A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy. Ed. Stephen P. Witte, Neil Nakadate, and Roger D. Cherry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 376 pp. Professional Communication: The Social Perspective. Ed. Nancy Roundy Blyler and Charlotte Thralls. Newbury Park: Sage, 1993. 292 pp. Business & Managerial Communication: New Perspectives. Linda Driskill, with June Ferrill and Marda Steffey. Fort Worth: Dryden, 1992. 810 pp. Business and Administrative Communication. 2nd ed. Kitty O. Locker. Homewood: Irwin, 1992. 775 pp. Contemporary Business Communication: From Thought to Expression. Joan Vesper and Vincent Ryan Ruggiero. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 565 pp. Impact: A Guide to Business Communication. Ann Fischer and Margot Northey. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice‐Hall, 1993. 247 pp. Teaching Technical Writing: A Pragmatic Approach. Rev. ed. John S. Harris, St. Paul: ATTW Anthology Series, 1992. 191 pp.

Today many students learn how to use desktop programs such as PageMaker and Ventura in technical communication courses; however, few of those students are also learning the principles of graphic design underlying the production of mechanicals. The ability to use a desktop publishing program does not necessarily guarantee the ability to produce well-designed and effective documents. In fact, the growing use of desktop publishing software has led to a proliferation of documents that violate all the rules of good design. This article describes a technical publications course in which students gain a better understanding of the principles of design and layout by using mechanical paste up techniques. When required to use mechanical paste up in addition to desktop publishing software, students acquired a more thorough understanding of grids and white space as well as a greater confidence in their abilities to do page design.

Identifying problems in recent technical communication studies of historical medical text, this article suggests ways for researchers to overcome them. Its approach uses five steps for conducting sound historical research: establishing originality for historical textual analysis; adopting an authoritative text for analysis; understanding the genre or form of a historical text; understanding the intellectual or social context for a historical text; and understanding the publishing and readership context of a historical text. These steps are discussed within the context of related fields of inquiry, namely history of medicine, history of the book, literary criticism and historical linguistics, and analytical bibliography. The article concludes by exploring new directions for research in technical communication and history of medicine.

This article discusses two conflicts occurring during the first decade of the Royal Society (1660–1670). One conflict concerned the proper method of scientific experimentation, the other the proper writing style for communicating scientific knowledge. Following the method proposed by taxonomists, language would be a vehicle for representing the order of reality in its undisturbed state. Following the method proposed by conjecturalists, language would be a means for constructing a theory and arguing for its validity. Members of the Society were divided over these crucial questions, as evident in scientific documents of the period as well as in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society. Parallels to this division are present in contemporary issues in technical writing, and this article closes by discussing some implications for teaching, practice, and theory.

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.

Although the research has clearly established that reading comprehension improves when the writer forecasts the discussion in an introductory or transitional passage, technical writing textbooks offer little guidance on how to construct effective forecasts. The most common pattern, in which the items to be discussed are listed, is boring and can leave unanswered some critical questions that can prevent the reader from paying full attention. This article describes techniques, based on four of the journalistic prompts (what, where, why, and how), that can help writers create contexts for their readers, thereby improving readers' comprehension and enlisting them in the creation of the discourse.

Utilitarianism, the ethical system of free-market capitalism, is limited in that it sanctions contingencies. Immanuel Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative-to treat ourselves and others not merely as means but also as ends-offers a clear and powerful ethic that enables technical communicators to subordinate contingencies to an understanding of people as rational entities possessed of full human dignity. John Rawls's (1971) model of an ideal society derives from and extends Kant's thinking on the primacy of human dignity in an ethical system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Two studies were conducted in order to investigate the technical communication practices of Russian and US aerospace engineers and scientists. Both studies had the same five objectives: to solicit the opinions of aerospace engineers and scientists regarding the importance of technical communication to their professions; to determine the use and production of technical communication by aerospace engineers and scientists; to seek their views about the appropriate content of the undergraduate course in technical communication; to determine aerospace engineers' and scientists' use of libraries, technical information centers, and online databases; and to determine the use and importance of computer and information technology to them. Responses to a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed to Russian aerospace engineers and scientists at the Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) and to their US counterparts at the NASA Ames Research Center and the NASA Langley Research Center are presented.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Chaucer's 'A Treatise on the Astrolabe' despite its medieval roots, still serves as a model for incorporating coherent organization, appropriate content, accurate and precise descriptions, personable tone, effective metadiscourse, and varied sentence structure and length in modern technical writing. This article explores how Chaucer merged his logico-rational self (as exhibited in the work's deliberate organization and thorough content) with his humanistic self (as shown in his simple style and personable tone). This is shown to be an effective technique for humanizing and strengthening a technical document. By following the lessons learned from Treatise, modern technical writers can minimize the semantic and psychological noise of a document, while maximizing the accurate and comfortable transmission of its content.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Ed. Janis Forman. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1992. 197 pp. (Inter)views: Cross‐Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 269 pp. Constructing Rhetorical Education. Ed. Marie Secor and Davida Charney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 452 pp. Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America. Nan Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 313 pp. The Interpretive Turn. Ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. 322 pp. Technical Writing: Student Samples and Teacher Responses. Ed. by Sam Dragga. St. Paul: University of Minnesota, Department of Rhetoric/Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, 1992. 326 pp.

The workplace is becoming increasingly diverse in ways that are changing our understanding of who our readers are and how we can make effective communication choices to bridge the gaps between us. Communication problems arise because of differences in world experience, in the amount of common knowledge shared within cultures, in the structure of societies and the workplace, in culturally specific rhetorical strategies, and even in differences in processing graphics. Most textbooks provide little information on these topics, so the technical writing teacher needs to find ways to incorporate issues of international and multicultural communication into the classroom.

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

As teachers integrate social theory into the technical communication classroom, it is clear that they interpret the connection between writing and culture in different ways. The result is a range of socially based pedagogies rather than a single paradigm for writing instruction. This essay describes four of these social pedagogies—the social constructionist, the ideologic, the social cognitive, and the paralogic hermeneutic—distinguishing them by their pedagogic aims and classroom practices. The essay closes by discussing the implications of the differences among socially based pedagogies for both _ teachers and programs in technical communication.

With the formation of the European Economic Area in 1992, the demand for good technical communicators has grown rapidly. To satisfy that demand under specifically European conditions, courses in technical communication must have high status, be flexible, use distance‐learning techniques, and meet the needs of in‐service communicators. Such courses should concentrate on four skill areas: composition, text‐handling, elicitation (including foreign languages), and specialized technical areas. Courses must also make use of experienced practitioners and be validated by the appropriate professional institutions.

Technical communication curricula vary because faculty use a variety of approaches to develop them. This essay suggests guidelines for curriculum and program development in technical communication based on a review of the relevant survey literature on the professional roles played by technical communicators, a review of academic literature on technical communication programs, and a review of the relevant demographic data on technical communicators. It then discusses the implications of the above for designing technical communication curricula and programs.

The case method of teaching is increasingly utilized as a tool for the teaching of business communication and technical writing. In addition to providing students with meaningful exposure to actual companies and written products, the use of cases challenge students to assume one or many various positions within an organization where effective communication with myriad publics is essential in meeting organizational goals and objectives.

The roles of physicians and nurses working in trauma centers are mirrored in their writing. Physicians must focus intensely on patients' injuries if lives are to be saved. Their professional prose is correspondingly, and appropriately, focused, with attention given to injuries and their repair. The doctors' partners in the admitting area, trauma nurses, adopt a holistic view, caring for patients' physiologic and psychologic stability. Nurses tend to be more comprehensive in their writing, describing patients as individuals, the families involved, and the threatening and encouraging events that emerge during recovery. Although the distance and impersonal nature of medical writing, as a subset of technical writing, is criticized by technical writing scholars, published works by trauma surgeons may require exactly those characteristics. Perhaps a reflection of that disparity, medical publishers give mixed messages regarding style to physicians and nurses who choose to be authors.

Business and technical communication have conventionally been separated in academe—a separation that formalist rhetorical theory has supported. Epistemic rhetorical theory, however, suggests that this separation does not reflect the profession's current understanding of workplace discourse. This article demonstrates that the labels business and technical communication are not helpful in understanding two workplace documents: a memorandum and a report. The article then explores the increased explanatory power in two epistemic theoretical approaches, social construction and paralogic hermeneutics, after which the article discusses the radical implications of these approaches for a curricular dialogue concerning workplace writing. Finally, the article describes interests inside and outside academe that preserve the status quo and thus mitigate against curricular change, positing that such change would be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve.

Technical books for women of the English Renaissance provide a microcosm for studying connections among the emergence of technical writing as a genre, the rise of literacy, expansion of knowledge and technology, and replacement of orality by textuality as a result of increasing knowledge. These books on Renaissance technologies such as cooking, carving, household “physick,” home management, silkworm production, farming and estate management, midwifery, medical self-diagnosis, and gardening exhibit some differences from technical books written for men. Books for women are shorter and less detailed, but their style is similar to that of books for men. The style does not suggest writers believed that their women readers possessed an inferior reading comprehension level. Content differences seem to suggest that women's work was different from men's with many skills taught by oral transmission. The increasing complexity of the styles of technical books for women during the 16th and early 17th centuries suggests that women's reading skills increased as knowledge increased. Thus the oral style of the early 16th-century technical books disappeared with the need for an analytical style that would better convey growth of knowledge in the English Renaissance.

Two versions of a manual for the Intel SatisFAXtion faxmodem-the original manual shipped with the product and a proposed shortened manual-are compared. It is found using either manual improves performance over using no manual; there is little difference in performance between the group using the original manual and the group using the proposed shortened manual; and documentation cannot completely compensate for inadequacies in the user interface.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Communication at the human-computer interaction level, is discussed. The presentation layer, or user interface, to computer programs acts as a shield to a far more complex array of processes. Using simple navigational and functional commands, the user can manipulate a computer program and achieve desired results quickly. This is not always the case, however, and deficiencies in both usability and information access continue to plague ordinary computer users. With increasing public reliance on computer-generated information, powerful computer applications must be amenable to nontechnical users. The most commercially viable and prominent of these efforts are explored, with particular emphasis on the evolving role of artificially intelligent technologies.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

The technical communication literature contains many articles and books providing advice on how scientists and engineers can improve their skills at communicating research results. The journal articles and book chapters the authors felt offered sound advice on fifteen topics relevant to writing original research results for publication are briefly discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) provide college students with hands‐on experience working with genuine technical documents from the working world, an overview of the writing process, and the strategies and tasks encountered in technical writing. Using EISs can help students understand decision‐making processes, heighten their environmental awareness, and generate class camaraderie. This essay details one method of introducing students to EISs and reports the benefits and problems encountered in doing so.

Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers. Stephen Doheny‐Farina. Cambridge: MIT, 1992. 279 pp. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 312 pp. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 212 pp. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Richard Rorty. Cambridge UP, 1991. 226 pp. Color for the Electronic Age: What Every Desktop Publisher Needs To Know About Using Color Effectively in Charts, Graphs, Typography and Pictures. Jan V. White. New York: Watson‐Guptill Publications, 1990. 208 pp. Eye on the News. Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark. St. Petersburg: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991. 86 pp. Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing. Roger C. Parker. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: Ventana, 1990. 371 pp. The Makeover Book. Roger C. Parker. Chapel Hill: Ventana, 1989. 278 pp. Graphic Design for the Electronic Age: The Manual for Traditional and Desktop Publishing. Jan V. White. New York: Watson Guptill, 1988. 212 pp. Technical Editing. Joseph C. Mancuso. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1992. 191pp.

Frank Aydelotte's English and Engineering (1917) is one of the first anthologies in technical communication. Developed at MIT, this book attempted to broaden the education of undergraduate engineering students by using the tenets of the thought movement. This movement, which Aydelotte first articulated while directing Indiana University's first‐year English program, modified for universities in the United States the education that he had received at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Rather than emphasizing matters of form and correctness, the thought approach required engineering students to think and write about issues important to their education and future careers.

Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance by Nancy S. Struever.Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1992. xiv + 246 pp. The Rhetoric and Morality of Philosophy by Seth Benardete. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1991. 205 pp. Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication by M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Michael K. Gilbertson. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, 1992. 257 pp. Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers by Stephen Doheny‐Farina.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992; 279 pp. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens by Jacqueline de Romilly. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992. 260 pp. Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation by Richard H. Haswell. Dallas: Southern Methodist U P. 1991. 412 pp.

Professional educational philosophers C.A. Bowers and D.J. Flinders (1990) describe the classroom as an ecology comprising interrelated linguistic and cultural patterns that determine how information is communicated in the classroom. their classroom ecology model centers on the observation of three interconnected areas: the metaphors that the teacher and the textbook use to introduce students to the formal and informal curriculum, the manner in which the teacher frames student expertise and classroom relationships, and the nonverbal communication between teacher and students. Using Bowers and Flinders' model, a technical writing class taught by a teacher who emphasizes relationships, understanding and acceptance, and collaboration was studied. The teacher's metaphorical language, framing of instruction and student relationships, and nonverbal language are shown to reflect a rhetorical approach to technical writing, a caring approach to teaching, and a supportive, community environment for learning. This ethnographic study provides a snapshot of how one teacher defines technical writing and how he answers the question of how is should be taught.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Those involved in journalism and communication programs recognize the need to teach students interviewing theory and techniques. Technical communicators rely on interviews for a significant percentage of the information they need to do their jobs. Interviewing techniques are ranked in the top ten topics that technical communicators think should be taught in technical writing programs. The author describes a course with a general focus on interviewing skills and a particular emphasis on the challenges technical communicators face in the interview situation.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Do university writing experiences prepare students for future job-related writing tasks? If not, how can we create a smoother transition from the academy to the workplace? The author analyzes the differing discourse communities of academic writing and technical communication which may limit the transfer of skills from one arena to the next. The discussion considers the ways process, collaborative learning, writing across the curriculum, and language theories can form the foundation for constructive communication among disciplines. As the focus of academic writing moves from an emphasis on the individual to social context and wider audiences, it bridges the gap between disciplines and can ease the movement from the classroom to real-world settings.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

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>

To measure how technical communicators can improve an organization's return on investment, reductions in calls for support, increases in customer satisfaction, or increases in workers' productivity may be measured. The authors describe a project funded by the Society for Technical Communication in which they are studying how technical communicators add value by increasing an organization's return on its investment. A project questionnaire is included.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Twenty years ago I had no idea what a computer was. Ten years ago I knew what computers were, but I had never sat at a terminal. I just assumed that computers were machines used in those “other” disciplines, certainly not in English courses. Today, I teach my technical writing classes in a collaborative computer classroom. The classroom consists of twelve networked computers which my twenty-four students per class use in tandem. Despite my original ignorance of computers, I'm now happily ensconced in a computer classroom. In fact, computers are so important, I've concluded, that teaching writing without the aid of computers does our students a disservice. How did I make such a complete turn-around in attitude? I realized that far from being anathema, computers helped to create a perfect marriage for teaching and writing. First, computers let students write more effectively because computers are compatible with the writing process (writing and rewriting). Next, teaching students to write in a collaborative computer environment prepares our students for business and industry where they will be asked to work on group projects and to communicate electronically. Despite the values of computerizing our instruction, however, computers in the classroom present problems. Do the benefits outweigh the deficits? My answer is yes.

This article analyzes postaccident investigation reports from a feminist perspective to show (a) how the conventions of public discourse privilege the rational (male) objective voice and silence human suffering, (b) how the notion of expertise excludes women's experiential knowledge, (c) how the conventions of public discourse sanction the exclusion of alternative voices and thus perpetuate salient and silent power structures, and (d) how interpretation strategies that fail to consider unstated assumptions about gender, power, authority, and expertise seriously compromise the health, safety, and lives of miners—and in a broader sense—all of those who are dependent on technology for their personal safety.

Technical writing theory and research about communication in large organizations mostly ignore from-the-top control of rhetoric. The usual emphasis on an individual writer negotiating with a known audience and generally free to decide on matters of style, organization, and so on can hide the ways that power relations often silently control internal rhetoric. Conclusions are based on two case studies: In the later Middle Ages, professional letters had to conform to a rhetorical format that necessarily foregrounded unequal power relations. In a contemporary nuclear power station, similar power relations purposely obscure writer and audience while procedures dictate format and content.

The authors explore the parallels to be found by comparing descriptions of the technical communicator with differing views of the communication process—the transmission, translation, and articulation views of communication. In each of these views, the place of the technical communicator and of technical discourse shifts with respect to the production of meaning and relations of power. The authors argue from the standpoint of the articulation view for a new conception of the technical communicator as author and of technical communication as a discourse that produces an author.

Over the past decade researchers, instructors, and people in industry and academia have begun to understand the value of teaching people how to collaborate. This selected annotated bibliography compiles some of the theories and research on collaboration from disciplines such as small group management, composition, scientific and technical communication, computer science, speech communication, and rhetoric. It also includes relevant sources from the popular press.

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

In recent years, a new pedagogical model has arisen in the teaching of technical writing, one of “technical writing as enculturation.” A close examination of this model reveals not only its relation to the workaday world of modern technology but also its roots in classical, especially Ciceronian, rhetoric. Our awareness that the model is both modern and classical may, in fact, enable us to carry its amplification and refinement even further.

This article quantifies specific elements of technical writing style in five award winning technical manuals where combined averages for the style elements are calculated. When these results are compared to what is generally regarded as good technical writing, the results show that the elements of style vary widely between the individual manuals examined. While attempting to define a good technical writing style, the value of such studies must be commented on.

Mohan Limaye presents two important concerns in his insightful response to my article [“Categorizing Professional Discourse: Engineering, Administrative, and Technical/Professional Writing,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 6:1 (January 1992), pp. 5–37]. I wish to comment on these points and also to submit a correction to the text of the article.

Although different writing courses exist because of the different forms and purposes of writing they teach, some continuity between composition and business/technical communication would allow students to move more readily from one course to the next, while clarifying for them that writing is primarily a system of options based on analyses of situations, readers, obstacles, and goals. In this article, I call for that kind of continuity not only in pedagogy but also in research. Explaining the value of connections in pedagogy and research between composition and professional communication studies, I conclude with various questions and avenues for further research.

Technical writing programs housed in geographically isolated universities face great challenges in regard to getting students career‐related work experience. A course in desktop publishing can provide students at rural schools with experience equivalent to internships. In the desktop publishing course I taught at Murray State University, in addition to learning principles of layout and design, students faced many challenges like those that will confront them in the workplace. They worked on projects that entailed real financial constraints and deadlines; they were required to modify their work after receiving reviews from several different individuals. In addition to providing students with experience, the course provided benefits to the university in terms of services and public relations.

This article focuses on recruiters' perceptions of technical writers in terms of what information should be included in cover letters and resumes, as well as the roles of interviewees and interviewers in the employment interview. The results reveal that 1) the interviewee should include information in the cover letter that is not in the resume, that 2) employment history and educational background are the most important parts of the resume, that 3) communication skills, credibility, maturity and work experience are the most important dimensions of the interviewee, and that 4) the interviewer should present an overview of the position, job description, and short-and-long range department goals. Other results are discussed in the article.

This article collects several examples of technical and creative writing in order to examine whether the differences which have been assumed to exist between the two genres do in fact exist. The formulation of such a dichotomy is traced from I. A. Richards' definition of “poetic vs scientific” writing through C. P. Snow's Two Cultures to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Richards' acknowledged source). Coleridge in turn has been shown to be heavily influenced by, in fact to have plagiarized, the work of German idealists, particularly the Schlegels. The German idealists, finally, were working with dichotomies which originate in Cartesian dualism and thus ultimately in the mind/body dichotomy with whose invention Nietzsche credits, or discredits, Plato. The differences and similarities discovered and discussed between the object texts turn out to be governed by Richards' elements of writing—“sense, feeling, tone and intention”—as these elements have been used to dichotomize technical and creative writing. Such previous formulations have attempted to show differences in what Aristotle termed “material cause.” The material causes—the tropes and devices of description—are in fact the same in technical and creative texts. The actual differences and similarities discovered between and among the object texts are, rather, differences governed by Aristotle's “final cause” ( telos).

Part I of this article, pp. 259–272, reviewed the relevant literature on advance organizers and suggested that methodological problems in previous advance organizer studies has not resolved the question of whether advance organizers facilitate the acquisition of subordinate information from text. This question is not an unimportant issue to technical communicators, whose readers often need to acquire factual information as well as more general concepts from the expository text they read. In two studies we investigated the influences of reader's background knowledge, advance organizers, relative importance of idea units, and idea units' position within a text structure on the recall of textual information. Subjects read introductory and text materials and subsequently were tested for their recognition of idea units that were structurally high and important, structurally high and unimportant, structurally low and important, or structurally low and unimportant. In the first study, forty-eight college students were randomly assigned to conditions consisting of relevant or irrelevant background, organizer or no organizer, and text or no text. There were significant main effects for having read a relevant text and for importance of idea units, and an interaction between structural level and importance. A significant organizer by text or no text interaction and absence of a significant main effect for the organizer indicated that the organizer influenced text processing rather than priming relevant prior knowledge, which is a previously undocumented requirement of advance organizer research. In the second study, conducted with eighty-eight college students, we substituted a purpose, no purpose condition for the text, no text condition of the first study. We observed a significant main effect for importance and a significant four-way interaction involving structure, importance, background, and organizer. The more relevant knowledge a reader had, the less dependent he or she was on text structure, and an advance organizer compensated for the absence of relevant prior knowledge.

As in the fields of composition and technical writing, the emphasis on hierarchical organization of texts in business writing has led to a devaluation of narrative, perhaps because the kind of knowledge that narrative creates has been insufficiently understood. By elucidating the special properties of narrative as a mode of discourse and as a cognitive instrument, this article argues for the potential power of narrative in many common business writing situations.

Severe icing on the space shuttle Challenger's launch pad should have halted the launch on the morning of January 28, 1986. One Rockwell International manager told his subordinates to be sure NASA knew that Rockwell thought a launch was not safe. When the Rockwell subordinates spoke directly to NASA managers, however, they used politeness strategies like those enumerated by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson to blur the directness of the Rockwell manager's message. The NASA managers interpreted the politeness of the Rockwell subordinates as meaning it was safe to launch. The Rockwell subordinates did not mean it that way, but the Challenger was launched.

This essay presents a critical case study of how shifts in the style and genre of written communication both reflect and influence historical shifts in political consciousness and action. The field of study is the discourse of environmental advocacy. With increased public support for actions that would forestall environmental degradation, environmental politics has diversified. Formerly a resistance movement directed toward influencing large-scale governmental or industrial actions through the rhetoric of polemical dispute, environmentalism has evolved into several distinct approaches, including a globalist movement and a grass roots movement that share an interest in policy and procedure, the traditional topics of instrumental discourse. A new genre built upon this proactive attitude—the green how-to book—currently dominates the popular literature on environmental problem solving. Capitalizing on the document designs of technical communication, these manuals recommend courses of action ranging from fixing the Environmental Protection Agency to fixing the toilet; they are directed to audiences ranging from the President of the United States to the ordinary householder. They have in common an attempt to break the paralysis of fear associated with realizations about the scale of environmental damage. But—because the instrumental genre tends to obscure relations of agent, action, and effect—covert political agendas may pass unnoticed into the personalist politics of the new literature.

Starting with the premise that there are two different ways of viewing readers, as empirical subjects and as rhetorical participants, the author presents a taxonomy of roles that readers play within technical documents. Even though these roles are shaped by distinct, often contradictory, theoretical traditions, they take on an independent existence during the reading process. Actual readers can assume a variety of roles, depending on the nature of the document and the willingness of each particular reader. Further, the author argues that this taxonomy is not complete, but subject to changes and additions as new technologies are developed requiring new roles to be played. It is concluded that researchers and teachers should encourage this more fluid view of audience in usability testing labs and classroom settings.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>