While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession.

White papers are commonly produced by for-profit organizations to market high-tech products and services and are often created by technical writers. But writers of this genre have little evidence-based research to guide them. To fill this void, the authors tested a rhetorical move structure with a sample of 20 top-rated marketing white papers and found that, despite the lack of industry standards for white papers, those written for marketing purposes display similar rhetorical moves: introducing the business problem, occupying the business solution niche, prompting action, establishing credibility, and providing disclaimers or legal considerations. Based on the results of this study, the authors advance guidelines for writers of this genre and suggest areas for future research.

Research activity is an integral component in the formation of professions. Evidence shows that business and technical communication specialists conduct research in both academic and practitioner career fields. In other disciplines, course work has been recognized as the primary means for preparing students to conduct and consume research. Yet, no publications document the status of research methods course work for U.S. students specializing in business and technical communication. This study provides a descriptive basis for assessing three areas in those courses: research methods topics, required readings, and teaching or assessment methods. An analysis of the results leads to a proposed agenda for preparing students specializing in business and technical communication for their future work roles in both academe and industry.

As environmental communicators partcipating in public meetings and interviews, engineers and scientists must sometimes walk a thin line between representing the best interests of their organizations and responding to the public's need to know. Unfortunately, published guidance designed to aid technical communicators in such situations is not clearly based on theory or actual behavior. This study analyzes actual responses to hostile questions by drawing upon speech act theory to demonstrate that spokespersons use five strategies for composing indirect answers to questions perceived as hostile.

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Although Halliday and Hasan claim that cohesion is a semantic relation, this paper suggests that cohesion might be better understood as a general perceptual phenomenon. Specifically, repetitions of both structural and semantic textual elements are analogous to repetitions of visual patterns in that both provide a uniform background against which distinctions are foregrounded and therefore more easily perceived. This article supplements Halliday and Hasan's categories of cohesive devices by discussing three types of structural cohesion based on an analysis of technical texts. First, cohesion produced through thematic progression (i.e., the repetition of topics and comments) is demonstrated; second, cohesion produced through parallelism (i.e., the repetition of syntactic structure) is illustrated; and finally cohesion produced with graphic devices (i.e., the repetition of typography, enumerators, and chart elements) is discussed.

Advice about how and when to implement the you-perspective is sometimes vague or contradictory. Many authorities simply advise writers to use the second person pronoun as often as possible, in either subject or object position; others suggest that the first person pronoun may be preferable for certain types of messages such as negative ones. Concepts from speech act theory can be used to clarify the most effective use of first and second person pronouns in two types of structures frequently found in professional communication: commissives and directives.