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Questions are an important means by which students actively participate in and exercise some control over the moment-to-moment focus of writing center conferences. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of student questions in 35 writing center conferences, we examined the frequency and type of students’ questions, finding no differences between native English speakers and non-native English speakers’ overall question frequency or their use of each question type. Students used common-ground questions most frequently, and knowledge-deficit questions second-most frequently. Our qualitative analysis revealed how students used questions to coconstruct potential language for their papers and to steer the course of their conferences. It also revealed the dilemma that arises when a student’s questions probe not only the tutor’s writing knowledge but also their subject-matter knowledge. This study demonstrates some ways that students take power over their conferences by asking questions and indicates that tutors might expect similar question frequency and similar types of questions from NESs and NNESs. It also suggests that tutors might use the tutoring strategy of reading aloud to create conversational openings for students’ questions. And it suggests potential benefits of attending to the type of questions that students use, as these types can indicate on a local level the extent of students’ contribution to their papers.

This article provides an account of the academic location of 142 technical communication programs as reported on program Web sites as well as in an online survey sent to technical communication program coordinators. According to the findings, most technical communication programs are located in departments of English, but programs outside of English are more likely to offer graduate degrees and a more technically oriented program focus.

In this microanalysis, a university writing center conference with an experienced tutor and a student he has never met before is analyzed for the tutor’s use of direct instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding. Along with verbal expressions of scaffolding, this analysis also considers the tutor’s hand gestures—topic gestures, which operationalize instruction and cognitive scaffolding, and interactive gestures, which operationalize motivational scaffolding. As defined in this analysis, instruction is the most directive of the three strategies and includes telling. Also directive, cognitive scaffolding leads and supports the student in making correct and useful responses, while motivational scaffolding provides feedback and helps maintain focus on the task and motivation. The microanalysis points to the importance of the student’s cognitive and motivational readiness to learn and the need for the student to control the agenda throughout the conference. It also contextualizes admonitions against tutor directiveness.

This survey research on National Writing Project (NWP) teachers and comparison teachers (N = 35) in a southeastern state found that the NWP teachers wrote more than the comparison teachers did and that the participating teachers' writing was associated with students' achievement in writing. The pattern of the impact of writing life on achievement was different among the NWP teachers than it was among the comparison teachers: NWP teachers who wrote had students whose achievement in writing increased significantly, whereas comparison teachers and NWP teachers who wrote less did not. This finding of an interaction effect between NWP affiliation and teachers' writing life in association with student achievement suggests that the writing by teachers central to NWP professional development may combine with the two other core elements of the NWP's programs across its 198 sites (demonstrations of practices for teaching writing and professional reading and study) to improve student achievement in writing....

The purposes of this study are to determine the current status of scholarship published in five major technical communication journals about women and feminism and to identify changes in focus that may have occurred over the last five years. We begin with a discussion of the frequency of publication for articles whose titles have keywords relating to women and feminism. After identifying 21 articles, we consider the thematic patterns in the narrowed corpus. We conclude that scholarly publication about women and feminism in technical communication has moved from a moderate or radical concern for inclusion to a postmodern concern for critique of visual, verbal, and mechanical “technologies,” which previously were not considered political.

In the past, veterinarians have participated in interprofessional collaboration to support the health promotion and disease prevention goals and objectives described in the United States Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Healthy People 2010. Such projects have resulted from collaboration resulting from a writing competition, the DHHS's Secretary's Award for Innovations in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (Secretary's Award). The Secretary's Award, which interfaces with Healthy People 2010, has been effectively used as a means of training community-responsive veterinary students in a variety of interprofessional collaborations. All future health care professionals should be trained in innovative interprofessional problem solving, the 'art of thinking outside the box', and the importance of responsiveness to the needs of the community. These health professional students' collaborative efforts are vital for the continual improvement of any nation's health care system in the 21st century.

This article interprets technical communication research about sex differences according to social role theory, which argues that sex differences are enculturated through experiences associated with social positions in the family and the workplace. It reevaluates technical communication research about sex differences in communicative and collaborative styles in the classroom and the workplace and about the effects of the double bind that women experience in the workplace. The article concludes with a recommendation that theoretical frameworks explaining sex differences remain flexible and able to account for social change.

This study extends the corpus of an earlier qualitative content analysis about women and feminism and identifies the knowledge claims and themes in the 20 articles that discuss gender differences. Knowledge claims are reflected in expressions such as androgyny; natural collaborators; hierarchical, dialogic, and asymmetrical modes; web; connected knowers; different voice; ethic of care; ethic of objectivity; continuous with others; connected to the world; the cultural divide; visual metaphor; andgender-free science. Built from knowledge claims, the themes in the 20 articles include gender differences in language use, learning, and knowledge construction; gender differences in collaboration; and reviews of research about gender differences and political calls for action. Although the 20 articles provide little support for the existence of gender differences, by introducing, discussing, testing, and revising new ideas about women and feminism, they serve as an example of the process of knowledge accumulation and remodeling in technical communication.

Chapter 1: Talk about Writing: An Introduction to Our Empirical Study Chapter 2: Literature Review Chapter 3: Methods Chapter 4: The Three Conference Stages and Tutoring Strategies: The Overall Results Chapter 5: Instruction Strategies Chapter 6: Cognitive Scaffolding Strategies Chapter 7: Motivational Scaffolding Strategies Chapter 8: Case Study: A Writing Center Tutor Becomes a Writing Fellow Chapter 9: Talk about Writing: A Conclusion to Our Empirical Study Appendix A: "Conducting a Conference with a Student" Appendix B: "Notes for Students" Form and Instructions Appendix C: The T5-S5 Conference Coded for Stages, Topic Episodes, and Strategies Appendix D: Questions Coding Scheme References

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.

This article discusses a theoretical framework for situating interpretations of textual data collected during research. Based on the reader response theory of Louise Rosenblatt, this framework consists of a continuum representing the range of interpretative assumptions—stances—researchers can bring to their reading of textual data. The continuum is bounded by the two most extreme stances defined by Rosenblatt as efferent, roughly comparable to the stereotypical scientific interpretative tradition, and aesthetic, roughly comparable to the stereotypical humanities interpretative tradition.

This study uses qualitative content analysis to discuss current perspectives in technical communication pedagogy. It examines the 1990-94 issues of five major scholarly journals—a collection of 563 articles—to identify 98 articles mentioning teaching in undergraduate technical communication courses. Influenced by differing theoretical and practical approaches, the 98 articles were classified according to four pedagogical perspectives: (1) the functional perspective, based on empirical research and workplace experience; (2) the rhetorical perspective, based on scholarship in the humanities and influenced by rhetorical theory; (3) the ideological perspective, also based on scholarship in the humanities but influenced by critical theory; and (4) the intercultural and feminist perspective, a bridging perspective based on both empirical research and critical theory. This article discusses the four perspectives in terms of the educational goals of communicative competence (the ability to use language to succeed in the workplace) and social critique (the ability to question existing social structures and to envision cultural change).

This study describes the roles and responsibilities of three editors employed in the publications unit of a large government agency. Along with the story of each editor, the article presents generalizations about the editing process in this particular organization. The description suggests that editing is a complex, meaning-making process. The three editors seem to make changes in the documents they edit based on their expert knowledge of writing, their empathy for readers, and their assumption of authority over a document. Although they all make rule-based changes that rely on external authorities, such as style manuals, they vary greatly in their readiness to use their personal authority in interpreting the needs of an audience. The editors gain the authority they need to make reader-based changes by assuming the role of language specialists and by enhancing the teaching role important in their organization.

One approach to exploring context in technical communication is through the speech community. Composed of people who share the means and the need to communicate with each other, the speech community is essentially a social entity, its boundaries determined by feelings of commonality among the community's members. In considering the communication that occurs in a speech community, this article asks two general questions. First, what is the relationship among language, culture, and thought? Second, what knowledge is needed for effective communication? Answering the first question requires an exploration of the Whorfian hypothesis as it may apply to technical communication, while answering the second requires an expansion of Chomsky's grammatical competence to include language function and use and a broadening of Flower and Hayes's investigations of cognitive structures beyond the isolated experimental situation into the community.

In the 1989 report by the Pew National Veterinary Education Program (PNVEP), communication skills topped the list of characteristics the veterinary graduate should possess in order to function effectively in the twenty-first century. To determine the reading, writing, and oral communication requirements and opportunities in veterinary curricula in the US and Canada, and to determine the perceived communication tasks that might be commonly required of practicing veterinarians in the next century, we sent a 15-item communications skills questionnaire to the academic deans of the 31 veterinary curricula in the US and Canada. The results reinforce the importance of communication skills in veterinary medicine, as detailed by the PNVEP over 10 years ago. Based on the responses to our questionnaire and on our own experiences with veterinary medical students, we make several recommendations to enhance communication instruction in veterinary medical curricula.

This article interprets research in linguistics and psychology in order to revise and enlarge existing definitions of readability. It suggests instructional methods for teaching students to compose more coherent—and, hence, more readable—technical writing. For a text to be readable, it must be coherent. However, like readability, coherence is variable, depending on the writer and the reader as well as the text itself. The reader is able to understand a message by relying on his shared knowledge with the writer. A starting place for comprehension, cultural and professional knowledge and linguistic knowledge allow readers to set up expectations about a text and to read efficiently. Because accommodating shared knowledge is vital to readable writing, we should teach students how to assess typical audiences and compose in forms routinely used for technical documents. With practice in audience analysis, students learn to accommodate a reader's professional and cultural knowledge. With practice in traditional organizational patterns, stylistic imitation of readable writing, they learn to accommodate common expectations about language and form.