ChatGPT is a newly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can generate and assess written text. In this study, we aim to examine the extent to which it can correctly identify the structure of literature review sections in engineering research articles. For this purpose, we conducted a manual content analysis by classifying paragraphs of…

Background: Federal law requires most school districts to develop school wellness policies (SWPs), which state agencies assist in by providing templates. Templates provide standard language, which districts may edit for numerous reasons. We aimed to identify the frequency/consistency of template usage and identify the types of edits districts make…

Students in an upper-division Environmental Chemistry course used peer review and response to reviewer comments to improve their writing skills. The process employed an anonymous and timed in-class Peer Review Format. In addition to editing peer papers, students were tasked to create a Response to Reviewer Comments document, which the authors used…

We investigated the perception and recognition of errors in a population of practitioners and academics in professional and technical communication. Specifically, we measured 303 participants' botheration levels of 24 usage errors and then correlated those results against their ability to recognize the errors. Results indicated that practitioners…

Avon Murphy has been a college professor, a technical communications program director, a government technical writer, a freelancer, a contract editor at Microsoft and other firms, and owner of Murphy Editing and Writing Services. An STC (Society for Technical Communication) Fellow, he was for 17 years book review editor for "Technical…

This article examines the historical professional project that created the Institute of Radio Engineers' Professional Group on Engineering Writing an Speech (IRE PGEWS)--now called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Professional Communication Society (IEEE PCS)--and recounts the group's early history in detail. It also traces…

The course will focus on the role of the editor in organizational settings, including creating successful writer/editor collaboration. Students will gain practice in editing documents for grammar, syntax, organization, style, emphasis, document design, graphics, and user-centered design. The course will provide an introduction to technology for…

The facts bear out that the odds are against most scientific researchers and scholars--especially those just starting out--in their attempts to win funding for their research projects through their grant proposals. In this article, the author takes a close look at some of the proposal-related problems and pitfalls that have historically challenged…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

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…

Those who submit manuscripts to academic journals may benefit from a better understanding of how editors weigh ethics in their interactions with authors. In an attempt to ascertain and to understand editors' ethics, we interviewed 3 current academic journal editors of technical and/or business communication journals. We asked them about the…

Businesses and other organizations are relying increasingly on virtual teams to perform a range of business activities. A key challenge in utilizing virtual teams is to support collaboration among team members who are separated by distance and/or time. In this paper we use a research model based on a combination of the Technology Acceptance Model…

The advantages of peer feedback in business writing classes are clear in that feedback comes from different perspectives and sometimes carries extra credibility coming from fellow students. However, students also hesitate to criticise their friends and prefer praising in a general way rather than suggesting improvements, which requires…

Discusses the current convention of putting only one space between sentences. Outlines reasons why existing reasons for only one space are not valid. (RS)

Argues that technical communication editing is most effective if it deals with structure first, and that structure deficiencies can be detected by applying a range of logical analysis criteria to each text part. Concludes that lists, headings, classifications, and organograms must comply with the laws of categorization and relevant logical…