http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/TC/History A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and TC and History in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/TC/History http://tc.eserver.org/35357.html http://tc.eserver.org/35357.html Examines the Chinese culinary instruction genre. Analyzes culinary texts produced from 500 BC to the present. Argues for a historicized and contextualized understanding of technical communication in China. http://tc.eserver.org/35332.html http://tc.eserver.org/35332.html Building on the 1996 retrospective by Pearsall and Warren, the authors examine the decade that followed for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC). As the world became more closely knitted together through trade agreements and advancements in communication technology, CPTSC took up its mission in response as it helped promote program growth internationally. During this period, the organization added many more members beyond the United States, as it hosted a series of roundtables in Europe and Canada, working to diversify the ethnic make-up of its membership through scholarships. http://tc.eserver.org/34898.html http://tc.eserver.org/34898.html Although we look at the past with embarrassment about some of our practices, we often lack the foresight to see the present with the same degree of scrutiny. Years from now, we’ll look back at what we’re currently doing and not only blush, but feel remorse and wish we could get back what we lost. http://tc.eserver.org/33302.html http://tc.eserver.org/33302.html A profile of Stan Higgins, one of the first editors of STC's journal. Based on archival research and an interview with Higgins. Includes a table of journal titles (e.g., TWE Journal, STWE Review) and names of editors. http://tc.eserver.org/32197.html http://tc.eserver.org/32197.html This year was an active one for the field of technical communication. New tools and technologies made their mark on our profession, while new pressures and business goals began to impact the way we see ourselves, our role in the organization, and our place in the communication spectrum. In this end-of-the-year report, Scott Abel, president of TheContentWrangler.com, takes a look at some of the year's most important developments in the field of technical communication and makes a few predictions of importance to documentation managers for 2007. http://tc.eserver.org/30223.html http://tc.eserver.org/30223.html Take a look at your bookshelf: what is the copyright date of your earliest book on technical communication? I doubt whether you will find anything much earlier than 1965. I describe and comment briefly on several well-reputed technical writing books published between 1908 and 1965. Then I lead into the changes that have been occurring in the technical writing scene, and the impact these changes have had on us as professional technical communicators. http://tc.eserver.org/29682.html http://tc.eserver.org/29682.html Can a liberal arts degree be parlayed into a career in technical communication? The presenters explain how they did precisely that, applying the overarching principle: 'Same method, different discipline.' This paper provides examples of how a history major (lead author Maureen Hogg) and an English major (co-author Dan Voss) drew upon the skills they honed as undergraduates in their respective majors to advance their careers as technical communicators at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation in Boulder, CO, and Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Orlando, FL, respectively. In Part 1, Hogg takes several principles of historiography and shows how she applied them in developing a series of information products on Ball Aerospace's landmark Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) program. In Part 2, Voss shows how principles of rhetorical analysis he learned in a course on linguistics became the linchpin in a year-long integrated strategic communication campaign that helped Lockheed Martin land a major contract to build the next-generation air-to-ground missile system for the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. http://tc.eserver.org/29214.html http://tc.eserver.org/29214.html This article presents the history, purposes, outcomes, and significance of the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication during its first five years. It analyzes the topical areas and research methods of the 34 dissertations nominated for the award from 1999 to 2003, as well as the evaluations of the judges. Methods of the nominated dissertations are interpretive (41%) and empirical (59%), but many dissertations combine methods. In the empirical category, qualitative methods (17) outnumber quantitative methods (3). The most frequent topical areas are workplace practice (8), rhetoric of the disciplines (7), and information design (6). Topics that are not widely investigated include issues of race and class and international communication. http://tc.eserver.org/29031.html http://tc.eserver.org/29031.html Ethics as a topic in technical communication has grown in interest in the past quarter century as the field itself has matured. We now understand technical communication as involved in communicating not only technical information but also values, ethics, and tacit assumptions represented in goals. It also is involved in accommodating the values and ethics of its many audiences. This understanding is linked to an awareness of the social nature of all discourse and the root interconnectedness of rhetoric and ethics. This article presents an introduction and annotated bibliography of articles from technical writing and communication journals over this period, arranged in categories of professional, academic, and systematic approaches. Ethics is broadly conceived to include not only particular theories but also systems of values and principles. http://tc.eserver.org/29114.html http://tc.eserver.org/29114.html My article traces the development, chronicles the impact, and explains the essence of Herbert Spencer's "The Philosophy of Style" (1852). Spencer's essay has had a significant influence on stylistics, especially in scientific and technical communication. Although in our generation Spencer's contribution to stylistics is not widely remembered, it ought to be. His single essay on this subject was seminal to modern theories about effective communication, not because it introduced new knowledge but because it was such a rhetorically astute synthesis of stylistic lore, designed to connect traditional rhetorical theory with 19th-century ideas about science, technology, and evolution. It was also influential because it was part of Spencer's grand "synthetic philosophy," a prodigious body of books and essays that made him one of the most prominent thinkers of his time. Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" carried the day, and many following decades, with its description of the human mind as a symbol-processing machine, with its description of cognitive and affective dimensions of communication, and with its scientifically considered distillation of the fundamental components of effective style. We should read Spencer's essay and understand its impact not so much because we expect it to teach us new things about good style, but precisely because: 1) it's at the root of some very important concepts now familiar to us; 2) it synthesizes these concepts so impressively; 3) we can use it heuristically as we continue thinking about style; and 4) it provides a compact, accessible touchstone for exploring--with students, clients, and colleagues--the techniques of effective style for scientific and technical communication. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler [1, p. 314]. . . . the fewer the words are, provided neither propriety nor perspicuity be violated, the expression is always the more vivid [2, p. 333]. However influential the precepts thus dogmatically expressed, they would be much more influential if reduced to something like scientific ordination. In this as in other cases, conviction is strengthened when we understand the why [3, pp. 2-3]. The psychology of language reception is still very imperfectly understood [4, p. 77]. http://tc.eserver.org/29035.html http://tc.eserver.org/29035.html The foundation for Rome's imperial bureaucracy was laid during the first century B.C., when functional and administrative writing played an increasingly dominant role in the Late Republic. During the First and Second Triumvirates, Roman society, once primarily oral, relied more and more on documentation to get its official business done. By the reign of Augustus, the orator had ceded power to the secretary, usually a slave trained as a scribe or librarian. This cultural and political transformation can be traced in the career of Marcus Tullius Tiro (94 B.C. to 4 A.D.), Cicero's confidant and amanuensis. A freedman credited with the invention of Latin shorthand (the &lt;em&gt;notae Tironianae&lt;/em&gt;), Tiro transcribed and edited Cicero's speeches, composed, collected, and eventually published his voluminous correspondence, and organized and managed his archives and library. As his former master s fortune sank with the dying Republic, Tiro s began to rise. After Cicero's assassination, he became the orator's literary executor and biographer. His talents were always in demand under the new bureaucratic regime, and he prospered by producing popular grammars and secretarial manuals. He died a wealthy centenarian and a full Roman citizen. http://tc.eserver.org/29096.html http://tc.eserver.org/29096.html Studying past examples of successful technical communication may offer insight into strategies that worked with technologies and audiences in an earlier time. This article examines the texts documenting a controversy before and during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Ellen Swallow Richards, chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bertha Honore Palmer, president of the Fair's Board of Lady Managers, had distinctly different visions of how cooking technology should be presented. Palmer invited Richards to create a Model Kitchen in the Woman's Building, but Richards wanted to avoid gendering the new knowledge of nutrition and she fought to control her exhibit. The multimedia Richards used in her resulting Rumford Kitchen exhibit reminds us that sometimes an entertaining but familiar atmosphere might be the best way to introduce threatening new knowledge and technology, particularly to our increasingly international and intergenerational audiences. http://tc.eserver.org/29092.html http://tc.eserver.org/29092.html The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The article provides and defends four guidelines as a foundation to study ways to incorporate history into classroom lessons: 1) maintain a continued research interest in teaching history; 2) limit to technical rather than scientific discourse; 3) focus on English-language texts; and 4) focus on American texts, authors, and practices. The second part of the essay works within the guidelines to show a lesson that contrasts technical texts by Benjamin Franklin and Herbert Hoover. The lesson can help students see the difference in technical writing before and after the Industrial Revolution, a difference that mirrors their own transition from the university to the workforce. http://tc.eserver.org/29160.html http://tc.eserver.org/29160.html A common aphorism in the halls of education is that the writing skills of Americans decline over time. Compared to the "golden age of letters," so the argument goes, each subsequent generation of writers is worse than the last. Although contemporary readers and educators commiserate over encounters with bad writing, a fair comparison of 18th century American exemplars to modern American exemplars reveals a significant advance in clarity, an advance that technical communicators can be proud of. To demonstrate the advances in expository writing over the past two centuries, the author compares what the authors of the U.S. Constitution did with their limited resources to what modern professional communicators do with their abundance of resources. Many of the communication problems that were pervasive when the U.S. Constitution was created have since been remedied by insights emerging from the fields of linguistics, human factors, and cognitive psychology, among others. http://tc.eserver.org/28179.html http://tc.eserver.org/28179.html What hasn't changed in twenty-five years? There are a couple of things--things that aren't likely to change in the next twenty-five years either. Technical communicators will always have to prove the value of what they do. We'll discover new ways in which to contribute, but the need to prove our value will persist. http://tc.eserver.org/26682.html http://tc.eserver.org/26682.html Online publishing technologies is an ever-changing, morphing animal that cannot necessarily be predicted, but perhaps we can work to harness it. As publishing technologies change, so too will the style in which the readability of those documents change as they are shaped and designed to meet new formulas and needs. Likewise, as the readability and accessibility of documents change, so too must the interaction and intervention of the technical communicator change to ensure readable, articulate, navigable documentation, as well as preserve an author-reader relationship and also to preserve the role of the technical communicator. http://tc.eserver.org/24555.html http://tc.eserver.org/24555.html Finding a method to determine terrestrial longitude was critical in the early seventeenth century as countries attempted to establish territorial boundaries. The magistrate and natural philosopher Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) spent much of his life working on a solution to this problem. As an early technical communicator, he was concerned with the criteria of acceptable observations, the standardization of materials and methods, and the communication of results. He refined a variety of strategies to obtain these observations and ensure their accuracy. He persuaded missionary priests to make observations throughout the Levant by promising patronage and gifts or stressing practical applications in the solution to the problem of longitude and church calendar reform. Although Peiresc did not resolve the issue of determining longitude, his efforts did provide the basis for work by later astronomers. http://tc.eserver.org/23420.html http://tc.eserver.org/23420.html This paper focuses on the technical communicator’s role as it relates to computer technology. http://tc.eserver.org/23419.html http://tc.eserver.org/23419.html For technical communicators, usually busy looking ahead, the new milennium is an occasion to review our history and achievements so far, and the development of our slightly strained relationship with those who tend to emphasize the T and disregard the C in TC: the developers. http://tc.eserver.org/22889.html http://tc.eserver.org/22889.html STC's international conferences offer a golden opportunity for professional growth and development. Taking a leaf from the book of Gordon McKenzie, keynote speaker at the 41st STC Conference in Minneapolis in 1994, the presenter has compiled his material from 16 previous presentations and workshops at regional and international STC conferences, as well as notes from many other technical sessions at those conferences, into a simulated 'HyperCard' stack of 32 topics (i.e., signs on the wall) which session participants can 'browse' simply by 'clicking' (read: shouting out a number). http://tc.eserver.org/22729.html http://tc.eserver.org/22729.html Offers an historian's view of the development of the scholarship about technology transfer over the past half century, interweaving two primary threads. First, it identifies events and circumstances that have influenced and shaped real-world efforts to move technology in its many guises across boundaries— national, geographic, institutional, organizational, social, or otherwise. These historical situations have had a profound impact on the efforts of American policymakers and leaders in business, government, universities, and nongovernmental organizations who deal with technology transfer. These circumstances have produced significant changes of emphasis in the definition of technology transfer at different points in time. http://tc.eserver.org/22450.html http://tc.eserver.org/22450.html History is a crucial dimension of any legitimate academic field because it identifies it as having lasting interest and signficance and, like a living organism, as a growing, evolving, coherent entity that progresses over time and advances to more sophisticated forms. History, after all, is scholarship and vice versa. http://tc.eserver.org/22104.html http://tc.eserver.org/22104.html Ever wonder about the relationship between academia and the corporate world? Or if you are on the corporate side (as I am), have you wondered why academia operates as it does? (And vice versa.) If so, <i>Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century</i> offers great insights that may help you gain an understanding of how each world operates, why they operate as they do, and how the two worlds influence and can alter the future of technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/21713.html http://tc.eserver.org/21713.html How has technical communication evolved over the years into what it is today? How big an industry is it and is there a count of the number of people working as technical communicators? http://tc.eserver.org/21670.html http://tc.eserver.org/21670.html This panel presentation addresses three questions: What changes/forces are shaping technical communication? What skills will we need to meet the changes in technical communication? What strategies can we use to maintain a sense of balance as we move to meet these changes? http://tc.eserver.org/21646.html http://tc.eserver.org/21646.html Speculates about what the future will hold for technical communicators. http://tc.eserver.org/19862.html http://tc.eserver.org/19862.html STC will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2003 and begins a year-long celebration here in Nashville. The STC 50th Anniversary Committee announces its plans, encourages chapters to participate, and asks members to share their ideas with the Committee. The plans include a special 50th anniversary website, an online STC history timeline, and recognition of pioneers. The committee prepared a Chapter Resource Kit, which includes program and speaker suggestions, news release templates, chapter historian guidelines, and chapter recognition recommendations. Members are asked to contribute anecdotes, as well as provide information on chapter pioneers and history resources. http://tc.eserver.org/19386.html http://tc.eserver.org/19386.html Nielan summarizes fifty years of Society history and identifies key events that influenced the development of technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/19387.html http://tc.eserver.org/19387.html In commemoration of STC's 50th anniversary, several Society members share anecdotes about their experiences in STC and the technical communication profession. http://tc.eserver.org/15088.html http://tc.eserver.org/15088.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from April 15, 2002, through August 15, 2002. http://tc.eserver.org/15108.html http://tc.eserver.org/15108.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from December 1, 1999, through February 29, 2000. http://tc.eserver.org/15109.html http://tc.eserver.org/15109.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from December 1, 2000, through February 28, 2001. http://tc.eserver.org/15135.html http://tc.eserver.org/15135.html This article presents a brief history of the Association of Technical Writers and Editors, one of STC's parent organizations. http://tc.eserver.org/15151.html http://tc.eserver.org/15151.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from January 15, 2002, through April15, 2002. http://tc.eserver.org/15154.html http://tc.eserver.org/15154.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from July 1, 2000, through August 31, 2000. http://tc.eserver.org/15155.html http://tc.eserver.org/15155.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from July 15, 2001, through October 15, 2001. http://tc.eserver.org/15166.html http://tc.eserver.org/15166.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from March 1, 2000, through June 30, 2000. http://tc.eserver.org/15167.html http://tc.eserver.org/15167.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from March 1, 2001, through July 15, 2001. http://tc.eserver.org/15171.html http://tc.eserver.org/15171.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from October 15, 2001, through January 15, 2002. http://tc.eserver.org/15191.html http://tc.eserver.org/15191.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from September 1, 1999, through November 30, 1999. Special emphasis has been placed on documentation in the category Technical Manual Specification & Standards (TMSS); however, other documents with widespread appeal are also included. http://tc.eserver.org/15192.html http://tc.eserver.org/15192.html This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from September 1, 2000, through November 30, 2000. http://tc.eserver.org/14665.html http://tc.eserver.org/14665.html <i>Intercom</i>'s assistant editor profiles a recent recipient of STC's President's Award. The Securities and Exchange Commission was honored for requiring plain English in all disclosure statements filed with the SEC. http://tc.eserver.org/14743.html http://tc.eserver.org/14743.html This article, reprinted from the January 1958 issue of the STWE Review (the quarterly journal of the Society of Technical Writers and Editors, one of STC's parent organizations), examines the state of the technical communication profession in the late 1950s. http://tc.eserver.org/14775.html http://tc.eserver.org/14775.html In this article, two original members of the Association of Technical Writers and Editors (TWE), a parent organization of the Society for Technical Communication, discuss how the profession and the Society have changed since TWE's inception. http://tc.eserver.org/14689.html http://tc.eserver.org/14689.html This article discusses the impact of STC's annual conference on the professional development of technical communicators. http://tc.eserver.org/14724.html http://tc.eserver.org/14724.html This article highlights the contributions of technical communicators to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mercury and Apollo programs, which culminated in 1969 with the landing of men on the moon. http://tc.eserver.org/14610.html http://tc.eserver.org/14610.html This article is one of two cover stories detailing trends in technical communication 2000. JoAnn Hackos predicts that technical communication will move from a 'cottage' industry--one that is dominated by independent craftspeople with a personal vision of their product--to a corporate industry. To survive in this team-oriented, cost-effective environment, Hackos suggests that technical communicators take note of some of the trends guiding the profession from a cottage to a corporate industry: http://tc.eserver.org/14611.html http://tc.eserver.org/14611.html This article is one of two cover stories detailing trends in technical communication for 2000. Saul Carliner outlines trends in business, technology, writing and design, and the profession of technical communication, and examines their impact on technical communication jobs and organizations in general. http://tc.eserver.org/14364.html http://tc.eserver.org/14364.html Professions change their ways of doing business when their paradigms -- their ways of seeing -- change. Technical communication went through one such paradigm change when the engineer-as-writer-and-reader became the technical-writer-as-writer and the user-as-reader in the early 1950's. In the 1990's, the technical communication paradigm is again changing, and this change will mean: the form of computer documantation will become more plastic; the concept of readability will become more of a design issue with the rise of document prototyping; audience analysis will become much less haphazard and dependent upon stereotypes; and the role of the technical writer will increase in visibility, responsibilities, and opportunities. John Carroll's new book on minimalist documentation, <I>The Nurnberg Funnel</I> and Edward Tufte's <I>Envisioning Information</I> are harbingers of this new paradigm change. http://tc.eserver.org/14311.html http://tc.eserver.org/14311.html The history of communications dates back to the pre-historic times when our ancestors used to communicate with the help of signs, flags, drums, fire, making odd noises. Those were the times when any language was not developed to communicate effectively. http://tc.eserver.org/13951.html http://tc.eserver.org/13951.html What did Henry Ford do? He learned from other people’s experiences as well as his own. He took risks. He saw failure as a lesson, and he applied everything he learned to perfect the product, the process, and the policies that shaped the American automobile industry. In short, he was a great innovator. And, because he was so willing to share the lessons he learned, he became an inspiration to many others. The field of technical communication has a bright and exciting future because we’re innovators, just like Henry Ford. We work constantly to perfect the product, the process, and the policies that shape our profession. Technical communication work is being performed in more diversified environments than ever before, with experience, skills, and talents that vary widely. We know that there will always be a need for trained people to explain new technology, processes, and products so audiences can better understand or use them, so our future is bright and exciting. Technical communication enjoyed sustained growth for the last eight years of the 20th Century, but times are different now. We entered this new millennium with high expectations for continued success only to have our hopes crushed by tragedy as America was thrust into uncertain times. We’ve learned that 2002 is going to be a lean year and that many companies have fewer people to do more work. To prepare for the future, there are a couple of things I think technical communicators should do. http://tc.eserver.org/13921.html http://tc.eserver.org/13921.html The changes in technical communication education between 1950 and 1998 have led to disciplinary maturity: the development of academic programs and of a body of innovative research.  This disciplinary maturity parallels the professional identity and growth of numbers of technical communication practitioners.  As a thriving multidiscipline with many direct research and pedagogical connections to the workplace, technical communication can uniquely influence workforce values, providing a new, evolving disciplinary model for higher education.  However, technical communication’s disciplinary maturity also means a movement away from practice and from the service course, the foundations of technical communication as a discipline and the sources of its workplace influence. http://tc.eserver.org/13925.html http://tc.eserver.org/13925.html The first books and the first technical books published by English women during the 1475-1700 period can be useful in teaching students about the emergence of technical style or 'plain style.' If we examine the style of these women writers, long ignored by canonical studies, we can see that plain English existed before Bacon and received its impetus not from science, but from the utilitarian attitude that pervaded the 1475-1700 period. These women writers provide a microcosm for studying the rise of modern English prose and what we now call technical (or plain) style. They also provide an efficient way to expose students to early published works by women and their contribution to the history of technical writing. Examining style from such a perspective helps students see that technical communication was a prevalent kind of writing before Bacon and the Royal Society. Thus, technical communication--and the style of technical communication--studied from this unique historical perspective deepens students' awareness of the roots of technical communication as it contributed to the history of English discourse. http://tc.eserver.org/13896.html http://tc.eserver.org/13896.html Instead of offering a predictive “history” of the future, this essay explores how we arrive at our attitudes toward the future and the effects of such attitudes toward current practice. We greet the future with attitudes prepared by myths, master narratives that guide our vision of who we are and what we are becoming. One key myth in our discipline, the myth of immediate communication, proves an unreliable guide to the future. Readings in science fiction serve to demonstrate how a critique of the immediacy myth might proceed. The essay argues for a critically informed, open-minded approach to the future, an approach that encourages an honest self-criticism within the discipline. http://tc.eserver.org/13525.html http://tc.eserver.org/13525.html Civilization is a cumulative enterprise, and communication has always been a vital component of that cumulation process. From the fourteenth century on, the social system of science has depended on technical communication to describe, disseminate, criticize, use, and improve innovations and advances in science, medicine, and technology. Rapid change in technical communication has been obvious during the past few decades with the advent of computers, laser printers, the Internet, and other developments. Viewed from a historical perspective, those changes can be seen as but a portion of the evolution that technical communication has undergone. It has undergone vast changes in the means and methods that it employs and in the audience to which it is addressed, the purposes to which it is put, the roles it fulfills, and the social forces that drive and support it.