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Describes the job of a technical editor. (MKM)

Notes that technical writing in industry includes instruction manuals, proposals, reports, and brochures and requires quality, quantity, and teamwork. (MKM)

First-hand experience in the business world can help an instructor better judge the content of the technical writing course and the competence of the materials to be graded. (MKM)

Describes the contributions made by the graphic designer to technical publications. (MKM)

The recognition of social work as a writing-intensive profession is the first step needed to bridge the divide between academic and practice writing. The demonstration of persuasive writing skills ...

This article focuses on how formative feedback can be used to help engineering students write precise and coherent management summaries that appeal to a mixed audience. Management summaries are especially challenging to master as students must strive for a balance between adhering to scientific standards and being intelligible for a wider non-expert readership. Students of Energy and Environmental Technology at the school of engineering (FHNW) in Switzerland write a total of six technical reports about their project work (mostly in German). By analysing two management summaries, the focus is laid on the lecturers’ approach of relying on formative feedback which supports and accompanies the students’ iterative writing processes. It is shown how in early semesters lecturers provide hands-on guidance, such as suggesting discourse markers or pinpointing vague references to sharpen students’ awareness of the need to write as concisely as possible for mixed audiences.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

This article explores the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, shedding light on the emergence of instructional writing from oral instruction. The 1549 text evinces qualities of preliterate oral communication identified by Ong. By contrast, the 1604 addendum reveals a trend toward modern plain style, which is even more pronounced in the 1647 Westminster Shorter Catechism. The evidence indicates the oral features were useful to the text’s technical aims. What Ramist plain style gains in precision and objectivity comes at the cost of other useful features, such as reiteration, contextualization, and agonism, which (in Tannen's phrase) involve a greater relative focus on interpersonal involvement between speaker and auditor/ reader.

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of embedding review and drill as a strategy in teaching technical writing to the second year students of Bachelor in Architectural Engineering Technology (BArET) at Surigao State College of Technology, Surigao City. It also probed the respondents’ level of writing competency both in the control and experimental groups as to grammatical accuracy, paragraph organization, and mechanics before and after instruction. Moreover, it investigated the significant difference on the writing competency of the respondents in both groups exposed to the conventional and review-and-drill strategy of instructions. The study employed a quasi-experimental research design. A research-made questionnaire was used to gather the data from the eighty (80) respondents. The data were analyzed through Mean and Standard Deviation, T-test for dependent and independent samples. Results revealed that the writing competency of the respondents in the control and the experimental groups did not meet expectations before instruction. However, after instructions were given, writing competency of the former became “accomplished” while that of the latter became “exemplary”. With regard to the effectiveness of the two instructions, both are effective; but the embedded review-and-drill strategy prevailed more effective based on the mean gains obtained by the respondents in the experimental group. Based on the foregoing findings of the study, the following conclusions were drawn: the writing competency of the respondents has improved after embedding review and drill as a new strategy of teaching and the conventional one as well. Nevertheless, they both excelled after being taught with lessons using different instructions; the conventional and the embedded review and drill in teaching technical writing are effective in developing writing competency of the students; and, embedding review and drill in teaching technical writing is more effective compared to the conventional instruction.

Improving assessment of engineering students’ technical communication skills is a good way to monitor and improve teaching of these skills, and positively impact associated learning. The present study reports on a method used to assess students’ technical writing abilities, while also evaluating the impact of technical writing-related instruction and associated curricular and pedagogical approaches. In this way, students’ improvements can be mapped to instruction methods. The strategies for enhancing the delivery of technical writing-related instruction are discussed in terms of the proposed assessment method. This method has three main parts: 1) Sample Generation Procedure – the strategic establishment of a pair of written reports, serving as BEFORE-Labs and AFTER-Labs, and similar enough in topic to justify comparison after assessment, but unexpected to students so that reports are not simply replicated; 2) A Rubric for Technical Writing – encompassing major features of technical writing requirements of engineering lab courses and developed to be both descriptive (having descriptions in each category, to make expectations explicit for evaluators and students) and holistic (having short summarizing narratives for different levels of work, to capture overall quality quickly); and 3) an Evaluation Demonstration – in which a matrix of faculty instructors from sections of different engineering lab courses used the rubric to retroactively assess the samples. Together, these efforts are used not only to assess improvements in students’ technical writing, but by effect also gauge teaching and effectiveness of curricular and pedagogical interventions. In two engineering lab courses, a thermo-fluid lab course and a solid mechanics lab course, BEFORE-Labs and AFTER-Labs were generated using either a method of impromptu “one-hour labs”, with experiments conducted and reports submitted all within an hour at the beginning and end of one semester, or comparison of full lab reports from consecutive semesters of students. Evaluation results clearly show that there were aggregate improvements in students’ technical writing skills, and as such it is concluded that the teaching methods were effective.

This paper describes the guidelines for writing effective manuscript that complies with general scientific writing style and in particular with those that are incorporated by the editors and reviewers of the Global Clinical Engineering Journal (www.GlobalCE.org) when they evaluate submission of manuscripts. Readers of this paper will gain understandings of the manuscript preferred writing format and of the submission’s individual sections. Examples are provided for each of individual sections that further explain their purpose and contrast of their various styles. When the guidance provided in this paper is incorporated into a new submission, it is expected to elevate the quality of the writing as well as the desire of young clinical engineers to publish about their work and the interest of the scientific community to read it.

This nationwide study of business communication instructors examined course delivery, course outlook, topics and depth of coverage, social media and technology coverage, diversity coverage, critical thinking, and accessibility. The outlook for the course appears positive and promising, and instructors continue to add content to the course. An important finding is that business communication instructors’ level of confidence in technology significantly affects how they cover technology-mediated communication. Therefore, we suggest professional associations and higher education institutions should provide more opportunities for voluntary training in these newer communication technologies. Further research is needed about the strain placed on business communication instructors.

In this study, a Scientific Communication Curriculum (SCC) was designed for middle school students and teachers to equip them with scientific communication (SC) skills, and the skills included in the SCC were integrated into the middle school lessons. Within the framework of the Curriculum Design Research (CDR), designing the Scientific Communication Curriculum (SCC) and integrating into the lessons were conducted by two cycles and each cycle consisted of four stages; analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation. In the first cycle, SCC was developed and implemented for the evaluating the effectiveness of the SCC in terms of teaching scientific communication skills to the students with the help of Information Technology (IT) course teacher. In the second cycle, the scientific communication skills were integrated into the lessons in collaboration with the teachers and the School Librarian (SL). As a part of the design process, the Teacher Training Program (TTP) was organized to equip all middle school teachers with scientific communication skills and to help them how to teach and how to integrate the SC skills. Furthermore the TTP served as a professional development component of the CDR framework. Based on the quasi-experimental study results and also opinions of the students and the IT teacher towards the first implementation stage, it was concluded that the SCC was effective in equipping students with scientific communication skills. Regarding the findings from the second cycle, the integration process was satisfying for the teachers and the SL. Teachers found the TTP helpful for their professional development. According to views of the teachers and the SL on the integration process was a positive and useful step for them. The results of this study were addressed and discussed under the headings of design principles, curriculum components, and professional development that are components of the CDR model.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

As people today use information products in contexts with distractions, we need to design for people’s attention. User experience design routinely relies on behavioral design to engage distracted users and nudge them toward specific behavior. Although practiced in user experience design, behavioral design is less known in technical communication. In this article, we use the CHOICES (Context, Habits, Other people, Incentives, Congruence, Emotions, and Salience) framework developed by McKinsey’s Behavioral Lab to introduce students to learn about behavioral design principles that make use of cognitive biases to influence people. We maintain that behavioral design is useful for technical communicators because they create digital assets that are part of the user experience.

Many entrepreneurs are moving away from creating traditional written business plans as they are too expensive and time-consuming to create, and they are instead using the streamlined visual invention tool known as the business canvas to articulate the details of their business. This article describes what business canvases are, covering the two main types of canvases and their characteristics. Then, the article provides a case study which illustrates how canvases can be used. I argue that this important visual genre is under researched and could have important pedagogical uses in professional and technical writing.

This article describes a technical writing assignment that requires students to use Minecraft to design and document interactive learning environments. In this project, students balance a critical awareness of this game's technical features with a rhetorical understanding of how those features impact the audience’s experiences and actions. This article demonstrates how video game-based writing projects can help students understand the role of an audience's agency in technical communication.

The COVID‐19 outbreak has shut down universities, and teaching faculty have moved to online classrooms to address students. This change has been supported by numerous online teaching tools and development of virtual classrooms. Undergraduate research programs in the sciences and biochemistry/molecular biology teaching labs, however, are affected by this change due to inaccessibility to laboratories. This communication outlines three concepts to engage undergraduate students who are involved in research: (a) remote data analysis, (b) literature review and science writing, and (c) science journal clubs.

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To assess collaboration, researchers integrated usability testing on workshop resources with 15 ( N = 15) participants, postworkshop questionnaires with 34 ( N = 34) participants, and interviews with 2 ( N = 2) community partners. Participants responded positively, and 47% of workshop attendees found jobs. The article argues that community-based research should use participatory and iterative models and resilience theory.

This article uses personas to illustrate the range of technical communication knowledge work developed through its practitioners—to articulate the functions, characteristics, traits, skills, and workplace styles of positions someone in the field might pursue. Recent research has provided valuable data about the expanding and evolving skill sets of the technical/professional communicator. We build on that by triangulating the data from an analysis of job postings, a survey of technical communicators, and interviews and embedded observations of practitioners to develop personas of technical/professional communicators on the job. The personas can help students, programs, and practitioners understand and navigate the many types of roles that are available in the field.