3:2: Writing the Future
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.
- Pedagogy and Technical Communication: The Power of Communal Learning
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Jana Jones
As technical communication teachers, we have the power to influence the status of our field and foster an understanding of good communication skills. We also face the struggle of imparting writing and speaking fundamentals as well as promoting advanced skills such as variation and innovation. - Towards a Sense of Ethics for Technical Communication
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Alicia McBride
Many articles from recent decades begin with the assumption that technical communicators do not have much power to make ethical decisions about their work. We need to start with a basic understanding of the relationships that technical communicators build with that audience in their work and identify ways in which those relationships might have ethical implication. - Defining Technical Communication: Is It a Goal or a Sisyphean Task?
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Alexander Thayer
Defining the field of technical communication is a potentially impossible task. In some respects, the process of defining this profession is similar to Sisyphus' eternally futile task: Just as one theory is proposed within the technical communication discourse community, another article is published and the previous theory suddenly collapses. Unlike Sisyphus, however, the members of the discourse community should be able to successfully create a definition of the field based upon the best ideas from previous theories and writings. - Building the Semantic Web
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Peter Emonds-Banfield
In the information age it is widely understood that there is now too much information. Some of this newly created information will most certainly be valuable, but despite marked improvement in search tools, finding the valuable information is a slow panhandle. Perhaps in light of this situation, the W3C under the direction of Berners-Lee has begun to build the foundation for the next phase of the web. This phase, called the Semantic Web, will make information stored with this technology much more processible by machines.