, with particular attention to how the grant develops engineering students' (and faculty members') ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. We also describe previous and planned methods for assessing the effectiveness of micro-insertions. Finally, we explain the role that technical communication faculty and graduate students are playing as part of the grant team, specifically in developing an Ethics In-Basket that will disseminate micro-insertions developed during the grant.

Web logs, or ldquoblogs,rdquo are fast developing in diverse social and business contexts as influential sources of discourse, knowledge, and community development. In this paper, we investigate an aspect of blogging highly relevant to professional communication: the fast-developing world of ldquotech blogging.rdquo Tech blogs are blogs that focus on information technology innovation and the high-tech industry. We examine nine months of blog entries gathered by an internet aggregator site dedicated to technology news and commentary. Our analysis provides insights on the discourse of tech bloggers and an elite subgroup (ldquoA-list bloggersrdquo), on the discursive practices of this virtual community, and on issues of identity and legitimacy. Our findings hold implications for tech bloggers as well as for managers who need to navigate the expanding blogosphere and for technical communicators who can benefit from using the information that tech bloggers produce.

Although much has been written about the use of rhetoric in technical communication, the framing of technical documents often is overlooked. Framing differs from rhetoric chiefly in that it involves the use of content selection and structure to place information in a particular context. In this article, I will analyze the techniques used to frame a technical report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's “Summary for Policymakers,” and compare them to the techniques used to frame corporate news releases and newspaper articles written about the report. This framing analysis shows that writers of technical documents, news releases, and news articles frame their documents chiefly by choosing which facts to include or exclude, and by the positioning of information within the document.

This article investigates the status of orality in the history of technical communication. The article calls for orality as an integral part and driving force of technical writing. The article brings to light the misconceptions that have led to a diminished role of oral communication in technical writing. The article shows the implications of oral skills for improved effectiveness of technical communicators. The article outlines the challenges and promises of teaching oral communication in technical writing.

A recent British national intelligence-based Assessment (2002) illustrates how one government agency communicated science to serve its policy goals. This article analyzes some of the values that drive science, public policy, and national intelligence, and traces how those values affected the Assessment writers' goals and communication strategies. Through close reading of the Assessment's foreword and first section, this study shows how the writers shaped scientific and technical information to satisfy their disciplines' values and to naturalize their “proper perspective” on the policy case. Further analysis of similar documents will extend current research on scientific rhetoric, multidisciplinary collaborative writing, and public communication.

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.