Technical communication, to be more effective in international business, must attempt to be culture free (without cultural impediments and irrelevancies) and culture fair (adjusted to meet local cultural expectations and communication styles). Both requirements raise serious philosophical questions of strategy and style: (1) Are the principles associated with North American-style technical writing in any sense universal? (2) Is it possible to write natural English documents that are univocal and reliably translatable? (3) Does the characterization of cultural differences lead inevitably to stereotyping and condescending tolerance? (4) Does the business motivation driving much international communication promote situations that may be exploitative of, and disadvantageous to, the targeted cultures? and (5) Does a postmodern approach to technical communication undervalue Western methods and the English language?

Nassi-Schneiderman (NS) Charts are a form of flowcharting invented in the early 1970s to ensure that emerging computer programs would be structured, that is, organized into strings and nests of allowable programming constructs. These same constructs, however, are inherent in manual procedures as well. Using NS Charts to diagram human procedures eliminates prose ambiguities and provides most of the advantages of decision tables and trees. At the least, NS Charts can be used to test the logic and completeness of traditional procedures. At the most, they can replace many of the traditional publications.

Complicated documents often affect readers the way computer programs affect computers; technical writers are prone to many of the same serious errors that plague programmers. Among the many principles that writers can learn from programming are: 1) Models save money: it is far more economical to develop detailed outlines and mockups than to improvise from a vague outline. 2) Quality demands maintainability: every complicated document will need frequent revision, and only documents designed for ease of change will be kept current. 3) The trouble is in the interfaces: the procedures and tasks in a manual are not as error-prone as the rules for moving from part to part of the book itself. 4) Readers are subject to the laws of physics: many publication economies produce documents that defy the physical powers of the reader. 5) Communication is control: readers must be prevented from getting lost.