http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/CCC A listing of works published by CCC 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/CCC http://tc.eserver.org/29886.html http://tc.eserver.org/29886.html The conviction that writing can be improved with a knowledge of grammar has prevailed for quite a long time. But research has shown no correlation between grammatical knowledge and writing ability. http://tc.eserver.org/29378.html http://tc.eserver.org/29378.html English departments, eager to boost enrollment, may press teachers into duty teaching technical writing courses on short notice and with little preparation. http://tc.eserver.org/29379.html http://tc.eserver.org/29379.html Recommends in-service training programs, including summer institutes and monthly workshops, to teach technical writing techniques to literature-trained English teachers who have plunged into unknown waters. http://tc.eserver.org/29351.html http://tc.eserver.org/29351.html Scientific and technical writing as a profession has much greater dimensions than many people realize. http://tc.eserver.org/29352.html http://tc.eserver.org/29352.html Technical writing students must learn that technical writing is objective, unemotional, unequivocal, and factual. http://tc.eserver.org/26293.html http://tc.eserver.org/26293.html I want to make two arguments. The first, a largely implicit one, concerns the life cycle of online scholarship and is marked by my added emphasis on the word 'article' in the opening sentence of this essay. My second argument, the explicit one, is about the value of blogging in the writing classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/23460.html http://tc.eserver.org/23460.html Technological literacy-meaning computer skills and the ability to use computers and other technology to improve learning, productivity and performance-has become as fundamental to a person's ability to navigate through society as traditional skills like reading, writing and arithmetic. In explicit acknowledgment of the challenges facing the education community, on February 15, 1996, President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced the Technology Literacy Challenge, envisioning a 21st century where all students are technologically literate. The challenge was put before the nation as a whole, with responsibility shared by local communities, states, the private sector, educators, local communities, parents, the federal government, and others. http://tc.eserver.org/20454.html http://tc.eserver.org/20454.html Grounded in theories of feminist research practices and in two empirical studies we conducted separately, our argument is that seeing reciprocity as a context-based process of definition and re-definition of the relationship between participants and researcher helps us understand how research projects can benefit participants in ways that they desire. http://tc.eserver.org/20456.html http://tc.eserver.org/20456.html In an attempt to bring composition studies into a more thoroughgoing discussion of the place of visual literacy in the writing classroom, I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition. http://tc.eserver.org/20455.html http://tc.eserver.org/20455.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/20453.html http://tc.eserver.org/20453.html This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design. http://tc.eserver.org/19935.html http://tc.eserver.org/19935.html In the past two years I have submitted proposals for the same study to eleven IRBs at colleges and universities across the country. While I strongly support the need for obtaining IRB approval, I believe as a discipline and as individuals we need to work to revise the IRB process. As it is now practiced at many institutions, the IRB process positions composition researchers and composition research in potentially problematic ways. http://tc.eserver.org/19932.html http://tc.eserver.org/19932.html This essay explores the question: 'Given the high value that most institutions put on scholarship that appears in refereed journals or in books produced by well-respected presses, how are innovative, intellectually valuable, well-researched, self-published Web sites to be counted in the processes of promotion, merit, tenure, review, and recognition?' http://tc.eserver.org/14464.html http://tc.eserver.org/14464.html When a composition teacher incorporated community-based writing assignments into her course, she found that the curriculum did not support students’ transitions to nonacademic settings. Her success in transforming the curriculum suggests that the writing classroom can function not only as a site for “general writing skills in-struction” but also for analysis of rhetorical variation. http://tc.eserver.org/14463.html http://tc.eserver.org/14463.html We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and com-position has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the de-partment of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory. http://tc.eserver.org/14461.html http://tc.eserver.org/14461.html I examine my involvement with writing centers as an example of how we can look at the choices we’ve made within our areas of expertise to see why they attract us. In my case, the flexible, collaborative, individualized, non-evaluative, experimental, non-hierarchical, student-centered nature of writing centers is an excellent fit. http://tc.eserver.org/14462.html http://tc.eserver.org/14462.html This article examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s—the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining—and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. The usefulness of these sentence-based rhetorics was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 doomed them to a marginality under which they still exist today. The result of this erasure of sentence pedagogies is a culture of writing instruction that has very little to do with or to say about the sentence outside of a purely grammatical discourse. http://tc.eserver.org/14458.html http://tc.eserver.org/14458.html Errors seem to bother nonacademic readers as well as teachers. But what does it mean to be “bothered” by errors? Questions such as this help transform the study of error from mere textual issues to larger rhetorical matters of constructing meaning. Although this study of fourteen business people indicates a range of reactions to errors, the findings also reveal patterns of qualitative agreement—certain ways in which these readers constructed a negative ethos of the writer. http://tc.eserver.org/14452.html http://tc.eserver.org/14452.html As a species of rhetoric and composition, technical communication studies is wrestling with issues of identity, professionalization, and status that help to define an academic discipline. Recent scholarly work has debated the research methods that might be productive for an applied field in a postmodern age, the theoretical and pedagogical connections between composition and technical communication in an electronic age, and the tensions between training and education in a global age that requires new models of work. http://tc.eserver.org/14460.html http://tc.eserver.org/14460.html The Conduit Metaphor has been roundly condemned by language scholars, including scholars in rhetoric and composition, but it is time to reevaluate its import and value. Rather than simply asserting a mistaken view of linguistic communication, the Conduit Metaphor combines with the metaphor Language Is Power to form a prudentially applied ethical measure of discourses, genres, and texts. http://tc.eserver.org/10054.html http://tc.eserver.org/10054.html CCC is a peer-reviewed journal about issues in rhetoric and writing from an academic perspective.