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To study the affective states of technical communicators, we administered a survey to examine three areas: first, the traditional facets or aspects of job satisfaction; second, any possible differences between male and female technical communicators in job satisfaction; and third, any influences on job satisfaction such as job stress that might be unique to the technical communication profession. To ensure the reliability and validity of the measures, the survey included the Job Descriptive Index (JDI), the most widely used measure of job satisfaction in the world. The sample from the Society for Technical Communication's (STC's) membership list yielded 323 usable responses. Our analyses included: a comparison of our subjects' responses to national norms for all occupations, an examination of male and female differences on satisfaction measures, and the use of various appropriate statistical procedures to select only the most significant results for discussion. The results indicate that technical communicators are satisfied with their compensation and opportunities for promotion, but they are dissatisfied with the work itself, their supervision, and their co-workers. No significant gender differences occurred. Implications are discussed.

Improving communication between tax practitioners and IRS agents requires identification of specific barriers that impede effective communication. This study extends prior research on communication barriers to the tax practitioner-IRS agent relationship. Survey responses of 98 experienced national and international tax practitioners revealed that the barriers perceived to be the most serious relate to behavioral and personality concerns, personal conditions, inflexible thinking, physical concerns, technical competence, and closed-minded attitudes. Although these perceptions generally were invariant to gender and age, some differences were observed by the level of work experience of the respondents. The results of this study may be used by the IRS to develop outreach and education programs consistent with Compliance 2000, a philosophy of tax administration that aims to improve communication channels between the practitioner community and IRS agents. In addition, practitioners may use the results to devise ways to deal with communication problems during interactions with the IRS.

The authors assessed writing attitudes and epistemologies of 117 first-year and 329 upper-level undergraduates. Attitude scales assessed enjoyment of writing, self-ratings of writing ability, and belief in writing as learnable. Epistemological scales measured absolutism (belief in knowledge as determinably true or false), relativism (belief in the indeterminacy of all claims), and evaluativism (belief that truth can be approximated). Absolutism correlated negatively with writing grades and verbal aptitude, whereas evaluativism exhibited a weak positive correlation with both. Students with higher evaluativism tended to enjoy writing more and to assess themselves as good writers. Upper-level students were less absolutist and marginally more evaluativist than first-year students. Differences in attitudes and epistemologies emerged between men and women and among upper-level students in four disciplinary groups. The authors sketch some implications for writing pedagogy.

A survey to study women in technical and scientific fields was conducted in 1993. The study examined the environment in which women work, the relationship between women's personal lives and their work, and women's interpersonal communication styles. Results of the study supported some of the previous research findings related to glass ceilings and career paths. However, results related to sexual harassment and benefits prompted new questions, and results related to communication styles conflicted with the findings of much previous research. To further investigate these conflicting results, a follow-up survey was conducted in 1993. Results of this survey supported the 1993 findings. Results appear to indicate that the workplace and the women in it are changing. The workplace is becoming more family-oriented, and women are practicing strategies for working effectively in traditionally male-dominated organizations. In technical/scientific fields, men and women have adopted androgynous language patterns, and little difference exists between the interpersonal communication styles of men and women.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Gary A. Olson presents six in-depth interviews with internationally prominent scholars outside of the discipline and twelve response essays written by noted rhetoric and composition scholars on subjects related to language, rhetoric, writing, philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. The interviews are with philosopher of language Donald Davidson, literary critic and critical legal studies scholar Stanley Fish, cultural studies and African American studies scholar bell hooks, internationally renowned deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller, feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins, and British logician and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism. Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary. This book is a follow-up to the editor s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.

A pragmatic work that begins with analyses of experimental expository prose, avant-garde feminist poetics, African American discourse, hypertext, and other innovative discourse influences, and goes on to present a series of proposals intended for teachers, theorists, graduate students, and administr

This collection of sixteen essays, authored by major scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric, offers an eclectic range of opinions, perspectives, and interpretations regarding the place of composition studies in its academic context. Covering the history of rhetoric and composition from the nineteenth century to the present, the collection focuses on the institutional and intellectual framework of the discipline while honoring Donald C. Stewart, a man who addressed the central paradox of the field: its homelessness as a discipline in an academic community that prides itself on specialization.Over the past two decades composition grounded in rhetorical tradition has emerged as a foundation for liberal and professional studies. These essays, furthering the often disputed point that composition is indeed a discipline, are divided into three parts that examine three crucial questions: What is the history of composition s context? How does composition function within its context? How should we interpret or reinterpret this context?In the first part, the essayists investigate the history of composition teaching, noting the formative influences of the eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoricians in the development of the American tradition as well as the effect of composition on education in general. The essayists question the public perception of rhetoric as the art of flimflam and examine the rise of expressive writing at the expense of argumentation and persuasion.In part 2, the contributors make clear that composition is a discipline in the process of defining itself. They explore the role composition plays in universities and the ways in which it seeks focus and purpose, as well as formal justification for its existence.In the last section, the authors scan the very edge of the field of composition and rhetoric, from examinations of the nature of the composing imagination and of the question of dialogue as communication to feminist theoretical approaches that attempt to bridge the differences between the New Romantics and New Rhetoricians composing models. The essays are enhanced by the coeditors witty and perceptive introduction and by Vincent Gillespie s tribute to Donald Stewart.

One meaning of postmodernism is the recognition and inclusion of the previously excluded and suppressed. Recent developments of a generally humanistic nature in technical communication—the rhetoric of science, social constructionism, and feminist and ethicist critiques of science—are instances of such recognition. These developments deflate some traditional assumptions about and privileges associated with scientific and technical knowledge and practice, while they elevate previously denied aspects. Thus, surprisingly, postmodernism reveals itself in technical communication as the resurgence of humanism.

Last year, I was invited to speak at a conference whose theme was the feminization of composition.2 This topic coincided with another discussion I had been following in our journals: the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field. In preparing my talk, I began to raise several questions like: What is meant by feminization in these discussions? Can we assume that composition is feminized? Are the discourses on disciplinary formation and on feminization already woven together? If not, should they be? This essay explores these questions, making distinctions and telling stories that offer an alternative perspective. Let me begin with the feminization of composition. My rereading of many of these discussions3 leads me to conclude that their statements about feminization apply largely to composition instruction, not to Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field.4 The two reasons generally advanced are the numerical predominance of women and the nature of composition pedagogy. Accounts agree that women do most of the teaching of writing from the university level to elementary school as either full- or part-time instructors. Many descriptions of recent pedagogies maintain that instructional practices, particularly of expressive and critical pedagogies, are marks of feminization because they are collaborative, student centered, and nurturing. A few, however, dissent. Susan Jarratt and Evelyn Ashton-Jones, for example, problematize collaboration as a desirable feminine pedagogy. Lil Brannon contends that the expressivists and people like Giroux, Shor, Freire, and Rose are reinscribing patriarchy by invoking masculine heroic narratives of conquest as traditional male Romantic heroes who, like the rugged individual in the Dead Poet's Society, work against all odds to make a difference. Some historical accounts of nineteenth-century composition position it as feminized in contrast to rhetorical instruction and the emerging professionalization of English Studies. Robert Connors argues that the demise of agonistic rhetorical instruction in persuasive public discourse, which he contends had largely characterized male education up through 1850, was related to the entrance of significant numbers of women into higher education in the nineteenth century. These women were excluded from taking oral rhetoric and assigned to a more appropriate course called composition. He

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This article is a case study of a small controversy involving a 1983 government research report on gender biases in naval officer fitness reports. The research at issue indicated that male commanding officers customarily wrote differently in naval fitness reports about women than in fitness reports they wrote about men, and the researchers concluded that the commanding officers needed to change their writing habits. But the objectivity of the researchers was soon challenged. In this survey of the controversy, the writing of several groups—male commanding officers, female naval officers, male newspaper editors, and female personnel researchers—is both illustrated and critiqued. The main focus here is rhetorical credibility in professional communications when gender is the issue at hand.

In this critical history of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the rise of composition, Miriam Brody argues that nothing about words or their arrangement is innately gendered. Yet since the English Enlightenment, teachers have encouraged their students to admire and imitate manly writing, writing that is plain, forceful, cogent, and true. Similarly, students have been enjoined to avoid so-called effeminate or feminine writingwriting characterized as vague, unorganized, ornate, and deceitful.Such advice, part of what Brody terms the hidden curriculum, has served the interests of discourse communities as various as the early Enlightenment Royal Society in seventeenth-century London (by urging a clear and masculine style for the work of science) and the land-grant universities of nineteenth-century America (by claiming that the work of writing was similar to clearing the land and pushing back the frontier). Brody s discussion in fact becomes a social history of canonical rhetorical essays and important late Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and early modern school texts. She points out that in their advice to writers even the Strunks and Whites and Peter Elbows of more recent times have extolled masculine virtues and urged control over invasive and problematic feminine qualities.Brody s book not only clarifies rhetoric s inheritance and transformation of the classical ideal of manliness, it also is the first critical work to explore the ideological significance of gendered imagery and to interpret in light of this imagery rhetorical essays and hard-to-locate early composition texts against a background of previously unpublished archival materials.

Miriam Brody. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 247 pages. Carol J. Singley and S. Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narratives by Women. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. xxvi + 400 pages. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.281 pages. Donovan J. Ochs. Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol, and Ritual in the Greco‐Roman Era. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. xiv + 130 pages. $29.95 cloth. Walter L. Reed. Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvi + 223 pages. Barbara Warnick. The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993. 176 pages. John Frederick Reynolds, ed. Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. xii + 170. $19.95 paper. Edward M. White. Teaching and Assessing Writing. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass Publishers, 1994. xxii + 331 pages. $34.95. Sharon Crowley. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. New York: Macmillan College Publishing Company, 1994. 365 pages. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. xviii + 150 pages.

We surveyed 1,152 employees of a midwestern telephone company to test the effects of gender and employee classification level on work outcomes. To determine whether gender differences in this organization were stable or context dependent, competing hypotheses were established from both structural and socialization perspectives. Significant main effects of gender and employee classification level were predicted and found by structuralist theory. Women reported lower job satisfaction and interaction as less desirable than men, whereas hourly workers reported lower supervisory support, teamwork, communication satisfaction, and accuracy of information than salaried workers. Structuralist theory also predicted and found significant interaction effects for satisfaction with communication, supervisory support, teamwork, and desire for interaction. However, both theories operated for employees' perceptions of information accuracy.

This study shows that race/ethnicity significantly explained differences in attitudes toward human resource policies fostering diversity held by faculty at a large public university in the midwestern United States. Overall, whites' attitudes were less positive regarding diversity programs and other human resource policies relevant to women and minorities than Black's, Hispanic's, and Asian's attitudes were. We also found that individual race and ethnicity significantly explained differences in attitudes toward diversity programs to a greater extent than the demography of the organizational work unit.

Technical communicators are becoming increasingly involved in product development, often playing important roles on design teams. This shift brings with it the possibility for technical communicators to play more critical roles in balancing gender biases in technology. Feminist critiques of technology offer a range of perspectives for both educators and practitioners. Because discussion of feminism and technology in relation to technical communication is relatively new, the possibilities for applications of these theories are broad.

In critiquing the sexually loaded metaphors in James Paradis' analysis of the problem of expert knowledge in technical operator's manuals, this essay demonstrates how professional discourse formally embodies images of violence and domination that may also interfere with the responsible control of a dangerous technology. Describing the relationship between logos and ethos in professional discourse, this essay demonstrates how a feminist perspective can help technical communicators understand the pragmatic consequences of unarticulated sexual codes in scientific and technical discourse.

This study focuses on the means by which women convey authority in their scholarly publications. After analyzing a selected sample of women's scholarship in technical communication journal articles, the study explores whether traditional authoritative writing features conflict with traits more frequently characterized in feminist research as “women's ways of making meaning.”; Findings point to a need for more research into how scholarly writers develop a voice of authority; such research may challenge how we define and teach scholarly writing in technical communication.

Drawing on gender theory and research and on audience theory and research, this essay suggests that although earlier studies would lead us to believe that women would be better at considering audience during a writing task, little difference exists between males and females as they constructed a verbal and visual set of instructions.

Increasingly, professional communicators are involved in situations in which social action, and questions of ethical and civic responsibility, are implicated. Arguing that feminist scholarship is a relevant and powerful means of understanding these situations, we position the five contributions to this special issue within theoretical frameworks that explore interconnections of gender with methods and practices in technical and professional communication. After outlining areas for future research, we raise the question of men's relation to gender research and feminism, calling for more scholarship that engages a wider spectrum of feminist thought.

Because technical communicators are expected increasingly to participate in environmental communication, technical communication practitioners, researchers, and teachers should be aware of current practices in public environmental debate and related reform movements. This essay uses a controversial case in which a Mohawk community clashes with the Environmental Protection Agency 1) to explore how alternative worldviews affect environmental remediation efforts; and 2) to serve as a template for the development of a feminist perspective on how communicative practices in environmental policy making should be reformed.

The goal of this study was to expand our understanding of mentoring situated within electronic exchanges. Focusing on three graduate and five undergraduate mentors’ responses via telecommunications, we explored the strategies mentors used to make their reading and understanding of the texts explicit to their students, the responses mentors provided to demonstrate how students might revise, and mentors’ perceptions toward mentoring. Mentors responded to eight drafts from 24 ninth-grade students over an eight-week period, generating an average of 20 comments per student draft. Data collected included response grids of each mentor’s comments to students, interviews with mentors midway and at the end of the study, and journals kept by the mentors. Results showed that mentor pre-project expectations about responses they might make to students did not correspond to their actual responses, and that as the project progressed, mentor responses formed patterns corresponding to the draft of the students’ writing assignment. Additional differences were found based on mentors’ previous teaching experience, gender, and requests for feedback. Mentors expressed as their greatest difficulty not knowing which comments were perceived by students as most helpful

The United States is at a crucial moment in the history of literacy, a time when how well Americans read is the subject of newspaper headlines. In this insightful book, Carl F. Kaestle and his colleagues shed new light on this issue, providing a social history of literacy in America that broadens the definition of literacy and considers who was reading what, under what circumstances, and for what purposes. The book explores diverse sources-from tests of reading ability, government surveys, and polls to nineteenth-century autobiographies and family budget studies-in order to assess trends in Americans' reading abilities and reading habits. It investigates such topics as the relation of literacy to gender, race, ethnicity, and income; the magnitude, causes, and policy implications of the decline in test scores in the early 1970s; the reasons women's magazines have been more successful than magazines for men; and whether print technology has fostered cultural diversity or consolidation. It concludes that there has been an immense expansion of literacy in America over the past century, against which the modest skill declines of the 1970s pale by comparison. There has also been tremendous growth in the availability, purchase, and use of printed materials. In recent decades, however, literacy has leveled and even declined in some areas of reading, as shown in the downward trends in purchases of newspapers and magazines. Since Americans are now being lured away from the print media by electronic media, say the authors, current worries about Americans' literacy levels may well be justified.

I he postmodern penchant for reflexivity has affected all arenas of social research, including composition and rhetoric.Sandra Harding explains the importance of reflexivity as she defines feminist methods: The beliefs and behaviors of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of research.This evidence . . .must be open to critical scrutiny no less than what is traditionally defined as relevant evidence....This kind of relationship between the researcher and the object of research is usually discussed under the heading of the "reflexivity of social science."(9) Reflexivity encourages a questioning of the most basic premises of one's discipline.Charles Bazerman, whose essay "The Interpretation of Disciplinary Writing" appears in Writing the Social Text, describes the fruits of interrogating one's discipline: "By reflection one can come to know the systems of which one is part and can act with greater self-conscious precision and flexibility to carry forward and, if appropriate, reshape the projects of one's discipline" (37).

ur Ptolemaic system of literary categories goes creaking and groaning onward, in spite of the widely acknowledged need overhaul it in response multiculturalism. This is not say that there have not been attempts revise course design in light of new materials and methods. For example, G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson's Writing and Reading Differently (1985), Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson's Gender in the Classroom (1990), and James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion's Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1992) address the pedagogical consequences of deconstruction, feminist literary theory, and cultural studies, respectively, and also incorporate more diverse literatures. these attempts foster innovation in the individual classroom still leave the basic structure of English studies intact. In Kristin Ross's description of the multicultural world and cultural studies program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she comments indirectly on this problem when she identifies as one stumbling block the Santa Cruz program the faculty's unwillingness to depart from their specialized fields (668). They fended off demands diversify their course material with plaints like But I don't have a PhD in South African literature (668). Ross gives good reasons for forging ahead in spite of such protests, but she doesn't say much about the underlying structure of English studies that still makes us think our scholarship must be organized along national or chronological lines, even though these are inimical the process of integrating new materials and methods because devised serve and protect the old ones.

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This article reviews selected gender scholarship that informs the study of professional communication as well as some recent articles on professional communication that make use of gender studies. The article also suggests future research directions that include a merger of gender and professional communication scholarship. Topics covered include gender and communication and gender identity, along with gender and writing, reading, speaking language choice, visual communication, collaboration, content analysis, management, history and case studies.

In the United States, the majority of technical writers and technical writing teachers are women. Their dominance of the profession has several causes, including the attractiveness of writing jobs for women, widespread associations of women and superior writing ability, the social acceptability of women in writing jobs, and occupational segregation. Women's dominance of the profession brings with it the risk of diminishing wages and prestige. To avoid this depreciation of the field, professional associations ought to equip technical writers and technical writing teachers with information regarding satisfactory salaries and working conditions, and teachers ought to communicate this information to their students.

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

Recent trends in gender and writing research avoid or ignore the issue of essentialism while attempting to formulate a theory of “composing as a woman” that might rely on essentialist assumptions. Codifying the characteristics of “writing like a woman” or “writing like a man” can result in a limited—and limiting—conception of gender and its effect on writing. To illustrate this argument, this article uses as an example of I'écriture féminine the writing of Kenneth Burke and as an example of writing like a man the prose of Julia Kristeva. It argues for conceptualizing and studying gender as a secondary factor affecting writing rather than the principal factor.

The inclusion of a course in gender issues in a technical communication curriculum affords students the opportunity to confront objectivist and rationalist paradigms still found in the discourse of technical communication. The theoretical and practical foundations of a course that examines feminist inquiry into the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as the language practices associated with professional writing and communication, are discussed. Issues of gender roles within organizational collaborative work groups, as well as issues related to gendered assumptions in science and technology, are also integral parts of the course design. A description of objectives, assignments, and tests for the course, as well as a full syllabus, are included.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>