A review of recent research in the field of technical writing and communication indicated that although the methodologies employed were sound, they were not fully articulated. An attempt to use a double-blind research design in the writing classroom by dividing the students into competing teams that reviewed each other's work led to some interesting reactions by the students as well as to some the need to introduce more open-ended assignments in our classrooms. Asking our students to come up with competing solutions to the same problem and requiring them to design means of testing their effectiveness can develop their abilities in critical thinking and group dynamics. At the same time this approach will allow teachers to pursue their own research on various problems in technical communication. The result is a unit which has pedagogical effectiveness and suggests new directions for writing research.

During the Iran-Contra hearings the following exchange occurred between Lewis A. Tambs, former Ambassador to Costa Rica, and Sen. George J. Mitchell:

The author focuses on criticisms of technical communication education as training that is too narrowly technical. He endorses the implementation of a program of general education that introduces undergraduate students not only to essential knowledge, but also to connections across the disciplines (E.L. Boyer, 1987). This program would include limitations on expansion of the major as a percentage of total credit hours required, and for greater restraint in course development, as well as more focused attention to meeting academic goals and objectives prior to vocational and career ones.

PCS was chartered to serve all members of IEEE, and the engineering profession in general, by sponsoring activities that focus on ways to improve technical communication. Our Society continues to make steady strides in improving our services to members, as reflected by the following status report.

Professional technical communicators and academicians who study and teach technical communication have opposing perspectives on the ethics that should guide the work of communicating technical information. Valuing most the well-being of their profession and the organizations in which they work, the professionals advocate an ethics in which competence is the principle and market success is the purpose that guides good technical communication. The academicians, valuing most the well-being of the larger society in which all technology is situated, advocate an ethics in which responsibility is the guiding principle and the protection of that society's interests is the guiding purpose. The author considers that an alternative perspective founded on rhetoric might be acceptable to both. He makes cooperation the principle and compromise the purpose that should guide technical communication, suggesting an ethic in which open interaction and collaborative judgment become the context in which technical communication functions.

AS a teacher of technical and professional writing, I have in recent years become acutely aware of what practicing technical communicators have always known: all communication has effects both intended and unintended. We communicate in dynamic and multidimensional environments and, no matter how hard we try, we sometimes cannot anticipate the consequences of our communications. Two powerful dimensions that we must try to be aware of are the legal and ethical aspects of our communicative activities.

The work of technical writers in the areas of writing warnings, product safety policies, instructions, and other documents can prevent or expose a firm to an expensive legal liability. To ensure that their communications are legally correct they may have to research legal references and law books. The authors guide writers of technical communications through the procedures necessary to thoroughly research legal thought, court opinions, case law, and statutes. They illustrate their approach with several examples from reference sources.

The syllabus for a course in teaching technical writing is presented. The course is intended for graduate students, who will in turn use the course material to teach technical writing to college undergraduates.

A few years ago I attended the Technical Writing Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (that's TWIRP, unfortunately) which runs concurrently with the Technical Writing Institute for Teachers (TWIT, to double the ignominy). Although the Institutes share a foyer and a few major speakers, they have different directors (one of whom is Lee Odell, co-editor of the anthology above), and for the most part their respective attendees participate in separate sessions. When the coffee break is over, it's TWITs to the left, TWIRPs to the right.

Technical communication may be chiefly informational in intent, but there are persuasive elements in almost all communications. Sometimes, even in technical matters, persuasive communication skills are very important. The author provides arguments for improving these skills, discusses a number of mini-strategies that can be used to persuade the recipients of written communication, and touches on the ethics of using persuasion tools.

One of the primary purposes of technical writing is to create memorable texts, especially when they involve large amounts of interrelated information or complicated step-by-step procedures. Epic poetry traditionally employs poetic devices which aided the poet in recalling as many as 27,000 lines of verse. These devices include not only familiar features such as rhyme and meter, but higher-order patterns of organization called formulae and themes. Recent research shows that these features also enable readers to recall the material. This article explores how these poetic forms work to enhance memory, explores some contemporary research in cognition which has confirmed their mnemonic value, and suggests ways that technical writers may apply them in their work.

Instructors in the field of technical writing must incorporate an ever increasing amount of information into their courses. They can save time and stretch the teaching potential of individual assignments by devising writing situations that combine different audiences and purposes. Such situations force students to perceive the writing activity as an integrated whole and make them evaluate different ways to present the same information. The lessons suggested in this article demonstrate the interrelationships between report types and rhetorical approaches, and they allow oral activities to arise naturally. The lessons do not interfere with the philosophical choices that an instructor has made about the proper approach to teaching report writing.

The new advances in electronic publishing systems and technology offer opportunities to dramatically cut the time and cost of producing documentation. These innovations ultimately increase the amount of information available. Yet this fact only underscores the critical need for new ways to make that end product information (documentation) more usable, accessible, and effective. The technology must be combined with the tools of information design. Using techniques based on current cognitive research, information design structures and predigests the content to increase end user comprehension, productivity, and effectiveness.

In spite of the recent proliferation of technical writing programs, textbooks, and professional associations, quantitative information on the people and work involved in technical writing is scant. This article reports the responses of 122 technical writers in the San Diego area to a questionnaire asking them about the tasks they perform, documents they produce, skills they consider significant, audiences they write to, working conditions, types of companies they work for, and education and training. The pilot survey also identified other demographic information such as salary and length of service as technical writers and in their present position.

Scientists and engineers have to present technical information effectively. But when they do it, they face language difficulties which are beyond formal grammar as taught at school. To overcome this problem, we designed a systematic course for technical writing aimed at breaking such language barriers by planned channeling of the scientific message. The course was designed to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers. In keeping with this goal effective writing criteria were defined and formal presentation conventions were described. Because Hebrew is the common language in Israel, problems of Hebrew structures were presented. The massive infiltration of vocabulary and syntactic elements from foreign languages into scientists' Hebrew style were addressed. An evaluation apparatus was also applied and future prospects of the course were discussed.

As communication teachers attempting to bridge the gap between school and industry, we need to give students a true understanding of what it means to be a professional. We may be spending too much time trying to get them to write and speak like professionals without also imbuing them with sufficient understanding of their responsibilities to behave as professionals. Students need to be practiced in the communication and decision-making situations they will encounter in their workplaces. These decisions involve ethical reasoning as well as technical problem solving. Teaching students to appreciate the consequences of their recommendations, through the use of fault-trees and cost/benefit analyses in realistic simulations, effectively bridges the gap between the classroom and boardroom. A sample situation is explained and analyzed for its use in any technical communications class.

Although engineering departments were dissatisfied with early twentieth-century technical writing teaching methods, those methods were not simply a result of “anti-science” attitudes. In fact, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composition teachers tried to accommodate the influx of applied science students by teaching correctness and clarity of style and stressing the expository modes of writing. Emphasis on “clarity” was a legacy of rhetoricians like Hugh Blair of the eighteenth century. Emphasis on expository modes was a legacy of the nineteenth-century rhetoricians' interest in the inductive methodology of “pure” science, a method which implied invention by “observation” and made conclusions “self-evident”: argument was unnecessary since observations and methods only need to be explained to “convince.” Applied science departments were, in reality, dissatisfied with teaching methods based on “pure” rather than “applied” science methodology.

There is a move in technical writing today toward a personalized, `user-friendly' writing style which is strikingly evident in many computer textbooks and instructional manuals. The author presents the results of a study to determine which style of writing people prefer in a computer tutorial, given the choice between formal, moderately friendly, and extremely friendly texts, and whether their level of computer expertise affects their selection.

Producing computer documentation today involves more than just writing. Today's computer documentation specialists must draw on a wide range of multidisciplinary skills to produce an effective documentation package. Beyond knowledge of the underlying computer technology and the necessary writing skills, they must also draw upon pertinent concepts from marketing, user psychology, graphic design, screen design, usability testing, and the product development cycle.

Each of the eighteen PCS members who make up the Administrative Committee (AdCom) extends an invitation for you to actively participate in our common purpose of improving technical communications. Service on one of our committees can be a rewarding experience for both you and our Society.

User-testing of computer documentation is beginning to move into the laboratory. A properly conducted user test offers software producer much more information that cannot be obtained in any other manner. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the previous ways of user testing such as testing in the marketplace, magazine reviews, and prerelease on-site testing (beta tests). In addition, a detailed case study of a laboratory-based usability test is presented.

A telephone survey is a potential effective way to learn the preferences of technical documentation users. The sample must be carefully selected, however, to ensure that it is representative of the customers who will be using a given category of products and manuals. Surveys of two different populations of computer manual users have been shown to yield conflicting results. In one such survey, 84 individuals were interviewed that were drawn at random from the customer list of a manufacturer of computer peripheral controllers. The sample was 96.4% male and primarily included programmers (33.3%), technicians (32.1%), and engineers (22.6%). The author discusses the responses obtained from this sample.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.

Writing better computer user documentation teaches good documentation practices by means of a process model that reflects current industry procedures. The book is more philosophical than its highly prescriptive and pedantic predecessors, and its emphasis is on writing for the computer industry, not on writing in general with computers thrown in as an afterthought. Its major audience is data processing professionals, most specifically practicing technical writers, information planners, and writing managers, although the book might well find its way into college classrooms in some of the burgeoning masters' programs in technical writing.

The current job market favors young technical writers who are skilled in the way of the computer both as a subject of writing and as a production tool. In the technical writing classroom students can be exposed to this important technology through assignments that include computerized instruction, word processing, text analysis, artificial intelligence, and communications.

Well-selected metaphoric terminology can reduce the fear and ignorance that often dishearten first-time computer users and can help them grasp new concepts and procedures. Many people are amused by terms such as bit, byte, and mouse and are enlightened by terms such as menu and wild card. Some users of computers, however, are offended by the metaphoric terminology that is commonly used in writing about computers and computing. They bridle at words like memory and intelligence applied to computing machinery. They are annoyed by casual uses of interface and parameter or puzzled by words like spool, boot, and argument. With the concept of usability as their guiding principle, writers in the computer industry can assess the appropriateness of metaphoric terminology by applying seven criteria: 1) Is a metaphoric term needed? 2) Is the old word familiar? 3) Is the metaphoric relation close? 4) Is the usage of the word consistent? 5) Is the metaphoric word brief? 6) Is the metaphoric usage acceptable? 7) Is the metaphoric word memorable?

Two hypotheses are outlined about the reasons for obscurity in expository writing. Neither accounts adequately for the general results of an exploratory study of the writing of postgraduates nor for the individual cases I present by way of illustration. A crucial factor, I suggest, is a person's implicit model of expository writing. Many of our subjects assume that the purpose of technical writing is to compress thought. I argue, on the contrary, that clarity is achieved through expansion.

The demand for quality technical manuals has increased. A survey of industry reveals that organizations are developing new techniques of management and are shifting old priorities in order to integrate production, technical writing, and marketing in an effort to produce better manuals. Companies are seeking to specify as much as possible the exact audiences for their manuals, and are writing and testing with users in mind. To facilitate revision and to cut costs, they are automating the production process.

Although Samuel Johnson is best known for his poetry, prose fiction, essays, criticism, and dictionary (the first one in English to deserve the title), he also produced a small body of technical writing. These writings include prefaces to the technical works of others and two technical pieces of his own: one on determining longitude at sea and the other on stresses in bridge designs. These works are of interest to contemporary technical writers for the clarity and conciseness of Johnson's explanations of difficult and complex matters. Of more general interest is the range of Johnson's knowledge and his ability, evidenced in these works, to grasp immediately the essentials of a subject.

The question of what makes technical communication a profession and its practitioners professionals is discussed. Technical communicators as professionals are urged to replace practices and standards of proficiency influenced by the technical aspect of the profession with a concept of professionalism based on elegance, as derived from the humanities.

The previous issue of the Transactions promised a new department intended for consideration of the large and small questions of technical communicators' workaday lives; readers were challenged to raise these questions, and to help answer them.

Despite the fact that technical writers try to maintain an objective outlook, they cannot ignore the psychological states of consciousness that influence their writing. Arthur J. Deikman's theory of bimodal consciousness outlines two psychological states: active and emotive (or receptive). Writers must maintain a balance between the receptive state and the active, striving state to prevent writer's block and to enhance creativity, just as scientists balance mathematical (i.e., lexical or verbal) thinking with physics-related thinking. This article describes Deikman's model and shows its application in the technical writing classroom.

Stylistic analysis of scientific and technical prose reveals that technical and non-technical expository prose share a number of common characteristics; consequently, common assumptions about a clear stylistic separation between scientific and literary writing are faulty. Technical prose, moreover, possesses a number of rhetorical features which further increase its likeness to literary writing. Both style and rhetoric of technical writing thus point toward non-referential functions in scientific discourse, including the operation of significant cultural codes.

This bibliography of thirty dissertations summarizes doctoral research in technical writing since 1975. It is intended as the first step in an on-going abstracting service to be performed by the ERIC system. The dissertations range widely, from theoretical pronouncements to classroom how-to's. The collection provides an overview of the kinds of research being done and the institutions sponsoring it.

Most technical writing texts contain grammar reviews, but few supply more than prescriptive rules to correct persistent examples of unclear writing. To provide a more progressive approach to grammatical analysis, this article applies the non-prescriptive constructs of modern grammar to the recurrent problem of faulty pronoun reference. Grammatical problems often arise because pronouns serve both as form-class and as structure-class words, because they often must agree in case, person, gender, and number with antecedents, and because the pronoun it is often misunderstood as an expletiv. The author suggests that small, problem-oriented doses of modern grammar may help students and professionals alike to better understand the intricacies of textual English.

Recent psycholinguistic research has challenged the view that English speakers interpret the male pronouns and the generic man as words that refer to both males and females. The suggested ambiguity of these terms is of concern to technical communicators because it can affect the accuracy of their messages. Since guidelines for avoiding sex ambiguity in language are not generally available in technical writing or speech manuals, this article offers simple devices for eliminating the generic use of male pronouns and man. It also provides alternate terms for common sex-biased expressions.

To evaluate Technical Communication faculty requires understanding of the distinctive nature of the research, teaching, and service performed by faculty in the field. This article documents the work situations and accomplishments of a cadre of twenty-four accomplished faculty members in Technical Communication. The study group, identified by a prior survey of 275 people in technical writing, composition, and rhetoric, provides an empirical basis for defining the kinds and quantities of work that currently can be expected in the field. The article thus helps to provide empirically-based guidelines and criteria for evaluation. Included also is a discussion of other relevant research on faculty evaluation.

This article interprets research in linguistics and psychology in order to revise and enlarge existing definitions of readability. It suggests instructional methods for teaching students to compose more coherent—and, hence, more readable—technical writing. For a text to be readable, it must be coherent. However, like readability, coherence is variable, depending on the writer and the reader as well as the text itself. The reader is able to understand a message by relying on his shared knowledge with the writer. A starting place for comprehension, cultural and professional knowledge and linguistic knowledge allow readers to set up expectations about a text and to read efficiently. Because accommodating shared knowledge is vital to readable writing, we should teach students how to assess typical audiences and compose in forms routinely used for technical documents. With practice in audience analysis, students learn to accommodate a reader's professional and cultural knowledge. With practice in traditional organizational patterns, stylistic imitation of readable writing, they learn to accommodate common expectations about language and form.

Extracts from technical advertising and new-product announcements are used as the basis for analysis of the structures and linguistic signaling of many forms of comparison. Based initially on descriptive texts, the analysis also explains problem-solving texts with and without comparison; and comparative texts are seen to include implicit differences or overt comparison as “knocking” copy. Comparative cohesion by co-hyponyms is shown to be the central feature of co-associative cohesion between separate features of competing products, and clause-relating matching relations are explained in these terms. The concept of improvement is discussed in terms of problem-solving, difference and the matching relations of comparative denial. Final notes are provided regarding the significance of this work to the developing paradigm of technical writing.

Writing in the computer industry most likely provides the greatest challenges for technical communicators. The technology changes rapidly, and there are few established models of how communication products should be written. There are even fewer established models of how communication departments should be run. This article looks at the frustrations, challenges, and rewards of writing in such an environment.

Many scholars call for systematic empirical research in technical writing. This article reviews the Westley-MacLean communication model and provides an example of the model within a technical communication context. The author suggests use of the Westley-MacLean model as a means to conceptualize the technical communication process, and illustrates how the model can be used as a technical writing paradigm.