Women Organizers of the First Professional Associations in Technical Communication

Women technical communicators helped to organize many of the first professional associations for technical communicators in the 1940s and 1950s. For some of these women, organizing was an occupational closure strategy of revolutionary usurpation: They may have hoped to position themselves favorably to shape a future profession that was not predicated on hidden forms of their inclusion. Exclusionary and demarcationary forces, however, seem to have ultimately undermined their efforts, alienating some of them and inducing others to adopt a strategy of inclusionary usurpation. In addition to using gender-sensitive revisions of occupational closure theory to explain the phenomenon of the woman organizer, the author chronicles the emergence of 8 professional associations for technical communicators and identifies the women technical communicators who helped to organize them.     

Video Games as Technical Communication Ecology

With an ecological approach to the genres that circulate within communities of practice, this article traces the overlap between technical communication and online gaming communities in terms of their rhetorical uses of technical communication genres. Through shared practices, technologies, and epistemologies, online gaming environments call upon gamers to become technical communicators and provide opportunities for technical communicators to apply their expertise within the gaming industry.     

Food Fights: Cookbook Rhetorics,Monolithic Constructions of Womanhood,and Field Narratives in Technical Communication

Field narratives that (re)classify technical genres as liberating for women risk supporting the notion that feminism is a completed project in technical communication scholarship. This article suggests that technical communicators reexamine the impact of past approaches to critical engagement at the intersections of gender studies and technical communication; cookbooks provide a material example. The authors illustrate how a feminist approach to cookbooks as technical/cultural artifacts can productively revise field narratives in technical communication.     

Metadata and Memory: Lessons from the Canon of Memoria for the Design of Content Management Systems

To date, most of the research on usability and content management systems has focused on the end-user products of such systems rather than on the usability for technical communicators of the single-source authoring tools offered within these systems. While this latter research is undeniably important, attention needs to be paid to the plight of technical communicators attempting to use single-sourcing tools. Otherwise, technical communicators in workplaces risk becoming semi-skilled contingent labor rather than empowered knowledge workers. This essay, therefore, attempts to open a debate about the design of content management systems by turning to the rhetorical canon of memory as an appropriate source for insights into how stored information can be flexibly retrieved and used during composing activities.     

Metadata and Memory: Lessons from the Canon of Memoria for the Design of Content Management Systems

To date, most of the research on usability and content management systems has focused on the end-user products of such systems rather than on the usability for technical communicators of the single-source authoring tools offered within these systems. While this latter research is undeniably important, attention needs to be paid to the plight of technical communicators attempting to use single-sourcing tools. Otherwise, technical communicators in workplaces risk becoming semi-skilled contingent labor rather than empowered knowledge workers. This essay, therefore, attempts to open a debate about the design of content management systems by turning to the rhetorical canon of memory as an appropriate source for insights into how stored information can be flexibly retrieved and used during composing activities.     

Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age

This article analyzes the location of “value” in technical communication contexts, arguing that current models of technical communication embrace an outdated, self-deprecating, industrial approach subordinating information to concrete technological products. By rethinking technical communication in terms of Reich's “symbolic-analytic work”, technical communicators and educators can move into a post-industrial model of work that prioritizes information and communication, with benefits to both technical communicators and users.     

User Agency,Technical Communication,and the 19th-Century Woman Bicyclist

This article considers how users employ extraorganizational technical communication to reshape technologies, both materially and symbolically, even after these technologies enter into common use. Specifically, I analyze how women bicyclists of the 1890s authored instructional materials to complicate gendered and classed assumptions about users implicit in manufacturer-produced texts. I argue that technical communicators, in their teaching and research, should consider the role that extraorganizational technical communication plays in generating vital and lasting cultural changes.     

From Deliberation to Responsibility: Ethics,Invention, and Bonhoeffer in Technical Communication

To make technical communication scholarship more reflective of the complexity of work done by such communicators, a new concept that marries recent parallel turns to ethics and invention is needed. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a stranger to the field, offers such a concept: responsibility. It covers more explanatory ground than the most cited of ethical concepts, deliberation, and most importantly, centers ethics and invention squarely within the technical communicator’s relationship to language.     

Politeness,Time Constraints,and Collaboration in Decision-Making Meetings: A Case Study

Relatively little is known about the politeness strategies used by technical communicators and designers in group settings, particularly in the decision-making, collaborative meetings of a real-world, naturally occurring group. This study explores the degree to which members of a well-established group linguistically express concern for their fellow collaborators and how that concern may be affected by the type and imminence of their deadlines.     

Myths about instrumental discourse: A response to Robert R. Johnson

Abstract of the original article

Robert R. Johnson's “Complicating Technology: Interdesciplinary Method, the Burden of Comprehension, and the Ethical Space of the Technical Communicator,” published in the Winter 1998 issue of TCQ, points out that there is much for technical communicators to learn from the burgeoning field of technology studies. Technical communicators, however, have an obligation to exercise patience as they enter this arena of study. Using interdisciplinary theory, this article argues that technical communication must assume the “burden of comprehension”: the responsibility of understanding the ideologies, contexts, values, and histories of those disciplines from which we borrow before we begin using their methods and research findings. Three disciplines of technology study—history, sociology, and philosophy—are examined to investigate how these disciplines approach technology. The article concludes with speculation on how technical communicators, by virtue of their entrance into this interdisciplinary arena, might refashion both their practical roles and the scope of their ethical responsibilities.     

The unfortunate human factor: A selective history of human factors for technical communicators

Human factors Is an important discipline for technical communicators to explore, but an examination of its historical bias toward the technological system and away from the user should be part of this exploration if we are to effectively use human factors methods in print and on‐line document development. Beginning with the advent of formal human factors in the early twentieth century, this essay reviews moments in the history of human factors that are especially relevant to technical communicators. The essay concludes with a discussion of human factors research that is most applicable to technical communications, specifically qualitative usability research, minimalism, and human activity interface design.     

Technological Literacy as Network Building

Following recent work to advocate a strongly social understanding of technological literacy, this article considers how networking technologies are reshaping our understanding of the social. In this context, technological literacy can be understood as a process of constructing the networks in which literate action is defined. I explore the role of technological literacy as a force of network building accomplished through a mechanism of translation. From the comments of experienced technical communicators, I make observations about how technical communicators are taught to be technologically literate.     

Music,Transtextuality, and the World Wide Web

This article sketches the significance of aurality in hypermedia, notes that the field of English studies is constructing the World Wide Web as a verbal and visual medium, and proposes a transtextual framework to aid technical communicators in designing musical hypermedia. Because the study of music on the World Wide Web is nascent, this article includes references to art and film music, whose theories and practices are substantially developed.     

Influences on Creativity in Technical Communication: Invention,Motivation, and Constraints

Interviews with 14 technical communicators reveal that skills in rhetorical invention help them creatively address communication problems. They define creativity in relation to four interrelated exigencies of invention: thinking like a user, reinvigorating dry content, inventing visual ideas, and alternating between heuristic and algorithmic processes. They recognize intrinsic factors such as curiosity and sympathy as motivations for their creativity, while being conscious of the external factors (people, money, and time) that may restrain creativity.     

Intercultural Rhetoric, Technology Transfer, and Writing in U.S.-Mexico Border Maquilas

This article explores the transfer of U.S. technologies to three maquilas, or joint U.S.-Mexican manufacturing facilities in northern Mexico. Drawing on case study methods, it focuses on the rhetorical strategies that Mexican engineers and manufacturing personnel used to translate U.S. technologies and corresponding documentation for their Mexican contexts. It also suggests ways U.S. technical communicators can adapt their documentation to be more effective for these U.S.-Mexican intercultural rhetorical contexts.     

Intercultural Rhetoric,Technology Transfer,and Writing in U.S.–Mexico Border Maquilas

This article explores the transfer of U.S. technologies to three maquilas, or joint U.S.–Mexican manufacturing facilities in northern Mexico. Drawing on case study methods, it focuses on the rhetorical strategies that Mexican engineers and manufacturing personnel used to translate U.S. technologies and corresponding documentation for their Mexican contexts. It also suggests ways U.S. technical communicators can adapt their documentation to be more effective for these U.S.–Mexican intercultural rhetorical contexts.     

Responding to Hostile Questions: More insights from Speech Act Theory

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.     

Responding to Hostile Questions: More insights from Speech Act Theory

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.     

Redefining the ResponsibiIities of Teachers and the Social Position of the Technical Communicator

As we increasingly recognize the social nature of technical communication, our responsibilities as teachers need to be redefined. Three levels of responsibility are suggested: at the theoretical level, we should study technical communication as a historically emergent social practice; at the pedagogical level, we need to incorporate social and historical perspectives into technical communication courses and curricula; at the level of social action, we should participate in defining and creating new sites of practice for technical communicators. Several suggestions are offered for helping students locate or develop alternative sites of technical communication practice.