Clarity in Context: Rethinking Misunderstanding    

Technical communicators are well aware of the potential for misunderstanding in their roles as communicators within organizations and as translators of information from technical to lay people. In fact, they spend much of their working lives trying to communicate clearly and avoid misunderstanding. Lack of clarity can lead to delays in completing work, to lost business, and to customer dissatisfaction. It has been blamed for everything from the delay in starting yesterday's meeting to the Challenger space shuttle disaster. If we are to address the problem of misunderstanding and try to avoid it more often, we have to understand what misunderstanding is and why it occurs.

Schneider, Barbara. Technical Communication Online (2002). Articles>Rhetoric

Nonstandard Quotes: Superimpositions and Cultural Maps      

We regularly chastise students for placing quotation marks around words that are not direct quotations. Yet, as this research shows, professionals use nonstandard quotations routinely and to rhetorical advantage. After analyzing the various purposes nonstandard quotations serve, I argue student use of the marks jars us not because it departs from good practice but because, through them, students invoke voices we do not want to recognize.

Schneider, Barbara. CCC (2002). Articles>Style Guides>Standards>Rhetoric

Theorizing Structure and Agency in Workplace Writing: An Ethnomethodological Approach    

This article proposes ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach for resolving the structure-agency binary and for treating the activities of writers in organizations as simultaneously embedded in and constitutive of organizational context. Structure is defined asthose elements of social circumstances that writers orient to as relevant to their immediatewriting task. In orienting to these elements, writers reproduce them as external andconstraining social facts. The value of ethnomethodology is illustrated with data from astudy examining the social practices that surrounded the writing of an evaluation reportby two managers in an educational institution.

Schneider, Barbara. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2002). Articles>Workplace>Writing