Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

This article explores the assumptions about science and technology held by the engineers who attempted to delay the launch of the Challenger space shuttle. These assumptions, it is argued, affected the ways in which the engineers framed the arguments used to persuade managers not to launch. Examining the decision making processes prior to the tragedy reveals three dominant conceptions of science and technology which guided the engineers' persuasive efforts, and which appear to account for why the engineers did not succeed in their attempt to influence the managers.

Current treatment of teaching transitions relies on an approach which presents students with lists of transitions to insert at unspecified places in the text. In addition, some textbooks and composition handbooks advise students to be “subtle” and warn against explicitly stating their purpose. This advice exists in spite of the fact that many professional writers are often explicit about the effect they intend in writing their transitions. Since handbook authors have failed to offer a general theory of how to write effective transitions, I propose that speech act theory can explain the function of transitions in terms of the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of explicit performatives. An analysis of various samples shows that published writers regularly use explicit performatives in scientific, business, technical and academic writing. This analysis offers specific implications for improving handbook explanations and for instructing student writers in writing effective transitions by determining the illocutionary force of the specific speech act underlying each transitional device.

The roles of physicians and nurses working in trauma centers are mirrored in their writing. Physicians must focus intensely on patients' injuries if lives are to be saved. Their professional prose is correspondingly, and appropriately, focused, with attention given to injuries and their repair. The doctors' partners in the admitting area, trauma nurses, adopt a holistic view, caring for patients' physiologic and psychologic stability. Nurses tend to be more comprehensive in their writing, describing patients as individuals, the families involved, and the threatening and encouraging events that emerge during recovery. Although the distance and impersonal nature of medical writing, as a subset of technical writing, is criticized by technical writing scholars, published works by trauma surgeons may require exactly those characteristics. Perhaps a reflection of that disparity, medical publishers give mixed messages regarding style to physicians and nurses who choose to be authors.

Research on the visual presentation of instructions (and other texts) tends to be repetitious, unsystematic, and overly complex. A simpler yet rich approach to analyzing the visual dimension of instructions is Gestalt theory. Gestalt principles of proximity, closure, symmetry, figure-ground segregation, good continuation, and similarity provide a powerful approach to making instructions more inviting and consistent, as well as easier to access, follow, and understand. This article applies six Gestalt principles to a badly designed instruction to show what improvements result when Gestalt theory is considered in instructional design.

Practitioners and consultants, who have developed much of the theory on the direct mail sales letter, emphasize one point: The reader must be enticed to read the letter. One way to entice the reader is to use an indirect arrangement of support: Invitation, Benefits and Proof, Acceptance, and Teaser. Other reader-directed principles are 1) create the look of a personalized letter and 2) employ strategies to promote readability.

The case method of teaching is increasingly utilized as a tool for the teaching of business communication and technical writing. In addition to providing students with meaningful exposure to actual companies and written products, the use of cases challenge students to assume one or many various positions within an organization where effective communication with myriad publics is essential in meeting organizational goals and objectives.

A clinical investigator's brochure is a summary of the preclinical and clinical information about a drug that is about to enter clinical trials. It serves to update clinical investigators on the possible benefits, risks, and areas of uncertainty still left to be studied. The writer of the clinical investigator's brochure can create a streamlined, succinct, and easily readable document by using a format that closely parallels the research and the development history of the drug, as follows: 1) Introduction, 2) Chemistry, 3) Pharmacy, 4) Animal Pharmacology, 5) Animal Toxicology, 6) Animal Pharmacokinetics, 7) Clinical Experience, 8) Possible Risks and Precautions, and 9) Bibliography. In this article, the author explains what information is needed in each of these sections and suggests ways to avoid redundancy.