Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication helps technical communicators make better sense of technology’s impact on their work, so they can identify new ways to adapt, adjust, and evolve, fulfilling their own professional potential. This collection is comprised of three sections, each designed to explore answers to these questions:

• How has technical communication work changed in response to the current (digital) writing environment?
• What is important, foundational knowledge in our field that all technical communicators need to learn?
• How can we revise past theories or develop new ones to better understand how technology has transformed our work?

Bringing together highly-regarded specialists in digital literacy, this anthology will serve as an indispensible resource for scholars, students, and practitioners. It illuminates technology’s impact on their work and prepares them to respond to the constant changes and challenges in the new digital universe.

Rachel Spilka, is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her current research interests are on reexamining audience and defining, from the perspective of students, promising strategies for achieving greater diversity in academic programs in the field. Over the past thirty years, she has interspersed academic positions with work in industry, including manager of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Research Grants Committee and Ken Rainey Excellence in Research Award Committee. Her previous edited volumes Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives (Southern Illinois UP, 1993) and, with Barbara Mirel, Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions for the 21st Century (Erlbaum, 2003) both received the Best Edited Collection Award in Scientific and Technical Communication from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).