#19135
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy: An Analysis 
Around 1 a.m. on Monday, the 3rd of December, 1984, in a densely populated region in the city of Bhopal, Central India, a poisonous vapor burst from the tall stacks of the Union Carbide pesticide plant. This vapor was a highly toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate. Of the 800,000 people living in Bhopal at the time, 2,000 died immediately, and as many as 300,000 were injured. In addition, about 7,000 animals were injured, of which about one thousand were killed. After the incident, over the next few years, numerous studies were conducted, many theories were explored, and the involved parties accused each other. In this paper, I will try to explore the various causes offered for the tragedy. In the course of my research for this case study, I came across many articles that put blame on various people and groups involved in the tragedy. I found one document particularly interesting from a rhetorical standpoint. This document, titled Union Carbide: Disaster at Bhopal , was authored by the retired Vice President of Health, Safety and Environmental Programs in Union Carbide Corporation. So for this paper, I would also like to rhetorically analyze this document and also, try to explore the various image restoration strategies that Union Carbide Corporation used through the course of the crisis.
Ungarala, Pratima. Michigan Tech University (1998). Articles>TC>Risk Communication>Crisis Communication
#26474
Now it is very important to recognize the vital role of a technical writer and services expected to provide to justify the requirements of this profession. Since technical writer is a sub category of technical communication, that involves other categories involved in documentation, like content writer, software configuration manager, technical editor, information designer and many more.
Albing, Bill. KeyContent.org (2005). Articles>TC>Communication>Technical Writing
#19267
Look Before You Leap: Marketing Communication Strategies for Practitioners and Educators 
Too often, the emphasis in marketing communication is the tactic—the specific promotional piece clients—or your bosses—think they need. But what should drive marketing communication are the intended audience and the ultimate goals of the effort. Part of the marketing communication practitioner’s job is to assist clients, whether they are internal or external, to step back and decide “what for,” “to whom,” and “when,” before plunging into “how” to implement marketing communication. Part of the marketing communication educator’s job is to make sure students learn that the marcom process determines the marcom product. As a result, the tactic in many cases presents itself.
Teich, Thea, Carol M. Barnum, Sandra Harner and Tom Zimmerman. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Communication>TC
#24263
Patients, Medicines, and Information
Van der Waarde summarizes the reasons why medicinal information provided to patients is often confusing and describes a method for evaluating its effectiveness.
van der Waarde, Karel. Intercom (2004). Articles>TC>Biomedical>Scientific Communication
#26462
On the morning of 29 August, Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama with winds clocked at 140 miles (225 km) per hour and more than a foot (30 cm) of rain. Although the hurricane spared New Orleans, the major population center of the area, a direct blow, the storm surge caused several of the cityï¿s levees to fail, flooding 80% of the city with up to 20 feet (6 m) of water fouled by sewage, oil, and other pollutants. It will be many years before the coastal areas of southeast Asia and the U.S. Gulf Coast have rebuilt and recovered from this year's disasters. Likewise, it will take time for us to create better disaster plans and disseminate them to the public, and for the value of those plans to be perceived. Neither of these facts makes the rebuilding, recovery, and planning any less necessary. We must do all we can to ensure that they happen as quickly as possible. We should see clearly that we can't afford to do any less.
Hayhoe, George F. Technical Communication Online (2005). Articles>TC>Risk Communication>Southern US
#31788
In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.
Rivers, Nathaniel A. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2008). Articles>TC>Business Communication>Theory
#24527
Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.
Smart, Graham. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1999). Articles>TC>Business Communication
#21714
Strategies of Effective Communication
Communication, the very essence of human subsistence, happens aplenty. But, how much of this communication is effective? Corporate milestones often end up in abysmal failures due to ineffective communication.
STC India (2003). Articles>Communication>TC
#29043
Structuring and Evaluating Scitech Communications 
The basis for effective scitech communications is formed by: focusing on the needs of the audience; structuring the substantive and language content accordingly; concentrating on accuracy, clarity and brevity; meeting logical requirements; and presenting in a communicative style and layout, including the use of visuals. In many scitech communications, the Appendix is the right place for detail not of immediate interest to most readers; this option is grossly under-utilized.
Mandersloot, Wim G. B. and Clive G. Bruckmann. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2000). Articles>Scientific Communication>TC>Assessment
#29826
This article argues that the small school context has been a relatively unexamined or under-examined context for technical and professional communication program development. While graduate program development holds a large share of the field's attention in recent national forums, growth in graduate programs is a consequence of demand in the job market among mostly "teaching" schools. Thus, the field must consider how well we are socializing new Ph.D.s into the values and the real work of institutions where they will find employment. Toward this end, this article articulates three mediating forces of program development in the liberal arts and humanities settings of small schools: 1) interdisciplinarity and flexibility are lived dynamics of small schools; 2) the campus-wide privileging of writing and communication skills presents ongoing opportunities for curricular initiatives and program development; and 3) compression of decision-making structures leads to more involvement of/with administrators and units across campus.
Latterell, Catherine G. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2004). Articles>Education>TC>Business Communication
#28080
Total Product Communication: Your Company Is Your Product
Learn how your work as a technical communicator can impact the marketing communication and corporate communication departments of your company. This article provides ways to demonstrate the value that effective technical communication adds across the business.
Wilson, John. Intercom (2006). Articles>Business Communication>TC
#31086
The Use of Playing Cards to Communicate Technical and Scientific Information
This article analyzes several decks of playing cards designed to communicate technical or scientific information ranging from military topics to the domestic arts to medical subjects. It places each deck in its historical context, describes the appearance and organization of the cards, and speculates about intended audience and purpose, drawing upon relevant secondary literature. It then extrapolates the conventions of this unusual genre. Finally, it argues that technical communicators can profit from this study because it raises questions and offers insights about such important topics as audience adaptation, organizational patterns, and ethical practices. Ultimately, this study may encourage reflection about these and other issues and perhaps lead to discovery and innovation.
Malone, Edward A. Technical Communication Online (2008). Articles>Scientific Communication>TC>Genre
#33577
Predicting Technical Communication in Product Development Organizations
This work explores prediction of technical communication patterns within product development organizations. Our methodology involves first predicting the patterns of communication and then measuring the actual communications to see if the anticipated linkages are realized. We applied this methodology to a commercial product development project in the electronics industry. In this case study we found that: 81% of all coordination type communication linkages were predicted in advance; occurrences of frequent communications were more accurately predicted than infrequent communications; and two-way communication exchange was most often observed, even where oneway information transfer was predicted. For the management of product development projects, these results imply that certain aspects of organizational design can be planned by anticipating the technical communication linkages required for project execution. Finally, a critical analysis of our methodology suggests improvements for future work.
Morelli, M.D., S.D. Eppinger and R.K. Gulati. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (1995). Articles>TC>Organizational Communication>Engineering
#35128
Although previous researchers have proposed organizational demography as an important determinant of communication, no one has tested this relationship directly.
Zenger, Todd R. and Barbara S. Lawrence. Academy of Management Journal, The (1989). Articles>TC>Workplace>Organizational Communication
