To determine which factors were considered important in composing legal written documents, personal interviews were conducted with 111 Middle Tennessee Bar Association members, and questionnaires were mailed to 211 legal secretaries/paralegals. The self-administered questionnaires were completed and returned by 133 persons. Of those, 108 indicated…

Technical writing scholars have discussed, but not resolved, the ethical problems of ghost authorship (Should the technical editor have a place on the title page?) and multiple authorship (Can nine people really author an eight-page essay?). These ethical questions, however, are trivial when compared with the significantly more grave and…

As changing and increasingly more specialized technologies take over many of the mechanical functions once performed by either technical communicators or users of material prepared by technical communicators, communicators are faced with greater and more complex responsibilities. For example, the advent of more sophisticated computer use in…

Several factors have contributed to the increased demand for corporate speechwriters, including the consumer and environmental movements, the economy, foreign competition, and a negative public attitude toward business. Corporate speeches serve a variety of purposes: promoting a corporation within a business community, providing information on…

A professional writing course can be both technical and humanistic by incorporating into the course a formal report assignment in which students pick a subject in the humanities about which they wish to know more. Once the students decide on topics to research, they develop a scenario in which they define a person or group who needs the…

Basic media writing courses are integral to and will become an increasingly important part of communication programs as confusion over goals and lack of focus are clarified. Currently, media writing textbooks are designed for freshman composition, rhetoric, journalism, or mass communications courses. None do an adequate job surveying all types of…

Arguing that writers must be able to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the texts they produce, this paper begins by isolating some of the persistent questions raised by people in education, business, and government who want to judge how well their texts are working. The paper then compares the cognitive processes involved in "reading…

A survey investigated whether changes in the curricular status of professional writing have produced concomitant changes in pedagogy. The study examined whether there are more professional writing teachers teaching as they traditionally have or whether teachers are now rethinking their approaches to the subject. A survey instrument was completed…

A guide to writing effective proposals that are designed to funding for specific projects is presented. The need to clearly identify the nature of project--its design, its anticipated outcomes, and the needs which the project is addressing--is described as the crucial first step in the grantswriting process. Next, the importance of the prospectus…

A modified version of the predominant economic impact model (Caffrey-Isaacs) is presented for use by higher education institutions in preparing and carrying out economic impact studies. Use of the modified version allows small institutional research offices to conduct studies in a timely manner with a methodology that remains within the boundaries…

Often colleges and universities that are just beginning to include technical communication in their curricula do so using faculty trained in traditional English doctorate programs. This digest examines several areas of concern for such institutions and discusses: (1) characteristics of technical communication; (2) issues in teaching technical…

While the classroom situation and textbook exercises are not irrelevant or useless, business writing assignments need a healthy dose of "real-world experience" to make their importance obvious to students. The instructor has only to ask a local employer if the business students can do some of the writing that is backing up in the employer's…

The Department of Defense (DOD) has undertaken major research and development programs to improve the quality of their documentation, yet there continue to be major deficiencies in the quality of the manuals produced. In an attempt to identify factors in the design and development process that may be contributing to such deficiencies, this project…

A continuing problem confronting businesses is the number of college graduates unprepared to write on the job because their communication abilities are meager and their knowledge of the many kinds of writing they must do in the workplace is incomplete. Causes of the gap between college writing instruction and the writing demands in the workplace…

A study of translation as a profession in Chile covered two areas: a diagnostic study of the real need for literary, scientific, and technical translations, and a followup study of graduates of the translation degree program at the Catholic Pontifical University of Chile (Santiago). The analysis considered the relationship between the need for…