Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

This article draws on the principles of linguistic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to analyze and explain discursive diversity in organizational Web pages. Organizational Web sites must typically appeal to multiple audiences, a condition that often results in different discourses being juxtaposed within the same interface. To analyze and explain the effects of such juxtapositions, this article adapts to the Web the principles that Bakhtin developed to conceptualize discursive diversity in the novel, in particular his concept of dialogism. To illustrate their efficacy, the article applies these principles to analyze a pair of government Web sites about forests, the forest industry, and the environment. Whereas the homepages of the two sites project divergent approaches to the discourses of their diverse audiences, a dialogic analysis of the new site's deeper levels reveals how the government's discursive strategy appears to favor one audience at the expense of others. Drawing on this case study, this article discusses how an approach informed by Bakhtin's principles can illuminate our analysis of organizational Web discourse.

This study investigates whether Iconic Linkage—the use of the identical wording to present the same information recurring in a text—can improve the usability of user guides. Iconic Linkage is a writing strategy that potentially allows users to work more quickly and effectively and which promotes better retention of information. The usefulness of Iconic Linkage was tested in a laboratory-based usability study that combined: 1) objective task-based evaluation; and 2) users' subjective evaluations of a software program used in recording parliamentary debates. A post-test survey designed to test subjects' retention of information contained in the user guides was also administered. The study shows that Iconic Linkage significantly improved usability of the user guide: in all tasks, subjects worked more effectively and made fewer mistakes; while in the three timed tasks, subjects completed the tasks much more quickly. Subjects also gave higher ratings for the software and their retention of information was noticeably improved.

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

The growth of international online access has given rise to a new production method—international outsourcing—that has important implications for technical communication practices. Successful interactions within international outsourcing require individuals to understand how cultural factors could affect online interactions. Today's technical communication students therefore need to understand how factors of culture and media could affect the success with which they operate in international outsourcing activities. This article provides technical communication instructors with a series of Web-based exercises they can use to familiarize students with different aspects that can affect intercultural online interactions. It also provides a series of online resources students can use to enhance their understanding of cross-cultural communication in cyberspace.

This article critiques some titles in journal articles for being misleading and it argues that titles need to be informative. Examples are given of work on measuring the effectiveness of titles in two areas—sentence structure and reader comprehension—and the article concludes with brief comments on the effectiveness of book titles.