Overarching Semester Goals:

be aware of audience, situation, and purpose
write from the middle
know how to get sources (through ILL if need be)
- know what citations are (the parts and why they are there) and what they reveal (information for other researchers; epistemology of the discipline)
know how to form a research question
know how to select a method
- understand what IRB is
  - Example IRB application for exemption: "Summarizing Content on Amazon's Mechanical Turk"
  - Example IRB application for expedited study: "Project Management across Intercultural Contexts"
draft and revise
use a citation manager

List of Methods (with Examples):

Text mining (including word clouds)
Usability testing (including surveys and performance tests)
Ethnography & autoethnography (including making observations, interviewing participants, and collecting artifacts)
- "Leveling-up and out"
- "Children Writing Ethnography"
- "Writing Ethnography"
- Dr. Lauren Cagle discussing participatory ethnography
Theory (applying and constructing)
History
- "A Genealogy of Social Geomedia"
Case study
Secondary data analysis
- Data correlation
- Meta-analysis
Content Analysis
- "Instagram, Geocaching, and the When of Rhetorical Literacies"
- "The Prevalence of Feminist Content in Music Chart Performance"
Visualization
- "An Analysis of Job Listings on rhetmap.org for Junior Scholars"
- Mapping
  - "A Geographical History of Online Rhetoric and Composition Journals"

Chapter 1: "What Are the Boundaries, Artifacts, and Identities of Technical Communication?"

defining the field through (19):
- history
- topics and issues it addresses
- skills (methods) and knowledge practitioners need
nobody knew what PTW was (19)
- here's another option for defining: the courses a student takes—the curriculum (19)
- a single definition is difficult because it speaks to many interested audiences and covers much ground (20)
- all definitions have bias (20–21)
the strengths of a historical mapping approach (21)
- and their limitations (22)
the strengths of mapping the research base of topics, questions, methods, and issues (23)
- its weaknesses (elitism, topic skew?) (24–25)
the strengths of mapping practitioners' skills (25)
- weaknesses (26)
How are these maps made? What do we mean by mapping?
text clouds (27–)
- creating (28)
  - focusing questions
  - identifying a corpus
  - structuring rules and generating
    - rhetorical data decisions here (30)
  - adjusting granularity
    - Is this manipulating the data to make it say something interesting or what you want it to say?
  - interpreting and comparing text clouds practical text cloud examples (33–) text clouds are highly rhetorical in construction and interpretation (42)
- how you represent the subject tells a very different story about it

Chapter 2: "What Are the Work Patterns of Technical Communication?"

- three major PTW work patterns:
  - information design
    - "distributed work" (52)
    - "symbolic-analytic work" (52)
    - "textual coordination" (53)
    - coordination and transformation (53)
  - user advocacy
    - "no, your audience" (54)
    - UCD
    - useable vs. useful (and compelling) (55)
      - needn't anticipate everything before shipping (55)
    - being a researcher as well as a writing (55–56)
  - content and community management
    - the value of information (57)
    - it's no longer possible for writing to be concentrated in PTW (57)
    - breaking information into reusable components (58)
    - ensuring that writing is effective and improving (59)
    - displaying, representing, and assembling (59–60)
- heuristics
  - information design: 61–62
  - user advocacy: 62–64
  - content and community management: 64–65
- translation (66)
- UCD vs. PCD (67)
- UX (67)
- Usability Testing
  - surveys
    - location tests
    - comprehension tests
    - feedback
  - performance (observation) tests

Chapter 3: "How can Technical Communicators Fit into Contemporary Organizations?"

Ethnography/autoethnography (78)
- pulling from anthropology, folklore and oral history, and biology
How do you define culture (78)
objectivity, triangulation, and positional subjectivity (79)
cultural analysis heuristic (81)
- participant observation (82)
  - 5W & H (although why is tricky)
  - language use
- compiling fieldnotes
  - systematic
  - two-columns representing time (present and reflective)
- interviewing culture members
  - triangulation and shared beliefs (85)
  - interviewing principles (86)
- collecting and analyzing artifacts
  - built/made aspects
  - what artifacts say and how they function (87)
- writing
  - memos to file as working papers (88)
  - final forms
    - internal auditing and reporting documents (annual reports, efficiency reports, etc.)
    - scholarly research
gatekeeping audiences (CEO, legal, etc.) (91)
IRB and human subjects (95–96)

Chapter 4: "How Can Technical Communicators Develop as Both Students and Professionals?"

Is this a profession at all? Is it different from other forms of workplace writing? (101)
kinds of materials
- end user documentation
- Text prompts
- PR
- Blog posts
- Supervise interns
- Software documentation
- Advertising Materials
three sets of competencies (103)
- Primary: collaborate, write clearly, assess and learn technology, take initiative, and evaluate your own and others' work
- Secondary: use technology to accomplish work in various media and to "write, edit, and test various technical communication documents"
- Tertiary: conduct research and usability tests, single-source, design instructional materials, budget, present, and respond to cultural differences
Four key skills (104)
- excellent communication skills, collaborative skills, interviewing skills, and an affinity for technologies
How is the Society for Technical Communication doing on four goals? (103)

Chapter 5: "How can Rhetoric Theory Inform the Practice of Technical Communication?"

instrumentalism (125)
Systems-centered vs. user-centered (126)
theory is perhaps incorrectly viewed in opposition to practice (127)
theory as hypothesis or possibility (127)
theory as established explanatory principle (127)
- inductive observation (128)
- Predictive power (128)
theory as a practice of analyzing assumptions (128)
- Burke's analogy (128)
Culler's theory characteristics (129)
what theory does (130)
different methods (131)
building theory (134)
Theory as conversation (135)
Concepts of writing (135)
DEPAA (137)
- Document
- Ethos
- Process
- Audience & Action

Chapter 6: "How Can Work Tools Shape and Organize Technical Communication?"

Technical communication is a tool-oriented profession, so we are obliged to consider how tools embed practices and ethics to make them seem natural (146)
- this can be understood as "mediation"—how acts are filtered through tool paradigms (148)
Tools shape the practices of technical communication and the social interactions that technical documents foster (149)
Activity theory asserts that tools should be understood within their larger historical and cultural contexts (151).
Actor network theory asserts that tools develop historically through relationships to other tools. Tools reflect the needs of previous tool designers (151).
The chapter joins these theories: "the use of tools is an evolutionary accumulation and transmission of social knowledge, which influences the nature of not only external behavior but also the mental functioning of individuals" (152).

Chapter 7: "What Can History Teach Us about Technical Communication?"

Creating a history is always a current construction of the past and present (166)
"In sum the history of technical communication is a history of ordering knowledge, of socializing communicators into certain cultures of writing, of creating technical documents that reveal the past and shape the present" (174)
- "First, technical communication operates as a system of ordering that shapes and produces technological, scientific, and often business knowledge through the creation and use of texts" (174)
- "Second, these processes of ordering often take the form of organizational culture or institutional history, which continue to influence the contemporary workplace environment" (174)
- "Third, through this continued influence of the past on the present, technical communication practices and documents play a socializing role; they encourage or value certain practices while discouraging or complicating others" (174)
- "Finally, the traces of this history, and this socializing function, can be witnessed in the actual documents of the workplace" (174)
History heuristic:
- What systems of order does my workplace create? (175)
- How does the history and culture of my workplace influence this process of ordering? (175)
- How will my decisions in this workplace shape and order the actions of others? (176)

Chapter 8: "What Is the Future of Technical Communication?"

The present and future of technical communication is based in teamwork on projects that are too large for any individual, so the greatest challenges address communication (189).
"Wicked" problems are unbound; "tame" problems are bound (191).
- Problems and solutions are tame because there is a limit to them (although it is large and complex), but how to design documentation for a new vehicle is wicked because there is no limit to the options.
Wicked problems invite three misconceptions:
- oversimplification (incomplete conceptual understandings or overgeneralization of features between problem instances)
- inflexible knowledge structures or rigid problem definitions (particular processes turn into general ones)
- resistance to indeterminate or uncertain information (problems get represented in ways that conform to a template rather than resist it)
Expertise is no longer limited to a single expert, which changes the conventional role of the technical communicator
- "In the past expertise was viewed two-dimensionally, with the subject-matter expert being an expert on the technology or process and the technical writer an expert on writing and document design. Today, expertise is distributed, if it exists at all" (190).

Chapter 9: "How Can Technical Communicators Work in an Ethical and Legal Manner?"

Draws a definition of ethics from Dombrowski: “Deliberation about how to determine and act on what is good, right, just, beneficial, desirable, or commendable” (215)
Positions ethics as a process of engagement, research, and negotiation rather than a checklist (216)
Ethics develops phronesis (concrete, situated, practical wisdom) (216)
Stakeholders in technical communication are distributed (219)
Nomos, an ancient Greek term for convention, custom, or law, is a process of developing phronesis (220)
- Nomos is commonly a counterpoint of physis, or what might be considered natural law
User-centered design (221)
User-friendly design (224)
An ethical heuristic (225–229)
Technical writers are co-creators of knowledge instead of transmitters of it (233)
“As this chapter defines it, ethics is more than a set of nomoi; it is a process, more specifically the relational, context-dependent, power-laden negotiation of, judgment about, and commitment to enact the best course. More important than knowing specific nomoi ahead of time is learning how to identify and negotiate the sometimes competing nomoi inherent in our relationships with others, how to identify and negotiate the perspectives, values, knowledges, and forms of deliberation that other stakeholders bring to an ethical challenge” (233–34)

Chapter 10: "How Can Technical Communicators Plan for Users?"

Incorporating users into design through user-centered design and usability testing (237–38)
three models to understand audience:
- classification-driven analysis (239)
- intuition-driven analysis (240)
- feedback-driven analysis (240)
considering users and their physical contexts (the situation where and when they use the document) (241)
"If a continuous stream of communication and interaction is ideal, what technical communicators do, in part, is build mechanisms that facilitate ongoing relationships" (246).
viewing users not as passive consumers but as active participants in the processes (247)
using a heuristic such as Table 10.1 to analyze audiences, contexts, and tasks (250–52)

Chapter 11: "How Can Technical Communicators Study Work Contexts?"

three heuristics
- communicative event models (272)
- genre ecology models (273)
- sociotechnical graphs (274)
a method must systematize—you can’t examine everything but you can’t be arbitrary in your selection (263)
there is no “A” paper (263)
the situation must have a defined purview—the case must be bound (265)
context definition: "The set of observable differences in actors’ material relationships within two or more instances of the same activity" (265)
communication definition: "The ways that people exchange their information, thoughts, writing, and speech with each other" (266)
mediation through texts that regulate writers' work but aren't necessarily shared (267)
systematizing data: "Don't mix and match, collecting just interviews at location A and just observations at location B, because you won't be able to compare the data directly for patterns" (269)
Table 11.1 shows standard ethnography techniques (271)

Chapter 12: "How Can Technical Communicators Evaluate the Usability of Artifacts?"

usefulness vs. usability (287)
- "Usefulness is a value that users experience. It measures whether intended audiences find an artifact meaningful and valuable to their actual work flows and tasks as they want to do them. Usability, by contrast, is a property of the artifact. It measures and assesses whether the artifact's operations, displays, and content are easy to understand, use, access, learn, and navigate" (287).
Rhetorical focus: "Rhetorical skills make evaluators sensitive to what makes language and the presentation of information work well for a particular purpose, audience, context, and medium" (288).
Error severity rankings (levels 1–5) (290)
Formative and summative testing
- "Formative testing occurs early and often, and it generates findings that can progressively improve an artifact during development" (290)
- "Summative testing occurs at the end of development and validates an application. Summative evaluations determine if an application and its documentation effectively and efficiently address audience, purpose, context, and tasks ad if they meet standard usability criteria" (291).
RITE (rapid iterative testing and evaluation): a development cycle of quick prototyping (or drafting), testing, revising, and retesting (291).
System-centered vs. user-centered approaches (298)
Heuristic questions:
- What distinct value and skills do I have to apply to this usability situation? (296)
- What evaluation methods/test designs are best for the goals and circumstances? (296–97)
- What report choices will communicate convincingly and ensure improvements? (298)

Chapter 13: "How Can Technical Communicators Manage Projects?"

processes: planning, research and information gathering, composition/invention, reviewing and/or testing against quality criteria, revision, production, and dissemination (311)
waterfall method (314–15)
alternative models: user-centered design (iterative design), extreme programming, agile development (314)
standard project phases: planning research and information gathering, composition/invention, reviewing and/or testing against quality criteria, revision, production, and dissemination (315)
tools: spreadsheets, project management software, web-based collaborative and project-management systems, and time-management systems (323)
- (a very common planning document, the Gantt Chart, is not mentioned)

Chapter 14: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about Genre?"

genre analysis is a practical utility and a potential research method (content analysis often classifies textual documents into a certain number of genres with codified features)
rhetorical definition of genre (339)
- focused on similar recurrent situations rather than document features
  - connection to user centered vs. system centered—focusing on the experience rather than the thing's traits
genre principles (338)
- social action: "genre as a category of social activity rather than a category of textual form" (339–40)
- typification: "a sociocognitive process in which situations come to be treated as example of a type" (341)
- genre and choice: genre conventions both constrain and empower the author (342–43)
- genre and change: genres are provisionally stable, but are "always subject to the pressures of changing situations, new writers and readers, and new content" (344).
- genre and competence: having command over genre boundaries allows one more ethos to resist them for rhetorical effect (345)
  - novices often either incompletely understand how the genre works in its context or they (understandably) cling to the safest, most formulaic variations of the genre (345)
- correlation of genres: "genres are not merely standardized containers of message content. Genres establish, articulate, and reinforce socially recognized relationships, and these relationships play a role in how the content of messages is understood" (346).
- genre systems: the activity is affected by the overlapping genres at play (348)
- genre, flexibility, and originality: "there remains a great demand for invention, judgment, and creativity in how writers use genres (349)
the heuristic also is a genre: it's a formalized list of questions to achieve an outcome
- genre and purpose (350–51)
- genre and relationships (351–52)
- genre and document characteristics (352)
- learning genres (352–53)

Chapter 15: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about Writing?"

This chapter used a mixed quantitative and qualitative survey (366)
Although technical writing as a profession encompasses a range of competencies, writing was the common denominator (364).
Writing task aspects (summary description 372–73)
- amount of writing (367–68)
- nature (or characteristics) or writing (368–69)
- genres and rhetorical strategies of writing (369)
  - genres (376)
  - audience analysis (377)
- approach to and processes for writing (370)
- knowledge and skills associated with writing tasks (370–71)
  - employers commonly don't hire based on familiarity with specific tools, because they change and are teachable (380)
- writer's personal traits and qualities (371–72)

Chapter 16: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about Information Design?"

"Information design is the art and science of integrating writing and design so that people can use content in ways that suit their personal goals" (388).
Content can be (heuristic on 398):
- grouped rhetorically
  - explain
  - unfold in layers
  - narrate
  - instruct
  - compare
  - illustrate part-to-whole
  - detail cause and effect
- organized visually to show relationships
- grouped to signal relationships

Chapter 17: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about New Media?"

new media: networked digital communication technologies (430)
- not just made and consumed on a computer
features of new media:
1. digitization (431)
2. code controlled (431)
3. dependent on networks (431)
4. faster than tangible (432)
5. different kinds of interactivity than tangible (432)
6. ubiquity of access (432)
new media impacts on technical communicators:
- multimodality (433)
- single-sourcing and CMS (434)
- Web 2.0 (436)
- gaming and immersive environments (437)
- technological/rhetorical decisions (439)
heuristic (442–47)

Chapter 18: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about Collaboration?"

collaboration is "an intentional, sustained interaction toward a common goal" (454)
collaboration involves these factors (458–60):
- interactions
- people
- goals
- settings
- tools
- complexity
- perspectives
"social loafers" are collaborators who don't assume their fair share of the labor (462).
assumptions about collaboration (457):
- collaboration is rhetorical
- collaboration is a process
- collaboration is multimodal
what collaboration isn't:
- "It is not having each group member write a separate section of a long document and then cobbling the document together at the end. It is not giving a group presentation where each speaker is only responsible for discussing his or her individual contribution on the overall project. It is not simply using computer-mediated communication (e.g., social networking, file or video sharing, blogs, instant messaging, chats, and online forums). It is also not being in a group that leaves you doing all the work." (458)
collaboration heuristic matrix (468–70)

Chapter 19: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about International Environments?"

"Within this context, perhaps the best way to think of culture is as an organizational system, or a worldview, that you use to identify and rank the importance of different items in your environment" (481–82, italics in original).
- no culture is objectively correct (482)
revising materials to meet the expectations of a range of cultural groups is called internationalization (483)
- the revisionist approach is creating materials according to your home culture's rhetorical expectations and then localizing them for other contexts (483–84).
heuristic (487–91)
- Identify the forum (488)
- Identify the forum's purpose (488)
- Identify the special topics related to achieving the forum's purpose (489)
- Understand the proper presentation format of the special topics within a forum (490)