#13760
The Culture(s) of the Technical Communicator 
The role of the technical communication practitioner stems from the need for members from two distinct professions to connect; for example, engineers have created some new technology, and users who are (assumedly) unfamiliar with the technology want or need to understand that technology.
Amare, Nicole. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2002). Articles>TC
#29124
Perceptions Of Memo Quality: A Case Study Of Engineering Practitioners, Professors, and Students
One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.
Amare, Nicole and Charlotte Brammer. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2005). Articles>Writing>Assessment>Engineering
#29146
To Slideware Or Not To Slideware: Students' Experiences With PowerPoint vs. Lecture 
This study analyzes the performance and attitudes of technical writing students in PowerPoint-enhanced and in non-PowerPoint lectures. Four classes of upper-level undergraduates (n = 84) at a mid-sized, Southern university taking a one-semester technical writing course were surveyed at the beginning and end of the course about their perceptions of PowerPoint. Of the four sections, two classes were instructed using traditional lecture materials (teacher at podium, chalkboard, handouts); the other two sections were instructed with PowerPoint presentations. All four classes were given the same pre- and post-test to measure performance over the course of the semester. Traditional lecture or PowerPoint presentations consisted of at least 50% of the course, with the remaining time spent on exercises and small group work. Results reveal that while most students say they preferred PowerPoint, performance scores were higher in the sections with the traditional lecture format.
Amare, Nicole. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2006). Articles>Education>Presentations>Microsoft PowerPoint
#34815
Writing for the Robot: How Employer Search Tools Have Influenced Résumé Rhetoric and Ethics
To date, business communication scholars and textbook writers have encouraged résumé rhetoric that accommodates technology, for example, recommending keyword-enhancing techniques to attract the attention of searchbots: customized search engines that allow companies to automatically scan résumés for relevant keywords. However, few scholars have discussed the ethical implications of adjusting résumé keywords for the sole purpose of increasing searchbot hits. As the résumé genre has evolved over the past century, strategies of résumé “padding” have likewise evolved, at each stage violating one of four maxims of the Cooperative Principle. Direct factual misrepresentation violates the maxim of quality and is of course discouraged, but résumé writers have turned in succession to violations of manner (formatting tricks) and then more recently to violations of quantity and/or relevance with deceptive keywording techniques. The authors conclude by suggesting several techniques to business communication instructors that may encourage students to create more ethically sound résumés.
Amare, Nicole and Alan Manning. Business Communication Quarterly (2009). Careers>Resumes>Search Engine Optimization>Ethics
#35000
Examining Editor-Author Ethics: Real-World Scenarios from Interviews with Three Journal Editors
Those who submit manuscripts to academic journals may benefit from a better understanding of how editors weigh ethics in their interactions with authors. In an attempt to ascertain and to understand editors' ethics, we interviewed 3 current academic journal editors of technical and/or business communication journals. We asked them about the ethical dilemmas they encountered while working with authors, whether the editors formally or informally followed a "code of ethics," and if they felt obligated to maintain any ethical codes in particular. In this article, we discuss the ethical dimensions of editorial practices using specific ethical scenarios provided by these three editors. We then analyze these scenarios using traditional ethical models in our field but also in terms of a less-known but powerful model of ethical analysis originally proposed by the philosopher C. S. Peirce. We argue that Peirce's "community of inquiry" ethics model best describes these journal editors' ethics when working with authors.
Amare, Nicole and Alan Manning. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2009). Articles>Publishing>Editing>Ethics
