Rapid advancement in communication technology has brought with it a host of relevant questions. This paper looks at some interactions of culture, communication, behaviors, and multimedia technology.

For technical editors accustomed to preparing manuscripts for print, editing in the new medium of the World Wide Web can prove challenging. The article suggests how technical editors can prepare themselves by adapting the levels of edit concept, long used in the technical editing of books, articles, and reports, to deal with the different requirements of this new medium.

Recently graduated engineers are apt to go to work in groups led by more seasoned engineers. When a new engineer gets a reporting assignment from the group leader, she is likely to assume that the group leader is her audience. That is a comfortable assumption, since the group leader speaks her language. But, it is false to assume that the immediate audience is the real audience. The new engineer's report may have to fit, for example, in a report where the aim is not technical analysis but economic justification. Writing for an unaccustomed purpose is a little like learning how to get along in a foreign culture. New engineers take pride in their work, and the familiar technical reporting format (background, problem, method, results, conclusions) lets them explain it in detail. They may feel chagrin when somebody up the line rewrites their results section and relegates the rest to an appendix or the wastebasket. It is wrenching to discover that in the corporate culture, everything but the results is looked on as BS. That is because engineers are logical people. When young, they expect the world to be logical too. And maybe it is, but its logic is not that of the linear mathematical demonstration. Organizations, like Newtonian flywheels, have inertia; the bigger they are, the more they resist changes in speed and direction. A large organization presents the same paradox as a government request for proposals: it says it wants innovative ideas, but then spells out in excruciating detail what it expects you to do.

Technical writing tries to be "objective" and "audience-oriented", but it neglects an element of persuasion known in ancient rhetoric as "ethos". This concept translates from the Greek as "character", but that English word does not convey the concept's richness; nor does the Latin "persona", a term sometimes used to describe the narrative voice in technical prose. "Ethos" is the root of "ethics", which tends to objectify values and choices, alienating them from the people making them. In this paper, I suggest that an understanding of "ethos" in all its richness can help writers of technical prose to produce work that, in relation to traditionally "objective" prose, is both more readable and more ethical.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Strategies for improving stylistic efficiency of technical writing are presented. The strategies, in contrast to the myriad of advice on how to improve sentence style, create sentence flow and give the prose a character that propels readers along. Improvements in stylistic efficiency come from aligning word order with readers' expectations so as to restrict the reader's interpretive latitude. >