Ethics in Technical Communication

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.

2000  paperbound  258 pp  ISBN: 0-205-27462-5

Oral Presentations for Technical Communication

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. Oral Presentations thus brings together the best, most current instruction from three fields: technical communication/rhetoric, speech communication, and computer and information technology.

2000  paperbound  263 pp  ISBN: 0-205-29415-4

Writing Software Documentation:
A Task-Oriented Approach

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.

1998  paperbound  484 pp  ISBN: 0-205-19576-8

Designing Visual Language:
Strategies for Professional Communicators

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.

1998  paperbound  455 pp  ISBN: 0-205-20022-2

Technical Writing Style

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 documents. 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.

1998  paperbound  302 pp  ISBN: 0-205-19722-1

Technical Editing

This market-leading text has been thoroughly revised to reflect recent changes in technology, workplace practices, and the global marketplace. As before, the book progresses from concepts to basic copyediting to comprehensive editing to management issues, but coverage now includes electronic editing and the editing of nonprint documents and an emphasis on global audiences.

Technical Editing takes a comprehensive approach to editing, defining editorial responsibility in terms of information design and the overall effectiveness of a document, not only the correctness achieved through sentence-level editing. The book teaches students to think about the effects of their choices of words, sentences, organization, and design, and gives them principles and processes for this thinking. They learn that the measure of a "good" document is in part outside the document, in the match of that document to the users' needs and the author's goals.

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1998  paperbound  422 pp  ISBN: 0-205-20032-X