Information fluency refers to the ability to recognize information needs and to gather, evaluate, and communicate information appropriately. In this study, I treat "information fluency" as both an overall competency and as a collection of knowledge and skills. The purpose of this study is to explore the specific workplace information fluency skills valued by employers of technical communicators, to find out how instructors perceive and teach these skills, and to suggest how these findings can inform our teaching practices. Within the framework of qualitative methodology, this study employs two data-collection instruments, including a content analysis of online job recruitment postings and a survey of technical communication instructors across the United States. The study discovers that when hiring technical communicators, employers require candidates to have skills in information processing, information technology, and critical thinking. Candidates must be able to identify their information needs, and must know how to use specified tools to gather, evaluate, and communicate information. It also reveals that although "information fluency" is a new terminology to a majority of instructors, the skill sets that constitute information fluency already existed in their knowledge. The study's last finding suggests that the opportunity for an internship is perceived as the most helpful in students' acquisition of information fluency skills. This dissertation concludes with a list of specific employer-valued information fluency skills, recommendations for program administrators and instructors for implementing information fluency, as well as recommendations for future researches on this subject.

This thesis seeks to investigate the influence and applicability of three technical writing principles across electronic maintenance manuals in the aerospace defense industry: military standard (MIL-STD) guidelines, plain language, and audience scope. Aerospace defense technical writers are liaisons tasked with coherent communication on advanced technological developments for technicians maintaining equipment. Their primary responsibility involves synthesizing specialized content from subject matter experts to draft comprehensive instructions for personnel safety and product sustainment during critical military operations. Current literature insufficiently examines the significance between aerospace defense technical documents and product performance following routine maintenance. Poorly composed manuals contribute to technician misinterpretation or disregard due to convoluted procedures and disorganized appearances increasing malfunction probabilities. Writing-based MIL-STDs and Simplified English emerged as efforts to mitigate understanding obstructs amongst domestic and international novice technicians. Maintenance manuals must conform to governmental guidelines including product liability laws, cultural variables, and audience expectations. Interview findings with two practitioners each from a different aerospace defense company supports the prediction that technical writing theories considerably impacts maintenance manual quality and recipience throughout the aerospace defense industry.

The purpose of this study was to examine the development, evaluation, and testing of a technical manual produced by the new United States Army Improved Technical Documentation and Training concept. The concept involved a complete systems analysis of the hardware being considered prior to the actual writing of the manual. The manuals were validated and verified by actual soldiers performing maintenance tasks using only the manuals. A comparison of the new manual with the old manual was Performed using untrained and trained soldiers. Conclusions formulated were that the new manual seemed to be a great improvement over the old manual and may assist in improving the present maintenance system.

This thesis is a study of the everyday communication of second language speakers in a major Swedish company. On the basis of eighteen interviews with permanently employed industrial and office workers, who came to Sweden as adults from countries outside the Nordic region where non-Germanic languages are spoken, five individuals were chosen for observation. The overarching aim of the study is to identify communicative factors with a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. Subsidiary aims are to map out the communication of the five participants and to analyse their involvement in communicative activities, both professional and social. The focus is on the interaction between participants and fellow employees, primarily in terms of what participants themselves do to promote mutual understanding and good relations at work. Theoretically and methodologically, the study has its basis in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. By means of fieldwork, a large body of empirical data was collected, comprising detailed field notes, audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk, and texts read and produced by participants. The five participants’ day-to-day communication is shown to be influenced to a large degree by the type of occupation. At the company studied, whose corporate language is English, white-collar employees can manage without a knowledge of Swedish, so long as they know English. Factory workers, meanwhile, regard an inadequate command of English, rather than Swedish, as an obstacle to promotion. All the participants perform communicative acts designed to create and maintain group solidarity. In seeking to foster good relations in the workplace, they make use of jokes, compliments, narratives, swearing and greetings. The participants are shown to be metalinguistically and metaculturally aware, which aids everyday communication and integration. Linguistic and cultural asymmetries seem to be able to mitigate potential threats to face, making the participants a valuable resource in sensitive communicative situations. All co-workers provide linguistic scaffolding, but in interaction with the most career-oriented participant, markers of power can sometimes be observed. A high level of awareness and performance of relational communicative acts appear to facilitate and speed integration in the workplace and the immediate work team. / Den kommunikativa situationen för invandrare på svenska arbetsplatser (KINSA)

Cette recherche porte sur l’écriture d’une profession, celle des éducateurs spécialisés, réputée être en délicatesse avec l’écrit. Dans cette profession le langage, sous forme orale ou écrite, EST le travail. Depuis le début des années 2000 le secteur médico-social qui lui sert de cadre est confronté, via la mise en place de la Nouvelle Gestion Publique, à la montée du scripturaire. Cette recherche interroge la prétendue « tradition orale » dont se revendiquent les professionnels du secteur médico-social et l’examine comme un problème écran. A partir des contraintes (naturelles, non naturelles, narratives et langagières) qui pèsent sur l’écriture professionnelle des éducateurs, la recherche s’organise en deux parties. La première dresse un cadre conceptuel destiné à interroger le terrain en se fondant sur un parcours à travers l’histoire, les mots, les savoirs et le langage du travail éducatif en se référant aux travaux de Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem,Paul Ricoeur. La deuxième partie donne la parole aux scripteurs et aux documents à partir d’un terrain constitué par une population de 389éducatrices et éducateurs spécialisés intervenant au sein d’une association gestionnaire de 60 établissements et services accompagnant des personnes en situation de handicap. In fine cette recherche entend ouvrir des perspectives permettant d’explorer les relations avec les personnes accompagnées, les rapports de l’écrit à la professionnalité, le renouvellement des formes de l’écrit à partir de la narratologie, l’articulation entre la praxis et une « clinique » de l’accompagnement et enfin de fonder une réflexion sur la place à donner aux littéracies dans la formation initiale et continue et dans l’analyse des pratiques des professionnels concernés. / The topic of this research is education specialists’ professional writing. It is generally assumed that education specialists feel rather uncomfortable with professional writings although language whether, oral or written, IS the work. Moreover, since the early 2000’s, along with the changes implied by the New Public Management reforms, a huge emphasis is put on written activities in this profession. This research examines the real issues hidden behind the claim of an oral tradition explanation from educators specialist. Starting with the constraints (natural, non-natural, narratives, linguistics) that are bearing upon these educators’ professional writing, this work is organized in two parts. The first part is setting up a conceptual frame based on history, words, knowledge and language of educational workers through authors like Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricoeur. The second part focuses on what educators, employed in a non profit organization, actually say about their practices through a quantitative enquiry and on analysis of documents. This non profit organization (OVE) dedicated to persons with special needs, manages 60 institutions and services and employs 389 teachers. To the end this research opens new ways of considering relations between professionals and persons with special needs, connections between profession and writing and, through narrative method, renewed forms of professional writing. Through thinking a new articulation between praxis and the clinical of care, a reflection on the place of literacies and pratices’ analysis is therefore needed in the educational training of this professionals.

<p>This research uses the composition practices of three experienced letterpress typesetters as a case study for the development of a methodology for studying human-technology interaction. This methodology tries to take seriously the implications that theories of materiality have for empirical research in writing and technology.</p> <p>Data was collected from three experienced typesetters, each of whom was observed setting type for two hours, then interviewed for 1 ½ to 2 hours, using observation footage to inform interview questions. Interview transcripts and observation footage were then coded for observable material intra-actions and the influences that characterized those actions and brought them into being.</p> <p>Data analysis produced six desiderata, or desires for design, that emerged as driving the composition process: 1) a desire to use the technology, 2) a desire for efficiency, 3) a desire to imitate/defer to historical practices, 4) a desire for letter-level correctness, 5) attention to aesthetics, and 6) a desire to communicate.</p>

Previous research has established the importance of the nouns and noun modification in academic writing because of their commonness and complexity. However, little is known about how noun modification varies across the rhetorical sections of research articles. Such a perspective is important because it reflects the interplay between communicative function and linguistic form. This study used a corpus of empirical research articles from the fields of applied linguistics and language teaching to explore the connection between article sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion; IMRD) and six types of noun modification: relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, ed-clause postmodifiers, prepositional postmodifiers, premodifying nouns, and attributive adjectives. First the frequency of these six types of noun modification was compared across IMRD sections. Second, the study also used a hand coded analysis of the structure and structural patterns of a sample of noun phrases through IMRD sections. The results of the analyses showed that noun modification is not uniform across IMRD sections. Significant differences were found in the rates of use for attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and prepositional phrase postmodifiers. There were no significant differences between sections for relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, or ed-clause postmodifiers. The differences between sections for attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and prepositional phrases illustrate the way the functions of these structures intersects with the functions of IMRD sections. For example, Methods sections describe research methods, which often have premodifying nouns (corpus analysis, conversation analysis, speech sample, etc.); this function of Methods sections results in a higher use of premodifying nouns compared to other sections. Results for structures of noun phrase across IMRD sections showed that the common noun modification patterns, such as premodifying noun only or attributive adjective with prepositional phrase postmodifier, were mostly consistent across sections. Noun phrase structures including pre-/post- or no modification did have differences across sections, with Introduction sections the most frequently modified and Methods sections the least frequently modified. The different functions of IMRD sections call for different rates of usage for noun modification, and the results reflected this. The results of this research benefit teachers of graduate students of applied linguistics in students' research reading and writing by describing the use of noun modification in the sections of empirical research articles and aiding teachers in the design of materials to clarify the use of noun modification in these IMRD sections.

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This dissertation examines the historical technical publications of the United States Army from 1775-2004. Historical research in Army technical communication reveals the persuasive characteristics of its technical publications. Elements of narrative, storytelling, and anthropomorphism are techniques writers used to help deliver information to readers. Research also reveals the design techniques writers adopted to unite the situated literacies of the troops. Analyses of print, comic, and digital media expose the increasing visualization of information since the eighteenth century. The results of such historical research can be applied to new media designs. Automating processes captured in paper-based technical manuals and adding intelligent functionality to these designs are two of many possible design options. Research also dispels a myth concerning the history of modern technical communication and illustrates the development of many genres and subgenres. Modern technical communication was not born of World War II as many scholars suggest, but was a legitimate field in eighteenth-century America. Finally, historical research in Army technical communication shows the systematic progression of a technological society and our increasing dependence on machine intelligence.

This is an interdisciplinary master's level thesis that explores links among technical writing, training manuals, surveillance, and anti-union rhetoric used with service workers in select American chains and franchises. Brief histories are provided, including those of technical writing, the rise of unions in America, and how technical writing became inextricably linked with labor. A major shift occurred in the 20th century when workers began interacting less with products and more with the public. The research focuses on training manuals, techniques, and rehearsed dialogues of McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Whole Foods, Panera, and Publix, though similar organizations are referenced. Service worker language, uniforms, and store decorum are sometimes analyzed for their rhetorical content. The idea of a single, technically written training manual in the service sector is a misnomer; training is delivered through a pastiche of manuals, videos, computers, apps, flipcharts, and on the job training. Unions are avoided through franchising (and therefore eat outlet not possessing enough workers to organize), creating conditions of high turnover rates, rhetoric, and use of euphemism. Global corporations are likened to "superfiefdoms," with service workers equated to modern serfs. If the world has evolved into supercorporations, it is argued then that the Publix employee-owned model may be the best approach and the most dignified of all. The technical writing and instruction in state-sponsored and federalized school pedagogies, which emphasize drills and compliance, may be culturally linked to the training found in these entry-level service jobs, and more academic study exploring these links is called for.