Keywords in Technical and Professional Communication

Keywords in Technical and Professional Communication explores the multiple and sometimes conflicting uses of terms central to the discipline of technical and professional communication (TPC). Each keyword was selected through a multi-stage process that involved corpus analysis of journal publications and surveys of technical communication scholars, educators, and practitioners. Written by experts who have published extensively on the concepts underlying each keyword, each essay provides a history and/or a summary of the changing contemporary and disciplinary contexts in which the keyword has been used, discusses the debates surrounding the term, considers the critical lenses shaping our understanding of it, and discusses how the term could be used in the future and/or whether it needs to be rethought in our current environment.

Han Yu is professor of English at Kansas State University, where she teaches scientific and technical communication. She is the author of The Other Kind of Funnies: Comics in Technical Communication; Communicating Genetics: Visualizations and Representations; and Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer’s. She is the coeditor of Negotiating Cultural Encounters: Narrating Intercultural Engineering and Technical Communication and Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies.

Jonathan Buehl is associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on research methods and technical and professional communication. He is the author of Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric and Scientific Discourse and the coeditor of Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a Digital Age. As a consultant and trainer, he has worked with teams of writers in organizations ranging from small nonprofits and biotech startups to business consulting firms and multinational insurance companies.