EServer TC Library: Recent AdditionsRecently-indexed online resources in technical, professional and scientific communication (including web design and human-computer interaction).Contextualize Technical Writing Assessment to Better Prepare Students for Workplace Writing: Student-Centered Assessment Instruments- June 26, 2008 To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some...http://tc.eserver.org/31787.html Graphics and Ethos in Biomedical Journals- June 26, 2008 This article describes a study that examined the tables and figures in articles from a basic research journal, The Journal of Cell Biology, and compared them to tables and figures from an applied medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine. Comparison of graphics between the two journals shows sharp differences in terms of range of graphics types, visual consistency within and between articles, or use of color. As the articles take into account what is needed by different audiences,...http://tc.eserver.org/31784.html Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication- June 26, 2008 In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the...http://tc.eserver.org/31788.html Toward a Critical Perspective of Culture: Contrast or Compare Rhetorics- June 26, 2008 Kaplan's framework of contrastive rhetoric has been widely accepted in the field of cross-cultural technical communication. However, in the last four decades, contextual factors such as economic globalization trend and the advances of communication technologies are changing our ways of interacting with others. As a result our understanding of culture and cultural differences need to be adjusted. In this research, I start by recommending a workable definition of culture in the present...http://tc.eserver.org/31782.html The New Atlantis- June 25, 2008 The New Atlantis is an effort to clarify the nations moral and political understanding of all areas of technologyfrom stem cells to hydrogen cells to weapons of mass destruction.http://tc.eserver.org/31781.html Are We Giving Readers What They Want, in the Way They Want and Need It- June 24, 2008 With all the talk about Web 2.0 and the attendant technologies, are readers actually being better served by documentation now than they were in the pasthttp://tc.eserver.org/31780.html |