Considers if teaching technology is problematic for technical writing instructors. Presents ideas of 64 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) members who were queried on their roles as teachers of technical writing in relation to the demands made upon them to also be teachers of technology skills. Concludes with a call for more…

Explores three ways to design cross-cultural studies to be more valid and ethical: (1) intercultural researchers need to distinguish broad rhetorical and cultural patterns from regional, organizational, and personal patterns; (2) United States researchers need to distinguish differences in rhetorical patterns in a form of communication and ways…

Discusses the functions of educational research. Examines differences between decision-oriented research and conclusion-oriented research. Urges researchers to improve the quality of their writing. (FMW)

Describes a collaborative writing assignment which features a series of interconnected business messages arising out of a case study and including inhouse memos and an analytical report. Shows how the design of a collaborative writing assignment can foster creative rather than debilitative tension. (RS)

Describes five writing activities for college writing courses: (1) a documented opinion paper exercise; (2) breaking writing rules; (3) trip reports from absentees; (4) case studies to promote writing for particular audiences for pragmatic purposes; and (5) an organizing strategy for studying, using a chart format. (SR)

Discusses difficulties technical writers and readers have concerning proposals that define problems and suggest innovation. Suggests that when writers recognize both their own and readers' assumptions about such problems, they can adopt techniques to gain reader concurrence. (KEH)

Compares technical journal editing practices with journal style, examining variables that reflect active, verbal expression of ideas and parsimony and clarity of sentence construction. Finds that editors have little professional training in editing and style, little knowledge of style terms and differences, and spend little time editing, and only…

Identifies four techniques that are effective in teaching technical writing to non-native English speakers: (1) one-on-one conferences aimed at easing language apprehension; (2) meticulously detailed and clear instructions; (3) teacher leadership through successive drafts of students' technical reports; and (4) peer evaluations. (SG)

Proposes a Center for Applied Writing which combines elements of the developmental and writing-across-the-curriculum models and bridges academic and nonacademic discourse. Explains that the center would offer new avenues for research, instruction, and practice in business and technical communication, while bringing together diverse approaches to…

Examines the ethics of fostering false inference. Presents and discusses a hypothetical case in which a firms's proposal seems intended to mislead, while actually stating nothing that is not literally true. (KEH)

Explains some courtesy techniques that technical professionals can use to deal with interpersonal problems that arise in writing situations. Presents three case studies with sample responses to show how case studies can teach these courtesy strategies to technical writing students. (MM)

Recounts how the author and 25 colleagues worked on a massive, long-term consulting project with a branch of the United States military to revise an extensive technical manual. Describes stressors of the project intrinsic to the job, the workers' roles in the organization, organizational structure, career development, and work relationships. (SR)

Describes the position of young humanists teaching courses in business writing (who job-hop in search of tenured positions or drop out of academe) as representative of "exhaustion," the final stage of Hans Selye's stress model. (SR)

Demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. Substantiates the claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. (MS)

Analysis of how students of English for Science and Engineering use certain categories of nouns in their technical writing projects revealed a significant use of "sub-technical" and "text-structuring" words serving both referential and discourse-oriented functions. The use of matching or cloze-type and open-ended writing exercises to improve…