Most technical communication practitioners conduct research throughout their careers. Yet, a survey of the Web sites of 114 undergraduate technical communication programs between September 2006 and April 2007 revealed that 65% (about two thirds) of these programs are providing minimal or no exposure to research instruction and therefore are not sufficiently preparing students to handle the types of research they will encounter in their upcoming careers. Given the disconnect between the centrality of research in the work that technical communicators do and the low presence of research instruction at the undergraduate level, academics need to look for ways to overcome institutional and other constraints in order to give research training greater priority in their undergraduate programs.

There have been many attempts to assess the state of research in our field. This article is our attempt to both (1) synthesize recent analyses, opinions, and conclusions concerning the status of technical communication research and (2) propose an action plan aimed at redirecting our field's agenda for its research. We explore these questions: What are the recent research trends in our field? What is and is not promising about our recent approaches to research? Where do we need to go next? What are the critical components for a new agenda for our research?

This article recommends strategies academics can use to contribute to an issue of great interest in industry: how best to define, measure, and achieve quality documentation. These strategies include contextualizing quality definitions, advocating the use of multiple quality measures, conducting research to identify specific heuristics for defining and measuring quality in particular workplace contexts, and partnering with industry to educate upper management about those heuristics and the benefits of promoting technical communicators to the strategic role of organizational “gatekeepers of quality.”

Rachel brings together nineteen previously unpublished essays concerned with ways in which recent research on workplace writing can contribute to the future direction of the discipline of technical and professional Hers is the first anthology on the social perspective in professional writing to feature focused discussions of research advances and future research directions.The workplace as defined by this volume is a widely diverse area that encompasses small companies and large corporations, public agencies and private firms, and a varied population of writersengineers, managers, nurses, social workers, government employees, and others. Because much research has been conducted on the relationship between workplace writing and social contexts since the ground breaking 1985 publication of Odell and Goswami s Writing in Nonacademic Settings, Spilka contends that this is an appropriate time for the professional writing community to consider what it has learned to date and where it should be heading next in light of these recent discoveries. She argues that now professional writers should try to ask better questions and to define new directions.Spilka breaks the anthology into two parts. Part 1 is a collection of ten essays presenting textual and qualitative studies conducted by the authors in the late l980s on workplace has chosen these studies as representative of the finest research being conducted in professional writing that can serve as models for current and future researchers in the field. Barbara Couture, Jone Rymer, and Barbara Mirel report on surveys they conducted relying on the social perspective both to design survey instruments and to analyze survey data. Jamie MacKinnon assesses a qualitative study describing what workplace professionals might need to learn about social contexts and workplace Susan Kleimann and editor Rachel discuss multiple case studies they conducted that help explain the value during the composing process of social interaction among the participants of a rhetorical situation. Judy Z. Segal explores the negotiation between the character of Western medicine and the nature of its professional discourse. Jennie Dautermann describes a qualitative study in which a group of nurses claimed the authority to restructure their own procedural information system. Anthony Parefinds in a case study of social workers that writing can be constrained heavily by socially imposed limitations and restrictions. Graham Smart describes a study of discourse conventions in a financial institution. Geoffrey A. Cross reports on a case study of the interrelation of genre, context, and process in the group production of an executive letter and report.Part 2 includes nine essays that assess the implications of recent research on workplace writing on theory, pedagogy and practice, and future research directions. Mary Beth Debs considers research implications for the notion of authorship. Jack Selzer explores the idea of intertextuality. Leslie A. Olson reviews the literature central to the concept of a discourse community. James A. Reither suggests that writing-as-collaboration in the classroom focuses more on the production of texts to be evaluated than on ways in which texts arise out of other texts. Rachel continues Reither s discussion of how writing pedagogy in academia might be revised with regard to the social perspective. Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter respond to the debate about the authority of theory versus that of practice on researchers notions of methodology. Mary Beth Debs considers which methods used in fields related to writing hold promise for research in workplace Stephen Doheny-Farina discusses how some writing researchers are questioning the underlying assumptions of traditional ethnography. Finally, Tyler Bouldin and Lee Odell suggest future directions for the research of workplace writing.

More than ever before, workplace professionals are facing the challenge of collaborating regularly and effectively with those situated in social contexts quite different from their own. Yet, knowledge of the rhetorical processes and social dimensions characterizing this type of collaboration remains scant and inadequate. This essay takes the stance that if rhetoricians hope to make significant strides forward in understanding writing that takes place both within and external to a single workplace culture, they will need to develop a much more expansive, complex, and sophisticated vision of collaboration across multiple organizational cultures. It suggests how, to accomplish this goal, rhetoricians might build on the strengths and overcome the limitations of past scholarship in organizational and related studies and in rhetoric, and it introduces new directions these scholars might take and new questions they might explore in future investigations in this area of inquiry.

What is the role of interaction, or, more generally, orality, in multiple-audience analysis and adaptation? How does orality relate to literacy in the evolution of corporate documents? A qualitative study of how seven engineers in two divi sions of a large corporation wrote for multiple audiences revealed that, in the more rhetorically successful cases observed, interaction was the central means of analyzing and adapting discourse to multiple audiences, fulfilling rhetorical and social goals, and building and sustaining a corporate culture; and orality was more potent than literacy in the engineers'composing behavior and the au diences' acceptance of the engineers' ideas and documents.