Theory and Practice of Editing Processes in Technical Communication

Beer, David F.

doi:10.1002/9781119134633.ch39

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…While it is not surprising that topics such as pedagogy and professionalism are divergent between academics and practitioners, it is surprising that topics such as technology, editing and style, and genre are divergent. Once again, these are topics that have been considered foundational aspects of TC (Allen, 1990;Dobrin, 1983;Farkas, 1985;Jordan, 1986;Kent, 1987;Masse, 1985;Ramsey, 1980), yet even these topics are not represented similarly in both the scholarly journals and Intercom.…”

Section: Primary Topicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Commonalities and Divergences Between Technical Communication Scholarly and Trade Publications (1996–2017)

Friess

Boettger

2021

Journal of Business and Technical Communication

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More than 20 years ago, Elizabeth O. Smith published her points of reference that documented the research trajectory of technical communication from 1988 to 1997. Her results indicated a focus on rhetorical analyses, a decrease in collaborative research, and a disproportionate representation of male authors. This study builds on these points with a quantitative content analysis of 1,271 articles that were published in five leading technical communication journals and Intercom, the trade magazine for the Society for Technical Communication, from 1996 to 2017. The results show that both the research journals and Intercom have pivoted to process-driven rather than product-driven content. The results also suggest that the primary topics of communication strategy and collaboration might be the most likely places to foster future industry–academic ties and that the greatest division between the two populations is the primary topic of rhetoric. This study offers an updated baseline for future investigations by offering an evaluation of disparate content foci between the publication types.

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