<p><P>The Internet has undergone a tremendous evolution during the past five years. Since 1995, consumer-catalog websites have not only come into being, but have become important business and consumer tools. Despite the upsurge and importance of these websites, it is difficult to find freely available tools that help website developers make important decisions regarding the content of these websites.</P><P> In this pilot study, I analyze a small sample of websites to compare the features of high-ranked and low-ranked consumer-catalog websites. The purpose of this research is twofold: to determine whether it is possible to pinpoint which features are exhibited by high-ranked and low-ranked websites and to present a tool that could simplify making decisions about certain content-related features.</P><P> I found that there are, indeed, differences between the content-related features of high-ranked and low-ranked websites. Some features are found more often in high-ranked websites than in low-ranked websites: longer, reader-based product descriptions; humor; certain types of company-related information (investor, staff, and employment information); consistent page design; consistent navigational patterns; sound; specific types of peripheral documents; alternate-language formats; sales incentives (discounts, bestsellers, advertising space, affiliate programs, and gift certificates). Following is a list of the features that are found more often in low-ranked websites than in high-ranked websites: product descriptions that are brief and jargon-laden; inconsistent page design; splash screens; inconsistent navigational patterns; fewer instances of peripheral documents and alternate-language formats than high-ranked sites; and fewer instances of sales incentives than high-ranked sites (discounts, bestsellers, and free product giveaways). I also found that it likely would be possible to develop the sort of tool described above. Implications for further research are also discussed.</P><P>

<p>Electronic publication brings a wide range of questions regarding how our lives will change. An area of great change has been electronic scholarly publication. One question this change has brought about is how we can prepare undergraduates as professionals prepared to meet this challenge. To this end, in 1996 I and the Center for Communication in Science, Technology, and Research began a two-year experimental online journal to publish "excellent" undergraduate research: the NCSU Student Researcher. Our goals were to introduce undergraduates from across the NC State campus to the challenges of electronic publication, to reward and enhance their class research by publishing their class papers, to highlight excellent NC State student writing across campus and beyond, and to explore electronic participation and presentation. The "peer" review procedure involved two faculty nominating the paper as "excellent" undergraduate research. We received a great deal of enthusiastic interest and input from many students and faculty, yet ultimately the Researcher received only two submissions. This thesis, the final report for the project, explores factors affecting student and faculty participation. Three different approaches to audience analysis were practiced in designing the journal (Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design, 1997): intuition-driven, classification-driven, and feedback-driven. The design process provides excellent examples of strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, and the superior approach of feedback-driven audience analysis, which was applied via systems analysis (Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 1990). The use of Senge's systems analysis as a form of audience analysis was a crucial contribution to understanding the journal's outcome. This thesis also discusses the dynamic model of scholarly communication uncovered by systems analysis. Rather than a linear process beginning with author and ending with reader, as found in the scholarly literature on scholarly publication, journals and other document series exist within an "interactive communication environment," not as single documents with a relatively distinct beginning and end, but a planned, dynamic series of documents that relies on its audience for input in order to survive. Feedback-driven audience analysis as practiced by systems analysis is particularly appropriate for analyzing audiences for such environments, which include periodicals, listservs, and chatrooms, as well as planned revisions based on audience feedback. Gathering feedback from the audience throughout the course of designing such an environment is critical if the environment depends on that audience for its survival. Systems analysis/feedback-driven audience analysis ultimately pinpointed the source of the Student Researcher's failure. The model of scholarly publication applied in the early design stages, derived by intuition- and classification-driven audience analysis, focused on authors (students) as the source of journal submissions. This conflicted with the mindset of faculty and students, because many conceived of no "disciplinary space" in which undergraduate publication is appropriate ("undergraduates are not authors"). Also, Writing Across the Curriculum initiative at NC State had caused most faculty to rethink what they considered "excellent" undergraduate writing, so publicly nominating a paper as "excellent" at that time was problematic. Systems analysis identified faculty, rather than the students, as the motivators in the publication process and thus the appropriate target for marketing and audience feedback. Because I did not seek systematic faculty and student input throughout the journal design process, I was unaware of the effect of the WAC initiative, and unaware that most faculty did not believe undergraduate publication per se was worth their effort. Because I focused on the students and not the faculty in marketing the journal, I had not invited broad faculty input in the design of the journal, a design that may have departed from the standard scholarly model in order for them to perceive it as appropriate for their students.<P>

Abstract not available.

<p> This project seeks to understand the relationship between visual rhetoric and power structure between FEMA&rsquo;s Earthquake publications and their audience. Research shows images leave a longer impression on readers than text, causing more studies to focus on visuals rather than just text in technical communication. Author uses Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the images in relation to text, design, and intended audience to determine what information is being privileged. It is determined that homeowners are being privileged with information over non-homeowners, established through a collection of images and image types. The lack of information for non-homeowners could result in injury or death of potential disaster victims, making it crucial for technical document revision.</p>

<p> This qualitative, exploratory study grouped together and explored custom-built environments for communities of online informal learning (COILs) with a special lens on the socio-technical relationship of platform tools, structures, and strategies that lead to social learning. The study was conducted through a three-phase process. First, a list of possible candidate sites was analyzed for appropriate fit based on the defining terms of a custom-built COIL environment. Second, an observational content analysis was implemented on 10 of the sites to aggregate a list of the tools, structures, and strategies used in the sites. Lastly, the same 10 sites and the lists of tools, structures, and strategies were researched through both pre-established codes for sociability, usability, and community-building designs and an open exploratory observation of their uses with a focus on the way these features support COILs. Social learning and informal learning were also purposefully scrutinized while themes regarding personalized learning and sustainability also emerged from the exploration. All design themes were found represented within the sites, as were social learning, informal learning, personalized learning, and efforts toward sustainability. </p>

This dissertation explores the ongoing division between technical communication practitioners and academics by examining the conceptual metaphors that underlie their discourse in professional journals and textbooks. Beginning with a demonstration that conceptual metaphor theory as formulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is a viable lens through which to engage in rhetorical (in addition to linguistic) analysis, the dissertation shows that academics and practitioners engage in radically different linguistic behaviors that result from the complex and often conflicting interplay of conceptual metaphors that guide their work. These metaphors carry assumptions about writers, texts, and communication that create covert tensions with the ethical value systems overtly embraced by both practitioners and academics. Chapter II looks at two professional publications written primarily by technical communicators for an audience of colleagues, and demonstrates that practitioners tend to use metaphors primarily centered around machines and money, objectifying both documents and people and reducing the processes of communication to a series of abstract mathematical influences. Chapter III looks at two technical communication journals with a more scholarly audience, and argues that academics participate in a much more convoluted conceptual system, embracing “humanist” language about communication that favors metaphors of human agency, physical presence, and complex social interaction; however, academics also participate in the abstracted, object-oriented metaphors favored by practitioners, leading to a particularly convoluted discourse both advocating and at odds with humanist social values. Chapter IV shows the practical consequences of these conflicting conceptual systems in several widely-used technical communication textbooks, arguing that academics inadvertently perpetuate the division between industry and academy with their tendency to use conceptual metaphors that contradict their social and ethical imperatives. This research suggests that a more detailed linguistic analysis may be a fruitful way of understanding and perhaps addressing the long-standing tensions between academics and practitioners in the field of technical communication.

<p>Kenneth Bruffee argues that for action to commence and for knowledge to be shared and furthered, communication must successfully occur between two or more individuals. Successful communication requires the reader or listener to interpret a message as the communicator had intended. Technical writers are responsible for composing documents that are easy to interpret and are useable for the intended readers. In contrast, lawyers have a reputation for being poor writers despite the extreme importance well written documents have for their careers and the negative consequences that may occur as a result of poorly written documents. Three lawyers and three legal writing professors were interviewed to learn about lawyers&rsquo; perspectives of the importance of legal writing and how they accommodate primary audiences. Three technical writers and three technical writing professors were also interviewed and asked parallel questions for comparison purposes. The interviews and additional academic resources showed that both technical writers and lawyers value writing in their careers and are responsible for clearly communicating specialized information to their readers. However, lawyers are often responsible for writing contracts that are not necessarily accommodated to the primary audience which makes it difficult for readers of the general public to understand. The thesis concludes that technical writers and lawyers, with the exception of the genre of contracts, use language as a social act to share knowledge and to persuade readers to perform practical tasks. </p>

This dissertation examines scholarly and classroom discussions that introduce technical communication students and practitioners to the concepts of ethics and professionalism. Through an analysis of scholarship, textbooks, and original survey data, I trace the development of a number of rhetorical frames used to articulate the role of the technical communicator in the workplace and in society to insiders and outsiders alike. I then propose an alternate frame, ethical professionalism, that can be used to articulate technical communication (and in particular the service course) as a site for outreach, not only through pedagogies that address the needs of local communities, but also as a site of ethical, professional, and civic instruction for students in disciplines outside of the humanities.

<p> The workplace success of new engineering graduates is ultimately affected by their oral and written communication skills. However, engineering students' academic preparation for industry's needs in terms of written communication has been widely acknowledged as inadequate. The present study is intended to improve our understanding of a prominent engineering genre, the engineering design report (EDR), and provide support for students learning to write this genre. The goals of this study are to (a) conduct a corpus-based register comparison between student and professional EDRs and (b) provide a more detailed description of professional EDRs, by determining their rhetorical organization and identifying linguistic features associated with this organization. </p><p> This research is based on two EDR corpora (N of texts=262, with approximately 1,119,186 words), one with upper-division engineering students' EDRs and the other with professional engineers' EDRs. The study examines both non-linguistic and linguistic features of student and professional EDRs. First, non-linguistic characteristics of EDRs are examined using the EDR situational framework developed for the study. Then, corpus-based methodologies are used to analyze core grammatical features and features associated with grammatical complexity in both corpora. Finally, to determine conventional discourse structures of professional EDRs, the study draws on the English for Specific Purposes tradition of genre analysis and then uses register analysis to investigate linguistic features associated with particular rhetorical structures. </p><p> The register analyses revealed complex patterns of linguistic variation, frequently influenced by the registers' situational characteristics. The results of these analyses indicate that two EDR registers fill different positions on the spoken-to-written continuum, with reports produced in the workplace being closer to professional written registers and student reports using more speech-like features. The genre analysis of professional EDRs uncovered the highly variable nature of this genre. Despite considerable variation in EDR rhetorical organization, 12 common moves were identified that cluster in specific ways to form EDR organizational units and rely on particular sets of linguistic features. A streamlined template of the EDR genre is introduced as are linguistic features associated with its organization. Study results may have pedagogical implications for teaching features of professional EDRs to students.</p>

<p> Cell phone companies are constantly developing faster and more high tech phones in order to satisfy society's demand to carry a miniature computer in their pocket. As society has a continual demand for cell phones, mobile phone companies continue to expand cellular capabilities. One of these advances in cell phone technology is the advent of text messaging. In a survey of 800 teens (ages of 12-17), one in three or 34% between the ages of 16-17, reported they text while driving (Lenhart, Ling, Campbell &amp; Purcell, 2010). Olsen, Hanowski, Hickman and Bocanegra (2009) reported text messaging on cell phones was the most risky behavior when compared with other behaviors such as dialing a cell phone, looking at a map or reaching for another object. A study in 2009 revealed cell phone use was associated with 995 distracted driving fatalities (NHTSA, 2010). This number accounts for approximately 18% of distracted driving related fatalities. Cell phone use was also associated with 24,000 distracted driving injuries, which accounts for 5% of overall distracted driving injuries. The current study seeks to examine what effect a person's attitudes regarding texting and driving, the likelihood of engaging in texting and driving behavior and frequency of reported texting and driving behaviors have on the probability of using a cell phone application designed to prevent texting and driving. The current study also seeks to examine whether downloading a cell phone application has an effect on texting and driving behaviors.</p>