In this special journal issue, we explore the turn toward human-centered design (HCD) in research and higher education. We begin with a discussion of how HCD emerged in scholarly work at the edges of our field in places such as design, psychology, art, and engineering. Following this, we consider how an HCD perspective is manifesting itself in academic programs in different institutional contexts. We then discuss how this trend is further illustrated by the transformation of our department at the University of Washington, which shifted from being the Department of Technical Communication to becoming the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. Finally, we discuss the work of a group of researchers who contributed articles to this special issue. Each of these articles offers a perspective from someone within our field about how an HCD perspective has influenced their thinking and research.

This article presents the results of a study that investigated readers' perceptions of tone formality in online text passages. The study found that readers perceived text passages to be less formal when they contained personal pronouns, active voice verbs, informal punctuation, or verb contractions. The study reveals that professional communicators can impact their readers' perceptions of tone in online passages. This study provides useful guidance for writers who wish to understand the impact of their stylistic decisions on audience perceptions of passage formality.

Technical writers and editors assume that readers are generally helped when nominalizations and the weak verbs that accompany them are replaced with the verb form of the nominalization. The study discussed here tests that assumption. Specifically, the study assessed the effect of nominalizations, nominalization imageability, and idea importance on readers' recall of technical prose. The results indicate that denominalized text is most effective in helping native speakers focus on more important information. Yet for non-native speakers, nominalized text may work quite well. Conclusions and recommendations for further study are offered.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that using a restricted language called Simplified English (SE) to write procedural documents is the best method to accommodate specific audiences. Providing empirical data to prove or disprove this hypothesis is the point of the experiment reported here. This study examined the effect of document type (SE versus non-SE), passage (Procedure A versus Procedure B), and native language (native versus non-native English speakers) on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion time of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. This research suggests that using SE significantly improves the comprehensibility of more complex documents. Further, readers of more complex SE documents can more easily locate and identify information within the document. For the documents tested in this experiment, the SE and non-SE documents took essentially the same amount of time for subjects to read and complete the test. Finally, while the difference between native and non-native English speakers could not be tested statistically because of extremely different cell sizes, the comprehensibility and content location scores for the native and non-native speakers appear to be quite different, with the non-native speakers benefiting from SE more than the native speakers.

Cues to text structure have been proposed to operate a number of different levels and it has been suggested that lower-level factors (e.g., word decoding) are more critical to reader performance than are higher-level factors (e.g., paragraph and text structure). The current study involved presenting texts in their base form and with cues to coherence at two levels—at the word and paragraph level—removed. These manipulations were performed on technical texts at two levels of familiarity and were presented to technical readers. Tests of recall, recognition, and problem-solving revealed that while removal of cues to local coherence did produce reliable decrements in reader performance, more dramatic effects occurred when both types of cues were removed. Results are discussed in terms of their relevance to questions of information design.

Technical communicators are faced daily with digesting the results of research reports; however, many technical communicators do not have the training that would facilitate their comprehension of such reports, particularly the sections of research reports that cite statistical terminology. This article addresses the need of technical communicators to become critical readers of empirical research. Specifically, we present simple definitions of selected research designs and statistical concepts and accompany these definitions with concrete examples related to the field of technical communication research.

This study investigated the role of signaling in helping good readers comprehend expository text. As the existing literature on signaling, reviewed in the last issue of this Journal, pointed to deficiencies in previous studies' methodologies, one goal of this study was to refine prose research methods. Two passages were designed in one of eight signaled versions each. The design was constructed to assess the individual and combined effects of headings, previews, and logical connectives. The study also assessed the effect of passage length, familiarity, and difficulty. The results showed that signals do improve a reader's comprehension, particularly comprehension two weeks after the reading of a passage and comprehension of superordinate and superordinate inferential information. This study supports the hypothesis that signals can influence retention of text-based information, particularly with long, unfamiliar, or difficult passages.

This article reviews previous research on the effects of certain structural cues, called signals, that affect a reader's comprehension of expository prose. It concludes that the inconsistent results of many studies may be due to inadequate methodologies that have failed to control for confounding variables, such as text length and difficulty, reader familiarity with the topic, and timing of comprehension tests. Further, accepted signal types (headings, logical connectives, and previews) have not been sufficiently examined for their individual effects, perhaps creating unidentified disordinal interactions that could preclude the possibility of researchers identifying significant effects. This article concludes with recommendations for more valid research methodology to be used in prose assessment studies. The next issue of this journal will present Part II of this article, which details a new study of signaling effects for readers of expository prose, a study that is based on the refined methodology suggested in this article.

This article examines the effects of headings, previews, and logical connectives on readers and their comprehension of technical expository prose. Results from two related experiments suggest that previews produce significant effects on literal and inferential comprehension while the other two signal types do not. Results are discussed in light of previous research and suggestions for future research are given.