Technical Communication

Written by two highly experienced teachers in the field of document design, Designing Visual Language offers useful strategies and tools for document design of all types. A chief goal is to enable students to extend to visual design the rhetorical approach they assimilate in writing and editing courses. The text focuses on the kinds of situations and practical documents that occur in the workplace and blends this focus with a rhetorical approach that ties design to the audience, purpose, and context of messages.

This book deals with ethics and value systems as they relate to technical and scientific discourse. While it covers several traditional ethical theories from classical to contemporary times, it also emphasizes that ethics is a personal matter of judgment. The book shows students how to become involved with thinking about and applying these theories to their own discourse. The fact that there are no easy answers to ethical questions is emphasized.

Issues that are covered include how and why information is obtained and how it will be used; how the meaning of technical terms shift with the value perspectives behind them; and how science and technology can be used to put forth questionable values or to serve values not apparent in the discourse.

Global Contexts offers a series of case studies about real and fictitious situations that allow students to understand the issues surrounding international and cross-cultural technical communication.

Cases are individually authored and have been created by many of the leading authorities in the field of international technical communication. The text is intended to help graduate and undergraduate students understand the context of and issues involved in writing for international audiences, as it has become increasingly common in the evolving global marketplace to address such audiences, especially in technical fields.

This guide teaches students and professionals a systematic process for researching, designing, writing, and submitting successful grant-seeking proposals.

Focusing on proposals submitted for government, foundation, and corporation funding, Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age leads the reader through a six-step grant-seeking process, from researching potential funders, to designing, writing and submitting a proposal that follows the funder's guidelines. Grounded in theory, but rooted in successful practice, it teaches students what really works—a third of students who submit proposals based on this text's approach get funded within a year. The text's guided discovery process provides a useful framework for novice writers while its thinking-planning exercises offer useful ways of organizing information and discovering what still need to be researched.

A Legal Primer for the Technical Age is an introduction to the essentials of law for technical communicators, multimedia developers, graphic designers, and other creative communicators.

This primer presents the basics of the law of agency and business organizations, contracts and intellectual property, as well as the differences between ethics and law. It will give creative communicators a general understanding of what they can expect from applied law in their workplace settings, helping them make informed choices in their professional relationships far into the future.

Management Principles and Practices for Technical Communicators presents theory and practice in a manner designed to help practicing managers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates.

The book covers areas of management that are specific to technical communication groups, focusing on how such groups should position themselves within larger organizations and how they should interact and communicate with other groups. These tasks and others are consistently informed by the book's four main premises: that technical communication managers need to conceptualize what they do, that they must understand and participate in the overall goals of their larger organizations, that technical communicators are developers who create products and services and not merely support, and that technical communication managers must educate peers and upper management to the value that their groups add to the development process.

Oral Presentations for Technical Communication provides what most technical communication textbooks lack: clear, accessible instruction on speaking. This book helps students and professionals master public speaking in a technical or scientific environment, whether it be through traditional presentations with whiteboards and flipcharts or presentations with computer software such as PowerPoint. Unlike most general speech texts, which include examples from various disciplines, Oral Presentations uses specific examples from the fields of science and technology and shows how skilled technical communicators make complex information accessible to non-technical audiences.

The first three parts of the book focus on basic skills and concepts, including four basic types of presentations relevant to technical communication. The last two parts introduce more advanced topics, such as legal, privacy, and censorship issues, and the changing nature of presentations in the digital age.

This is a conceptually rich textbook that teaches Web design skills and offers practical guidance within a coherent framework of information-design principles and hypertext theory.

The authors believe website design should be taught as a substantive body of knowledge, an application of rhetoric to a new non-linear medium. This book offers students a great deal of practical, mainstream design guidance—as much as can be found in any trade book. But in contrast to trade books, Principles of Web Design offers a coherent, evolving framework of ideas.

Grounded in the practices of ethical deliberation and civic action, this text creates a resource for helping technical and professional communication students and teachers implement service-learning projects in campus and larger communities.

Designed for a wide-ranging audience, Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication address both advanced and beginning students and both veteran service-learning teachers and those trying it for the first time.

The text begins with three chapters that define and explain the authors' approach to service-learning and develop a rhetorical toolbox for implementing this approach. The remainder of the book is loosely organized around the process of developing, executing, and evaluating service-learning projects. These “process” chapters teach rhetorical strategies, ethical concerns, genre conventions, and style principles in an integrated, contextualized way. Discussions of rhetoric and ethics are supplemented with heuristics for analyzing the larger cultural effects of service-learning projects.

This market-leading text has been thoroughly revised to reflect recent changes in technology, workplace practices and the global marketplace. The book progresses from concepts and basic copyediting to comprehensive editing, management and production issues. Coverage now includes a new chapter on client projects.

Technical Editing takes a comprehensive approach to editing and defining editorial responsibility in terms of information design and the overall effectiveness of a document in helping readers understand and complete tasks. Expanding the concept of editing from a narrow focus on sentence-level revisions for correctness, this book encourages students to think about the effects of word choices, sentences, organization and design. Students learn that the measure of a “good” document is in part outside that document, in the document’s “match” to the users' needs and the author's goals.

Few marketing professionals, let alone graduating students, are prepared for the breakneck speed of technical marketing communications in today's Internet economy. This book provides that preparation.

The ease of publishing content to the Internet has challenged many basic communication principles.

Harner and Zimmerman's Technical Marketing Communication offers a conversational, easy-to-follow mix of fundamentals, planning tools, and real-life marketing examples. Harner and Zimmerman first clearly explain the role and responsibility of marketing communication in a technology-filled world. Then they progressively introduce the concepts of needs analysis, audience analysis, strategy development, media choices, tactics, and continuous evaluation. The text is filled with first-hand insights into the successes and failures of technical marketing communication in today's corporate world.

Corporate communication teams as well as students can immediately apply these concepts to their next technical marketing project.

Part of the new Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication, Technical Writing Style is equally appropriate as a core text or as a supplement. This text offers the most current and comprehensive instruction available in achieving an effective style in technical docu- ments. It shows that technical prose style varies from the highly formal to the colloquial, from the pretentious to the plain, and it demonstrates the many stylistic strategies writers should consider for every technical document they write.

Among the major topics included are: style and technical writing style; audiences and discourse communities; persuasion through style; diction; style in sentences and paragraphs; tone; bias; ethics; and editing for style. Throughout, engaging real-world case studies and numerous examples reinforce the author's discussion of effective and ineffective technical prose styles.

Built on a solid foundation of current research in the field, Carol Barnum's Usability Testing and Research provides a comprehensive, up-to-date perspective in this increasingly important area of technical communication.

Adopting a practical approach to the field of usability and the techniques for usability testing, this book lays out the subject from beginning to end: starting with definitions of usability, usability testing, and the way in which usability testing fits into a user-centered design process, then progressing through other methods of gathering data, as well as methods for learning about users, tasks, and environments. Following a chapter on ways to test throughout product design, the second half of the book focuses on planning, conducting, and reporting the results of usability testing. The last chapter discusses the usability testing of web sites.

Founded on rhetorical principles guiding the field of technical/business/professional writing, Writing Proposals offers a comprehensive, activity-based approach to proposal and grant proposal development.

Writing Proposals provides readers with a full range of tools needed to develop sound, convincing proposals.  This comprehensive and up-to-date text, takes readers step-by-step through the development process, helping them invent their ideas, organize their materials, write in plain and persuasive styles, and create an effective visual design.

The inclusion of grantwriting expands the range of uses for this book. The second edition offers full coverage of this important subgenre of proposal writing. One of the case studies that runs through the book shows a team of people writing a grant to a private foundation. Readers will find the book very helpful for writing grants to fund research and good causes.

Writing Proposals offers a comprehensive approach to proposal development which is often not found in other books on the subject.

The book takes readers step-by-step through the development process, helping them invent their ideas, organize their materials, write in plain and persuasive styles, and create an effective visual design. Another strength is that the book uses “visual learning” techniques to improve the readers' creativity as they write proposals. This text provides students with additional material frequently not found in other texts on writing proposals, including a full chapter on creating budgets, and thorough coverage of using the Internet.

Founded on time-tested rhetorical principles that guide the field of technical/business/professional writing, this comprehensive and up-to-date text provides students with the full range of tools needed for them to develop sound, convincing proposals.

Part of the Allyn & Bacon series in technical communication, Writing Software Documentation features a step-by-step strategy to writing and describing procedures.

This task-oriented book is designed to support both college students taking a course and professionals working in the field. Teaching apparatus includes complete programs for students to work on and a full set of project tracking forms, as well as a broad range of examples including Windows-style pages and screens and award-winning examples from STC competitions.

This is the first collection of narratives by practicing technical communicators telling their own personal stories about the workplace and their lives on and off the job.

The stories vividly demonstrate the unique power of narrative as a teaching and learning tool. Unlike fabricated cases, these real-life narratives show new and veteran technical writers at work on the job, dealing with tasks, clients, and co-workers, and revealing their insights, values, and attitudes about their work. The stories also show the skills required in the profession and the ethical and other issues raised in the course of the workday.

Writing for the Government blends experience-based theory with actual workplace applications from a wide range of fields and documents to prepare readers for positions in government.

Taking a rhetorical approach to writing, the authors encourage students to consider every document’s audience, purpose, and cultural context and increase the effectiveness of their communication.  Writing is also presented as a process, particularly collaborative, in which authors have a stake in the outcome.  The purpose is to prepare students to become “adaptable” writers regardless of their job, their agency, or its writing tasks.

Practical, applied, and up-to-the-minute, Writing for the Health Professions teaches students, healthcare professionals, and professional writers the essential skills in medical and health communications.

Drawing on her extensive experience as a nurse, cardio-pulmonary technician, medical writer, and writing teacher, Barbara Heifferon addresses the communications requirements of the healthcare professions and those who write in these high-tech fields. This comprehensive text covers writing situations and documents common in hospitals, clinics, HMOs, health insurance companies, public health campaigns, and other healthcare environments. Special attention is given to visual and electronic forms of communication, including Web sites and multimedia productions.

This rhetorical, multi-disciplinary guide teaches the major genres of science writing, including research reports, grant proposals, conference presentations, and a variety of forms of public communication.

Writing in the Sciences combines a descriptive approach—helping students to recognize distinctive features of common genres in their fields—with a rhetorical focus—helping them to analyze how, why, and for whom texts are created by scientists. Multiple samples from real research cases illustrate a range of scientific disciplines and audiences for scientific research, along with the corresponding differences in focus, arrangement, style, and other rhetorical dimensions. Comparisons among disciplines provide the opportunity for students to identify common conventions in science and investigate variation across fields.