Vivian Cook, University of Essex, advises his fellow EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers to view their students as multicompetent language users rather than as deficient native speakers. The same advice can readily be given to technical writers and editors who may occasionally struggle to adapt the writing of nonnative speaking (NNS) engineers, researchers, and programmers to style book norms. This approach certainly applies to those of us who work with or manage NNS colleagues. Although addressed to language teachers, the author considers how Cook's observations have validity for many workplace interactions in the growing international community.

How well do you understand copyright law? How about the doctrine of fair use? If a recent study reported in the Business Communication Quarterly is any indication, IEEE members may not have a very solid understanding of either. J.V. Arn, R. Gatlin, and W. Kordsmeier reported the results of a questionnaire survey of the membership of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) (see Bus. Commun. Quart., vol.61, no.4, p.32-9, 1998). The survey was designed to test the understanding of ABC members of various parts of copyright law including the sections cited in the fair use guidelines for educational multimedia. In their brief description of fair use, the authors explain: "fair use is a possible defense to copyright infringement in an educational or nonprofit environment but not in a commercial application" (p. 36). This difference has long been recognized in differing fees for use. Nonprofit institutions who publish newsletters, monographs, and books routinely pay nominal fees to use copyrighted materials, but what about more limited uses such as in the classroom or in a presentation at a professional meeting? Defining multimedia as "a single, computer-controlled product that integrates text, audio, graphic, still image, and moving pictures", J.V. Arn et al., note that such a "variety of sources requires the producer to understand a wide variety of legal constraints" (p. 33). Their study showed that ABC members often underestimated their rights to use copyrighted material.

Does language reflect psychological reality, or does it form psychological reality? In other words, does the language we use to discuss something determine our attitudes toward that thing? Feminist literature has made much of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which asserts that linguistic bias is a cause rather than a symptom of social bias (F.W. Frank and P.A. Tretchler, 1989; F.J. Newmayer, 1986). However, conflicting views do exist on the direction of influence. The article discusses a recent study published by M.A. Dyrud illustrating a clear gender bias in computer clip art (see Business Commun. Quart., vol.60, no.4, p.30-51, 1997). Dyrud argues that if language, as a symbol system, both reflects and invents our reality, the same can be said of another symbol system, that of visual images. If the images are predominantly one gender, they may reflect cultural mores, but at the same time they help to sustain those beliefs by shaping our concept of what is real. Her study examines more than 14000 images in Windows based programs. She found that gender bias does exist in available visuals. In addition to a bias in presentation, clip art is also a man's world in terms of sheer numbers of images. Of 14108 images, there were three times as many male as female. The attitude of available images also differs: male figures-often of athletic build with full heads of hair-are usually in motion; female figures are usually standing, waiting, or even posing fashion-model style.

While Australia is positioning itself politically to capitalize on the strengths of its multiculturism and many ethnic identities, the nation is also vigorously addressing companion language needs to support workplace interaction, cooperation, collaboration and negotiation. The paper discusses the implementation of the genre approach in Australia. The approach is a new paradigm that emphasizes content, structure and sequence.

The paper surveys studies of the process model for understanding writing, focusing in particular on problem-solving strategies in the writing process. It then presents a case study of the use of issue trees-a hierarchal network of goals not unlike the decision trees used in management science and artificial intelligence-to guide the writing process of the second author as he wrote a technical report. A good issue tree shows the relationships between various pieces of information: which information is central and which is supportive or incidental. Issue trees offer engineers a visual view of their writing plan. By building a hierarchal issue tree to illustrate the logical links of the proposed writing task, the engineer can put an overlay of "technology" on the task of writing-an overlay that may "trick" the unwilling writer into writing, and writing well.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>