Applying the communication theory called punctuated equilibrium to an activity system in the federal department that oversees health-information privacy reveals that the theory fails to align well with a government activity system rooted in a stable democratic tradition. This activity system is structured to accommodate a wide variety of stakeholders and significant organizational change. This case study prompts a reexamination of punctuated equilibrium as an approach to understanding the role of documents in certain types of activity systems.

Anti-employer blogs, those which criticize companies or their employees, are posing significant legal and ethical challenges for corporations. The important legal issue is the conflict between the employee's legal duty of loyalty to the employer and the employee's right to free speech. Although U.S. and state law describes what an employee may or may not say in a blog, corporations should encourage employees to contribute to the process of creating clear, reasonable policies that will help prevent expensive court cases. The important ethical issue concerning anti-employer blogs is whether an employee incurs an ethical duty of loyalty. In this article, I conclude that there is no such ethical duty. The legal duty of loyalty, explained in a company-written policy statement that employees must endorse as a condition of employment, offers the best means of protecting the legal and ethical rights of both employers and employees.

Genre use entails a rhetorical response to an exigence in the writer's context. In one category of genres, which the author calls temporal genres, linear time constitutes a major exigence to which writers must respond. Temporal genres, such as annual reports and status reports, call for writers to publish texts because a certain amount of time has passed, even if they are not yet ready to do so. The first annual report of the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security reveals an ineffective ethos and discontinuities between the mission of the office and that of the department. But the second annual report reveals a more effective ethos and greater harmony between the missions. This study shows how the requirement to report can force writers to decide existential issues of identity and mission.

U.S. businesses wish to continue to profit by collecting personal information from their website visitors, yet they fear that the practice both alienates visitors and exposes them both to legal problems from U.S. authorities and business sanctions from data-privacy authorities in Europe and Canada. This dilemma is reflected in the typical corporate privacy-policy statement, which is full of misleading and deceptive rhetoric intended to cover up the gap between the company's privacy policy and the image it wishes to project.

Distance education, broadly defined as instruction that is not bound by time or place, is bringing about fundamental changes in higher education. Writing in a recent online newsletter from the American Association for Higher Education, Ted Marchese describes the many "not-so-distant" distance competitors to traditional colleges and universities: the University of Phoenix, the for-profit university with some 50,000 students in 12 states; the Western Governors University, the competency-based consortium that was founded by 17 governors and is supported by 14 business partners, including Sun, IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft; and Britain’s venerable OpenUniversity, which has allied with several universities in the United States and will begin offering courses here this year.

Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Johndan Johnson‐Eilola. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 272 pages. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. Laura J. Gurak. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pages. Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology. A. D. Van Nostrand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. 241 pages. Rhetoric and Pedagogy, Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 337 pages. Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language. Michel Meyer. Trans. David Jamison, in collaboration with Allan Hart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 310 pages.

This study uses a case-study approach to describe and analyze the effects of emphasizing design principles in a technical communication course. A look at student assignments—including a job description, a set of instructions, and a feasibility study—and at student self-evaluative comments about their job descriptions suggests that focusing on design principles can help students improve the organization and design of their documents and achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the role of design in communicating technical information.

In teaching a technical communication course, I introduced document design principles before discussing traditional verbal rhetoric. A comparison of the writing of two students—a competent writer and a weak one—before and after the design discussion indicates that a basic understanding of design principles helped them improve document macrostructure. They saw the need to involve the audience, to provide an introduction and a forecast, and to organize and highlight information using headings. The design discussion, however, appears to have had little effect on document microstructure. Although more research needs to be conducted to better understand the relationship between verbal and visual rhetoric in technical communication, integrating document design principles early appears to be a promising pedagogical technique.

Although the research has clearly established that reading comprehension improves when the writer forecasts the discussion in an introductory or transitional passage, technical writing textbooks offer little guidance on how to construct effective forecasts. The most common pattern, in which the items to be discussed are listed, is boring and can leave unanswered some critical questions that can prevent the reader from paying full attention. This article describes techniques, based on four of the journalistic prompts (what, where, why, and how), that can help writers create contexts for their readers, thereby improving readers' comprehension and enlisting them in the creation of the discourse.

Although Baconian induction—the belief that we can infer accurately from the known to the unknown—has been supplanted by social constructionism, the two perspectives are quite similar in their description of how science is done; the principal difference is that Baconian theory is overtly prescriptive, whereas social constructionism is essentially descriptive. The argument that the inductive organization of the science paper misrepresents how science is actually carried out is based on a faulty premise, for the purpose of a science paper is not to provide a narrative account of the laboratory work, but rather to enable the reader to assess the quality of the scientist's logical reconstruction of the laboratory work. The critical factor in determining the fidelity of the paper to the science is not the organization of the paper but the ethical intent of the writer.

To make informed decisions about ethical issues, technical communicators need to understand how to apply general ethical principles to the kinds of dilemmas they will face routinely, concerning such issues as plagiarism, trade secrets, and misrepresentation of text and graphics. This article reviews the controversy about the relationship between ethics and rhetoric among the Greeks, provides basic definitions of ethics, and applies the literature of business and professional ethics to the concerns of technical communicators and other professionals who communicate, showing how they must think through the conflicts of obligations to their employer, the public, and the environment. It provides a case study that can be used to reinforce a student's understanding of the relationship between technical communication and ethics.

This article surveys and critiques the literature on using style checkers and the text-editing capabilities of the computer to assist in revising technical writing. The literature on text-editing capabilities is inconclusive because it is largely anecdotal and methodologically flawed. The literature on style checkers is similarly inconclusive. To better assess the value of the computer, we need to examine the basic premise of the research on revising and word processing: that more revising leads to higher-quality writing. We need to be sure that our evaluative techniques for measuring writing improvement are valid; to focus our attention not only on computer novices but also on computer-experienced writers; to examine other factors that affect how writers use word processing and that in turn might affect writing quality; and to examine more carefully the differences among word processors and among the different style checkers to determine their effects on writing behavior and writing quality.