Technical Communication Practitioners Research Articles

Increasing Inclusion in Technical Communication Academic Programs

Purpose: Technical communication (TC) academic programs are responsible for training future technical communication practitioners. Increasing diversity in the field starts with increasing diversity in academic programs and helping students from diverse backgrounds to graduate. Previous research has shown a lack of diversity in technical communication academic programs and a lack of inclusive practices in higher education in general. This study seeks to show how technical communication program administrators can increase support for students from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds through better inclusion. Method: I conducted qualitative interviews with undergraduate students, graduate students, and pre-tenured faculty members regarding their experiences in technical communication academic programs. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded for emerging themes. Results: Interview participants identified several areas where TC academic programs can increase inclusion, including focusing on inclusion rather than simply increasing diversity, problems with microaggressions, lack of representation, and the complications brought about by intersectionality. Conclusion: TC academic programs, like higher education in general, are interested in increasing diversity. However, rather than focusing on simply increasing the number of students from diverse backgrounds, TC programs should focus on increasing program inclusiveness. This includes actively including diverse voices in program decision making and being willing to make changes based on the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of traditionally marginalized people. These recommendations can also be used by practitioners to begin increasing inclusion in the workplace.

The social help desk

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

“Write Me a Better Story”: Writing Stories as a Diagnostic and Repair Practice for Automotive Technicians

Although storytelling research is rarely applied to technical communication, I approach it as one way of technical communication practitioners and teachers might account for the social, creative, knowledge-intensive ways technical service work gets done. In particular, I look to the technical service work of automotive technicians at a repair shop in the Northwest. These technicians not only tell each other stories, but they also write stories about their diagnostic practices, or what they do to determine problems, and about their processes for addressing those problems—their actual repair work. But writing stories is more than instrumental. I argue that acts of storytelling are inseparably entangled with acts of accessing technical breakdowns, determining possible problems, and then producing acceptable solutions. For these technicians, writing stories and fixing cars intertwine. My central question, then, is how can technical communication researchers and teachers approach acts of storytelling in ways that offer us richer, more precise articulations of the relationship between writing and technical service work like that of fixing cars?

Our Unstable Artistry

This article considers how technical communication practitioners and teachers can approach Donald Schön’s notion of problem setting as rhetorical and reflective work that offers us a richer, more precise language for articulating the technologies, narratives, and values from which problems appear as problems in the first place. The author posits that problem setting, when foregrounded in our work, adds value to the knowledge we make in practice rather than the knowledge we gain from stepping back and abstracting. After briefly describing problem setting as a significant yet invisible practice already underlying technical communication, he then describes a vignette from a digital marketing and design firm to foreground problem setting as creative, on-the-spot reflective work that we often use to invent, rather than discern, problems in unstable situations. The larger goal of this article is to further investigate Schön’s past construction in order to examine how the practice of problem setting affects our ability to act within the instability of digital, divergent, and knowledge-intensive settings—the kinds of settings we regularly face in the workplace and the classroom.

The invisible web and the need for new research methodologies

A research question that I believe will be important for technical communication practitioners and scholars in the next decade is as follows How do we do develop big data methods for locating and studying web-based technical communication artifacts?

Educating Technical Communication Teachers: The Origins, Development, and Present Status of the Course, “Teaching Technical Writing” at Illinois State University

Since the early 1980s, Illinois State University’s English Department has educated numerous technical communication practitioners as well as dozens of teachers of technical communication throughout the United States. Today, the program’s faculty members are nationally recognized for their contributions to scholarship and education and its Ph.D. and M.A. students are sought after to teach in the technical communication programs of other universities. A critical component of this success was the development of the graduate course, Teaching Technical Writing in 1990. This essay situates the development of that course in the history not only of the technical communication program at Illinois State University but in the history of the technical communication field, particularly since 1950. Although the essay focuses on one course in one midsized, Midwestern U.S. University, it is, I believe, exemplary of the development and current status of technical communication pedagogy throughout the U.S.

Rubric Use in Technical Communication: Exploring the Process of Creating Valid and Reliable Assessment Tools

Assessing the quality of student efforts and products is a continual necessity for academics and practitioners in technical communication; however, the process of constructing valid and reliable rubrics remains an underexplored topic in the field. This paper first addresses some of the assessment concerns and then describes a case study that documents the development and implementation of one holistic and five analytic rubrics to evaluate undergraduate projects. The discussion focuses on identifying site-specific criteria and training effective raters and is intended to help academics respond to their required accreditation mandates and offer practitioners alternatives for evaluating products and services.

Practitioner Research Instruction

Most technical communication practitioners conduct research throughout their careers. Yet, a survey of the Web sites of 114 undergraduate technical communication programs between September 2006 and April 2007 revealed that 65% (about two thirds) of these programs are providing minimal or no exposure to research instruction and therefore are not sufficiently preparing students to handle the types of research they will encounter in their upcoming careers. Given the disconnect between the centrality of research in the work that technical communicators do and the low presence of research instruction at the undergraduate level, academics need to look for ways to overcome institutional and other constraints in order to give research training greater priority in their undergraduate programs.

English

This article is based on the author's experiences in providing documentation and KM-based services to a variety of audiences. Starting from the basic definitions of the fields of information science (IS) and technical communication (TC), the interdisciplinary nature of the emerging field of knowledge management (KM) and the role of TC practitioners in building KM systems are described. DOI: 10.14429/djlit.28.5.213

Using the Internet as a Tool for Public Service: Creating a Community History Web Site

Creating a community history Web site is a way for technical communication practitioners, students, and teachers to improve their expertise while performing a valuable public service. Developers of this kind of Web site combine personal interest in the history and culture of their chosen communities with professional interest in a wide range of skills: for example, online research, Web site design, creation of artwork, photography, graphics editing, collaboration, professional/technical writing, as well as site publication and promotion. Technical communicators working on community history Web sites enjoy creative freedom that makes these projects especially engaging and fun. While learning about subjects of particular interest and improving professional skills, developers gain the satisfaction of trying to help communities increase civic pride and heritage tourism. Also, the technical communication profession benefits when its members demonstrate good citizenship to employers, other constituencies, and the public.

Toward a Post-Techne-Or, Inventing Pedagogies for Professional Writing

This article examines the concept of techne in relation to situatedness. Techn� is conceived as techniques for situating bodies in contexts. Although many theorists and practitioners in technical communication are working from ecological and posthuman perspectives with regard to interface designs, this article argues for extending those perspectives to workplace and classroom situations. Starting from a Heideggerian reading of techne, the article moves toward the concept of post-techne, which remakes pedagogical techniques for writing and inventing in institutional contexts.

Learning-To-Communicate and Communicating-To-Learn in Veterinary Medicine: A Survey of Writing, Speaking, and Reading in Veterinary Medical Curricula

This article reports the results of a survey of thirty-one colleges of veterinary medicine in the United States and Canada to identify common writing, speaking, and reading tasks performed by veterinary medical students and practicing veterinarians. From the twenty-seven colleges that responded (87% response rate), we learned that writing, speaking, and reading tasks are assigned in almost every veterinary medical course and that the communication tasks assigned in veterinary medical courses accord well with the communication tasks expected to be performed by practicing veterinarians. Along with these learning-to-communicate tasks, veterinary medical students are also assigned communicating-to-learn tasks. Unlike many of the writing-to-learn tasks associated with writing-across-the-curriculum programs, communicating-to-learn tasks in veterinary medical courses seem concerned with teaching students to think like veterinary medical practitioners. The emphasis on communication in veterinary medical curricula is probably due to some extent to the emphasis on problem-based learning, a curricular innovation popular in veterinary medical education. Problem-based learning requires that instruction be designed around cases or problems to be solved rather than topics or information to be covered. This merging of research and practice in the education of veterinary medical students may offer lessons for the education of professional practitioners in technical communication.

Technical communication from 1950–1998: Where are we now?

The changes in technical communication education between 1950 and 1998 have led to disciplinary maturity: the development of academic programs and of a body of innovative research. This disciplinary maturity parallels the professional identity and growth of numbers of technical communication practitioners. As a thriving multidiscipline with many direct research and pedagogical connections to the workplace, technical communication can uniquely influence workforce values, providing a new, evolving disciplinary model for higher education. However, technical communication's disciplinary maturity also means a movement away from practice and from the service course, the foundations of technical communication as a discipline and the sources of its workplace influence.

A feminist perspective on technical communicative action: Exploring how alternative worldviews affect environmental remediation efforts

Because technical communicators are expected increasingly to participate in environmental communication, technical communication practitioners, researchers, and teachers should be aware of current ...

Broadening the base of a technical communication program: An industrial/academic alliance

Developing alliances with industry may be one of the primary factors in creating a technical communication program that blends sound rhetorical theory and pedagogy with the discourse knowledge of technical communication practitioners. Creating an Advisory Board is one way to forge this alliance. This article describes how such a board was created, the influence it had upon program development, and the insights both industry and academia gained from this alliance. Although industry and academia are not the same, both had overlapping goals: to develop a symbiotic relationship that would provide students and faculty with the technological expertise practicing technical communicators could offer, but, at the same time, to provide a construct true to the missions of a liberal education.

Computer-Based Writing and Communication: Some Implications for Technical Communication Activities

Most research on writing has focussed on the work of single authors working by hand on prose texts. However, much professional work is collaborative, computer-based, not exclusively prose, and not well studied. Some preliminary research suggests that the use of computers will affect the cognitive activities of individual authors in several domains of immediate relevance to composition and technical communication practitioners: planning activities, editing activities, the writing of novice computer users or poor typists, and writing for electronic mail and other electronic communication. Research reported here suggests that the rapidly increasing capability of computer-based writing systems will force communication researchers to 1) broaden their basic conception of and methods of studying “author” to include authoring teams, 2) broaden the type of material studied from that which is purely or largely textual to that which much more frequently includes other types of information, and 3) track changes in “genre conventions” resulting from the increased capabilities of computer-based systems—in short, to assess the impacts of the medium on the message.