This article examines changing social media practices, arguing that technical communicators and teachers understand their roles as mediators of information and communication technologies. Drawing on a case study growing out of a colloquium on technology diffusion and communication between the Global North and South, the author proposes that technical communicators be attentive to the participatory nature of social media while not assuming that social media replace the dynamics of face-to-face human interaction.

Medical personnel in hospital intensive care units routinely rely on protocols to deliver some types of patient care. These protocol documents are developed by hospital physicians and staff to ensure that standards of care are followed. Thus, the protocol document becomes a de facto standing order, standing in for the physician's judgment in routine situations. This article reports findings from Phase I of an ongoing study exploring how insulin protocols are designed and used in intensive care units to transfer medical research findings into patient care “best practices.” We developed a taxonomy of document design elements and analyzed 29 insulin protocols to determine their use of these elements. We found that 93% of the protocols used tables to communicate procedures for measuring glucose levels and administering insulin. We further found that the protocols did not adhere well to principles for designing instructions and hypothesized that this finding reflected different purposes for instructions (training) and protocols (standardizing practice).

After World War II, the United States government and citizenry were concerned with truth, propaganda, democracy, and national security as they entered the Cold War era. This was a time when technocrats, engineers, and scientists could lead our free-world government through the perils of our tense relationships with Russia, Red China, and Korea. In the early 1940s, Rudolf Flesch began developing what he termed a “scientific rhetoric” to help writers of functional documents more effectively communicate technical information to a general public. He came up with a readability formula to help writers evaluate whether their writing was effective and this readability formula has profoundly shaped notions of “clear writing” for the last 60 years. This article explores Flesch's development of this readability formula, placing his work in a historical context, as well as discussing how the readability formula fit into a larger project to make effective writing more of a science than an art.

Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.

When the idea of culture is expanded to include institutional relationships extending beyond the walls of one organization, technical writing researchers can address relationships between our power/knowledge system and multiculturalism, postmodernism, gender, conflict, and ethics within professional communication. This article contrasts ideas of culture in social constructionist and cultural study research designs, addressing how each type of design impacts issues that can be analyzed in research studies. Implications for objectivity and validity in speculative cultural study research are also explored. Finally, since articulation of a coherent theoretical foundation is crucial to limiting a cultural study, this article suggests how technical writing can be constituted as an object of study according to five (of many possible) poststructural concepts: the object of inquiry as discursive, the object as practice within a cultural context, the object as practice within a historical context, the object as ordered by language, and the object in relationship with the one who studies it.

Technical writing is rooted in books of Hermetic secrets and mining lore. Hermetic texts, written in the early centuries A.D., were based in experiential/experimental knowledge of illiterate people and were written as recipes for manipulating nature. Set against the legitimate, text-based academic knowledge of the time, this proto-scientific knowledge was called “secret” to give it authority through revelation. In the mid-1500s, Agricola combined the traditions of Hermetic secrets and handbooks to compile mining lore into De Re Metallica, in which he sought to write clearly and simply, illustrate information with graphics, and rationalize the use of occult knowledge based on its utility. This early technical text paved the way for philosophers, such as Francis Bacon, to legitimate scientific knowledge based on experience/experiments as being more “beneficial” for social organization than knowledge based on a priori textual authority and speculation in the then-dominant Scholastic tradition.

In the study of law, postmodernism's interpretive turn has given rise to a wealth of scholarship analyzing the relationship of law's rhetoric to its social, cultural, and political contexts. This shift has influenced some teaching of “substantive” law school courses. At the university level, the interpretive turn has prompted composition scholars to reconsider how the teaching of writing is implicated, but no similar shift has occurred in legal writing pedagogy. Instead, those teaching legal writing largely teach as they were taught, emphasizing the use of rhetoric as a tool for successful lawyering. Legal writing professors must move beyond this narrow conception of rhetoric to help students become adept at the discourse of the legal community and capable of critically evaluating it.

In using a community model of communication based on consensus, we adopt a double-edged notion that encompasses both harmony and coercion within the community. But the possibility that any one of us might engage in coercion and/or terror when we intend to create harmony is something we would rather not acknowledge. So we use the metaphor “community” only in its benign aspect, in its possibility of harmony, to describe communication. This article explores how ideas of harmony and coercion play out in the metaphor of community and suggests four dimensions as continua along which communities could be described: choice/chance, time/space, abstract/concrete, affinity/proximity. If we break up the clearly bounded, either/or approach to modeling community, we can better accommodate the ambiguity we intuitively understand as an important part of communication.