The engineer faces daily the challenge of communicating. To ease this challenge, professional communicators offer practical suggestions based on their own experience and training, combined with their observations of writing in engineering environments. The articles in this issue range from suggesting a variety of techniques for producing clear technical writing to contrasting human and mechanical editors.

Specialized publication of scientific and technical journals during the 1970's showed marked growth in Europe and North America, was measurably stable in Africa and the Middle East, but was rising somewhat in the Asian-Pacific and Latin American-Caribbean regions. The number of journals in the basic sciences, the medical sciences, and technology-related industries continues to climb, worldwide, but the universal data-base on scientific periodicals remains fragmentary and needs completion. Primary-source scientific journals are relatively few in number, in most languages, and current economic considerations suggest that this number will not rise significantly. Journals of popularization, on the other hand, continue to grow in number and variety. Audiovisual and electronic information technologies are making inroads into the domain long dominated by typography, but replacement of printed journals by electronic journals can be expected to remain problematic for reasons related to technology, budget, and distribution. Current specialization in primary- and secondary-source journals may gradually give way to consolidation of journals now serving highly focused, comparatively small audiences.

Traditionally, technical writing has been characterized by impersonal, mechanical, objective prose. However, this attempt to deanthropomorphize reality must ultimately fail because science cannot escape metaphorical language. There is a move in technical writing today toward a personalized, sometimes called “friendly,” writing style which is strikingly evident in many computer textbooks and instructional manuals.

Each semester, undergraduate technical writing students at The University of Texas at Arlington learn to adapt and present written material orally and visually by participating in a three-or four-day simulated professional meeting. Each student gives a ten-minute oral presentation, followed by a five-minute question-and-answer period. Presentations are grouped in panels of five papers; each panel is moderated by a session chairperson. Students receive copies of the schedule and presentation abstracts prior to the opening sessions. Presentations are evaluated by the students and the instructor for technical content, visuals, and delivery using a standardized evaluation checklist. Students learn to analyze and speak to a heterogeneous audience; to distinguish the strengths and weaknesses of presentations and visuals; and to convey assessments to others in a professional manner.

The use of quirk topics can help solve one of the technical writing instructor's hardest problems: selection of a challenging topic. A quirk topic derives from some paradox of science or technology which, upon reflection, calls for thought. The quirk topic challenges the technical writing student to focus on the reader, gather data, and interpret and report data convincingly. This article explains the use of quirk topics, suggests twenty such topics, and explains how to solve problems of their use.

An in-house writing course needs a knowledgeable and skilled manager for sponsorship and leadership, technical expertise from inside or outside the company, a well-written text, and a curriculum that addresses the common and recurring in-house communication problems. Having the employee students suggest topics and provide troublesome documents for diagnosis adds interest and generates commitment to the program.

A process is presented for planning a company's overall approach to technical documentation. A hierarchical document tree is used which guides the company to set policies, develop standards, write procedures, and produce drawings and manuals in a coordinated fashion. Using this system, each item that is produced becomes part of an accumulating body of documentation that improves the efficiency of management, production, and contract fulfillment. The program for technical documentation will support the company's quality assurance program.

A scorecard is introduced for evaluation by authors, peers and instructors of technical writing that guides technical professionals to shared standards for good writing. Methods for applying the scorecard to both classroom and industrial situations are described.

Graduate interns in technical writing and editing can be a valuable source of professional support for a publications department, especially if their managers keep certain management principles in mind. Fresh from year-long internships at New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory, two interns briefly describe their experience and offer publications managers eight suggestions for the effective management of technical writing and editing interns. They also include an annotated bibliography of recent literature about internships in technical writing.

Roman Jakobson's six-factored model of verbal communication provides the schema to generate formal definitions of business writing and technical writing. It also enables us to apply these definitions to communication in the world of work. The six factors—addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, and code—have six parallel functions—emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual. Each of these factor/function pairs is present to some degree in all types of writing, from technical writing to poetry. However, in certain types of written communication a few functions dominate the others. For instance, the referential or informational function is primary in technical and scientific writing. An examination of different binary functional relationships yields distinctions among various types of writing. For example, the inspection of the you versus it relationship yields the most substantive theoretical distinction between persuasive business writing and technical writing. From this single theoretical distinction emerge various practical aspects of communication, such as good will, the “you-attitude,” and the techniques of behavior modification applicable in business writing; and objectivity, clarity, and precision of meaning aimed for in technical writing.

This paper discusses crosscultural differences in audience analysis, using research conducted during a series of consulting trips in Japanese industries. The paper identifies problems implicit in the way technical writing is taught to nonnative speakers in this country and abroad, and shows how awareness of and experience with audiences in non-American and non-Western cultures can benefit instruction in technical communication classes for American students.

Rhetoric teachers often defer responsibility for technical-problem treatment to either the technical student or the technical instructor. But these technical persons are trained largely in academic problems and treatments, which are shown to differ profoundly from their professional counterparts. For engineering students are traditionally trained in a discipline dissociated from a professional base at its very origins, enrolled in a science-oriented curriculum, and taught by technical instructors lacking professional experience. Rhetoric instructors should not, therefore, consider engineering students experts in the articulation and treatment of typical problems addressed by professionals. This paper describes representative student difficulties in the selection and treatment of technical problems in simulated professional reports. Based on results obtained with questionnaires and in-depth interviews, these difficulties are traced to the use of academic materials as sources. Representative case histories are used to illustrate typical student pitfalls in adapting academic source materials. Pedagogical suggestions are offered.

This article emphasizes the growing need for good technical communication in application program development, and relates the usability of program documentation to the productivity of computer systems. It describes in detail the process involved and the human thinking that must accompany the generation of high quality computer user documentation. The methodology described in this paper has been exercised by the author on two major interactive IBM application programs. However, the methodology should not be interpreted as an IBM discipline, and views expressed in this paper are those of the author.

Bachelor-, master-, and doctorate-level programs related to technical communication in U.S. colleges and universities are tabulated by state, based on 1982–83 academic data. The programs are grouped into six categories: communication; communication theory; English (technical writing emphasis); technical communication; technical journalism; and technical writing.

The author, a Briton, presents an informal case-study of two years as Publications Secretary at a Nigerian agricultural research institute. The difficulties and frustrations he faced are described. Staff, supply, and equipment problems are discussed. He suggests that such problems may be general to black Africa and are likely to be faced by technical communicators moving for the first time to this region and to some other parts of the Third World. He concludes that such posts demand more of their incumbents in terms of personality than in terms of qualifications. He questions whether potential Third World communicators are properly informed about or prepared for their posts, and criticizes the tendency of employers, particularly international organizations, to require applicants for communications posts to hold exalted formal qualifications.

A survey of technical communication students at North Carolina State University has revealed information about students' perceptions of their communication skills and abilities, their immediate and long-range career plans, and what should be offered in a technical communication course. This information complements information gathered from surveys of business and industrial employers and of technical graduates on the job. The results of the survey suggest the desirability of increased technical communication course emphasis on oral reports and simulating professional communication activities. The survey also suggests specific areas for emphasis in the teaching of organization, format, and style.

Native and international science, engineering, and humanities graduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington experience real-world communication situations in an interdisciplinary, projected-oriented technical communication course team-taught by a technical writer and a mechanical engineer. The course simulates the writing requirements of industry and helps students prepare theses and dissertations. A special feature for international students is a supplementary weekly laboratory session devoted to intensive review of writing fundamentals. The course, which has been offered three times since 1976 with enrollments of eleven, five, and nine students, has been received well by science and engineering students for whom it was initially designed and by humanities students who now also enroll. Even though in some cases the progress that a foreign student makes in one semester is limited, all students have found the course of great benefit. The interdisciplinary team approach is an effective way of teaching graduate-level technical communication, providing engineers an opportunity to learn to express ideas to humanists and providing humanists an opportunity to learn to communicate effectively with engineers and scientists.

New this edition: Up-to-date information on on-line research and computer resources. A unique four-way access system enables users of the Handbook of Technical to find what they need quickly and get on with the job of writing: 1. The hundreds of entries in the body of the Handbook are alphabetically arranged, so you can flip right the topic at hand. Words and phrases in bold type provide cross-references related entries. 2. The topical key groups alphabetical entries and page numbers under broader topic categories. This topical table of contents allows you check broader subject areas for the specific topic you need. 3. The checklist of the writing process summarizes the opening essay on Five Steps Successful Writing in checklist form with page references related topics, making it easy use the Handbook as a writing text. 4. The comprehensive index provides an exhaustive listing of related and commonly confused topics, so you can easily locate information even when you don't know the exact term you're looking for.

This is a lucid, easily readable, and beguiling book that will succeed both in its stated purpose, which is to help people teach themselves to write business and technical material, and in classroom use.

Chapters on doing research in the library are the backwater of English handbooks and rhetorics. Even a cursory survey of the contents of these chapters reveals a strange combination of intimidating lists of indexes, vague-if hopeful-advice about the uses of the card catalogue, and caveats about choosing books carefully and remembering not to steal them. After reading through seventeen introductions to research in twelve currently marketed handbooks, a recently issued guide to the research paper, two popular textbooks, and two widely used technical writing handbooks, I am led to ask 1) what relation exists between what professional researchers do and what the handbooks recommend and describe? 2) what should be the pedagogical goals of these chapters? and 3) how might research writing be taught more effectively ? Professional researchers start with an hypothesis or an observation, not with a topic; they look for answers, not for an exercise in debate; and when they seek out information, professionals scope. They look for every conceivable way to save time and cut through the literature by finding a few trustworthy guides. First, of course, they turn to the telephone to network, to make contact with people who can recommend either experts or publications that present the most recent information. Second, researchers send letters of inquiry to concerned individuals and organizations, a strategy that recognizes that we live and work by committees, institutes, centers, associations, and lobbies that produce thousands of publications, many of which may never appear in traditional bibliographies. Professionals also use automated bibliographic searching, with all of the methods now available for selecting review articles and limiting the field in other ways. Finally, and most important for the purposes of composition teachers, professionals use selected bibliographic tools to find 1) recent studies, 2) review articles, and 3) recent publications that include annotated bibliographies. Here I would emphasize the word selected. It takes time to use

The three technical writing workshops a colleague and I gave to Idaho eligibility examiners were especially challenging because of the discrepancy in education and writing ability within each group — as well as our own initial ignorance of what eligibility examiners do and write. The workshops gradually improved as we modified our material based on our increased knowledge of the examiners and their work, became increasingly problem oriented in our approach, and effectively implemented our inductive pedagogy.

This collection of thirty-six articles exposes the problem and the promise of historical research in technical writing. The central problem is that historical research in technical writing has too often been focused only on celebrated authors or scientists as technical writers. The central promise contained in some very recent essays is that historical research in technical communications is beginning to consider the slow evolution of technical communication taking place across a broad spectrum of both celebrated and uncelebrated writers. This historical approach, though more difficult to carry out, is immensely more accurate and meaningful.

Because in these days of economic troubles, all areas of science, social science, and industry must account for and justify more closely what they do and want to do, students of technical writing will receive immediate, practical benefit from learning the theory and practice of writing proposals. Proposals are also marvelously versatile for the teacher, because they can be taught in courses of varying length, and to both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups of students. The greatest advantage in teaching them is that through the various parts of a standard proposal, practically every theoretical and/or expository technique used in technical writing can be discussed and practiced. Indeed the proposal can become in itself a minicourse in technical writing, creating yet another possible avenue for work: private consulting.

The technique of repetition violates what most writers have learned about good writing (and good manners). It is, however, a prominent and effective rhetorical feature of technical communication. In the way that it is used in technical writing, repetition establishes that technical authors are “reader friendly.”

Accuracy, clarity, and efffectiveness are basic qualities of good technical writing. If there is conflict in accommodating all three simultaneously, or when stylistic choices are being considered, writers should not sacrifice accuracy for clarity nor accuracy and clarity for effectiveness. The priority of accommodation is accuracy, clarity, effectiveness: ACE.

Teachers who consider adopting Technically-Write! must make a crucial decision: Can a technical writing course thrive on a single, elaborate fiction? If the answer is “Yes,” this textbook is well worth considering.

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Much has been written on and about technical communication. Most of this writing focuses on specific advice for practitioners (e.g., how to write better, typographical guidelines, proposed standards, how to produce more effective manuals, and the like). Also, considerable literature deals with the field theoretically. Often, this second category of literature is difficult to find because so much is buried under the welter of pragmatically oriented material and is interwoven with literature from related fields. Assemblage of this hard-to-find material reveals that within the context of the considerably broader area of human communication, generally technical communication occupies a unique position. Schematic models of related human communication disciplines are used to construct an overall theoretical model which locates this specialized niche occupied by technical communication. Contributions to the overall model come from such areas as empirical social research, general semantics, learning theory, and modern rhetoric. The overall model represents an attempt to provide a catalogue of perspectives from which technical communication might be studied profitably. It also is intended to provide a useful guide to specific actions in various pragmatic and occupational technical communication situations.

Only recently has anything been written about internships in technical writing; however, teachers interested in setting up internship programs can learn from papers written on the experience of teachers of journalism and from cooperative education programs. Internship programs vary widely–some offer academic credit, some do not. Students work from four to forty hours per week for credit of one to fifteen hours; some internships pay students; some provide them with samples of their work; some use contracts, some do not; some are located on campus, some off campus; some are part of cooperative education programs; different programs require different prerequisites; and students do a number of different types of jobs. Sourcebooks can provide information about how to locate employers, how to administer programs, how to evaluate programs, and what other people's solutions to common problems have been.

Teaching technical writing to non-native speakers of English is complicated by their special needs. Central to the discussion is the idea that expository writing ought to be a key element of any program purporting to teach English. The nature of proper preparatory training is discussed with specific reference to the language groups American trainers are likely to encounter working in the U.S. or abroad. The justification for specific practices is discussed and should enable instructors to develop further strategies for training. Once the preparatory work is completed, effective technical writing instruction for non-native trainees requires modification of a good program for native speakers. Training is most effective if material is presented in culturally familiar and intellectually compatible ways.

Dorothy Augustine's Geometries and Words: Linguistics and Philosophy: A Model of the Composing Process (College English, 43 [1981], 221-31) illustrates how radically our understanding of the composing process has changed from the linear schemes of the last generation.' However, this new understanding is not always applied to discussions of technical writing. In fact, technical writing is sometimes assumed to be a rhetorically simple process because the rhetorical context of the completed product, the document, is generally limited.2 This assumption is not borne out by practical experience. My own initiatory adventures as a technical writer have led me to the conviction that technical discourse of any seriousness is a structure necessarily created by the writer out of the elements of the writing situation. In other words, the writing situation cannot by itself determine for the writer or editor the meaning of the technical document to be produced; in a fundamental sense, technical discourse is a lamp upon rather than a mirror of the world it represents. Of course, not all technical writing is complex; the IRS form 1040A is simple, not only as product but also as process. Moreover, a given technical document

WITH the half-life of an engineering education today being between five and ten years, many industrial organizations are concerned with the technical proficiency and vitality of their engineering employees.

This bibliography contains a list of books, journal articles, and other works that should be useful to writers and editors. The 261 references are in three sections — general, business, and technical writing — and range from 1953 through 1981. The entries in each section are alphabetical by author and, if an author published more than one item, chronological by date of publication.

To effectively communicate with lay audiences, it is helpful to use verve — enthusiasm and energy for an idea. We can add verve to technical writing and attract audiences by using intriguing titles and good beginning sentences. We can hold an audience's attention with colorful, interesting opening paragraphs. We can communicate by using analogies, using colorful words and phrases, using illustrations, using humor, repeating and explaining, being colloquial, translating terms, and detailing implications.