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

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

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

Writing in the Health Professions is one of the latest books in the very popular Allyn and Bacon Series in Technical Communication published by Pearson/Longman and is the first one in the series to...

This research article reports the results of an online survey distributed among technical writing instructors in 2006. The survey aimed to examine how we teach intercultural communication in basic technical writing courses: our current practices and methods. The article discusses three major challenges that instructors may face when teaching about intercultural communication. These challenges concern teacher preparation, time and proposed goals and objectives, and teaching materials and methods. This article provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

Qualitative sampling methods have been largely ignored in technical communication texts, making this concept difficult to teach in graduate courses on research methods. Using concepts from qualitative health research, this article provides a primer on qualitative methods as an initial effort to fill this gap in the technical communication literature. Specifically, the authors attempt to clarify some of the current confusion over qualitative sampling terminology, explain what qualitative sampling methods are and why they need to be implemented, and offer examples of how to apply commonly used qualitative sampling methods.

Edward Hall's model of low-context and high-context cultures is one of the dominant theoretical frameworks for interpreting intercultural communication. This article reports a meta-analysis of 224 articles in business and technical communication journals between 1990 and 2006 and addresses two primary issues: (a) the degree to which contexting is embedded in intercultural communication theory and (b) the degree to which the contexting model has been empirically validated. Contexting is the most cited theoretical framework in articles about intercultural communication in business and technical communication journals and in intercultural communication textbooks. An extensive set of contexting propositions has emerged in the literature; however, few of these propositions have been examined empirically. Furthermore, those propositions tested most frequently have failed to support many contexting propositions, particularly those related to directness. This article provides several recommendations for those researchers who seek to address this popular and appealing yet unsubstantiated and underdeveloped communication theory.

Pedagogical and scholarly discussions of the process of usability tend to focus more on methods than on practices, or specific, tactical performances of and adjustments to these methods. Yet such practices shape students' learning and determine the success of their usability efforts. A teacher research study tracking students' understanding and enactment of usability and user-centered design over the course of a service-learning project illustrates the importance of practice-level struggles—and the thoughtful preparation for and facilitation of these struggles—to the development of students' flexible intelligence (metis) and rhetorical translation skills. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Some struggles for prestige in academic technical communication are self-defeating and wasteful because of the clash between the material (or positive-sum) economy of the workplace and the positional (or zero-sum) economy of the academy. Some professors of technical communication create disrespect for themselves and their specialities because they create degrading representations of working people and their artifacts, they promote impossible standards, and they advance discredited or misleading theories. More profitable approaches to gaining prestige for academic technical communication include recognizing that not everyone can be the top person in the positional economy, studying works on the economics of prestige, and promoting the genuinely good works that already exist in academic technical communication.

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom.

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

Telemedicine has been shown to be an effective means of managing follow-up care in chronic diseases such as depression. Exactly why telemedicine calls work, however, remains largely unknown because there are no adequate research tools to describe the complex communicative interactions in these encounters. We report here an ongoing project to investigate the efficacy of telemedicine in depression care, arguing that technical communication specialists have unique contributions to make to this kind of research.

Each year, more people search the Internet for health information. Through a case study conducted at a prominent health-information company, I will show that technical communicators are well-suited to contribute to the development of online health information. Like other technical communicators, online health-information developers must make rhetorical choices based on audience needs, function within specific social contexts, and work through challenges of writing, editing, and project management.

Abstract Early scholarly inquiries into online health information focused primarily on questions of accuracy and credibility. In recent research, however, we are seeing an expansion in this initial focus, to include issues such as the usability, design, and ethics of online health information. This special issue contains five articles that contribute to scholarly inquiry in these emerging areas of interest.

Viewing “informing” as a process to protect patients and support autonomy, we undertook a user-centered design process to develop online support for informed consent in pediatric Phase I research trials. Challenges included (a) delivering accurate information to people unfamiliar with medical terminology; (b) delivering this information humanely under time constraints and heightened emotions; (c) allowing users control over the information, while ensuring availability of legally required information. We addressed these challenges through analyses of audience, task, and information design.

When developers need to make a system available for a particular culture, the specific aspects of the target group are evaluated and then the content and navigation are ldquolocalizedrdquo for it. However, there are many situations in which Web media cannot be localized and hence, culturally heterogeneous users must interact with the same interface. The emerging strategy for this kind of usability is known as the shared meaning or shared context approach. This paper presents results of a between-group study of culturally heterogeneous users who provided shared contextual meanings and performance measures from interaction with a Web interface. Results were mixed but do suggest methods for how Websites may be developed in shared situations.

Although the title alludes to communications in general, the emphasis within this book is on speaking, not writing. Eight of the chapters deal specifically with public speaking, one addresses email and memos, and the last two deal with presentation elements, graphs, and PowerPoint. With two chapters emphasizing anxiety, the reader may experience anxiety overload. Control remedies listed include drugs to relieve anxiety. If your profession is highly dependent on oral communication, then this book may offer a number of items to help you become a better than average speaker. If, on the other hand, your profession is more aligned with technical writing, or editing communications, then this text offers very little.

If service education is to avoid the many cultural pitfalls that have been signaled to date in the literature, it seems crucial that town-gown articulations be nurtured as organic, reciprocating, knowledge-producing endeavors that position the ethnographic encounter at their epistemological center. For these articulations to be organic, they must grow from encounters between graduate students and community organizations that begin very early in students' scholarly careers—perhaps even as undergraduates in the same locale. This organic relationship should be grounded in writing with the organization or for the organization. My decades of embedding service learning in an undergraduate course in technical communication and in many internships I have directed have shown me that writing with and/or for the organization is a key step in the ethnographic encounter that community-based education involves. Students come to know the local culture first as one of its discursive agents, the better to discern if they want to pursue this agency in further scholarship.

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional writing and usability (what we would call “his things”), and writing program administration and adult basic education (“my things”).

Kaplan's framework of contrastive rhetoric has been widely accepted in the field of cross-cultural technical communication. However, in the last four decades, contextual factors such as economic globalization trend and the advances of communication technologies are changing our ways of interacting with others. As a result our understanding of culture and cultural differences need to be adjusted. In this research, I start by recommending a workable definition of culture in the present context—culture as a process, which establishes a foundation for cross-cultural rhetorical research in the new era when communication across cultures transcends national boundaries. Based on the critical perspective of culture, I continue to point out the limitations of contrastive rhetoric and argue that contrastive rhetoric's view of culture and its research purpose and methodology need to be modified to overcome its constraints and better meet the needs of the present social context.

Technical communication instructors want to help students, as well as professionals, design effective PowerPoint presentations. Toward this end, I compare the advice of academic and industry experts about effective PowerPoint presentation design to survey responses from university students about slide text, visual elements, animations, and other issues related to PowerPoint presentation design and delivery. Based on this comparison, I suggest some topics, such as PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view, that technical communication instructors and other presentation instructors might address when they cover presentations in their classes or seminars.

In this article, the authors analyze early technical documents produced by the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration (NMBI), including “The Legend of Montezuma” and “Illustrated New Mexico.” The purpose of these documents are clear: to increase the number of white Americans to create a clear white majority when New Mexico became a state and thereby prevent the Mexicans from gaining power. In analyzing these documents, the authors use theoretical frameworks from studies in the history of business and technical writing (SHBTW) and critical whiteness theory to show how early textual representations of New Mexico reproduce racist constructions of native New Mexicans and represent whiteness as the norm.

Technical communicators, if you wonder what relevance this book has for you, or for the field of technical communication, please suspend judgment for a moment. The fact is, Nuechterlein and Weiser ...

In this book, the author mentors his readers in principles of designing a web portfolio, a multimedia vehicle that allows individuals and companies to show their work across geographical boundaries. He outlines a modular process for developing a web portfolio and explains common pitfalls that can interfere with the process. Topics covered include: conceptualization; information design and visual design; content, collection, development and management; web page design; functionality; uploading and testing sites; and portfolio launch and promotion. This practical book is worth the time and price.

After the controversial police shooting of a developmentally-disabled African-American teenager in July 2003, the new mayor of Denver, CO, appointed a politically diverse task force to revise the police department's use-of-force policy and propose a new model for police oversight. This teaching case is based on the task force's deliberations and collaborative efforts to build policy consensus in a sometimes rancorous, high-stakes environment. In it, I reconstruct the story of the shooting that gave rise to the task force, trace the arc of the task force's 104-day existence, and analyze the letter and final report submitted by the task force's co-chairs to (1) demonstrate the highly-pressurized nature of policy language invention and the crucial impact of word choice in such policy, and (2) illustrate the difficulty the task force encountered in attempting to secure consensus and the manner in which the final work product acknowledges, rather than obscures, this struggle. Finally, the case includes recommended readings and a guide for individual and group activities for implementation in either an undergraduate- or graduate-level technical communication course.

Using technical writing basics, a cohort of Lighthorse Police Officers from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation added to their tribe’s cultural history by recording part of their family and clan history as well as documenting their law enforcement careers and education.

Describing the emergence of the first shipbuilding texts, particularly those in English provides another chapter in the story of the emergence of English technical writing. Shipwrightery texts did not appear in English until the middle decades of the seventeenth century because shipwrightery was a closed discourse community which shared knowledge via oral transmission. The shift from orality to textuality in shipwrightery did not occur until advancing navigation principles enabled ships to sail in open waters. Shipping rapidly became a commercial business, and shipwrightery was forced to move from closely-guarded simple design principles to mathematically-based designs too complex to be retained only in memory of shipwrights and shared via oral transmission. Textual transmission began to supplant oral instruction. The evolution of English shipwrightery provides rich research opportunities for historians tracking the development of technical writing.

To date, most of the research on usability and content management systems has focused on the end-user products of such systems rather than on the usability for technical communicators of the single-source authoring tools offered within these systems. While this latter research is undeniably important, attention needs to be paid to the plight of technical communicators attempting to use single-sourcing tools. Otherwise, technical communicators in workplaces risk becoming semi-skilled contingent labor rather than empowered knowledge workers. This essay, therefore, attempts to open a debate about the design of content management systems by turning to the rhetorical canon of memory as an appropriate source for insights into how stored information can be flexibly retrieved and used during composing activities.

This article lays out some of the key issues driving organizations' increasing interest in enterprise content management (ECM). It then problematizes both the rhetoric that technology developers are using to sell ECM technologies to business leaders and the assumptions on which business leaders are basing critical technology implementation decisions. Finally, it argues why technical communicators must take action—through direct participation in the ECM discourse—to shift the rhetoric that is structuring the ECM debate and thus shaping the potential of the field of technical communication.

The importance of separating presentation from content is taken as a given in many kinds of publishing, despite the fact that the notion of separation has received little critical scrutiny. I provide a closer look at the separation, first by providing contemporary and historical context, then by laying out key distinctions in the ways the separation argument is used in Web design versus Web content management versus full-featured content management systems (CMSs). I suggest that these distinctions are critical in how we should view the separation and the implications of the separation for the work of technical communicators.

While content management systems (CMSs) might be a new concept to many.people in our field, content management as a practice within our discipline is not; our field has been studying it and practicing it for years, though under different headings: single sourcing, knowledge management, and course management (such as in the form of WebCT and Blackboard). We started our work on this special issue with a rather ambitious mission-to bring together some diverse perspectives on content management and CMSs, to both theorize and operationalize the content management practice, and to rationalize our participation in the broad domain of content management discourse. Grounded on the premise that technical communication requires information and knowledge management, this special issue is one of the first systematic and deliberate attempts to extend our perspectives, both theoretical and practical, about technical communication from the relatively static sphere of document design to the more dynamic horizon of content (information/knowledge) management.

Twenty years after the publication of Patricia Sullivan's ldquoBeyond a narrow conception of usability testingrdquo in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, three scholars - all Sullivan's students - reflect on the history and development of usability testing and research. Following Sullivan, this article argues that usability bridges the divide between science and rhetoric and asserts that usability is most effective when it respects the knowledge-making practices of a variety of disciplines. By interrogating trends in usability method, the authors argue for a definition of usability that relies on multiple epistemologies to triangulate knowledge-making. The article opens with a brief history of the development of usability methods and argues that usability requires a balance between empirical observation and rhetoric. Usability interprets human action and is enriched by articulating context and accepting contingency. Usability relies on effective collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders in the design of technology. Ultimately, professional and technical communication scholars are best prepared to coin new knowledge with a long and wide view of usability.

In this paper we present, from an academic perspective, the perceived quality ratings of business and technical communication journals. Through a survey of academic experts, we asked respondents to rate the top overall journals, business communication journals, technical communication journals, and the top journals from a technology perspective. In addition, we asked respondents to list the journals that they read most frequently. We analyzed the results by breaking down the rankings into world regions and academic departments. The top-three overall journals for all regions are Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Business Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Importantly, differences by world region and academic department type were found in all these rankings. These results can support researchers worldwide by helping them target their publishing efforts to journals that have the best fit with their business and technical communication discipline, world region, and academic home.

Our view of ethics in professional and technical communication has evolved, paralleling developments throughout society. Earlier views on ethics and values have grown into a broad perspective of complex gradations with people at many levels affecting eventual practical outcomes. This newer perspective includes not only persons but social forces and organizations. The organizational culture of NASA, for example, was specifically identified by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) as one of the causes of faulty communication leading to a terribly tragic event. The Challenger investigations of 20 years earlier, on the other hand, focused primarily on physical events, secondarily on professional judgments, and only little on the social and cultural context of the disaster. We learn by failures but also by self-examination. As we see how ethics and values impact technical events, we understand that technological progress is ultimately a human endeavor in which reflection and judgment is as important as measurement and observation.

Not only have historical studies of technical communication increased in quantity and quality over the last 15 years, but they have also entered the mainstream of technical communication research. These studies have focused on practitioners, artifacts, genres, movements, techniques, events, and the profession, as well as relevant methodology and pedagogy. There are still many opportunities for historical research in our discipline, particularly in the areas of chirographic, oral, and nonverbal communication as well as technical communication activities such as illustrating, translating, and editing and the business of technical communication. Researchers now have many online indexes, databases, and archives to assist them in locating and studying primary sources. There is a need, however, for greater coordination among scholars and a better awareness of the areas that have already been studied. Historical studies can serve teachers and practitioners by suggesting ideas, supplying precedents, creating critical distance, and establishing context.

The Multimodal approach offers technical communicators and science writers an analytical tool to synthesize the meaning made in the connections across communicative modes. This multimodal synthesis can help technical communicators better exploit the meaning-making potential of multimodal combinations and understand the needs of future generations shaped by their increasingly developed multimodal literacy.

Many engineering undergraduates receive their first and perhaps most intensive exposure to engineering communication through writing lab reports in lab courses taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Most of the TAs' teaching of writing happens through their comments on students' lab reports. Technical writing faculty need to be aware of TAs' response practices so they can build on or counteract that instruction as needed. This study examines the response practices of two TAs and the ways the practices shifted after the TAs began using a grading rubric. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in focus and mode, some reflecting best practices and some not. It also indicates encouraging changes after the TAs started using the grading rubric. The TAs' marginalia became more content focused and specific and, perhaps most important, less authoritative and more likely to reflect a coaching mode. The article concludes with implications for technical writing courses.

Expectations for a book in its 6th edition are relatively high: it must have more than casual merit to garner continued editions, and this book meets most expectations quite nicely. Structure, content, and presentation combine for an effective text for those practicing technical communication (or pursuing the educational prerequisites for such a career plan). Some of the topics covered include: resources for technical communication; visual communication; workplace literacy; collaboration and ethics; document design; the need for good definitions; description; instructions, procedures, and process explanations; the different types of reports; letters, memos, and email; and career communication (a.k.a. resume writing) and oral presentations. The text is well written and should prove useful to the practicing technical writer, regardless of the particular industry in which he or she is employed. It will be referred to on a regular basis.

In addition to technical documentation, face-to-face helpdesks and telephonic helplines are a powerful means for supporting users of technical products and services. This study investigates the factors that determine user satisfaction with helpdesks and helplines. A survey, based on the SERVQUAL framework and questionnaire, shows that the SERVQUAL dimensions of customer satisfaction are not applicable in these contexts. Three quality dimensions were found instead: solution quality, the experience of the consultation, and, in the case of a physical environment, the so-called tangibles. Helpdesk customers base their overall quality perceptions mainly on their experiences during a consultation, while helpline customers focus strongly on the quality of the solution offered. The study also found a connection between the perceived helpline quality and the appreciation of the primary service.

In Technical Communication and the World Wide Web, editors Carl Lipson and Michael Day attempt to present a realistic picture of the many-sided task of writing for the Web. All things considered, i...

This paper explores the growing popularity of animated software agents as a rapidly evolving technology for supporting website users and particularly the tendency among designers to figure them as young women. While designers claim that animated/personified interfaces are more intuitive and natural than the traditional point-and-click interfaces that users encounter, this paper aims to show how virtual humans can enact familiar scripts about women's work, circumscribe the range of possible roles and personalities for women, invoke service to others as the primary context for women's work, and objectify women through a not-so-subtle process of linking technology-as-tool to the idea that women are tools, fetishized instruments to be used in the service of accomplishing users' goals. In conclusion, this study develops our field's tools for critiquing technical communication texts and interfaces by focusing attention on the implications of how technologies for interacting with website users are designed.

In 1974, the traffic-accident data archive maintained by the Department of Transportation for the state of Iowa was transferred from a primarily paper-based system to a mainframe computer. Data reg...

The “steel bible” emerged in 1919 and went through 11 editions in 80 years. In its evolution we can see the shift from individual to group authorship, an increasing use of visual elements, and a physical change from a small, hand-held volume to a weighty desktop reference. In a textual analysis, we can see that it was essentially static, changing only by additions and deletions, as the industry evolved. The eventual closing of hundreds of plants and the migration of the industry to other countries can be seen in the change of publisher, the sudden absence of photography, and the international references. Originally, the steel bible came from the factory floor and the words of the plant managers, but by the 1990s, it was a highly-abstracted representation of knowledge. In the steel bible, we can see the history of the industry and the maturing of technical communication in the 20th century.

Content analysis is a powerful empirical method for analyzing text, a method that technical communicators can use on the job and in their research. Content analysis can expose hidden connections among concepts, reveal relationships among ideas that initially seem unconnected, and inform the decision-making processes associated with many technical communication practices. In this article, we explain the basics of content analysis methodology and dispel common misconceptions, report on a content analysis case study, reveal the most important objectives associated with conducting high quality content analyses, and summarize the implications of content analysis as a tool for technical communicators and researchers.

Teachers often test course materials by using them in class. Usability testing provides an alternative: teachers receive student feedback and revise materials before teaching a class. Case studies based on interviews and observations with two teaching assistants who usability tested materials before teaching introductory technical writing demonstrate how usability testing can make novice teachers more confident about and help them predict student experiences with their assignments. By helping to train teachers, usability testing can also help better serve students.

Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology is an underutilized, relatively unknown resource in technical communication which could be exploited not only for its potential clarification of large social issues that involve our discipline, but also specifically toward the development of a critical theory of illustrations. Applications of critical theory help strengthen our discipline by forcing us to delineate extant approaches and consider whether democratic goals are being achieved through those approaches. If a critical theory of illustrations can be built from Feenberg's critical theory of technology, it should be useful for classroom instructors and researchers as well as theorists.

In a profound sense, the teaching of business and technical communication (BTC) is always already the teaching of writing in the disciplines (WID). Yet the WID dimension of BTC is often hard to see. The question this article addresses is, How might the North American tradition of BTC communication courses be more consciously—and effectively—articulated with the disciplines? The article reviews some of the research literature concerning the value of articulating BTC with WID in undergraduate education and program descriptions of such efforts to examine what BTC has done, is doing, and might do in the future to strengthen WID in BTC.

As distributed work begins to shift the nature of practice for technical communication professionals in the workplace, faculty need new frameworks to help prepare students for roles that involve negotiating, supporting, and facilitating virtual global collaboration. This paper identifies key areas of metaknowledge appropriate to these new frameworks by synthesizing a review of current scholarship on such collaborations and a case study of students participating in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural team project.