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Preface for Instructors

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION has always involved collaboration. A writer who needed to produce a user manual for a new software package would likely have interviewed the engineer who wrote the code. The company might also have convened a focus group to find out what users liked and didn’t like about the prototype of the software. Now, however, there is more interaction than ever before between the people who produce technical documents and those who consume them. Often, that interaction goes in both directions. Using social media and new technologies, technical communicators can collaborate with their audiences at every step of the communication process. And thanks to online publishing, audience members contribute to the development of technical documents even after they have been published, by asking and answering questions, revising existing information, and contributing new information.

The types of documents that technical communicators routinely produce have changed as well. Microblog posts, contributions to discussion boards and wikis, and status updates to one’s LinkedIn profile—once the raw materials of longer and more formal documents—are now routinely used to communicate important messages.

Despite these changes, the fundamentals of technical communication are at least as important as they always have been. An inaccuracy in a microblog post communicating a project update is every bit as big a problem as an inaccuracy in a traditional progress report. And even though we live and work in an era that values brevity and quick turnaround, some information can be properly communicated only through the longer, detailed documents that have always been at the center of technical communication.

I have revised this new edition of Technical Communication to help students learn how to communicate effectively in the fast-paced, highly collaborative world in which they will work. Employers have never valued communication skills as much as they value them today, and for good reason. Today’s professionals need to communicate more frequently, more rapidly, more accurately, and with more individuals than ever before. This book will help prepare students to do so—in their courses and in their careers.

New to This Edition

The Eleventh Edition recasts the text’s most enduring features in the context of today’s professional environment. Chapter 1, thoroughly revised in light of the input of fellow technical-communication instructors, sets the stage for the text’s new focus. Throughout, I’ve updated and expanded coverage of the topics and technologies most relevant to the technical communication process; in fact, I’ve eliminated Chapter 22, “Connecting with the Public,” altogether, as its topics are now integrated into many chapters throughout the text.

The chapter about audience includes an expanded introduction that prepares students who are, for the first time, considering audiences other than their instructors. In addition, this chapter presents techniques for analyzing social-media data to better understand those audiences. The correspondence chapter now includes guidelines on how to represent one’s organization on a microblog. The chapter on definitions, descriptions, and instructions covers the new role of discussion boards, wikis, and videos in disseminating information. Updated sample documents, both in the print text and online, provide opportunities for students to analyze the types of documents they’ll need to produce or contribute to, such as a municipal government app that enables residents to report infrastructure problems directly from their phones, as well as an interactive map of global forest changes that allows different audiences to customize their viewing experience to obtain the precise information they need.

In keeping with its promise of serving as a model of the principles it teaches, the new edition communicates in new ways. Online resources, labeled in the text with an icon, are located in the LaunchPad, a customizable online course space including a full e-book that can be packaged with new copies of the text for free. Cases are now presented in the LaunchPad so that students can easily download and work with related documents. Tutorials introduce tools for multimodal composition, teach helpful technology tips, and offer another means of learning documentation. LearningCurve adaptive quizzing activities, covering the first ten chapters, help students master and apply concepts in a new, personalized way. LearningCurve activities for multilingual writers are also available here, as are video-based team writing modules that help students learn collaborative writing skills. Also available in the LaunchPad are two full-length e-books: Document-Based Cases for Technical Communication, Second Edition, by Roger Munger, and Team Writing, by Joanna Wolfe. Finally, instructors can access a variety of instructor resources here, including a new test bank featuring multiple-choice, true/false, and short-answer questions for each chapter.

The following table describes the updates made to each chapter in the Eleventh Edition.