3:1: Professionalism in Technical Communication
Up one levelThe status of technical communication as a profession has been a subject in debate in recent decades. This issue discusses how to address professional/practitioner dichotomies within the field of technical communication, how to increase our status within organizations and how should could and should imagine ourselves as a professional community.
- Reconsidering the Role of Plain Style in Technical Writing
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Jill Campbell
According to the technical writing textbook used in the Introductory to Technical Writing class I teach, there are two purposes and at least five audiences of technical documents. Yet students are taught only one style of writing to satisfy all writing situations: the plain style. This essay examines the history and current state of plain style's role in technical writing. It further discusses plain style's relation to rhetorical and instrumental approaches to technical communication, and finally offers writing teachers a new approach to plain style and instrumental language in technical writing. - Professional versus Practitioner: Making the Case for Theory
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Susan Hubbard
The knowledge of theory is something that I have at my disposal to use in helping me anticipate the needs of my audience in regards to context and meaning. Understanding theory assists me in creating roles that readers enjoy assuming. - The Role of the Professional Technical Communicator
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Gail Gilliland
Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities has been highly regarded for the past two decades. This paper deals with the idea of multiple interpretive communities as they relate to technical communicators. Technical communicators have a duty to use rhetorical devices and embedded structural cues to help readers identify the correct interpretive framework. - Just A Cog in the Machine?
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Lisa Clare MacQueen
If we work at a large company or bureaucracy, the majority of us will play the role of cog no matter which rung of the ladder of hierarchy we happen to be standing on. - A Cubist Approach to Analyzing Interpretive Communities
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Brianne Connolly
Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities has been highly regarded for the past two decades. This paper deals with the idea of multiple interpretive communities as they relate to technical communicators. Technical communicators have a duty to use rhetorical devices and embedded structural cues to help readers identify the correct interpretive framework.