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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 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 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.

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.