Technical Communication and the Discipline of Content

This book explores how workflows and technologies that treat content as computable data are changing the roles, work activities, and outputs of professional technical communicators.

It describes how the need for disciplinary approaches to design, manage, and deliver content has given rise to “the discipline of content” – content strategy, content design, content engineering, content operations – that increasingly defines a facet of technical communication work in modern organizations. This book draws on extensive research of the discipline of content and dozens of interviews with industry leaders, hiring managers, and academic administrators, educators, and alumni. These first-hand accounts outline how roles and activities in content organizations are changing, how these changes are impacting hiring needs and practices, and what skills and qualities students and early-career professionals now need to obtain content-related jobs and advance to strategic positions. This book also offers guidance for building curricular pathways that prepare students for work in the discipline of content and offers strategies for enhancing pathways through industry outreach and partnerships.

A thorough assessment of the implications of the discipline of content for technical communication, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of technical writing, professional and public writing, content strategy, content marketing and information design.

Rebekka Andersen is an Associate Professor and the Associate Director for Professional Writing in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis, United States.

Carlos Evia is a Professor, Associate Dean, and Chief Technology Officer in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, United States. He is the author of Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA (Routledge, 2018).