The plaintiff suing for injuries arising from a product with allegedly defective instructions or warnings has the burden of proving each of the elements for every cause of action asserted, while the defendant prevails by defeating just one element for each cause of action. Technical communicators can increase their legal literacy by learning the elements that are most easily defeated and thereby avoid subjecting their product instructions and warnings to litigation. This article surveys the existing scholarship to show the need for more attention to legal terms, theory, and practice before explaining how lawyers approach litigation. The article then turns to each of the main causes of action—the functional approach of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability , negligence, and breach of express warranty and misrepresentation—with an emphasis upon the elements that are most within the control of the technical communicator.

In 1992, the American Bar Association released the MacCrate Report, which listed the ten skills and four professional values that all attorneys need and critiqued law schools and state bars for not doing enough to teach and encourage the development of these skills and values. In response, law schools have significantly increased the skills-based components in their curricula, and most state bar exams now include a performance test. Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) programs already provide substantial instruction in all of the skills and values described in the MacCrate Report; further, an education in TPC prepares graduates to excel in law school and on the bar exam. This knowledge offers opportunities for growth if educators, administrators, and scholars take steps to encourage students to consider not only writing for but also joining in the legal profession.

The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The article provides and defends four guidelines as a foundation to study ways to incorporate history into classroom lessons: 1) maintain a continued research interest in teaching history; 2) limit to technical rather than scientific discourse; 3) focus on English-language texts; and 4) focus on American texts, authors, and practices. The second part of the essay works within the guidelines to show a lesson that contrasts technical texts by Benjamin Franklin and Herbert Hoover. The lesson can help students see the difference in technical writing before and after the Industrial Revolution, a difference that mirrors their own transition from the university to the workforce.

This article supplements existing rhetorical scholarship by returning to the notion of invention as general preparation of the communicator. Although much scholarship about invention in technical communication exists, it consists mainly of heuristics, checklists, ethical considerations, and audience awareness. Part of invention is using basic strategies to prepare the communicator to assess any communication situation and its context and to generate the appropriate discourse. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke's theories of dialectic and rhetoric are a twentieth-century version of this; this article explains important Burkean strategies such as etymological extension, limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, translation or alembication, the four master tropes, and the pentad, and it shows how to apply these in technical communication. The article closes with a classroom assignment that uses Burkean invention strategies.

The rhetorician Longinus advises writers to “transport”; their readers by aligning the readers’ perspective with the writer's. The methods for transport are five “fountains”;: high thought, emotional appeals, figures of speech, notable language, and arrangement. This essay develops a Longinian concept and methodology for technical communication by comparing his ideas to current scholarship and then applying them to two technical texts. It shows how and why technical writers employ stylistic elements to achieve transport.