Because of accreditation, budget, and accountability pressures at the institutional and program levels, technical and professional communication faculty are more than ever involved in assessment-based activities. Using assessment to identify a program's strengths and weaknesses allows faculty to work toward continuous improvement based on their articulation of learning and behavioral goals and outcomes for their graduates. This article describes the processes of program assessment based on pedagogical goals, pointing out options and opportunities that will lead to a meaningful and manageable experience for technical communication faculty, and concludes with a view of how the larger academic body of technical communication programs can benefit from such work. As ATTW members take a careful look at the state of the profession from the academic perspective, we can use assessment to further direct our programs to meet professional expectations and, far more importantly, to help us meet the needs of the well-educated technical communicator.

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This study focuses on the means by which women convey authority in their scholarly publications. After analyzing a selected sample of women's scholarship in technical communication journal articles, the study explores whether traditional authoritative writing features conflict with traits more frequently characterized in feminist research as “women's ways of making meaning.”; Findings point to a need for more research into how scholarly writers develop a voice of authority; such research may challenge how we define and teach scholarly writing in technical communication.

Although assessment has been the focus of many recent discussions about our technical communication programs, little work has been done to outline the kinds of issues we should address in a valid assessment. In this essay, the author notes the kinds of assumptions and ensuing questions that will surround a thorough assessment of our programs, classes, teachers, and students.

Although different writing courses exist because of the different forms and purposes of writing they teach, some continuity between composition and business/technical communication would allow students to move more readily from one course to the next, while clarifying for them that writing is primarily a system of options based on analyses of situations, readers, obstacles, and goals. In this article, I call for that kind of continuity not only in pedagogy but also in research. Explaining the value of connections in pedagogy and research between composition and professional communication studies, I conclude with various questions and avenues for further research.

This article presents an overview of research and unanswered questions related to gender issues in technical communication. Specific issues affecting our profession, our research, and our pedagogical philosophies and assignments are presented. The article addresses the consequences of the feminization of technical communication, the avenues for research on gender differences in communication—specifically those differences that affect technical communicators—and the means for encouraging a more gender-balanced view of business and industry within our technical communication classrooms by giving students a chance to practice writing about gender-related issues.

While several strategies have been credited for enhancing the rhetorical acceptability of important historical works in scientific and technical writing, little attention has been paid to William Harvey's On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. A close examination of his work shows his fear of publication (because of his contemporaries' long-held beliefs about the order of the body and its functions) and his strategies for reducing resistance to his ideas: appropriate circular references and metaphors and organizational techniques that clarify and enhance not only his thesis—that the blood circulates through the body—but also demonstrate the circular pattern as part of God's natural order for the universe.

Ongoing attempts to define technical writing are inevitably confounded by problems caused by an excessively broad focus, which obscures the basis and usefulness of the definition, or by an excessively narrow focus, which arbitrarily-and sometimes oddly-relegates samples of writing as in or out of the realm of technical writing. Technical writers have been doing their jobs for far too long without a definition to be satisfied with a one- or two-sentence catch-all definition, and such a definition may result in dividing technical writing into two (or more) cultures.