To paraphrase John Tukey, the beauty of working with data is that you get to "play in everyone's backyard." A corollary to this statement is that working with data necessitates collaboration. Although students often learn technical workflows to wrangle and analyze data, these workflows may break down or require adjustment to accommodate…

Many researchers dread writing. They find it laborious - even painful - to put their scholarly work into words. They get bogged down in the study, and lose track of the story. And they produce uninspiring papers that fail to resonate with readers or reviewers. This book offers an antidote to this problem: brief, accessible lessons that guide…

Collaborative writing assignments are an essential element of teaching technical and professional writing, and they should be included in online writing instruction (OWI). The COVID-19 pandemic was a drastic interruption of regular teaching practices that had the potential of derailing the practice of assigning online collaborative writing…

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design…

We evaluate the use of a Virtual Exchange (VE) writing task, Stimulus Writing, which we assigned to groups of UK and Finnish business students. There were two learner cohorts in the study: one in the UK (mainly Chinese students), the other in Finland (mainly Finns). The Finnish students wrote authentic case studies about Nordic businesses, while…

Using a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) model of education, an English composition instructor designed an honors section of first-year composition to evaluate current best practices in the field of teaching writing to STEM undergraduates. The students, all first-year engineering majors, conducted guided research on best…

Responding to the call for the contemplative teaching of writing initiated by O'Reilley (1993) and extended by Kirsch (2008; 2009), Kroll (2013), Kroll (2008), Wenger (2015), and Harrison (2012), among others, this article explores the theoretical considerations, practical components, challenges, and adaptability involved in teaching a…

In this paper, we discuss the multi-faced role of English writing in the international workplace. Drawing upon previous research, we point out that English, as the main lingua franca, supports a variety of writing practices in the workplace, and so it presents both significant value and challenges for internationally operating individuals and…

This article reports on a qualitative study of strategies and competencies used by technical communication and translation students to address challenges inherent in global virtual team collaboration. The study involved students from three universities collaborating in virtual teams to write and translate instructional documents. Qualitative…

An approach is described that gradually transitions second-year organic chemistry students to writing full "The Journal of Organic Chemistry" ("JOC") style lab reports. The primary goal was to introduce students to and build rhetorical skills in scientific and technical writing. This was accomplished by focusing on four main…

This article traces the history of Mary Schuster's career in technical writing and communication from 1968 when she took a position in the Publications Department at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to her work at "Technical Communication Quarterly" ("TCQ") in 2003 and forward. She discusses the…

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3-4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing…

Peer review is applied as a powerful tool to enhance student collaboration online writing. The purpose of this paper is to analyse learners' mechanisms of peer reviewing in the nature of student interventions and interactions in written online peer reviewing and how categorization of student comments can be used as a means for analysing student…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the genre of the reviewed scientific articles published in the "FJNSc" ("Finnish Journal of Nursing Science") during its history. The aim was to bring a critical approach to writing in nursing science and to discuss the dominant conventions of scientific writing in nursing. A total of 27…

ETC 408/508: Technical Editing is a cross-listed undergraduate and graduate course at Missouri Western State University, an open admissions public university with approximately 6,000 students. 508 is an elective course for students in the Master of Applied Arts in Written Communication degree and highly recommended for those in the Technical…