#31200
Joseph D. Chapline: Technical Communication's Mozart 
Presents a biography of Joseph D. Chapline, noting his role in the founding of IRE-PGEWS.
Malone, Edward A. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>History
#26498
If usability is part of technical communication, language – the building block of technical communication – is an important part of the usability of a web site or software application. The better a product communicates, the more helpful it is, the easier it is to use.
Quesenbery, Whitney. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Usability>Writing
#31645
Making Connections: An Intercultural Virtual Team Project in Professional Communication 
This presentation reports on an intercultural virtual team project conducted by students in two management communication courses, one at the University of Delaware (USA) and one at McGill University (Canada). The goal of the partnership between the two classes was to enhance students' ability to collaborate across cultures using a variety of technologies for collaboration, a skill they need in order to succeed in the increasingly global and technologically mediated environment of work. Each team, which included students from both universities, compared communication practices in a company or type of business that exists both in the United States and in Canada. Their task was to analyze how the practices reflect and shape the particular environments in which the businesses operate. During the project they advanced and monitored their work through different technologies, including blogs, email, and a designated collaborative Web-based workspace, and they produced several genres of documents reporting their achievements. This presentation first analyzes the advantages, vulnerabilities, and faultlines of virtual intercultural teamwork as students experienced them. We then describe conditions that help teams overcome the risks of virtual work and assess how well we were able to create these conditions in the courses.
Andrews, Deborah C. and Dorreen Starke-Meyerring. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Case Studies
#31646
Teaching writing to engineering students representing Indian, Middle Eastern, Asian, and American cultures can be daunting as their cultural perceptions of time, gender, source of authority, individualism and risk taking, affect learning styles. However, despite cultural differences, many International students have no difficulty with much of American instruction and, in some cases, perform better than American students. Their ability to adapt to American instruction appears to depend primarily on the educational goals of their cultures.
Boiarsky, Carolyn. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Education>Technical Writing>Engineering
#26502
The suffix -able can be very useful in the English language because it helps us to express capability or worthiness. However, it's often bad form to pick any verb, slap -able on the end of it, and try to make a valid adjective.
#31653
When Monsanto attempted to release transgenic wheat in the upper Midwest of the US, localization efforts to accommodate stakeholders were unsuccessful. This paper explores this case briefly and suggests a new role for technical communicators as negotiators of technology.
Sullivan, Dale L. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Intellectual Property>Collaboration>Case Studies
#30223
Peek Into the Past: 90 Years of Technical Communication 
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.
Blicq, Ronald S. IEEE PCS (2000). Articles>TC>History
#10227
Preparing Outstanding Presentations: Effective Visuals
Good visuals can strengthen your presentation tremendously - but unfortunately, they're rare. Here are their four key attributes: few, big, simple, and (occasionally) memorable. How many visuals per minute? People often ask me how many visuals they should use per minute of speech. I think they hope I will say expansively, 'As many as you like!' Instead, I tell them the opposite: 'Use no more than you really need.' The key is this: Use a visual only if it has a clear purpose.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#10228
Preparing Outstanding Presentations: Making Visuals Memorable 
We saw how to create clean visuals that support your points. In essence, this involves 1) keeping text big (at least 18-point) so it can be read easily from the back of the room and 2) minimizing clutter (grids,numbers, legends, and unnecessary details). If you do that, your visuals will work for you rather than compete against you. This time, we will discuss how to make some of your visuals not just effective but memorable.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#10229
Preparing Outstanding Presentations: The Basic Structure
Last time, I showed you that answering three questions will give you the right main message and key points for a strong presentation: 1. Who are my listeners? 2. What do I want them to do or believe? 3. What are their main needs and interests? Once you have the message and key points, you need to fit them into a structure that will produce the response you want. There is one structure that works uniformly well for all presentations technical or non-technical, informative or persuasive. It consists of three parts, which I will discuss more fully in upcoming columns. Here, I want to show you what the structure is and why it will always work for you.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#10230
Preparing Outstanding Presentations: The Summary
In this series, I have described a universal presentation structure consisting of introduction, body, and summary. Parts 3 and 4 discussed the introduction and the body in detail. This time, we'll see how to close the presentation with an effective summary.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#10226
Preparing Outstanding Presentations: Understanding Your Audience
A presentation is a great chance to further your career. The reason is simple: most presentations are ill conceived and poorly delivered. So, if you can become one of the few who do it right, you'll stand out like a shining beacon in a dark wasteland. People will pick you for key projects because they can count on you to sell the work at presentation time. In this series, we look at the principles that enable you to prepare outstanding, career-boosting presentations.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#31648
As global online access grows, Web site designers find themselves creating materials for an increasingly international audience. Cultural groups, however, can have different expectations of what constitutes acceptable Web site design. This article examines how prototype theory can serve as a methodology for analyzing Web sites designed for users from different cultures. Such analyses, in turn, can help individuals create more effective online materials for international audiences.
St. Amant, Kirk R. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Web Design>Localization>Cultural Theory
#21524
Shaping Knowledge through Usability Testing
Shaping Knowledge through Usability Testing
Usability testing can make a difference in the product and and the documentation. Seeing is believing.
Barnum, Carol M. IEEE PCS (2003). Presentations>Usability>Methods>Testing
#31762
Who to target with your email, how long it should be, and what should and shouldn't go in it so that it can be an effective means of communication for you.
Hayhoe, George F. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Email>Podcasts
#31670
A Structured Approach to Selling
High-value goods and services are not impulse purchases. Both the purchaser and vendor may need to invest significant time in the purchasing process. When I first started working for myself, I wasted much time. Now I make the process as efficient as possible, both for myself, and for enquirers.
Unwalla, Mike. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Project Management>Collaboration
#31760
Tackling Typical Grammar Problems
This training podcast provides examples as well as explanations and tips for dealing with a few grammar or usage problems that occur for many engineering and technical professionals who have to communicate in a hurry, via, for example, email. Listen for ways to know when to use can or may, affect or effect, it's or its, and also me, myself, or I.
Still, Brian. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Writing>Grammar>Podcasts
#31650
TCeurope: A European Umbrella for Technical Communicators
This paper presents TCeurope, the European umbrella organization for technical communicators and its activities in the past, including lobbying for technical communication at the European Parliament, formulating a European guideline for usable and safe operating manuals for consumer goods, and formulating a European guidelines for professional education and training of technical communicators in Europe.
Fritz, Michael, Michael F. Steehouder and Ursula Wirtz. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>TC>Community Building>Europe
#28874
Writing is a culturally situated activity. When writing is outsourced to other cultures, because of a lack of knowledge of the users' culture and also because of influences from the writer's local culture, those doing the writing and designing, despite various strategies adopted for overcoming the disadvantage of not knowing the users' culture, may not know how to culturally situate writing. It is, therefore, important that bicultural people, who know the users' culture, as well as the culture of those doing the outsourced work, give writing teams feedback about the users' culture. Doing so can make outsourced writing more culturally situated.
Jeyeraj, Joseph. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Language>Localization>Offshoring
#31667
Technical Communicator's Glossary
Technical communicators employ a wide range of strategies to make scientific and technical information accessible to as wide an audience as possible. This glossary introduces some of these strategies by defining some terms commonly used to discuss them. The aim of the glossary is to help students in technical and professional communication successfully enter this rapidly expanding profession.
Jovanova, Anica and John Salt. IEEE PCS (2008). Reference>Dictionaries>Glossary
#26500
here are advantages to being a bad development manager. For one thing, you don’t stand out from the crowd; most development managers are pretty bad. For another thing, bad development managers have a knack for getting promoted in the face of all evidence to the contrary. With mediocrity as the norm, bad development managers have an edge: nobody expects much of them. Perhaps best of all, bad development managers don’t have to do a lot of original thinking. This article identifies the 10 most common things that bad development managers know in their bones. If you follow all 10 of these rules, you’ll be able to hold your head up as the baddest of the bad.
Hedtke, John. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Project Management>Documentation
#26499
With a small budget to create a website, many small businesses bypass usability testing. While it is not always possible to do a full-blown usability test on a small website, there are steps that website developers can take to help make sure users are not ignored during the process.
Weise Moeller, Elizabeth A. IEEE PCS (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#31651
Using Visual Rhetoric to Avoid PowerPoint Pitfalls
Criticisms that Tufte and others have leveled against PowerPoint are not insurmountable defects of the programs themselves. These defects are generally due to an orientation, shared by program designers and users alike, and toward images rather than diagrams, toward perceptual decoration and object indication rather than toward visually mediated, iconic representations of verbal information. Using Peirce's theories of visual rhetoric, we show that improvements in visual communication generally - and PowerPoint slides in particular - depend on shifting our orientation away from image-driven thinking and toward diagrammatic modes of presentation.
Manning, Alan D. and Nicole Amare. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Presentations>Visual Rhetoric>Microsoft PowerPoint
#31763
Brenda Huettner provides us with the basics for making our web sites accessible in this training podcast.
Huettner, Brenda P. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Podcasts
#31669
What Do We Gain by Assessment?
The question, what do we gain by assessment, is one that has been asked more and more often by engineering educators. They ask the question even as the changes in accreditation brought on by ABET, Inc. and the Engineering Criteria have been cemented in programs both in the United States and abroad.
Williams, Julia M. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Education>Assessment>Engineering
