Scholars have long argued that technical editing should be viewed as a rhetorical practice in which copy editors take “a situational approach to each individual task” (Buehler, 1980/2003, p. 458). Yet many editing pedagogies still treat some language-level editing tasks, like those that involve prescriptive usage rules, as mechanical rather than rhetorical. This article discusses how empirical data from corpora can help copy editors adopt a more rhetorical view of prescriptive usage rules and introduces corpus linguistics as a methodology that can contribute to technical editing pedagogy.

The authors examined a corpus of figure captions from technical and professional communication (TPC)-journal articles to test their sense that TPC captions do not fulfill their communicative potential as well as, they sensed, journals in science often do. The authors performed a content analysis on captions from biology-journal articles and iteratively tested a coding scheme of caption content. The resulting scheme can help in analyzing caption content, developing captions, and imparting a variety of TPC-related skills to students.