Editor

Rebecca E. Burnett
Iowa State University

Book Review Editor

Kelli Cargile Cook
Utah State University

Managing Editor
Lori Peterson

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Roundy Blyler, founding coeditor 1987-1989
Charlotte Thralls, founding coeditor 1987-1989
Thomas Kent, editor 1990-1994
Charles Kostelnick, editor 1995-1997

Editorial Board
Gerald J. Alred, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Paul Anderson, Miami University
Marthalee Barton, University of Michigan
Charles Bazerman, University of California, Santa Barbara
Stephen A. Bernhardt, New Mexico State University
Davida H. Charney, University of Texas at Austin
Barbara Couture, Washington State University
Stephen Doheny-Farina, Clarkson University
Linda Driskill, Rice University
JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc.
Thomas N. Huckin, University of Utah
Mohan R. Limaye, Boise State University
Carolyn R. Miller, North Carolina State University
Michael G. Moran, University of Georgia
Lee Odell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Richard David Ramsey, Southeastern Louisiana University
Janice C. Redish, Redish & Associates, Inc.
Jone Rymer, Wayne State University
Rachel Spilka, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Elizabeth Tebeaux, Texas A&M University
James P. Zappen, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The editor gratefully acknowledges the support given by

the Department of English, Iowa State University

For Sage Publications: Stephanie Lawrence, Angela Emery, Paul Doebler,

and Julie Pignataro
 Journal of Business and
Technical Communication
Volume 15 Number 4 October 2001

CONTENTS

SPECIAL ISSUE:
Prospects for Research in Technical
and Scientific Communication—Part 2
Guest Editor: Davida Charney

Guest Editor’s Introduction:

Prospects for Research in Technical
and Scientific Communication—Part 2
DAVIDA CHARNEY 409
Articles
Writing as an Embodied Practice:
The Case of Engineering Standards
CHRISTINA HAAS, STEPHEN P. WITTE 413
Issues of Validity in Intercultural
Professional Communication Research
BARRY THATCHER 458
Research Opportunities in the US Patent Record
KATHERINE T. DURACK 490
Commentary
STC Funds Research in Technical Communication
SANDRA HARNER 511
Announcements 516
Board of Reviewers 518
Submission Guidelines 519
Index 521

Sage Publications Thousand Oaks • London • New Delhi

JBTC is a refereed journal that provides a forum for discussion of communication practices, problems,
and trends in business, professional, scientific, and governmental fields. As such, JBTC offers opportu-
nities for bridging dichotomies that have traditionally existed in professional communication journals
between business and technical communication and between industrial and academic audiences.
Because JBTC is designed to disseminate knowledge that can lead to improved communication
practices in both academe and industry, the journal favors research that will inform professional
communicators in both sectors. However, articles addressing one sector or the other will also be con-
sidered. Submissions may address such topics as state-of-the-art communication technologies; in-
novative instruction; qualitative and quantitative research in governmental, industrial, or academic
settings; and theoretical approaches to business and technical communication. While published
manuscripts may represent any one of a wide range of approaches and methodologies, treatment
should meet the highest standards for scholarship.
JOURNAL OF BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION (ISSN 1050-6519) is published
four times annually—in January, April, July, and October—by Sage Publications, 2455 Teller Road,
Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Telephone: (800) 818-SAGE (7243) and (805) 499-9774; FAX/Order
line: (805) 375-1700. Copyright © 2001 by Sage Publications. All rights reserved. No portion of the
contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Subscriptions: Regular institutional rate $340.00 per year, $90.00 single issue. Individuals may
subscribe at a one-year rate of $65.00, $25.00 single issue. Add $8.00 for subscriptions outside the
United States. Orders with ship-to addresses in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, and Africa should
be sent to the London address (below). Orders from India and South Asia should be sent to the New
Delhi address (below).Noninstitutional orders must be paid by personal check, VISA, or MasterCard.
Periodicals postage paid at Thousand Oaks, California, and at additional mailing offices.
This journal is abstracted or indexed in Abstract Journal of the Educational Resources Infor-
mation Center, Academic Search, Business Source, ComIndex, Communication Abstracts,
Corporate ResourceNET, CRN: Business & Industry, Current Citations ExpressD, Current
Contents: Business Collection, Current Contents: Social & Behavioral Sciences, Current
Index to Journals in Education (CIJE), Human Resources Abstracts, MasterFILE FullTEXT,
Periodical Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, Standard Periodical Directory (SPD),
and TOPICsearch.
Back Issues: Information about availability and prices of back issues may be obtained from the pub-
lisher’s order department (address below). Single-issue orders for 5 or more copies will receive a
special adoption discount. Contact the order department for details. Write to the London office for
sterling prices.
Inquiries: All subscription inquiries, orders, and renewals with ship-to addresses in North America,
South America, and Canada must be addressed to Sage Publications, 2455 Teller Road, Thousand
Oaks, CA 91320, U.S.A., telephone (800) 818-SAGE (7243) and (805) 499-9774, fax (805) 375-
1700. All subscription inquiries, orders, and renewals with ship-to addresses in the U.K., Europe, the
Middle East, and Africa must be addressed to Sage Publications, Ltd, 6 Bonhill Street, London EC2A
4PU, England, telephone +44 (0)20 7374-0645, fax +44 (0)20 7374-8741. All subscription inquiries,
orders, and renewals with ship-to addresses in India and South Asia must be addressed to Sage
Publications Private Ltd, P.O. Box 4215, New Delhi 110 048, India, telephone (91-11) 641-9884, fax
(91-11) 647-2426. Address all permissions requests to the Thousand Oaks office.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of spe-
cific clients, is granted by Sage Publications for libraries and other users registered with the Copy-
right Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service, provided that the base fee of 50¢
per copy, plus 10¢ per copy page, is paid directly to CCC, 21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970. 1050-
6519/2001 $.50 + .10.
Advertising: Current rates and specifications may be obtained by writing to the advertising man-
ager at the Thousand Oaks office (address above).
Claims: Claims for undelivered copies must be made no later than six months following month of
publication. The publisher will supply missing copies when losses have been sustained in transit and
when the reserve stock will permit.
Change of Address: Six weeks advance notice must be given when notifying of change of address.
Please send old address label along with the new address to ensure proper identification. Please
specify name of journal. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Journal of Business and Techni-
cal Communication, c/o 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320.

Printed on acid-free paper

JBTC / October 2001 Charney / GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Prospects for Research in Technical
and Scientific Communication—Part 2

This is the second of two special issues on prospects for research in

technical and scientific communication (see also JBTC 15.3). In seven
articles in these two issues, researchers argue for new approaches to
three key areas: designing and using electronic media, investigating
and improving communication among professionals and with the
public, and studying the role of texts in the course of scientific and
technical innovation. The final piece in this issue, a commentary by
Sandra Harner, provides timely information about applying for
research funding from the Society for Technical Communication
(STC) and about disseminating the results of this research to STC’s
membership of scholars and practitioners.
In addition to galvanizing future research, the articles in these
issues also contribute to current discussions of appropriate research
methods in our field. Three positions on methods emerge. First, some
authors, including Christina Haas and Stephen Witte (this issue) and
Clay Spinuzzi (forthcoming in JBTC 16.1), argue for making our meth-
ods more comprehensive so that we can develop better explanations
of how communication works in complex settings. Others, including
Ellen Barton (JBTC 15.3) and Joanna Wolfe and Christine Neuwirth
(JBTC 15.3), make strong cases for making our methods more relevant
and accessible to researchers and practitioners in scientific and tech-
nical communities so that the findings will be more likely to lead to
productive change. A third set of authors, including Barry Thatcher
(this issue) and Danette Paul, Davida Charney, and Aimee Kendall
(JBTC 15.3), challenge the assumptions underlying previous research
about what texts we should choose to study and how we should eval-
uate responses from readers. In addition, Katherine Durack (this
issue) offers a variety of methods that technical and business commu-
nication researchers can use in the US Patent Office.
As a confirmed methodological pluralist, I am delighted by the
wide range of methods promoted in these articles, including ethnog-
raphy and activity theory, text and discourse analysis, observational
case studies, process tracing, historical studies, and experimental

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 409-412
© 2001 Sage Publications

409
410 JBTC / October 2001

methods. But with a plurality of methods, we must also make and

defend our choices. Some of the methods advocated here call for such
intensive observation and analysis of objects, participants, events,
and settings that they may well seem daunting to researchers who
have not used them. Experimental methods may seem daunting
because they employ unfamiliar techniques and standards. Then, of
course, research methods are argued to carry ideological baggage that
may seem daunting as well. Nevertheless, we must resist being
daunted. The way to do so, I believe, is through incrementalism; that
is, by putting a greater value on smaller, simpler studies that are easier
to do well. By conducting a series of studies, individual researchers
can gradually enlarge their scope. And by working more collabor-
atively as a discipline, we can gradually incorporate these fragments
into a larger picture. The picture will never be a timeless and
unchanging representation of a fixed reality, but it can still become
better and better.
Some researchers revel in studies that look exhaustively at the
complex minutiae of a single site or occasion, and their detailed narra-
tives give us a sense of the whole that is often exactly what we need to
establish the nature of an event or phenomenon. But I do not believe
that such comprehensive methods are always the best. Methods that
collect and analyze data on a need-to-know basis, such as experi-
ments or even surveys, also can be of great value. A quest for compre-
hensiveness reflects an expectation that each study should stand
alone, an expectation that in itself emphasizes the uniqueness of each
site and each occasion for research. If we have only one chance to
study a phenomenon, then collecting all possible information about it
when we can makes sense. But why assume we only have one chance?
If many researchers in many places can ask similar questions, then we
have many chances. For example, one question raised by Cheryl
Geisler and her colleagues (JBTC 15.3) is, “How can coauthors work-
ing from different locations keep track of versions using different
electronic tools?” Surely this question can be pursued in many work
sites across the country. Why assume that the differences between
research sites must outweigh their commonalities?
Even if the differences between research sites are important, a good
way to assess them is to compare them on similar scales. I suggest that
we search for commonalities by conducting similar small-scale stud-
ies in many sites, each one seeking a degree of replication of previous
 Charney / GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 411

findings as well as a degree of extension to new questions. When we

view studies as incremental bids for meaning, we can learn more from
our research literature. Many of us read research studies, especially
experimental studies, as if we were engaged in a single-elimination
contest—as if finding any weakness whatever makes the study
entirely invalid. Instead, we should look for ways both to challenge
and to build on previous work. A discipline is constituted not by each
of us separately pursuing our own explorations but by a joint
endeavor toward understanding.
To build on the work of colleagues in our own and other disci-
plines, we also have to overcome a tendency to see research methods
as mutually exclusive rather than as complementary worldviews.
The best method is the one that gets most directly at the crucial ques-
tion. Questions become more targeted as a research area becomes
better understood, after many researchers have studied it using a
variety of approaches and have shared their findings. In “Experimen-
tal and Quasi-Experimental Research,” I discuss more fully the kinds
of questions addressed by different methods and the interrelations of
these methods.
The methodological pluralism that I have been describing is not a
theory in which anything goes. It does not condone fishing expedi-
tions, self-fulfilling prophecies, bad planning, or unethical opportun-
ism. What it does admit is that we have a lot to learn from each kind of
method. If our goal is to understand and improve technical, scientific,
and professional communication, we need all the methods at our dis-
posal. If we pursue the intriguing and important questions raised in
these issues, and if we choose our methods wisely, the prospects for
research are very good indeed.
I want to thank all the scholars who submitted such interesting
manuscripts for these issues. I surely speak for these authors as well
when I thank those colleagues who reviewed the manuscripts so care-
fully and constructively: Paul Anderson, Stephen Bernhardt, Ann
Blakeslee, Deborah Bosley, Saul Carliner, Bill Coggin, Sam Dragga,
Jeanne Fahnestock, James Hartley, Richard Haswell, Mohan Limaye,
Lucille McCarthy, Carolyn Miller, Meg Morgan, Paul Prior, Janice
Redish, Peter Reilly, Philip Rubens, Jone Rymer, Karen Schriver, Kath-
erine Staples, Jim Stratman, Peg Syverson, Beth Tebeaux, Gretchen
Vik, Dorothy Winsor, and Kristin Woolever.
412 JBTC / October 2001

REFERENCE

Charney, Davida. “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Research.” Research Methods

in Technical Communication. Eds. Mary Lay and Laura Gurak. Norwood, NJ: Ablex,
Forthcoming.
—Davida Charney
University of Texas at Austin
JBTC / October 2001 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE

This article explores the role of embodied knowledge and embodied representation in the
joint revision of a small section of a large technical document by personnel from two
organizations: a city government and a consulting engineering firm. The article points
to differences between the knowledge and the representation practices of personnel from
the two organizations as manifested in their words and gestures during the revision task,
and it points to the gestures of the city personnel as a principal means by which their
greater embodied knowledge of channel easements becomes distributed across the group
as a whole. The article concludes by pointing to some advantages of considering acts of
writing as embodied practices and by indicating a number of related questions that
should be pursued in subsequent investigations of literacy in modern workplaces.

Writing as an Embodied Practice

The Case of Engineering Standards

CHRISTINA HAAS
STEPHEN P. WITTE
Kent State University

Le concert, c’est moi!

—Franz Liszt, nineteenth-century composer
and pianist (qtd. in Wilson 214)

Howlin’ Wolf taught me how to play “Red Rooster.” It was a hairy

experience. He came over and got hold of my wrist and said, “You
move your hand up HERE!” He was very, very vehement about it being
done right. Because he considered us to be English and foreigners, and
therefore we wouldn’t have heard the song, right? So he just got his gui-
tar out and said, “This is how it goes.”
—Eric Clapton (qtd. in Roberty 58)

These two epigraphs are our attempt to suggest that in certain

areas of human performance, embodied practice is acknowledged as
a given condition of the performance itself. In asserting that “I am the
concert,” Franz Liszt was not only declaring that music is inseparable
from its performance but that differences in bodily manipulations of
musical instruments yield different music from the same score, a dis-
covery that Liszt repeatedly capitalized on in his own concerts (Wil-
son 214-15). Nearly a century and a half later, the American blues man
Howlin’ Wolf made essentially the same point when he physically
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 413-457
© 2001 Sage Publications

413
414 JBTC / October 2001

repositioned Eric Clapton’s left hand so that the young guitarist’s fin-
gers met the strings above the frets at a different angle to produce a
different sound. And when Howlin’ Wolf “got his guitar out and said,
‘This is how it goes,’ ” he was not intending to teach Clapton a melody
line but, rather, was intending to teach him that Wolf’s kind of music
depended on creating and maintaining a proper relationship between
the performer’s body and the musical instrument.
We might have referred to other domains of human performance—
sports, surgery, cooking, dance, carpentry—to make the same point
about embodied practices, but we chose music because some evi-
dence (see Wilson) suggests that the production and appreciation of
music occur in the same neurological center that affects language pro-
duction and use. In any case, acts of situated writing clearly entail
bodily performances of many kinds: the manipulation of fingers,
hands, arms; the orientation or positioning of the body; the use of
visual, aural, and tactile senses.
Whereas the notion that writing entails physical, embodied action
may seem commonsensical to many readers, writing studies in gen-
eral have yet to attend systematically to the embodied nature of writ-
ing. Some notable exceptions include Janet Emig’s suggestions for
research on writing processes (“Hand”), Kristie Fleckenstein’s pre-
sentation of the notion of “somatic mind” as a theoretical concept that
links mind and body, and Jonathon Goldberg’s exploration of the
“disciplining” of writers’ bodies through the tools and conventions of
penmanship.
Within the field of technical communication, some issues involv-
ing the embodied nature of writing have been considered although
usually only indirectly. Patricia Sullivan and Jennie Dautermann’s
Electronic Literacies in the Workplace provides a case in point. This inter-
esting and timely anthology focuses dually on writing technology
and on workplaces—two sites that lead some scholars to consider
issues surrounding embodiment. Although it may not use the words
body and embodiment to refer literally to human, physical, real-time

Authors’ Note: The study reported in this article was funded in part through a Research Chal-
lenge Grant from the Ohio Board of Regents. Earlier versions of the article were presented to the
Writing and Literacies Special Interest Group at the 1999 American Educational Association
Annual Meeting and to the English Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. We
appreciate the thoughtful and useful comments of colleagues on both occasions. We are also
grateful to our colleagues in the Center for Research on Workplace Literacy at Kent State Uni-
versity. We are especially grateful to the technical professionals who participated in this
research.
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 415

activity, the anthology does deal with the technologies of writing,

technologies that are manipulated almost exclusively by human
hands. Furthermore, the various chapter authors examine
workplaces, sites where writers and other technical professionals are
most likely to encounter what Sullivan and Dautermann called “the
material conditions” of context (ix), many of those conditions point-
ing to the embodied nature of writing. For instance, Nancy Allen
addressed access to technology, which requires that writers or other
workers be in close proximity to, if not in bodily contact with, a
machine; Susan Jones focused on the computer interface, which liter-
ally requires that the writer face the computer; and Powell Henderson
illustrated the way training (of the body as well as the mind) and the
phenomenologically experienced element of time constrain writers
and other workers in a technical workplace.
Yet even in these important and suggestive studies, the authors do
not address the embodied nature of writing directly or explicitly.
Beverly Sauer, in her studies of coal miners’ embodied understanding
of risk, is one of the few writing researchers to treat embodiment
directly. Sauer has done extensive research on the material environ-
ment in which miners work (“Sense,” “Dynamics”), and she has
shown how miners work with “pit sense,” that is, “embodied sensory
knowledge derived from site-specific practice.” Miners often repre-
sent their “pit sense” through gesture (“Embodied Experience” 322),
but this experientially derived, embodied knowledge is much less
successfully represented in or communicated through written or
graphic texts (“Embodied Knowledge”). Although we share Sauer’s
general interest in embodiment—and indeed have learned much
from her work—our focus in this article is on exploring not the mis-
matches between embodied experience and technical communica-
tion but rather the essential embodied nature of technical writing.
Furthermore, although Sauer’s work has taken her to mines on three
continents, our study of the technical professionals discussed here is
set in our own backyard.
Our study illustrates in a preliminary way how embodiment fig-
ures in the communicative practices of a group of engineers and utili-
ties personnel as they revise a small section of a very large technical
document. In its entirety, this document—an engineering standards
document—delineates standards for developing and maintaining the
material infrastructure of a small and rapidly growing city. The study
suggests how explicit attention to writing as embodied practice can
add important perspectives and detail to information gleaned
416 JBTC / October 2001

through other research approaches in technical communication. Ini-

tially, we present four sections that (1) clarify terms, (2) provide some
background for our study, (3) describe our data collection procedures
and analytic methods, and (4) provide an immediate context for our
analyses of a specific part of the engineering standards project. We
then turn to our three major analyses. The first analysis describes the
revision of a small section of the standards document in terms of the
interaction of visual and verbal texts, and the second analysis exam-
ines the verbal processes of that revision through the lens of writing
process theory and the notion of distributed cognition. The third, and
longest, analysis presents a more detailed look at how these technical
professionals use material and embodied knowledge and means of
representation to create a set of engineering standards.

CLARIFICATION OF TERMS

To say that an act is embodied is to say, ultimately, that it is accom-

plished by means of the human body. Embodied acts always take
place in real time and in specific physical spaces, and they entail the
usually skillful and often internalized manipulation of an individ-
ual’s body and of tools that have become second nature, virtual exten-
sions of the human body. In many ways, embodied acts are lived
experiences and, as such, are intrinsic to a human life world—the
world of the senses, the world of affect, and the world beneath words.
To the notion of an embodied act, we here add the concept of practice,
which, following Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, we define as “a
recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activities using a particular tech-
nology and a particular system of knowledge” (236). Hence, in label-
ing writing an embodied practice, we mean that its recurrent nature,
its goal directedness, and its intimate linking with technologies and
with knowledge are always enacted in part through bodily and sen-
sory means.
Our understanding of writing as an embodied practice can be fur-
ther clarified by describing two working assumptions. First, we
believe that, in the case of writing at least, the distinction between
mind and body is a specious one. The mind-body distinction is, of
course, prevalent in both scholarly discourse and everyday thinking.
Gilbert Ryle described the distinction between mind and body—the
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 417

“official doctrine,” which he attributes chiefly to Descartes—as

follows:

Human bodies are in space and are subject to the mechanical laws
which govern all other bodies in spaces. . . . But minds are not in space,
nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws. A person therefore
lives through two collateral histories, one consisting of what happens
in and to his body, the other consisting of what happens in and to his
mind. (11-12)

Ryle went on to refute the viability of this official Cartesian doc-

trine. We cannot here enumerate the theoretical and practical prob-
lems inherent in the mind-body duality; indeed, such work has been
done by others (e.g., Kim; Toulmin), but Ryle’s may be one of the most
lucid problematizations. In any case, we see this categorical distinc-
tion as untenable in the study of real-time human practices such as
writing. Rather, we see thinking as distributed, not only across indi-
viduals and institutions but within the individual as well. We agree
with Lev Vygotsky (“Historical,” “History”) that the mind is a func-
tion that manifests itself in myriad ways.
Second, we assume an important difference between embodiment
and the body. Whereas the body is a cultural, social, and linguistic con-
struct, embodiment is lived experience. And whereas the body as a the-
oretical construct has been much discussed of late in fields such as lit-
erary theory, social theory, and cultural studies (e.g., Butler),
embodiment, as real-time, material, corporeal action, has been less
explored. Indeed, for us, embodiment signifies a unification of mind
and body that, in fact, denies the possibility of abstracting the body as
an analytic category, at least in studies of everyday human acts such
as situated writing.
Embodiment often manifests itself as a kind of felt sense (cf. the
miner’s “pit sense”) and is a transparent part of everyday life, not a
reified conceptual category. Although embodiment exists in an
uneasy relationship with abstract language (Sauer, “Embodied
Knowledge”; Scarry), that does not mean that embodiment is always
unavailable for analytic observation. Indeed, we report on and ana-
lyze here some specific ways in which writing is embodied. Further-
more, we believe that studying the embodied nature of writing is one
appropriate and useful way to pursue research on technical commu-
nication and other kinds of literate performances.
418 JBTC / October 2001

BACKGROUND FOR THE STUDY

Our example of writing as an embodied practice is drawn from a

protracted and ongoing study of the joint production and revision of a
document to standardize procedures and products related to the
infrastructure maintenance and expansion of a small but rapidly
growing city in northeast Ohio. Authorized by the city council and
managed by the city engineer, the project aims at creating an artifact, a
set of published city engineering standards that will mediate the
work of people employed in various city departments (e.g., water,
planning, engineering, electric, wastewater, transportation, fire,
emergency services) and of elected and appointed officials such as the
council members and the city manager. More important, from the per-
spective of city personnel, the engineering standards also will medi-
ate the work and interactions of a wide range of persons and compa-
nies doing business with the city for many years to come: consulting
engineers and engineering firms, construction companies, land
developers, architects, building contractors and subcontractors,
material supply companies, and local property owners and residents.
In essence, the standards document (which is the term participants
use to refer to this jointly produced mediating artifact in progress)
will become a reference for citizens, city personnel, developers, con-
tractors, and many others involved in city maintenance and expan-
sion. The standards document includes 15 lengthy chapters or sec-
tions that detail specifications for items ranging from type and size of
fire hydrants in the city limits to the species of trees to be planted
along city roadways to the width and depth of street gutters to the size
and material of underground water pipes. An even cursory reading of
the document suggests the broad range of representational systems
used in it: verbal text, tables, sketches, maps, charts, timelines, and
detailed technical drawings (see Witte, “Context,” for an argument
about why our understanding of writing must include multiple rep-
resentational systems). Each of these representational systems, in
turn, requires distinct embodied production processes using different
material and computer-based technologies.1
The purpose of the standards document is to smooth transitions
(i.e., adjudicate controversies) between the city and developers and
builders of new construction and to be a ready reference for answer-
ing citizens’ or employees’ concerns or questions. According to the
city engineer, the resulting document will standardize construction
and maintenance operations in the city and serve as an authority for
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 419

individuals and groups to consult in making decisions about engi-

neering issues. The standards document, then, is meant to codify
expert knowledge (much of it, as we illustrate, embodied knowl-
edge), streamline decision making, and standardize the material real-
ity of city infrastructure.
Primary responsibility for the development of the standards docu-
ment is distributed across two organizations. The first is a large con-
sulting engineering firm, which consists primarily of civil, mechani-
cal, and environmental engineers. The consulting engineers develop
initial drafts of the document sections, gather input from city person-
nel, and revise the standards. The second organization is the city
itself, particularly the engineering department, whose involvement
in the project is managed and coordinated by the city engineer, Jeff.
The joint production of the standards document was, during the six-
month period in which this study was conducted, unfolding accord-
ing to an agreed-on procedure. This kind of a priori process planning
appears to be common in collaborative writing tasks that involve
writers from different organizations and is probably meant to stream-
line decision making and resolve in advance potential conflicts over
ownership.
As previously noted, the standards document includes 15 chapters
or major sections. The production of each major section entails the fol-
lowing eight steps:

1. Using initial fact-finding data and prior experience in generating such

standards for other municipalities, the consulting engineers develop,
over a period of about four weeks, a draft of a given section, which
includes verbal specs and related drawings.
2. A single copy of the draft for a given section is placed in a conference
room at city hall for review by interested parties.
3. Over a two-week period, city personnel—usually department manag-
ers and their field supervisors whose expertise relates to the particular
draft section—review, mark, and comment on the verbal text and
drawings, each using a different color of ink.
4. The city engineer “red lines” (his term) the marks and comments on the
draft that he wants the engineering firm to incorporate into the next
draft of that section and then forwards the marked draft, together with
his own directions for revision, to the consulting engineers.
5. The engineering firm produces, over the following two weeks, a new
draft of the section, incorporating the “red-lined” comments of city per-
sonnel and the additional comments of the city engineer.
6. City personnel and the consulting engineers meet to discuss and agree
on further (and, many hope, final) revisions to the specs and drawings.
420 JBTC / October 2001

7. Consulting engineering firm personnel produce another revised draft

and submit it to the city engineer for approval.
8. The city engineer either approves the revised draft as final or returns it
to the engineering firm for further revision, either with or without
advice or comments from other city personnel.2

Although the general shape of this eight-step procedure held true for
all sections of the document for which we collected data, the clear
deadlines set forth by the city engineer were seldom met and some
inevitable glitches in the process occurred, which probably reflects
the scope and complexity of the standards project as a whole. The
standards project, after all, entailed not only the joint production and
revision of highly technical verbal texts and drawings but also the
coordination and use of the broad ranges of professional expertise
available in two organizations. In addition, because the two organiza-
tions are geographically dispersed, the task of coordinating produc-
tion and standardizing versions was complicated. Moreover, the use
of several textual and graphic production technologies—across the
two sites—had to be coordinated, as did the use of various systems of
communication between sites and between individuals.
This writing project was chosen for study precisely because of
these complexities—in integrating verbal text and graphics, in stan-
dardizing versions across time, in negotiating and distributing exper-
tise, in bridging the geographical distance between the two organiza-
tions, and in deploying multiple production and representation
systems. Indeed, these complexities make the engineering standards
document project fairly typical of technical communication projects
in the contemporary workplaces we have studied.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYTIC METHODS

This study of the standards document—and the larger projects of

workplace literacy research in a city manager’s office and in a civil
engineering firm of which it comprises a part—was sponsored by the
Center for Research in Workplace Literacy (CRWL) at Kent State Uni-
versity. The center’s general approach to studying the situated prac-
tices of workplace literacy has involved extensive observational-
analytic research conducted over several months or even years at
particular work sites, in deep collaboration with workplace partici-
pants. Specifically, we have been studying various aspects of the city
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 421

management of this small city of about 20,000 people for about five
years, and we have been engaged in observational research with the
consulting engineers for almost four years.3
We studied the specific activity of the production and revision of
the standards document for about six months. Data sources were
multiple. One or both of us collected systematic observations of regu-
larly scheduled monthly or bimonthly joint meetings of employees
from the consulting firm and the city, as well as of smaller, more infor-
mal meetings held to discuss particular issues associated with the
document. At the meetings, we collected detailed field notes and cop-
ies of all documents used or distributed. In all, we observed about
24.5 hours of meetings. During an intensive data-gathering period of
about six weeks, we also audiotaped and videotaped a series of meet-
ings, and the tapes were later transcribed. In addition, one of us
observed city employees as they reviewed various sections of the
evolving standards document, and the other researcher observed a
consulting engineer at work revising a particular section of the stan-
dards document with the help of a materials supplier.
In addition, we conducted about 12 hours of interviews, about
6 hours of which were taped. Multiple interviews were conducted
with the city engineer (Jeff), the assistant to the city engineer (Stan,
who was later promoted to supervisor of utility services), and the city
utilities supervisor (Vern, who retired about halfway through the pro-
ject). Additional interviews were conducted at the city with the assis-
tant city engineer (Jerry), the utilities manager (Jake), his assistant,
and the subcontractor who was hired to produce an electronic version
of the standards document. At the engineering consulting firm, we
interviewed five engineers, including Brian and Dale. Another engi-
neer working on the project also was shadowed as he worked on the
standards document at the consulting firm’s office.
Our research on workplace literacy generally—and this study spe-
cifically—is collaborative in at least two senses. First, because literacy
and workplace activity are both immensely complex phenomena and
because a range of analytical expertise is necessary to begin to make
sense of both literacy and workplace activity, two distinctly trained
researchers collaborated on the research. Second, workplace partici-
pants have contributed to the project as well, primarily through our
multiple, extensive, and lengthy interviews with them but also by
providing periodic validations for our interpretations. Although
workplace participants’ interpretations may not always be accepted
422 JBTC / October 2001

in toto, their expertise and experience are an integral part of the analy-
sis we present here.
We use a modified “grounded theory” approach for data analysis.
Based on the pioneering work of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss
and their studies of medical professionals, the modified grounded
theory approach is a qualitative, field-based methodology. Although
we see Glaser and Strauss’s grounded theory and our modified
approach for studying writing as holding much promise for writing
research, we cannot here make the full case for it or provide exhaus-
tive descriptions of it (for these, see Haas and Witte).
A grounded theory is inductively derived from the systematic
study, over time, of a specific human activity or practice, and it is
grounded to data in specific and identifiable ways. Theoretical cate-
gories, which emerge from data (in this study, written artifacts, notes,
audiotapes and videotapes, and interviews), are “dimensionalized”
through recurrent comparisons with one another (Strauss 14-15).
During the first phases of analysis, which Strauss called “open cod-
ing” (59), theoretical categories emerge through repeated engage-
ments with the data. In this study, initial categories reflected partici-
pants’ verbal actions, including their statements about characteristics
of the material world in which they worked, queries about document
form, and accounts of how standards were and could be used in their
work. Initial categories also referred to document objects, such as def-
initions, graphic displays, or references to supporting documents.
Then, categories were dimensionalized and refined through compari-
son with one another during “axial coding” (Strauss 64). For instance,
graphic displays might be dimensionalized along an axis of more or
less literal. Or, in another instance, references to supporting docu-
ments might be counted and compared across sections of the stan-
dards document. These types of coding recur cyclically until a kind of
“theoretical saturation” is reached (Glaser and Strauss 61-62, 111-13;
Strauss 25-26); that is, repeated coding seems to reveal no new pat-
terns or categories.4
This method allows for the construction of what Glaser and Strauss
called a “substantive theory” (33-35, 114-16)—that is, a theoretical
explanation for a specific arena of human activity and performance.5
The modified grounded theory approach works inductively; that is,
conceptual categories from other theoretical systems are not explicitly
brought to the research but arise from the analysis. Provisional cate-
gories are refined, revised, and discarded as analysis proceeds. Data
collection, analysis, and theory building occur iteratively, as analysis
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 423

sends the researchers back to the site for more data collection, and
new data leads to revision of existing conceptual categories.
Grounded theory studies are judged (often by participants as well as
researchers) primarily by the fit of the provisional substantive theory
to the phenomena under study, the increased understanding of the
phenomena that the theory provides, and the usefulness of the sub-
stantive theory in understanding the domain under study (Strauss
and Corbin).

THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT:

THE PROBLEM OF CHANNEL EASEMENTS

In the following analyses, we focus on one small subsection of the

standards document—a spec and drawing concerned with channel
easements—and the approximately six minutes of discussion sur-
rounding the collaborative revision of this spec and drawing (step 6 in
the general, agreed-on procedures described earlier) that occurred in
February 1999. This discussion, which took place in a meeting room at
the city’s community center, involved personnel from both the city
and the consulting engineering firm. Figure 1 shows the arrangement
of the meeting room, which included two projection screens: The spec
under discussion appeared on one screen, and the drawing appeared
simultaneously on the other.
We chose to examine here the channel easements standard in part
because it combines verbal text and graphics in interesting ways. In
addition, because grounded theory methodologies can yield thick
descriptions and multifaceted categories, this relatively brief text and
drawing as well as the participants’ interactions around them consti-
tute a manageable subset of the data that can be examined in some
detail. The participants’ discussion of the spec and drawing is in itself
interesting for at least two reasons. First, the discussion somewhat
typically reveals various kinds of ambiguity, complicating a concept
deemed initially to be relatively simple. Second, the participants’ dif-
ficulties (as reflected in the amount of overtalk, the quick uptake of
conversational turn, the rich participation of five of the seven men
present, and the eventual bracketing or deferral of some parts of the
spec) in dealing with the ambiguity renders the discussion a particu-
larly interesting site for seeing literacy in action. The latter is in keep-
ing with our general approach of examining breakdowns, mis-
matches, or conflicts (cf. Dunmire; Engeström, Learning, “Tensions”)
424 JBTC / October 2001

Jerry
Laptop Dale

Projection
Equipment

Jeff
Screen 1 for
the spec
Table

Audio
Recorder John
Stan Table

Table

mera
o Ca
Vide
Jake
Overhead
Projector
Brian

Screen 2 for
the drawing

Figure 1. The Arrangement of the Meeting Room and Participants

NOTE: Jake is the city utilities manager, Stan is the assistant to the city engineer, Jeff is
the city engineer, Jerry is the assistant city engineer, Dale is the transportation engineer
representing the engineering firm, John is the transportation engineer representing the
engineering firm, and Brian is the civil engineer representing the engineering firm (the
senior firm engineer present).

as crucial sites for inquiry about literate practices in modern

workplaces.
Most important for our purposes here, the issue of channel ease-
ments brings the phenomenological, material world—with all its
unpredictability—directly into the writing process. Unlike roadways,
which are primarily or completely designed and constructed by peo-
ple, channels are naturally occurring phenomena, such as streams
and creeks of various kinds that can change through natural, but
largely unpredictable, processes. Such processes include seasonal
precipitation, which can increase water flow in unexpected ways, and
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 425

erosion (itself dependent on the makeup of the surrounding soil),

which can change the size, shape, and course of the channel over time.
However, managing water channels is critical for city engineers
and city utilities departments, and channel easements provide a
means for this management. For example, if eroded soil or fallen tree
branches stop the flow of water in a channel, some residents’ proper-
ties may be flooded, and storm sewers that drain into the channel may
cease to function, causing backed-up water to flow over roadways. In
such cases, city personnel and their equipment (from crowbars to
chainsaws to backhoes) must be able to reach quickly and easily the
problem area of the channel. Channel easements allow city personnel
such access (by prohibiting constructions that would interfere with
access) even as they protect the residents’ rights to use the property at
other times.

THREE ANALYSES OF THE STANDARDS PROJECT:

TEXT, PROCESS, AND EMBODIED PRACTICE

With these contexts (of our research, of the engineering standard

document, of the nature of channel easements) in place, we now turn
to our main analyses. First, we briefly analyze the verbal spec and the
drawings themselves, noting, particularly, changes in the relation-
ship between the initial spec and drawing (from February 1999) and
the revised spec and drawing (which appears in the 2001 published
sections or chapters of Engineering Standards for the City of ___). The
changes reflected in the revised spec and drawing are then used to
inform our analysis of a portion of the verbal transcript of the channel
easement discussion. Second, we analyze the verbal transcript,
attending to how the collaborative process by which the spec and
drawing were revised entails the distribution of cognitions among
city personnel and consulting engineers. Finally, building on our sec-
ond analysis, we analyze a larger portion of the verbal transcript from
the channel easement discussion to suggest that collaborative writing
might usefully be seen as a situated example of distributed cognition.
Then, we introduce the concepts of embodied knowledge and
embodied representation as we examine in some detail the full tran-
script of the session, including not just the verbal interactions but also
the physical movements of the participants. Through this third analy-
426 JBTC / October 2001

Figure 2. The Initial Spec and Drawing

sis, we suggest how explicit attention to writing as embodied practice

can add important dimensions to analyses of situated writing.

The Revision of Spec and Drawing

The initial channel easements spec and drawing (under discussion
at the February 1999 meeting) are presented in Figure 2 (and labeled
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 427

Figure 3. The Revised Spec and Drawing

6.4 and 6.4.1, respectively), and the published revised spec and draw-
ing are shown in Figure 3. (In Figure 3, the revised verbal spec and
drawing are labeled 6.5 and 6.5.1 because in the course of revising ear-
lier sections of the standards document, another subsection had been
added, thereby increasing the length and changing the numbering of
the various subsections.) The verbal specs and the simple graphic
drawings are analyzed together here for two principal reasons. First,
428 JBTC / October 2001

at a practical level, the city personnel at least discussed the spec and
drawing as if they were, in fact, one intact piece of the document. Sec-
ond, we are persuaded by Karen Schriver’s argument that verbal texts
and graphics are best understood (and frequently best used) in tan-
dem (see also Witte, “Context”).
The initial spec consists of four sentences (see Figure 2). The first
sentence, in a construction that seems to grant agency to the easement
itself, indicates the purpose of the channel easement. The second sen-
tence gives the property owner the right to use the easement for any
purposes that do not obstruct water flow or drainage. The third sen-
tence defines the dimensions of channel easements relative to the
streams they border, and the final sentence refers the user to the
accompanying illustration.
An interesting issue here for technical communicators is the inte-
gration of verbal text and graphics. The drawing (6.4.1) relates only to
the third sentence of the spec. The words and symbols that appear on
the drawing (“width of channel easement,” “5′,” and “top of bank”)
appear as well in the third sentence. The pictorial symbol at the bot-
tom of the channel refers to water level, but it is not labeled as such nor
is it referred to in the spec. The relationship between spec 6.4 and
drawing 6.4.1, then, would appear to be primarily one of redundancy.
Schriver identified a “redundant” relationship between text and
graphics as one in which content is “substantially identical” and “key
ideas” are repeated (412).
Generated by Dale some days after the meeting and following fur-
ther consultation with Jeff, the revised spec and drawing for channel
easements are shown in Figure 3. The revised spec (6.5) is now 127 words,
whereas the initial spec is 72 words. The initial part of the first sen-
tence remains essentially the same but the revision adds new informa-
tion, including examples of open watercourses and further elabora-
tion of rights entailed in the channel easement. The second sentence
remains intact but the third sentence reflects two changes: the ease-
ment width on both sides of the channel is now 15, rather than 5 feet,
and the phrase “or as approved by the City” is added. The reference to
the figure remains, but following the reference to the figure a rather
technical, almost legalistic, definition for “top of bank” is added.
The drawing and its relationship to the spec are changed as well.
The drawing now has two distinct parts: The left side is essentially the
same, with only the width of the easement changed from 5 to 15 feet.
The right part of the drawing in effect tries to illustrate not the whole
spec but only the added definition of top of bank. The “adjacent stable
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 429

land,” “unstable overhang,” and “eroded channel” that are referred

to in the spec are illustrated in the revised figure. These two parts are
reflected in the labels at the bottom of the drawing, where a distinc-
tion is made between a “typical channel” and an “eroded channel.” In
this revision, the relationship between verbal text and graphics has
changed: Much redundant information remains, of course, but what
Schriver (following Hegarty, Carpenter, and Just) called a “comple-
mentary” relationship also is established (412). The drawing—in par-
ticular the label at the bottom—establishes the possibility of two dis-
tinct situations: typical and eroded channels. These two situations are
not referred to in the spec itself although they may be inferred from
the reference in the spec to special cases that would need to be
“approved by the City” and in the last part of the definition of top of
bank.
This simple analysis of two versions of the channel easements sec-
tion provides an example of how verbal texts and graphics interact,
specifically, in redundant and complementary ways. As a naturally
occurring example, it corroborates distinctions in text-graphic inter-
actions constructed both through theory (Schriver; Witte, “Context”)
and through controlled studies (Hegarty, Carpenter, and Just). In
addition, the analysis shows that the revised spec and drawing are in
many ways improved: Both now have more specificity and detail and
both now provide for at least two situations of use. The two versions
of the section would not, however, be very effective models for teach-
ing purposes (even though such models abound in technical writing
textbooks) because they give no information about where the changes
came from or how they were implemented. The next section, in which
we look at the channel easement discussion as an example of the dis-
tributed cognition of writing, sheds some light on the revision
process.

A Writing Event: Revising the

Channel Easements Spec and Drawing
Some of the most important advances in writing research of the last
20 years have concerned the complex, constructive mental or cogni-
tive processes of writing. Researchers and theorists of writing from a
variety of backgrounds and with a variety of interests have argued
that examining texts alone provides only a partial view of what writ-
ing is, how it is accomplished, how it functions, and how it might be
taught (for the variety of ways this argument was made in its early
430 JBTC / October 2001

form, see Bracewell, Fredrikson, and Fredrikson; Emig, Composing;

Flower and Hayes; Rose). More recent work—coming from perspec-
tives as diverse as early childhood education (e.g., Nelson; Valsiner),
cultural-historical psychology (e.g., Hutchins and Klausen; Laufer
and Glick; Martin; Valsiner and van der Veer; Scribner), and computer
systems design (e.g., Clancey; Bødker; Pea)—argues that cognition
(including knowledge and expertise) is distributed. At school, work,
and home, cognitive acts are shared—“stretched over,” to use Jean
Lave’s apt metaphor (1)—across individuals, organizations, tools,
technologies, and systems for representation (see also Hutchins;
Salomon).
The verbal transcript (see the Appendix) of the entire six-minute
channel easement discussion illustrates collaborative writing as dis-
tributed cognition. The opening 39 lines of the verbal transcript sug-
gest what a detailed examination of the processes of distributed cog-
nition, as they are manifest in collaborative workplace writing, might
yield.
The discussion (step 6 in the procedure discussed earlier for pro-
ducing the engineering standards document), which began about
30 minutes into the meeting, is opened by Dale, an engineer from the
engineering consulting firm, who begins by reading the spec aloud.
Recall that all the individuals present had (presumably) read and
marked an earlier version of the section of the standards document
under discussion. Dale reads only the first part of the first sentence of
the spec (lines 2-3), however, before he begins to introduce informa-
tion not in the spec itself (lines 2 ff.). In particular, he adds details
about property owners and water channels and in fact starts to elabo-
rate the difficulties in producing the spec: “It’s tough to put a mini-
mum width on a channel because you have varying . . . situations
involving channels . . . and swales” (lines 8-10). Dale’s shift from dis-
cussing the verbal text itself to discussing the reasoning behind it sug-
gests that he is aware of a problem with the text—in the parlance of a
cognitive process theory of revision, he “detects” a problem (Flower
et al.)—apparently the lack of correspondence between the words of
the verbal text and the things of the world to which they refer.
City engineer Jeff’s query (lines 12-13) begins to point at a “diagno-
sis” (Flower et al.) for the problem in the text: It is missing a definition
for “top of the bank” (lines 12-13). Jeff poses a hypothetical question
(lines 15-17) to indicate the variability of channels over time. Dale tries
to return to the verbal text itself (lines 18-23), agreeing in effect with
Jeff’s diagnosis of the problem (“it [the document] doesn’t address
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 431

future erosion or movement of the channel”). Dale then proposes a

potential solution to the problem: the addition of an accepted “legal
definition” (line 20) or an “industry standard definition” for “top of
bank” (line 21). Dale’s proposal for revision of the text is not taken up,
however, as Stan (engineering assistant) and Jake (utilities manager)
begin to talk to each other. Then Stan asks a question, apparently
about whether the proposed easement width is “enough to get a
machine down” (lines 26-27).
Meanwhile, Jeff also ignores Dale’s attempt to return to the revi-
sion task focused on verbal text per se. Jeff continues to elaborate the
importance of the top of the bank definition (lines 28-39). Here, he
introduces even more complexity into the revision task by, in effect,
bringing into the discussion the interests of others concerned with
channel easements, including city residents (lines 28 ff.) and person-
nel from other city departments (lines 34 ff.). These other interested
parties, Jeff says, might construct top of bank differently from the way
“you just marked it” (line 37), a comment that signals the necessity of
focusing the discussion on the spec and the drawing as two compo-
nents of a single text (see Witte, “Context”). The final part of Jeff’s
comment is set off with a two-second pause, which could reflect some
difficulty in formulating the next part of his utterance or could sug-
gest a rhetorical choice made for effect. In any case, what follows is
apparently a general critique of Dale’s text. Jeff begins to formulate
his critique with “I don’t” (line 37), hesitates, starts again, backs up to
acknowledge that he thinks the “drawing is reasonable” (line 38) but
suggests (in the guise of “wonder[ing] whether” [line 38]) adding the
definitional complications just discussed to the document. Brian
(Dale’s coworker from the consulting engineering firm) is focused—
as we suspect Dale is, too, at this point—at a much lower level on the
existing document. After another lengthy pause (two full seconds),
Brian asks whether Jeff means to include the drawing in the docu-
ment (line 40). The pause may indicate Brian’s confusion because no
problems with the drawing, nor any grounds for excluding it, had
been mentioned before. The question Brian then asks also may sug-
gest that he is invoking a less complex internal representation of text
than the one Jeff seemed to invoke a few moments earlier.
Several points are worth making here. First, although the working
group is not explicitly composing textual linguistic structures, their
discussion constitutes a writing event, which comprises those social
interactions surrounding the joint work of collaborative revising. Sec-
ond, in this writing event, both expertise and responsibility for the
432 JBTC / October 2001

document are distributed. Whereas Dale (and, to a lesser degree,

Brian) focuses primarily on the spec, Jeff, Stan, and Jake explore the
implications of the spec and the drawing for the work activities in
which they engage: getting machines down banks, dealing with resi-
dents’ questions and complaints, and interacting with personnel from
other city departments. These few lines (i.e., lines 1-39) of the verbal
transcript show a writing problem being dealt with on several levels
simultaneously: Dale and Brian, who are ultimately responsible for
the actual production of the document as a whole, are focused on the
verbal spec and potential revisions, which they do not make on the
spot even though they have available in the meeting room, as Figure 1
indicates, the equipment to do so. The city employees—Jeff, Stan, and
Jake—explore, in contrast to Dale and Brian, the implications of the
easement standard in the context of their expertise and their everyday
responsibilities.
This distribution of both expertise and responsibility can profit-
ably be viewed as an instance of what Herbert Clark called “perform-
ing a joint action” (99) or “joint activity” (109). Clark (following
Goffman) postulated that joint activity—his prototype is everyday
conversation—is often carried out by agents working at different lev-
els. He identified a “vocalizer/inscriber” as “the sounding box from
which utterances come.” The “formulator” is the agent who con-
structs, puts together, or composes the substance of what is uttered,
and the “principal” is the “party to whose position, stand, and belief
the words attest” (20). In this case, these roles are distributed across
several individuals. Dale, acting for the consulting firm, has inscribed
the actual text from which the group is working, and inscribing the
next iteration will be his responsibility. In this short interchange, how-
ever, formulations of the situation are obviously composed by oth-
ers—Jeff primarily but also Jake and Stan, in this example. And the
city itself, through Jeff and its other representatives, takes the role of
principal, the entity that “means what is represented by the words”
(Clark 20). In essence, because of the distribution of expertise and
responsibility, the city personnel (Jeff, Stan, Jake) are able to bring
their wide-ranging expertise from the world beyond the verbal text to
a problem that Dale, because of his responsibilities as inscriber, con-
tinues to attempt to solve at the level of textual constructions.
This brief look at the opening of the channel easement discussion
as an example of the distributed cognition of writing suggests, in part,
the role of expertise in practices of situated writing. The next section,
based on video as well as audio recordings, treats this notion of exper-
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 433

TABLE 1
Five Major Topics Considered during the
Channel Easement Discussion
Topic Transcript Example

Property owners ignore “a lot of times private property owners . . . don’t pay
channel easements attention to this [i.e., the channel easement] with their
creeks or anything” (lines 4-6)
Width of channel “what we are recommending [for the channel easement]
easement is that it is required that the width extend five feet
beyond the top of the bank on the side of the channel”
(lines 6-8)
Introduction of the term (lines 6-8)
top of bank
The channel easement Figure 6.4.1 from the standards document that Dale
drawing points to on the screen (line 7)
Variations in banks and “so it’s . . . it’s tough to put a minimum width on a
widths of channels channel because you have varying . . . because you
know . . . of varying situations involving channels . . .
and swales . . . and ditches” (lines 8-11)

NOTE: All line numbers refer to the transcript in the appendix.

tise more thoroughly and directly as part of the distributed cognition

of collaborative writing. Specifically, we examine (a) the embodied
knowledge of these technical professionals and (b) their embodied
representations of that knowledge.

Embodied Knowledge and Embodied Representations:

Further Insights into the Channel Easements Discussion
The full transcript of the discussion, shown in the Appendix,
reveals that the group takes up five major topics in its consideration of
the channel easement.6 Those five topics are all represented in Dale’s
opening statement, even though Dale probably did not think at the
time that he was identifying the topics the group would discuss.
Those topics appear in lines 1 to 11 of the transcript and are summa-
rized in Table 1.
Dale seems to represent only the fifth and last topic as being poten-
tially problematic, but the discussion that unfolds clearly shows that
the other topics are also problematic. The problems in the easement
section are revealed through, and in part resolved by, participants’
434 JBTC / October 2001

embodied knowledge of the material world, which seems distrib-

uted, initially at least, only across the city employees. In addition, the
embodied knowledge of the individuals here is often shared or com-
municated via gesture, a particular form of embodied representation
(see McNeill). We find this not surprising given the documented diffi-
culties that people have in representing embodied experience linguis-
tically (Sauer, “Embodied Experience”). The following account of the
channel easement discussion foregrounds these embodied aspects of
this writing event.

Embodied Knowledge
The notion of channel variation (Dale’s fifth topic) signals an
important difference between a channel easement and three other
easements discussed previously by the group. The boundaries of
highway, utility, and sewer easements can be reliably set in relation to
permanent material objects such as the center of a roadway or survey-
ing stakes placed in the ground. Setting the boundaries of a channel
easement, however, is a bit more complicated, in part because vari-
ability in the course and width of a natural channel together with an
irregular bank typically yield variable distances between relatively
parallel lines drawn through any two fixed points on either side of a
channel. Moreover, the problem of variability, or irregularity, in chan-
nel bank, channel width, and channel course is exacerbated by
another problem: Naturally occurring processes such as erosion typi-
cally cause indigenous channels, swales, and ditches to change their
banks, their widths, and their courses over time. Therefore, the diffi-
culty confronting this group of engineers and city employees is simi-
lar to one reflected in using different kinds of maps, for example, a
road map and a topographical map: Only the most detailed topo-
graphical map approaches an accurate representation of the true
course of a stream. Indeed, the topographical map, in depicting three
dimensions of the material world, comes much closer to representing
the embodied experience of moving through material space than does
a road map. As can be seen in drawing 6.4.1 (see Figure 2), the consult-
ing engineering firm has, in effect, proposed something akin to a
road-map solution to a problem that the city employees, it is revealed,
represented to themselves as a topographical-map problem.7
Of course, Dale and his colleagues from the consulting engineering
firm understand—as engineers and as functioning adults—the vari-
ability of channels of moving water. Indeed, Brian’s remarks during a
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 435

brief interview after the meeting indicate that they do have such
knowledge but that “channel easements are not something we deal
with every day.” Brian’s comment calls attention to a difference that
shows up repeatedly in the joint discussions of the various sections
and subsections of the standards document: Whereas the consulting
engineers often represent what they do as practical or applied science,
their knowledge differs in significant ways from the knowledge of
those who must work with and within the material structures that
engineers design (e.g., a wastewater lift station) or specify (e.g., a
channel easement). In short, although the consulting engineers do not
deal every day with such material structures, the city employees do.
Therein lies the differences in the knowledge the respective groups
bring to the channel easement discussion.
The practical and applied knowledge that derives from work with
and within such material structures is what we call embodied knowl-
edge—a type of knowledge that the city employees repeatedly access
and activate in their reading and revising of the spec and drawing.8
For example, embodied knowledge of the material world of the city
seems to prompt Jeff’s initial responses to Dale’s opening statement
on the channel easement. Recognizing the irregularities of channel
banks, widths, and courses, Jeff wants to know, “How do we define
the top of the bank?” (lines 12-13), and he wants to know how top of
bank, the key engineering term, accommodates changes over time in
channel banks, widths, and courses (lines 15-17). Jeff refers initially to
the written language of the spec and then moves his focus immedi-
ately to the drawing (line 13), which—as we noted previously—may
suggest a more inclusive notion of text on Jeff’s part than it does on the
part of the consulting firm engineers. In any case, Jeff’s movement
from spec to drawing in this instance is a move that he and other city
employees make repeatedly in their discussions of the engineering
firm’s drafts. Moreover, once that move is made (and it is typically
made early during the discussions of subsection drafts), the verbal
spec is relegated to the background, and the drawing is pushed to the
foreground of the discussion. Sometimes, at least, linguistic meaning
appears irrelevant or untrustworthy unless it is linked directly to a
drawing that, as an alternative representation, stands in closer prox-
imity to the material object or structure to which both the words and
the pictures presumably refer.
The closer representational proximity of the drawings to material
objects is crucial to the city employees’ activation of their embodied
knowledge of the world in which they work. In particular, Jeff’s initial
436 JBTC / October 2001

response (lines 12-13) to Dale’s opening statement (lines 1-11) sug-

gests that such embodied knowledge permits the formulation of rep-
resentations and assessments of future states in the material world
wherein design parameters are likely to affect bodily presence and
action. For Jeff and the other city employees, such embodied knowl-
edge also manifests itself in what appear to be internal representa-
tions of antecedent states and of consequences attendant on projected
future states, internal representations that seem to underlie the verbal
comments and gestures that are so important to their discussion of the
channel easement spec and drawing. This distribution of the city
employees’ embodied knowledge through words and gestures, we
suggest, permits the consulting engineers to revise the spec and the
drawing. Manifestations of embodied knowledge through invoca-
tions of antecedent and future states of the material world can be eas-
ily tracked through the transcript (see the Appendix), and they are
summarized in Table 2.
The grounding of city employees’ responses in their embodied
knowledge of antecedent and future states of channels stands in stark
contrast to the absence of grounding for the engineering firm’s key
technical term, top of bank. As we noted previously, appearing in
Dale’s opening statement as well as in the verbal text of subsection 6.4
and in Figure 6.4.1, that key term was apparently deployed to over-
come the inherent difficulty of materially fixing a channel easement as
compared to fixing engineered structures on the basis of, for example,
surveying stakes. However, in all three of the engineering firm’s uses,
top of bank is proffered, without definition, as both nonambiguous and
as though materially fixed via something like a surveyor’s stake, even
though some definitional uncertainty regarding the meaning of top of
bank seems to creep into Dale’s opening statement (lines 8-11).
Dale attempts to bypass the problem of materially fixing a top of
the bank by invoking a “legal definition” (line 20) of that concept. A
legal definition is altogether a linguistic definition. As Table 2 indi-
cates, Stan (in lines 26-27) and Jeff (in lines 28-30) ignore Dale’s offer
and move instead to two actual scenarios—getting “a machine
down” (lines 26-27) an embankment and “gettin’ into a pissin’ match
with a resident” (lines 28-29). In short, Jeff and Stan reject Dale’s
attempts—both in the spec and drawing and during the meeting—to
fix the top of the bank verbally in a disembodied way.
Furthermore, the first drawing prepared by the engineering firm,
Figure 6.4.1 in the initial draft of the standards document (see Figure 2),
depicts only a cross-section of a channel, thus inviting the inference
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 437

TABLE 2
Manifestations of Embodied Knowledge
of Antecedent and Future States
Line
Numbersa Evidence of Embodied Knowledge

15-17 Jeff’s query regarding the alteration of a channel over time

26-27 Stan’s query about easements too narrow to allow a crew to move a
machine such as a track hoe into or adjacent to a channel to clean it out
28-34 Jeff’s account of differing interpretations of the location of the top of the
bank in situations involving residents of city departments needing
access to a channel
46-57 Stan’s concern, amplified in much detail by Jake, about the need to have a
wide enough easement to allow personnel in Jake’s department to move
machines into a channel
72-74 Jake’s concern that the easement be wide enough to permit his crew to
maneuver around trees along the banks of channels
79-93 Stan’s identification of “the sticking point for the smart resident” and the
problem of fixing the top of the bank for a channel that erodes and
meanders
94-107 Jeff’s concern over trying to use the ill-defined top of the bank concept to
convince a resident, whose property butts up to a channel, to permit
access to the channel through the easement
108-15 Stan’s introduction of the problematic case in which a stream undercuts,
through erosion, a channel bank
117-23 Stan’s concern with the top of a bank that moves when erosion occurs
127-31 Jake’s calling attention to the need for an easement wide enough to allow
crews from his department to control erosion in a channel

a. All line numbers refer to the transcript in the appendix.

that the top of the bank lines up over the entire length of the channel in
much the same way as surveying flags line up alongside, for instance,
a utility easement or a roadway. Indeed, the only exact specification of
the top of the bank is offered with respect to its distance of five feet
from the unlabeled—and unfixed—easement boundary, which—the
drawing implies—can be fixed off the undefined top of the bank. That
is a classic case of begging the question, in which the term top of bank is
in effect defined with reference to itself. No less telling are the explan-
atory words appearing below the caption at the bottom of Figure 6.4.1
(see Figure 2), namely, “No Scale,” which serve to distance further the
drawing and the spec from any material world in which embodied
work within a channel easement might occur.
Also important in the channel easement discussion are the material
consequences of defining the top of the bank and of determining ease-
438 JBTC / October 2001

TABLE 3
Anticipated Legal and Material Consequences of the
Engineering Firm’s Ungrounded Top of the Bank Concept
Line
Numbersa Legal and Material Consequences of Ungrounded Concept

28-36 Jeff’s concern with how the top of the bank concept could be interpreted
differently by different interested parties
58-66 An exchange involving Jeff, Jake, and Brian that leads to the addition of a
phrase—”or as otherwise determined by the City ______”—to the spec,
a phrase that allows the city to treat each channel easement as a special
case
77-78 Jeff’s representation of the drawing as a backing for the spec
77-93 Stan’s insistence on coming up with “some type of formula for establish-
ing” the top of the bank or a “common point” for deciding the location
of the top of the bank
94-107 Jeff’s continued worries about how different parties could invoke different
geographical or topographical features in defining the top of the bank
108-115 Stan’s observation that a workable definition of the top of the bank would
need to accommodate overhanging banks and erosion more generally to
avoid problems in interpretation
117-123 Stan’s references to property owners’ structures that encroach on
easements
141-144 Jeff’s insistence that grounding the top of the bank concept will “cover
probably 95 to 98% of the people we deal with”

a. All line numbers refer to the transcript in the appendix.

ments. Because embodied actions must occur within bounded mate-

rial spaces—often in spaces occupied by people and machines—those
actions have material and legal consequences. Specifically, materially
ungrounded verbal constructs such as top of the bank have the poten-
tial to problematize the relationship between property owners or resi-
dents and the city itself. In his capacity as city engineer, Jeff must deal
with those consequences almost on a daily basis, as must Jake and
Stan in their capacity as, respectively, utilities manager and engineer-
ing assistant. Evidence of the city employees’ concern for the legal
consequences resulting from projected uses of the materially
ungrounded top of the bank construct also abounds in the transcript
and is summarized in Table 3. Jeff and Stan are clearly concerned with
both legal and practical consequences of leaving the top of the bank
concept ambiguous. They seem to understand that such ambiguity
would lead to arguments or possibly even lawsuits with citizens,
builders, contractors, and developers. In addition, Stan notes that ero-
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 439

sion (lines 84, 108, 112) and buildings (line 121) that encroach on
easements would have embodied material effects, and Jeff predicts
(lines 141-44) that defining the top of the bank concept unambigu-
ously would help him deal with the bulk of those legal and material
consequences.
As the summary provided in Table 3 shows, the city employees
repeatedly drew on their embodied knowledge of antecedent and
future states in critiquing the engineering firm’s work on the channel
easement subsection of the document, and they repeatedly voiced
their concern that the top of the bank concept be fixed or grounded in
the material world. However, the group was in fact unable to resolve
the difficulty that arose with respect to that key technical and legal
construct, at least during this particular discussion. In the end, Brian
announces that the engineering firm will “work . . . some more . . . [on]
the top of the top of bank definition” (lines 133), presumably by
searching for and finding what Dale had earlier called something
“close to a legal definition” (line 20) “or an industry standard defini-
tion” (lines 20-21). Although unable to define verbally or to specify
graphically the top of bank construct, the group, however, solves a
second problem, namely, the width of the easement, which it con-
cludes ought to be at least 15 feet on either side of the channel. Again,
that solution reflects the city employees’ embodied knowledge of the
work activity that they have done and will likely have to do in the
future, and it reflects the antecedent and projects the material and
legal consequences of that work.
Table 4 summarizes the discussion about changing the width of the
channel easement to 15 feet on either side of the channel. During that
discussion, the issues surrounding the top of the bank concept, chan-
nel erosion, and changes in the course of a channel over time are never
completely resolved but are rather deferred by adding the phrase “or
as approved by the City” to the revised spec (see Figure 3) as a way to
deal with ambiguities on a case-by-case basis.9 In recommending the
channel easement width itself, however, the group comes to closure in
less than three minutes. During this short period of time (see the
Appendix, lines 41-76), the group agrees on the increased standard
width for easements—15 feet. In a sense, they employ a material solu-
tion—additional space on either side of the channel—because they
cannot agree on a linguistic definition for the top of the bank con-
cept.10 In addition, the 15-foot easement allows for some variation in
channel width and course over time, thereby accommodating some
minor changes in channels, at least in the short run.
440 JBTC / October 2001

TABLE 4
Changing the Recommended Width of the Channel Easement
Line
Numbersa Consideration of Channel Easement Width

41 Jeff notes that “five feet is a little shy.”

42 Stan agrees.
43-57 Jake, with Stan agreeing, argues from pragmatic grounds that the width of
the channel should be 15 feet on each side.
58-60 Jeff seeks confirmation from Jake regarding his recommendation of a 15-
foot easement on either side of the channel.
61-62 Jake reiterates the need for an easement of that width.
63-66 Brian and Jeff work out a way for the city to make exceptions for the now-
agreed-on 15-foot rule.
68-71 Stan seeks to expand on something Jeff introduced earlier, namely,
alternative widths.
72-74 Jake further grounds the 15-foot rule.
75 Stan proclaims that the 15-foot rule is “easy to remember.”
76 Jake ends the discussion of the channel easement width.

a. All line numbers refer to the transcript in the appendix.

Embodied Representations
The spoken utterances that compose the bulk of our account of the
channel easement discussion are, of course, themselves embodied in
the additional sense that they are physiologically produced by partic-
ipants’ respiratory systems and mouths. Yet our data reflect another
type of embodied representation in these discussions: gesture.
Although gesture and speech are obviously related (see McNeill),
writing and gesture are related as well, in at least two important ways.
First, gesturing requires the use of some of the same bodily tools as
writing—hands, arms, shoulders, heads, torsos—but these physio-
logical tools are employed somewhat differently in producing ges-
tures than they are in producing written texts (see Goldberg; Haas,
Writing, 127-33). Second, gesture seems to stand in closer proximal
relation to acts of writing and inscribing than do spoken representa-
tions—not only because gesture may be an indexical precursor to
writing but because with gestural representations, the means of pro-
duction and the production itself appear to be one and the same. As
such, the physical, embodied nature of gesture gives rise to its seman-
tic component, which allows it to function in human communication.
To say that gestures thus incorporate (i.e., materially embody) a
semantic component is simply to acknowledge the obvious: Gesture
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 441

is no less a meaning-making or meaning-constructing action than is

speech (see McNeill), and it can function as such independently of
speech, as when a pedestrian waves a hand to “say” hello to someone
passing by in an automobile.11
In the channel easement discussion as well as in other similarly
focused discussions occurring as part of the standards document pro-
ject, gesture regularly complements (which is not the same as supple-
ments) speech in some interesting ways, yielding equally fluid (or
ephemeral) but often more precise representations that bear directly
on the revision of both specs and drawings. With gesture, these repre-
sentations are clearly and literally embodied.12 Although gestures
occur throughout the transcript presented in the appendix, a brief
analysis of one portion of the transcript—lines 96 through 117—
shows how gesture further instantiates and justifies our claims about
writing’s embodied nature and further grounds our sense that ges-
ture plays a critical role in distributing the city employees’ knowledge
across all participants in the work group. The following excerpt from
the transcript shows the use of gesture in part of the channel easement
discussion (the numbers in parentheses correspond to the line num-
bers of the full transcript in the appendix):

(96) Jeff: . . . or two owners down the line where you’re walkin’ in there
[points to left bank in (97) Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] to do a maintenance
and they want to know . . . how you (98) have a right to be in there
[points again to the left bank in Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] . . . (99) and you get
into an argument over where top of bank is [points again to left bank in
(100) Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] . . . obviously the 15 feet on each side
[moves hand left to (101) right from top of bank line toward easement line on
the left] makes it . . . gives us a little (102) more leeway . . . but a . . . the top
of bank definition somehow . . . we need to try (103) to define it
some . . . {two or three words indecipherable} if nothin’ else . . . we define
(104) it as plus or minus a foot . . . instead of plus or minus 10 feet {three-
second pause} (105) cause they could say top of bank is where [appears
now to be pointing to lower portion (106) of Figure 6.4.1] the water level is
{two-second pause} cause they don’t understand (107) what that
means . . . what a top of a bank is.
(108) Stan: Oh yeah . . . I think . . . take this same view . . . and . . . and . . . show
erosion where (109) the top is actually [makes a vertical arc in front of him
with his right hand] overhanging (110) . . . you know the top of bank for
them is that overhang [points to Figure 6.4.1 on (111) screen] . . . but you’re
not going to put a piece of equipment out there . . . you have (112) to start
from the erosion [points again to Figure 6.4.1 on screen] point and work
back (113) [moves hand from left to right, seemingly from the “top of bank”
designation on the screen (114) toward the easement line] for safety
442 JBTC / October 2001

too . . . so . . . that . . . I mean that needs to be (115) considered too,

which . . .
(116) Jeff: Which we’ve seen.
(117) Stan: Oh yeah! We’ve seen it.

As this excerpt shows, the first three gestures Jeff makes are all in
the direction of the left channel bank represented in Figure 6.4.1 (see
Figure 2). These first three gestures, indexical gestures to the existing
drawing, are directed toward the goal of critiquing the drawing or,
more specifically, the representation of the top of the bank construct in
the drawing. Jeff’s critique, which manifests itself jointly in words
and gestures, draws explicitly on embodied knowledge of a future
state. In addition, it anticipates material consequences, specifically,
face-to-face arguments with property owners over where to fix the
top of the bank. Next, Jeff focuses on revising the width of the ease-
ment as represented in Figure 6.4.1. He does so both by stating ver-
bally the new width and by moving his hand through the space in
front of him to indicate the act of widening, which entails revising the
drawing. The gesture here is not indexical; that is, it does not point to a
real and shared object (the drawing) in the room as do his earlier ges-
tures. Rather, Jeff creates a new representation—by widening his
hands—and others in the room appear to understand Jeff’s new rep-
resentation. Jeff’s gesture is clearly oriented toward a future state that
entails working within the width of a channel that is materially and
legally bounded differently than it is represented through the initial
drawing in Figure 6.4.1. Using gesture, Jeff represents a reality that is
not, in fact, represented in the existing drawing: He is using gesture in
a representational, rather than purely indexical, way.
Stan’s contribution to the discussion shows a similar distinction.
He refers specifically to erosion, which—given his embodied knowl-
edge of channels—he believes would be a component problem in
some future state that he wants accommodated in a revised drawing.
That future state entails an overhanging bank, which Stan represents
through gesture as an arc. Stan’s next gesture is very important
because, as do gestures depicted in other parts of the transcript (e.g.,
Jeff’s, as noted above), it suggests a different drawing from the one
that appears as Figure 6.4.1. In fact, we believe that, for Stan, Jeff, and
the other city employees, the initial drawing no longer exists even
though it remains projected onto one of the screens in the room. Stan’s
gesture and words indicate that, for him (and for the other people in
the room), the drawing now includes a representation of an “over-
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 443

hang” (line 110). This overhang, which Stan has represented through
gesture, immediately prompts him to specify a further revision of the
initial drawing, a revision that entails moving the apparent top of the
bank further away from the channel proper. Moving the easement is
represented by Stan’s gesture, which in effect moves the top of bank
on the right of the channel away from the channel itself.
A second brief example of gesture use underscores the differences,
discussed earlier, in the embodied knowledge of the participants.
These differences concern the objects of pointing gestures. David
McNeill discussed the deictic gesture of pointing, noting that the
object of the pointing gesture can be (a) a material and materially pres-
ent object; (b) a real material object but one that is not present to the
interlocutors; or (c) an abstraction that is pointed to as if it were con-
crete and could occupy space. Our analysis of the transcript revealed
24 instances of pointing, 23 of them toward the screen on which the
initial drawing was projected. We then categorized each of these 23 ges-
tures according to their object, as per McNeill’s discussion. We found
no instances of pointing to an abstraction; all of these 23 pointing ges-
tures were directed toward material objects, either ones present in the
drawing—what we call “literal” (McNeill’s present “objects and
events in the concrete world” [18])—or ones represented by the draw-
ing—what we call “nonliteral” (McNeill’s absent object as when
“there is nothing objectively present to point at” [18]). A literal object
is the drawing itself or a particular part of it. A nonliteral object is an
entity from the material world (e.g., channels, banks, overhangs) that
the drawing represents either directly or indirectly. Of the 23 pointing
gestures we analyzed, 19 were made by the city employees: 10 by Jeff,
6 by Stan, and 3 by Jake. The four pointing gestures made by the con-
sulting engineers—two by Dale and two by Brian—all had as their
object the literal drawing on the screen. Of the 19 pointing gestures
made by the city employees, however, 12 seemed to have as their
object an entity from the material world represented (for the city
employees) by the drawing—a nonliteral object.
Because of their field experience and embodied knowledge of the
material world represented by the drawing, the city employees—
both engineers and nonengineers—made more nonliteral pointing
gestures, gestures whose objects were absent material objects, such as
a bank or a stream. However, the consulting engineers (Dale and
Brian) focused during most of the discussion on the document (spe-
cifically, the initial drawing) rather than on the material world. Hence,
when the consulting engineers did use pointing, which was seldom,
444 JBTC / October 2001

they made gestures whose objects were actual items in the drawing
projected on the screen.
This brief analysis of gestures leads us to several tentative conclu-
sions. First, gestures, as much as words, appear to function as repre-
sentational tools, the use of which enable the city employees to move
almost seamlessly from embodied knowledge of antecedent states to
embodied knowledge of future states. This movement is a necessary
component of the city employees’ concerted efforts to deal with the
material and embodied consequences of writing the spec and of creat-
ing other representational media, such as the drawing.13 Second, the
employees’ gestures may be “trial locutions” or “pre-texts” (Witte,
“Pre-Text” 422, see also “Revising”) in a fairly sophisticated process of
clarifying, critiquing, and revising representations. Indeed, the
embodied and physical component of the gesture is significantly
closer in material form to writing and drawing than is speech. Third,
the analysis of deictic gestures corroborated our analysis of differ-
ences in the use of embodied knowledge between employees from the
two organizations. Fourth, our analysis of the deictic gestures, when
set alongside the revisions that the engineering consultants made to
the original spec and drawing (see Figure 3), strongly points to the
facilitative role that gesture, as well as words, played in distributing
some components of embodied knowledge across all members of the
working group.

DISCUSSION

The engineering standards project, only a small portion of which is

the focus of the present article, has provided us with multiple oppor-
tunities to examine important aspects of the embodied nature of writ-
ing. Those opportunities were, in large part, available because so
much of the work on the engineering standards document has been
collaborative and because the 15 major chapters or sections of the doc-
ument require the collaborators to understand text as a complex inter-
lacing of multiple systems of representation (see Witte, “Context”).
As the research we have reported here implies, the collaborators’ reli-
ance on multiple systems of representation in producing the docu-
ment helps them attend to two interacting sets of coherence condi-
tions. The first set of coherence conditions demands, as our analysis of
the discussion focused on revising the channel easement section sug-
gests, that the verbal spec and drawing function as semantic comple-
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 445

ments (Schriver; Witte, “Context”) in the text world (see Beaugrande)

of the standards document. The second set of coherence conditions
(see Witte and Faigley) demands, as our analysis also suggests, that
the interlaced text of verbal spec and drawing reflects and anticipates
as precisely as possible the material world of work in which the docu-
ment as a whole must function.
From our perspective, the collaborative revision of the channel
easements section suggests that the group’s ability to manage suc-
cessfully those two sets of coherence conditions depends in very
important ways on various aspects of the embodied nature of writing
practices: The collaborators simultaneously invoked their embodied
knowledge of the material and everyday worlds of work and enacted—
through speech and bodily gestures—trial locutions that anticipated
and rehearsed the revised verbal spec and drawing. As the group dis-
cussion proceeded, these trial locutions served two functions. First,
they served as the means by which the group jointly interrogated the
accord between the linguistic meaning of the initial channel ease-
ments spec and drawing (i.e., the consulting engineers’ ungrounded
and disembodied top of the bank concept) and the grounded and
embodied world of work. Second, the trial locutions served as the
means by which the group developed alternative representations of
meaning that better met the need for (a) a text world to cohere seman-
tically and pragmatically and (b) the text world of the standards docu-
ment to reflect and anticipate the embodied nature of work in the
material world. The collaborative nature of the writing event pro-
vided us the opportunity to observe and record, through unobtrusive
means, evidence of the importance of two aspects of embodiment—
embodied knowledge and embodied representations—in writing
production as well as evidence of the increasing distribution of
embodied knowledge across all members of the group, both city per-
sonnel and consulting engineers.

EMBODIED WRITING AND FUTURE RESEARCH

IN TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

Understanding writing as embodied has profound implications

for conducting research on written communication generally and on
technical communication particularly. For us, one of the most impor-
tant implications of this work is that it brings the notion of writing as
production back to the fore. Over the course of the last two decades,
446 JBTC / October 2001

writing scholars and researchers have (rightly) emphasized the social

and cultural aspects of writing. One consequence of this sociocultural
emphasis has been to focus on the positions of writers as culturally
constituted beings embedded and acting within complex webs of eco-
nomic, power and authority, class, race, and gender relations. Such an
emphasis has taught us much, and such relations are important in the
standards project, even if they are not central components of this arti-
cle. The embodied practices we observed during our study of the
engineering standards project allow us to understand the social in
writing as something other than deterministic hierarchical structures.
We certainly cannot claim that this collaborative work group was
egalitarian; after all, Jeff “red lined” (his term) the acceptable written
comments penned by other city personnel, his view held the greatest
sway in the discussions with the consulting engineers, and he initi-
ated most of the topics. Yet Jeff did not initiate all of the topics, and his
was not the only voice that held sway. Throughout the discussion, the
authority and power of various participants’ embodied knowledge
and representations—as they became more widely distributed
among participants—moved the revision process toward solving the
problems reflected in the initial spec and drawing (see Figure 2). And
Jeff, for his part, recognized the expertise of the various members of
the group. In fact, it was Stan’s arcing gesture, used to explain over-
hanging banks of channels, that turned out to be more powerful in
determining the final shape of the channel easement drawing (Fig-
ure 6.5.1 in our Figure 3) than were the textual and graphic production
systems used by the consulting engineers.
A second consequence of the sociocultural emphasis in recent writ-
ing research has been to make the object of study a text rather than an
event. Writing is an action that is conducted in real time by active
agents using cognitive and material tools, and an understanding of
writing as embodied practice invites, even forces, a reconsideration of
the active meaning-making processes of writers and writing. Studies
of writers’ embodied knowledge and representational processes can
link studies of material and cultural conditions to the real-time pro-
cesses and practices of individual writers and groups of writers. If
writers are active social agents, as clearly they are; if their expertise
and cognitions are distributed socially and dependent on interactions
with the phenomenal world, as surely they must be; and if writing is a
social act and hence always collaborative in some sense, as seems to
be the case, then we need to study acts of writing as social and collec-
tive events.
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 447

The research reported here also has implications for understand-

ing how writing is embedded in work activity. Specifically, the techni-
cal professionals we studied were not producing text (whether verbal
or graphic) for its own sake. Their textual practices were always
linked—in interviews, in group discussions, and in observable
actions—to work-based goals. When writing is conceived of as an
embedded and embodied practice, understanding links to the sub-
suming and circumscribing human activities of which writing is a
part becomes paramount. Embodied knowledge of the world is not—
and cannot be—developed through writing per se, and we have good
reason to believe that whereas the consulting engineers learned much
from the city employees’ representations of their own embodied
knowledge, the engineers’ knowledge of channels remained fairly
disembodied and verbal in nature. To understand the origins and
development of embodied knowledge, we need to understand the
myriad bodily actions that people perform in the course of their work
and the goals that those actions are meant to serve. Understanding the
relations between writing as embodied practice and writing as
embedded practice is important, particularly when verbal and
graphic texts must correspond to or map onto the phenomenal world.
When Charles Filmore noted insightfully that texts are always
“relativized to scenes” (84), he was pointing to the shared material
space occupied by communicants. Similarly, when Herbert Clark
claimed that the meanings symbolized through language depend on
the establishment of “common ground” (92 ff.), he was not merely
invoking a metaphor of linguistic convenience but was, rather,
acknowledging that participants can be successful only if and when
they share common internal representations of and assumptions
about being in the world. Such a view of the embedded nature of writ-
ing is a powerful counter to the tendency to see verbal text as existing
for its own sake. In our studies of situated writing, in this and other
sites, we have encountered no data that would suggest that writing—
and especially technical writing—exists in and for itself.
With these comments about general implications in place, we sug-
gest, in closing, some specific research questions that could guide
future efforts to understand and document further the embodied
nature of writing.

• How is embodied knowledge—especially specialized knowledge—learned?

Studies that follow engineers, city personnel, and others as they work in
448 JBTC / October 2001

the field would allow us to understand the processes and actions by

which specialized, embodied knowledge is developed.
• Would modeling the development of specialized embodied knowledge be possi-
ble? If so, would such models be useful for workers—such as the con-
sulting engineers in our study—who do not spend large amounts of
time in the field? Would such models be useful for teaching or for the
design of instructional software for technical professionals?
• How do technical professionals and other workers understand relationships
among different representational systems? Do categories of verbal-visual
relationships, developed by document-design theorists such as
Schriver, reflect how workers understand the multiple representational
systems they use in their daily work?
• What differences in writing as embodied practice are obtained for different writ-
ers, different situations, and different tasks? We have focused here on
abstracting some common aspects of writing as embodied practice, but
researchers might focus on differences as well. For instance, do differ-
ently gendered bodies produce or enact text in observably different
ways? The writers we studied were both white-collar and blue-collar
male Caucasians. Is writing embodied differently for writers of different
classes, genders, or races? Do the same writers use their bodies in differ-
ent ways in different situations—when writing a grocery list, or a per-
sonal letter, or a child’s story?
• Similarly, do embodied knowledge and embodied representational processes in
writing function similarly in the work of other kinds of technical professionals?
Our research focused on workers concerned with developing and main-
taining a city’s infrastructure. However, the workers we studied may be
more concerned with the material world—with variables such as the
physicality of creek banks, machines, and property lines—than would
other kinds of workers. How do embodied aspects of writing reveal
themselves in the work and textual (which should not be construed as a
synonym for verbal) practices of other kinds of writers?
• How do various representational systems—not just verbal and graphic but ges-
tural as well—support meaning making in collaborative groups? We were
intrigued with how deeply these technical professionals relied on ges-
ture and graphics, at least in the early stages of text production, and with
how quickly the verbal spec was relegated to the periphery of the
group’s discussion. Would it be possible to track the use of various sym-
bolic or representational systems during various phases of collaborative
work or through various aspects of individual writers’ writing
processes?

Questions about the embodied practices of writers, which we have

just begun to sketch here, have the potential to open up entirely new
ways of seeing and studying writing. We believe that a multimodal
approach, which may include grounded theory methodologies, and
explicit attention to writers’ embodied practices will illuminate some
thorny issues within writing studies—issues that have to do with the
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 449

nature and development of specialized knowledge and expertise,

with the interrelationship of complementary (or conflicting) repre-
sentational systems, and with the nature of power in collaborative
work.

APPENDIX
Full Transcript of the Channel Easement Discussion

Note on transcription: In producing the transcript, we employed the follow-

ing simple conventions, which we see as appropriate for the purposes of the
present article: (1) material enclosed within angular brackets (i.e., <> ) repre-
sents our editorial insertions to help readers understand aspects of the con-
text in which the discussion occurred, (2) material enclosed in square brackets
(i.e., [ ]) identifies gestures at the points they occurred during the discussion,
(3) material enclosed in curved brackets (i.e., { }) gives information about the
language (e.g., indecipherable words, longer pauses) presented in the tran-
script, and (4) ellipses (i.e., . . . ) indicate the short pauses of halting speech
characteristic of people thinking on their feet.
Start time: 27 minutes, 18 seconds
1 Dale: <reading initially from section 6.4 of the draft document, which appears on one of two
2 screens> “A channel easement conveys the right to construct and maintain an <a
3 perpetual in the document is omitted in Dale’s reading> open watercourse,” particularly
4 ditches . . . or swales or channels that the city will maintain . . . a lot of times
5 private property owners . . . don’t pay attention to this with their creeks or
6 anything . . . what we are recommending for the channel easement is that it is
7 required that the width extend 5 feet [points to Figure 6.4.1, which is projected on the
8 second screen] beyond the top of the bank on the side of the channel . . . so it’s . . .
9 it’s tough to put a minimum width on a channel because you have varying . . .
10 because you know . . . of varying situations involving channels . . . and swales . . .
11 and ditches
12 Jeff: how’s . . . how’s that language written in that thing? how . . . how do we define
13 the top [points to Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] of the bank?
14 Jerry: yeah
15 Jeff: and what if the . . . the creek is 10 feet wide today and . . . and 20 years from now
16 [raises hands with palms turned inward and then widens the gap between them] it’s 15 feet
17 wide?
18 Dale: it doesn’t address future . . . ah erosion . . . or . . . movement of the . . . channel . . .
19 that I’m aware of . . . we could define . . . top of bank further . . . we could maybe
20 get . . . maybe get a . . . close to a legal definition of the top of the bank . . . or an
21 industry standard definition of what top of bank means {2.5-second pause} I’m
22 not sure if . . . we can check . . . check on wordings . . . that can be added to cover
23 future movements of the channel . . . {several words indecipherable as Stan and Jake
24 begin to overtalk and}[gesture between themselves, each apparently indicating some variable
25 distance between each of their two hands]
26 Stan: {two or three indecipherable words before Dale and Jake stop talking} enough to get a
27 machine down?
28 Jeff: yeah . . . like you mean . . . when you start gettin’ into a pissin’ match with a
29 resident over what is top of the bank [points to Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] . . . I mean
30 . . . I know what I think it is . . . you know . . . you know where . . . like you’ve
450 JBTC / October 2001

31 <i.e., Dale> drawn it . . . but I mean . . . you know . . . they . . . they could say that
32 it’s two feet closer [points to Figure 6.4.1 on the screen and moves his hand a little left to
33 right, indicating movement for the left easement line] to the stream or someone else . . .
34 another department could say well heck top of the bank isn’t ‘til it really flattens
35 out [hand is extended in front with palm down and then moved left to right as on a flat
36 surface] . . . which is . . . five feet beyond where [points again to Figure 6.4.1 on the
37 screen] you just marked it {2-second pause} um . . . I don’t . . . you know . . . I don’t
38 . . . I think you have . . . think your drawing is reasonable . . . I wonder whether
39 that should become part of the easement . . . document. {2-second pause}
40 Brian: you mean the drawing itself?
41 Jeff: I think five [points again to the figure on the screen] feet is a little shy . . . on each side
42 Stan: I think it is!
43 Jake: [who has left his seat and walked to the screen on which Figure 6.4.1 is projected, now points,
44 tapping on the screen, to the “five foot” distance between “top of bank” and edge of the channel
45 easement indicated on the right side of the drawing] this should be 15
46 Stan: on one side . . . to get a machine down through
47 Jake: otherwise we’re gonna hafta . . . we’re gonna hafta <the foregoing is spoken as Jake
48 retakes his seat next to Stan> . . . we’ll spend a fortune just to move dirt to get a
49 machine in there [makes a downward motion with his right hand that echoes the contour of
50 the “bank” depicted in Figure 6.4.1] just to reshape a channel . . . because we’re gonna
51 be movin’ an awful lot of dirt to level up . . . and to get in reach of that crick if we
52 don’t have enough room {2-second pause} we’ve got some <i.e., channels> where
53 we got to be makin’ a four-foot cut [makes a downward slicing motion with his right
54 hand] on one side just to get down to a level . . . to where they can get a machine
55 . . . down [points down toward the floor with his right hand] in there . . . to . . . to work
56 {2-second pause} more like [hands in front with palms turned inward are quickly moved
57 apart] 15 feet
58 Jeff: 15 [the index finger on his right hand traverses in the air the distance from the “top of
59 bank” on the left of Figure 6.4.1 to the edge of the easement] on each side? . . . Or 10
60 and 15?
61 Jake: put 15 on [points again to Figure 6.4.1 on the screen, his hand criss-crossing the figure
62 horizontally] each side if we can get it there
63 Brian: of course we can word it “15 on each side” or . . . a . . . as . . . a . . . “otherwise
64 . . . a . . . or otherwise”
65 Jeff: . . . “determined by the City of ___ <name of city deleted from transcript>“
66 Brian: “Determined by the City” . . . say “shallow ditch?” Is that a little overkill?
67 Jeff: eh . . . but of course we got a Brandywine Creek
68 Stan: right {three or four words indecipherable} well okay . . . 15, 15 . . . or 20,
69 10? but you’re . . . if you have 10 you can’t access the . . . all right . . . to get a
70 machine [points to Figure 6.4.1 on the screen, possibly to the bottom of the channel] down
71 there . . . all right . . . no . . . you can’t {two or three words indecipherable}
72 Jake: 15 may even give you a chance to get around trees that you might not have
73 to remove {2-second pause} you could get past ‘em [makes an abbreviated “s” shaped
74 motion with his right hand into the space in front of him]
75 Stan: yeah 15’s good . . . it’s easy to remember . . . all right
76 Jake: that’s what we should decide
77 Jeff: but I think a [makes a general motion toward Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] drawing almost is
78 part of the easement backing {indecipherable three or four words}
79 Stan: you know what I think that . . . that . . . that the sticking point for the smart
80 resident is where’s the edge of the bank the top of the bank [points to Figure 6.4.1
81 on the screen] begins and I think that we need to . . . calculate or . . . represent some
82 type of formula for establishing . . . that top of bank [points again to Figure 6.4.1 on
83 the screen] . . . you know . . . even if it’s something like saying stable ground . . . you
84 know one foot further than the current erosion [points again to Figure 6.4.1 on the
85 screen] or something that just . . . gives us a common point of saying well this is
86 what we call top of bank and this is where it starts from here [makes a quick, short,
87 vertical chopping motion with his right hand] . . . I’m not sure you can do width [raises
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 451

88 both hands in front, palms pointed inward, and opens them] of stream plus . . . because it’s
89 going to [makes a quick, horizontal arc in the air] meander . . . it’s going to do this
90 [makes a snake motion with his right hand] and this . . . but to try to prevent us from
91 getting into an argument with a resident about where his top of bank starts . . .
92 maybe we could think . . . about how we . . . determine . . . where that starting
93 point is you know
94 Jeff: and I don’t think it’s a problem with the current owner . . . it’s the next owner
95 Stan: right
96 Jeff: or two owners down the line where you’re walkin’ in there [points to left bank in
97 Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] to do a maintenance and they want to know . . . how you
98 have a right to be in there [points again to the left bank in Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] . . .
99 and you get into an argument over where top of bank is [points again to left bank in
100 Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] . . . obviously the 15 feet on each side [moves hand left to
101 right from top of bank line toward easement line on the left] makes it . . . gives us a little
102 more leeway . . . but a . . . the top of bank definition somehow . . . we need to try
103 to define it some . . . {two or three words indecipherable} if nothin’ else . . . we define
104 it as plus or minus a foot . . . instead of plus or minus 10 feet {3-second pause}
105 cause they could say top of bank is where [appears now to be pointing to lower portion
106 of Figure 6.4.1] the water level is {2-second pause} cause they don’t understand what
107 that means . . . what a top of a bank is
108 Stan: oh yeah . . . I think . . . take this same view . . . and . . . and . . . show erosion where
109 the top is actually [makes a vertical arc in front of him with his right hand] overhanging
110 . . . you know the top of bank for them is that overhang [points to Figure 6.4.1 on
111 screen] . . . but you’re not going to put a piece of equipment out there . . . you have
112 to start from the erosion [points again to Figure 6.4.1 on screen] point and work back
113 [moves hand from left to right, seemingly from the “top of bank” designation on the screen
114 toward the easement line] for safety too . . . so . . . that . . . I mean that needs to be
115 considered too which
116 Jeff: which we’ve seen
117 Stan: oh yeah! we’ve seen it! . . . when you’re looking at it from the top down [points to
118 Figure 6.4.1 on screen] as a resident you say “oh, no, no, no, no . . . starts right there
119 [makes a short vertical chopping motion with right hand] . . . I don’t care if you can’t . . . if
120 you have to come back five feet . . . no way” . . . you know . . . especially if it’s a
121 fence or somebody’s garage that’s . . . encroaching, so {about 4 seconds of
122 indecipherable sounds} it’s a moving [moves left hand out and away from his body] . . .
123 obviously it’s a moving easement isn’t it? as far as erosion and
124 Brian: that’s right . . . and if you [points to Figure 6.4.1 on screen] put it back by
125 Jeff: yeah move [points to left bank in Figure 6.4.1 on the screen] the top of bank
126 Brian: not as close to [points toward the center of Figure 6.4.1] the stream
127 Jake: {several indecipherable words} at the top of the bank . . . especially if you know you
128 got a bad situation . . . you’ve got to put [points to left bank in Figure 6.4.1 on the
129 screen] erosion control . . . or whatever in there
130 Stan: yeah
131 Jake: and then it may be more easily maintained . . . after that point
132 Stan: {three or four indecipherable words} have to make it the issue
133 Brian: we’ll work on it <i.e., Figure 6.4.1> some more . . . and the top of bank definition
134 . . . and see what we can come up with
135 Dale: we’ll probably modify this drawing [points to Figure 6.4.1, which still appears on the
136 screen] to not . . . not to show just a nice simple case like this . . . we’ll include
137 some overhang or . . . some other instance . . . so that it’s [points to left bank in Figure
138 6.4.1 on the screen] not just solid ground that drops off {three or four indecipherable
139 words}
140 {a 4- to 5-second pause here}
141 Jeff: yeah, with a couple of standards like that with the accepted document I think
142 we’ll . . . it’ll cover . . . probably 95 to 98% of the people we have to deal
143 with . . . another 2 to 5% will probably be a problem no matter how
144 many definitions, how many drawings
452 JBTC / October 2001

145 Stan: we’ll just throw ‘em over the bank

146 {Group laughter and much overtalking}
147 Stan: give us one of those drawings too would you?
148 {Someone alludes to an oversized 24" × 30" line drawing with multiple images stuck in the
149 back of the standards document.}
150 Jake: really big
151 Stan: man it’s going to be huge
152 {group laughter and overtalk continues for 7 or 8 seconds before Dale begins talking about
153 section 6.5 in the standards document}

End time: 33 minutes, 30 seconds

NOTES

1. See Haas (Writing, 127-33) for a discussion of some differences in writers’

embodied interactions with pen and paper and word processing technologies. Spe-
cifically, Haas’s analysis showed writers using four distinct kinds of physical interac-
tions with technology (above and beyond actual text production): distancing moves,
pointing, moves to change perspective, and tactile manipulations of text.
2. The consulting engineering firm also has subcontracted the production of an
electronic version of the standards document to accompany the hardbound version.
This electronic version is hypertextual, with links that allow users to navigate back and
forth between sections of the document and between the verbal specs and the drawings
relevant to them. The contract calls for the electronic version to be made available at the
city’s Web site and also, by request, on CD-ROM. (As of February 2001, most, but not all,
of the 15 sections or chapters of the electronic version had been completed.)
3. Under the auspices of tehe Center for Research in Workplace Literacy (CRWL),
we received for ourselves, other CRWL-affiliated faculty, and graduate students writ-
ten permission from the city manager to carry out long-term and extensive research in a
number of city departments and offices. Before granting permission, the city manager
consulted with his department heads, office managers, and field personnel. We also
sought and received specific permission from the heads and managers of the city
departments and offices whose work we studied. Before the study reported here was
undertaken, the authors—again under the auspices of CRWL—also had sought and
received written permission to carry out extensive and long-term research in the con-
sulting engineering firm. That the consulting engineering firm was awarded—through
a competitive bidding process—the contract for developing the standards document
was a happy accident. Although none of the persons whose words and actions are
reported in the present article see any reason for us not to use their real names, we have,
nevertheless, decided to employ pseudonyms for each.
4. True theoretical saturation, of course, is impossible and—similar to other
researchers—we have often discovered (especially after a long hiatus from the data)
new patterns of categories even after we thought saturation had been reached.
5. We follow Glaser and Strauss, Strauss, and Strauss and Corbin in distinguishing
between substantive theory, which has explanatory and interpretive power within a
specific arena of human activity (e.g., civil engineering practice or local government
decision making), and high or grand theory, which seeks to explain high-level
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 453

abstractions (e.g., language, power, gender, or human activity itself). Although our
purposes in this article are much more modest, our research, of course, is guided to
some extent by our own high theories and epistemologies.
6. Our identification of these topics during this initial conversational turn is an
example of the grounded theory approach on a very small scale. Through repeated
encounters with this first portion of the transcript, we were able to identify the category
of topic, which we could then label and dimensionalize. We reached what Glaser and
Strauss called “theoretical saturation” (61-62, 111-13) when we were not able to gener-
ate any more topics from Dale’s opening statement. Admittedly rather mundane, the
category of topic and its instantiation allow us to demonstrate how the grounded the-
ory approach works in process—a demonstration that is considerably more involved
and difficult with categories that are more complex and wide-ranging.
7. In the recent movie The Blair Witch Project, Mike discards the topographical map
in disgust because he can’t read it like a road map and therefore sees it as useless.
Heather and Josh, on the other hand, understand the value of the map and, as they
become increasingly disoriented, note that the “feel” of their current situation does not
match the “feel” they see represented in the topographical map.
8. We are not making a professional/practitioner distinction here because two of
the five city employees at this meeting are trained and certified engineers. Rather, the
distinction has more to do with the worlds through which each set of participants
moves in its work activities. Whereas the consulting engineers see their knowledge as
practical and applied, it is still knowledge gleaned primarily from working with textual
representations (often in the form of computer-generated figures) of the material
world. The city employees—even though they work a great deal with such representa-
tions as well—spend much more time in the field than do the consulting engineers.
9. The discussion yielded an earlier version of this addition to the revised spec: “or
as otherwise determined by the City of ____” (see lines 63-65).
10. Unable to solve the problem (and adjudicate the controversy) with language, the
participants here circumvent it materially, or spatially: They increase the width of the
easement in an attempt to solve a problem they cannot seem to solve linguistically. We
have seen this intriguing strategy in other research. Particularly, we note how in recent
Supreme Court rulings on abortion, justices—in profound disagreement about con-
flicting rights of clinic owners, patients, personnel, and protesters—have manipulated
space by creating “privacy zones,” “bubbles,” or “buffers” of particular dimensions
around clinics, patients, or workers (Haas, “Materializing” 232).
11. Some treatments of gesture within writing studies (e.g., Sauer, “Embodied Expe-
rience”) have focused on the important affective or emotive function of gesture. We
have not here systematically analyzed the emotive or affective content of the gestures
made during the channel easement discussion although it would be entirely possible to
do so. Rather, we have looked primarily at the representational content of the gestures
and, in this way, interpreted them as what McNeill labeled (105) and discussed (105-44)
as “gestures of the concrete” or “iconic” gestures.
12. We should also note that when the records of utterances and gestures that
occurred during the channel easement discussion are correlated and combined, the
resulting transcript supports certain observations. First, the ratio of gestures to utter-
ances generally increases from the beginning of the discussion (line 1) up to, but not
including, the summary and wrap-up (beginning at line 141). Second, this increased
ratio seems to reflect a general movement from clarifying to critiquing to revising the
drawing of the channel easement and, accordingly, the semantic force of the key
454 JBTC / October 2001

constructs represented in both the drawing and the spec: width of easement and the top
of the bank. Third, the gestures can be said to be oriented toward the spec only insofar
as the expressions “top of bank” and “a point 5 feet beyond the top of bank” are verbally
present in Figure 6.4.1 (see Figure 2). Fourth, the gestures, like the utterances, consis-
tently invoke and represent the participants’ embodied knowledge of channel ease-
ments. Together, these four observations permit the gestures we observed to be fairly
consistently and systematically classified along two dimensions, which can be repre-
sented as goals and semantic content. This analysis, which we believe is potentially
quite valuable, is too complex to treat in the present article, and we plan to pursue it in
subsequent work.
13. As noted, the city is in the process of transforming the hard-copy version of the
completed standards document into an electronic version complete with links that will
permit users to navigate back and forth between the specs and the drawings. Such navi-
gation occurs through each of the joint meetings we have observed, and the records of
such navigation could be used to identify many of the places where links should be
built into the electronic version of the standards document.

REFERENCES

Allen, Nancy. “Gaining Electronic Literacy: Workplace Simulations in the Classroom.”

Electronic Literacies in the Workplace. Ed. Patricia Sullivan and Jennie Dautermann.
Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996. 216-38.
Beaugrande, Robert de. Text Production: Toward a Science of Composition. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex, 1984.
Bødker, Susanne. Through the Interface: A Human Activity Approach to User Interface
Design. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.
Bracewell, Robert J., Carl Fredrikson, and Janet Donin Fredrikson. “Cognitive Pro-
cesses in Composing and Comprehending Discourse.” Educational Psychologist 17
(1982): 146-64.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge, 1993.
Clancey, William J. Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representa-
tions. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Clark, Herbert. Understanding Language. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1996.
Dunmire, Patricia. “Genre as Temporally Situated Action.” Written Communication 17
(2000): 93-139.
Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1971.
. “Hand, Eye, Brain.” Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Ed. Charles Cooper
and Lee Odell. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1978. 59-72.
Engeström, Yrjö. Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretic Approach to Developmental
Research. Helsinki, Fin.: Orienta-Konsultit, 1987.
. “The Tensions of Judging: Handling Cases of Driving Under the Influence of
Alcohol in Finland and California.” Cognition and Communication at Work. Ed.
Yrjö Engeström and David Middleton. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1996. 199-232.
Filmore, Charles. “Topics in Lexical Semantics.” Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Ed.
Robert W. Cole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 455

Fleckenstein, Kristie S. “Writing Bodies: Somatic Mind in Composition Studies.” Col-

lege English 61 (1999): 281-306.
Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College
Composition and Communication 32 (1981): 120-60.
Flower, Linda, John R. Hayes, Karen Schriver, James Stratman, and Linda Carey.
“Detection, Diagnosis, and Strategies of Revision.” College Composition and Commu-
nication 37 (1986): 16-55.
Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for
Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine, 1967.
Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
Goldberg, Jonathon. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Haas, Christina. “Materializing Public and Private: The Spatialization of Conceptual
Categories in the Discourses of Abortion.” Rhetorical Bodies. Ed. Jack Selzer and
Sharon Crowley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. 218-38.
. Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1996.
Haas, Christina, and Stephen P. Witte. Modified Grounded Theory: An Approach to Man-
aging Tensions between Data and Claim in Studies of Situated Writing. CRWL Technical
Report No. 8. Kent, OH: Kent State University, Center for Research on Workplace
Literacy, 1999.
Hegarty, M., Patricia Carpenter, and Marcel Just. “Diagrams in the Comprehension
of Scientific Text.” Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. 2. Ed. Robert Barr, M. Kamil,
Peter Mosenthal, and P. David Pearson. New York: Longman, 1991. 631-68.
Henderson, Powell. “Writing Technologies at White Sands.” Electronic Literacies in the
Workplace. Ed. Patricia Sullivan and Jennie Dauterman. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996.
65-88.
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Hutchins, Edwin, and Tove Klausen. “Distributed Cognition in an Airline Cockpit.”
Cognition and Communication at Work. Ed. Yrjö Engeström and David Middleton.
Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 15-34.
Jones, Susan. “Specialized Language as a Barrier to Automated Information Technologies.”
Electronic Literacies in the Workplace. Ed. Patricia Sullivan and Jennie Dautermann.
Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996. 23-40.
Kim, Jaegwon. Philosophy of Mind. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998.
Laufer, Edith A., and Joseph Glick. “Expert and Novice Differences in Cognition and
Activity: A Practical Work Activity.” Cognition and Communication at Work. Ed.
Yrjö Engeström and David Middleton. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1996. 177-98.
Lave, Jean. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life. Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Martin, Laura M. W. “Linking Thought and Setting in the Study of Workplace
Learning.” Sociocultural Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and Knowing. Ed.
Laura Martin, Katherine Nelson, and Ethel Tobach. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1995. 150-67.
McNeill, David. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1992.
Nelson, Katherine. Language in Cognitive Development: The Emergence of the Mediated
Mind. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
456 JBTC / October 2001

Pea, Roy. “Practices of Distributed Intelligence and Design for Education.” Distributed
Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations. Ed. Gavriel Salomon. Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 47-87.
Roberty, Marc. Eric Clapton. New York: St. Martins, 1993.
Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist
Analysis of Writer’s Block.” College Composition and Communication 31 (1980): 389-
401.
Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.
Salomon, Gavriel. “No Distribution Without Individuals’ Cognition: A Dynamic
Interactional View.” Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Consider-
ations. Ed. Gavriel Salomon. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
111-38.
Sauer, Beverly. “The Dynamics of Disaster: A Three-Dimensional View of Documenta-
tion in a Tightly Regulated Industry.” Technical Communication Quarterly 3 (1994):
393-419.
. “Embodied Experience: Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture.” Discourse
Studies 1 (1999): 321-54.
. “Embodied Knowledge: The Textual Representation of Embodied Sensory
Information in a Dynamic and Uncertain Material Environment.” Written Commu-
nication 15 (1998): 131-69.
. “Sense and Sensibility in Technical Documentation and Accident Reports: How
Feminist Interpretation Strategies Can Save Lives in the Nation’s Mines.” Journal of
Business and Technical Communication 7 (1993): 63-83.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schriver, Karen. Dynamics in Document Design. New York: John Wiley, 1997.
Scribner, Sylvia. Mind and Social Practice: Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner. Ed.
Ethel Tobach, Rachel Joffe Falmagne, Mary Brown Parlee, Laura M. W. Martin, and
Angie Scribner Kapelman. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
Strauss, Anselm L. Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Cambridge, Eng.: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1987.
Strauss, Anselm L., and Juliet Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Pro-
cedures and Techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990.
Sullivan, Patricia, and Jennie Dautermann, eds. Electronic Literacies in the Workplace:
Technologies of Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996.
Toulmin, Stephen. “Knowledge as Shared Procedures.” Perspectives on Activity Theory.
Ed. Yrjö Engeström, Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamäki. Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1999. 53-64.
Valsiner, Jaan. Human Development and Culture: The Social Nature of Personality and Its
Study. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989.
Valsiner, Jaan, and René van der Veer. The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea. Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Vygotsky, Lev Seminovich. “The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Meth-
odological Investigation.” Trans. René van der Veer. The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky,
Vol 3: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology. Ed. Robert W. Rieber and
Jeffrey Wollock. New York: Plenum, 1997. 233-343.
 Haas, Witte / WRITING AS EMBODIED PRACTICE 457

. “The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions.” Trans. Marie J.

Hall. The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 4: The History of the Development of
Higher Mental Functions. Ed. Robert W. Rieber. New York: Plenum, 1997. 1-259.
. “Thinking and Speech.” Trans. Norris Minick. The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky,
Vol. 1: Problems of General Psychology. Ed. Robert W. Rieber and Aaron S. Carton.
New York: Plenum, 1987. 37-285.
Wilson, Frank R. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.
New York: Random House, 1998.
Witte, Stephen P. “Context, Text, Intertext: Toward a Constructivist Semiotic of Writ-
ing.” Written Communication 9 (1992): 237-308.
. “Pre-Text and Composing.” College Composition and Communication 38 (1987):
397-425.
. “Revising, Composing Theory, and Research Design.” The Acquisition of Written
Language: Response and Revision. Ed. Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex, 1985. 250-83.
Witte, Stephen P., and Lester Faigley. “Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality.” Col-
lege Composition and Communication 32 (1981): 189-204.

Christina Haas is an associate professor of English at Kent State University, where she
teaches in the doctoral program in literacy, rhetoric, and social practice and directs a
writing internship program. Her current research concerns embodied aspects of text pro-
duction and use and the nature of credibility in online discourse. Her e-mail address is
chaas@kent.edu.

Stephen P. Witte is a Knight Professor of Composition Theory in the Department of Eng-

lish at Kent State University, where he chairs the doctoral program in literacy, rhetoric,
and social practice and directs the Center for Research on Workplace Literacy. He is cur-
rently working on several articles on systems of representation used in workplaces
entered by college graduates and, with Hunter Stephenson and Robert Bracewell, on a
book tentatively titled Cultural-Historical Psychology, Cognitive Science, and the
Study of Writing. His e-mail address is switte@kent.edu.
JBTC / October 2001 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

This article explores three ways to design US empirical methods to be more valid and eth-
ical in cross-cultural studies. First, intercultural researchers need to distinguish broad
rhetorical and cultural patterns from regional, organizational, and personal patterns, a
process that requires balancing the fact of difference with the need for generalization. Sec-
ond, US researchers need to distinguish not only the differences in rhetorical patterns in
a form of communication but also in the ways that form is used rhetorically. Third,
researchers need to construct researcher-participant relationships that are sensitive to
the values of organizational relationships in both cultures.

Issues of Validity in Intercultural

Professional Communication Research
BARRY THATCHER
New Mexico State University

lthough a growing number of professional communication

A researchers have explored theories and practices of

intercultural professional communication, very few of
these researchers have addressed empirical research methodologies
for intercultural communication (MacNealy 40-41). For example, in
the 1997 special edition of JBTC devoted to international issues
(Driskill), none of the articles draw on data obtained through empiri-
cal research methods or explore issues in empirical research method-
ology. Similarly, in Carl Lovitt and Dixie Goswami’s 1999 collection
that examines important theoretical issues in intercultural profes-
sional communication, no article explores major issues in empirical
research methodology; only one article explores researcher roles
(Jorgenson), and only one article uses an empirical study to report the
findings. Similar approaches can be found in Deborah Andrews’s col-
lection and the 1999 special edition of Technical Communication
devoted to international communication (Hoft).
At first thought, overlooking intercultural empirical methods
might not seem that problematic because many research methods
now assess US multiculturalism (Longo) and the various social and
cultural constructions of power in the workplace (Blyler; Sullivan and
Porter), all of which seem easily adaptable to intercultural situations.
Amore critical examination, however, reveals that these research meth-
ods are not designed to assess second-language and cross-cultural

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 458-489
© 2001 Sage Publications

458
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 459

assumptions, variables that move far beyond a US multiculturalism.

Furthermore, these methods seem derived from and designed for pre-
dominant US cultural and rhetorical values, especially those associ-
ated with US equality and individualism. Thus, these methods need
to be critically adapted for intercultural studies.
To demonstrate the ways and the extent to which these methods
should be adapted for professional communication research, I use
two English translations of an Ecuadorian/US document. In Figure 1,
Letter O (original version) is a close English translation of an actual
letter (Luque) that was published in El Universo, a daily newspaper in
Guayaquil, Ecuador. In Figure 2, Letter R (rhetorical revision) is my
rhetorical reworking of the content of Letter O to make it more appro-
priate for US audiences (based on my knowledge as a US-born
instructor of professional communication). As a pilot project for my
research in US/South American professional communication
(“Orality”), I surveyed 200 South Americans and 200 US Americans
about their rhetorical preferences, asking them which letter they pre-
ferred and why. Whereas US researchers might not be surprised to
learn that all 200 US Americans preferred Letter R, they might be sur-
prised that 67% of South Americans preferred Letter O, 21% were
undecided, and 12% preferred Letter R.
I present these letters here not to essentialize or reify South Ameri-
can or US American writing patterns but to demonstrate the broad
rhetorical differences between the two cultures. Such a striking differ-
ence in the rhetorical approaches of these two letters prompts two
central questions for intercultural researchers: Why are intercultural
rhetorics such as these so different, and what happens when
intercultural rhetorics interact in professional contexts?
In many types of intercultural rhetorical situations such as this US/
Ecuadorian example, professional communication researchers can
draw on general monocultural empirical methods (MacNealy; Lauer
and Asher; Blyler; Sullivan and Porter), but they need to adapt these
methods in three ways to ensure their validity and ethics in
intercultural studies. First, intercultural empirical methods should
distinguish broad cultural and rhetorical patterns from regional,
organizational, and personal patterns, which requires balancing the
fact of difference with the need for generalization. For example, the
United States and the countries that make up Spanish-speaking South
America are richly varied, with different traditions, histories, and
rhetorics. This fact of difference is an obvious point and needs no fur-
ther elaboration here. Equally obvious, however, is that the response
460 JBTC / October 2001

TRANSIT COMMISSION
OF THE GUAYAS PROVINCE
[O]
TO THE PUBLIC
In response to the publication made by the Bureau of Industrial Development on
April 15, 1993, the Transit Commission of the Guayas Province unanimously
resolved to publish a clarification and/or answer through the means of communica-
tion about the assessments and negotiations that this body adopted against the
methods of REGISTRATION and TAXATION of new and imported cars. That in a
terse and clear way it was determined that this Directorate which began to function
since August of 1992 has been against those procedures that have been utilized for
more than twenty years and began to carry out negotiations so that this system did
not continue, as is evident in the deliberative nature of the resolution adopted by
this organization in an ordinary session on February 15, 1993, in which it was unani-
mously resolved to solicit the most distinguished Constitutional President of the
Republic, Sixto Durán-Ballén, to reform by executive decree, according to the Art. 78,
Letter A of the Constitution, the Art. 14 of the General Rule of Tax Law of Motorized
Vehicles of Land Transportation, published in the Official Register N. 127 on Febru-
ary 13, 1989, in the sense of which: “The owners of new vehicles will pay the tax
within 30 days from the date of acquisition, according to that which is established in
the Art. 8 Law 004 and the Art. 52 of the political constitution of the state, that is,
paying the annual portion determined from the first day of the month following the
month of acquisition of the new vehicle, until the 31 of December of that year, or giv-
ing up ownership of the vehicle, this last applicable in the case of residents or natu-
ralized persons that are not dedicated to the selling of automotive vehicles.”
What is needed is to respect the proportionality that the constitution mandates
without having an answer for the moment to the legal requirements from the Minis-
try of Finances that was sent in a correspondence dated February 9, 1993. In light of
that we are doing the respective consultations to the Attorney General and Inspector
General of the government to avoid possible future clarifications, since the civil ser-
vants of this Ministry in multiple occasions have verbally indicated to our civil ser-
vants to levy taxes for the complete year, notwithstanding the date in which the
vehicle was registered.
Clarifying that the Transit Commission of the Guayas Province does not receive
not even five percent (5%) of the total value that the owner of the vehicle pays.
The problem first presented itself to our institution from the moment we were
converted to an agency for withholding monies which corresponds to the Treasurer
and we hope the Finance Ministry will receive tax payments through the province
administrators and that as requirement for registering the vehicle, the owner will
have to present the receipt for having fulfilled the payment of this obligation to the
Treasurer.
José Plaza Luque
President
TRANSIT COMMISSION
OF THE GUAYAS PROVINCE

Figure 1. Original Ecuadorian Letter

NOTE: Thatcher’s translation of the original Ecuadorian letter.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 461

TRANSIT COMMISSION
OF THE GUAYAS PROVINCE
[R]
TO THE PUBLIC
The Transit Commission of the Guayas Province proposes to reform the terms
and administration of new car registration and taxation.
The terms of taxation are unfair. The Attorney and Inspector General insist that
taxes are to be levied for the whole year, notwithstanding the date the car was regis-
tered. As a result, one car owner pays the same tax for a car acquired on December 31
that another owner pays for the same vehicle that he acquired on January 1st of the
same year. Because of this inequity, we resolved to solicit President Durán-Ballén to
reform the terms of taxation by executive decree.
To be more fair to the owners, we suggest changing the terms to a monthly basis,
or as follows: “The owners of new vehicles will pay the tax within 30 days from the
date of acquisition, according to that which is established in the Art. 8 Law 004 and
the Art. 52 of the political constitution of the state, that is, paying the annual portion
determined from the first day of the month following the month of acquisition of the
new vehicle, until the 31 of December of that year, or giving up ownership of the
vehicle, this last applicable in the case of residents or naturalized persons that are
not dedicated to the selling of automotive vehicles.”
In addition to these terms, the methods of charging and withholding taxes need
clarification. Although the Attorney and Inspector General want our Commission to
administer the transaction, they have not given us the legal guidelines. Thus, we
suggest for the time being that the Finance Ministry receive tax payments through
the provincial administrators.
José Plaza Luque
President
TRANSIT COMMISSION
OF THE GUAYAS PROVINCE

Figure 2. Rhetorical Revision of Original Letter

to these two letters is rather unified: All US Americans preferred Let-

ter R, whereas many South Americans either preferred Letter O or rec-
ognized in Letter O predominant rhetorical strategies from their cul-
tures (Thatcher, “Orality”). How can intercultural researchers,
therefore, make sense of these striking but broad rhetorical differ-
ences without oversimplifying people, organizations, and cultures?
What balance between difference and generalization is most effective
and ethical for our development of theory, practice, and pedagogy?
Second, intercultural empirical methods need to focus on the rela-
tionships of communication media and predominant cultural pat-
462 JBTC / October 2001

terns. For instance, many of the rhetorical strategies in Letter O resem-

ble Ong’s descriptions of oral cultures, whereas the strategies in
Letter R resemble a more written culture. Indeed, many South Ameri-
can survey respondents in Ecuador identified the rhetoric of Letter O
as representing the strong element of orality in their culture; thus, the
written forum of the newspaper was not closely aligned with tradi-
tional means of arguing for changes in Ecuadorian society (Thatcher,
“Orality”). Consequently, critical questions for US intercultural
researchers focus on how the rhetorical features of communication
media relate to the cultural values of each culture. For example, does
writing serve a different purpose in the United States than in Latin
America or other parts of the world because of the United States’s
original foundation; constitution; and legal, social, and educational
institutions? Furthermore, how are uses of orality, e-mail, and hyper-
text communication related to cultural values across the globe? Do
distinct rhetorical patterns of a culture predispose corresponding
purposes and uses of communication media?
Third, intercultural empirical methods should construct re-
searcher and participant relationships that are sensitive to the organi-
zational relationships common in the participants’ cultures. For
example, Letter O exemplifies many of the hierarchical (Hofstede)
and ascriptive (Trompenaars; Stewart and Bennett) patterns of orga-
nizational relationships that are common in South America and many
other parts of the world. However, many current research theories
that argue for obtaining data through close participant-researcher
relationships (Sullivan and Porter; Blyler; Kirsch and Mortensen) are
based on the more egalitarian, democratic, and emancipatory organi-
zational relationships that are more common in the United States
(Hofstede; Trompenaars; Stewart and Bennett). Thus, can the data of
intercultural research be valid if researchers rely on participant-
researcher relationships based on US assumptions of organizational
relationships? How can intercultural researchers construct
researcher-participant relationships that are sensitive to the values of
organizational relationships in both cultures?
This article addresses these issues of difference, and generalization,
communication media, and researcher-participant relationships in
intercultural professional communication, focusing on the problems
and possibilities of adapting US monocultural empirical methods to
be more effective and ethical in cross-cultural contexts.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 463

THEORIZING DIFFERENCE AND GENERALIZATION

IN THE CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXT

The responses to Letters O and R (see Figures 1 and 2) exemplify a

central dissonance in intercultural research: How, for example, can
such a diversity of people from the United States or South America
exhibit such unified responses to these rhetorical strategies? Further-
more, given the postmodern explosion of attention to difference and
the accompanying attention to power relations, politics, and ideology
in workplace research (Blyler; Sullivan and Porter), how can
intercultural researchers compare cultures at any level, and why is
this cultural comparison important? Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s
dialogic theories, this section explores a tentative framework of three
levels of analysis (larger cultural and linguistic, organizational, and
personal) that help ensure greater design validity and balance
between difference and generalization in cross-cultural studies.
This tension between diversity and generalization is central to
Bakhtin’s philosophies, and perhaps his idea of a “dialogized unity”
(“Content,” “Author”) can offer an effective approach for
intercultural studies. Bakhtin clearly rejected both the idea of a
mechanical or static cultural unity and what we might now call the
poststructuralist fixation on difference. Both extremes work against
individuality, creativity, and “answerability” (see, e.g., “Art,” “Con-
tent”). If, however, discourse structures thinking processes and corre-
sponding cultural patterns (Bakhtin, “Problem”; Berlin), a group of
people who share certain discourses also share the cultural patterns of
those discourses, despite their other differences. According to
Bakhtin, this sharing of discourse features creates a rhythm or unity, a
dialogized configuration of agreed-on cognitive processes and
accompanying ethical actions (see “Content”). This unity is situated
in a physical context and is constantly being dialogized and subjected
to change because it is the meeting point of authoritative and persua-
sive discourses and centripetal and centrifugal forces; such dialogism
is permitted precisely because of the dialogic unity—not the hetero-
geneity. And only through this dialogized unity can people meaning-
fully participate in and be answerable for the events in their lives
(Bakhtin, “Art,” “Content,” “Author”). The unified responses to Let-
ters O and R show that both cultures have developed through the
dialogic processes some general rhetorical assumptions and expecta-
tions, a sort of rhetorical unity. These assumptions are situated in a
concrete physical and social context and are constantly being chal-
464 JBTC / October 2001

lenged and revised, but they indeed represent contingent, dialogized

thinking patterns and corresponding rhetorical interactions.
Although researchers can make inquiries into various levels of
unity, such as local genres and utterances (Bakhtin, “Problem”), the
broad cultural level provides perhaps the most valid and ethical
approaches for starting or framing cross-cultural research. Dharm
Bhawuk and Harry Triandis, two noted intercultural researchers, and
John Lucy, a prominent cross-cultural linguist, argued that the emic or
ethnographic approach that is so common in cultural anthropology—
and predominant in rhetoric and professional communication
(Barton; Charney, “Logocentrism”)—is quite useful for studying one
culture but inappropriate when comparing two or more cultures. The
specificity of the ethnographic approach works against the construc-
tion of ethical and valid variables for the cross-cultural comparison.
For example, the fixation on the differences between types of apples
works against developing more neutral variables to compare apples and
oranges. (Unlike apples and oranges, however, differences between
cultures are socialized, not essential.) Bhawuk and Triandis, and Lucy
argued that to establish valid cross-cultural comparisons, researchers
need to start by recognizing similarities based on shared contexts and
then considering differences within the framework of these similari-
ties. In other words, apples and oranges are indeed different but they
are both fruit, about the same size, used for similar purposes, and
their textures are not remarkably different. This embedding of differ-
ence in a framework of similarities works against analyzing a second
culture using the cultural constructs of the first culture (Bhawuk and
Triandis 23-24), thus establishing a common ground in which to
operationalize and compare the variables of both cultures in the
intercultural context (Lucy). Furthermore, this embedding of differ-
ence also helps researchers distinguish personal patterns from
assumptions about communication media and research methods. As
I discuss later in this article, if researchers do not understand how
their conceptions of communication media and participant-
researcher relationships compare with those of the target culture, they
will most likely confuse a personal rhetorical pattern with an assump-
tion about a communication medium or participant-researcher
relationships.
According to Bhawuk and Triandis, and Lucy, these similarities are
not the modernist conceptions of progress or other hegemonic narra-
tives that have been used, often unethically, when comparing cul-
tures. They are shared contexts or thresholds of interaction that are
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 465

common to humans, as perhaps compared to other species on this

planet. For many intercultural scholars, the shared contexts tend to be
time, relationships with each other, relationships with nature, and
conceptions of humanity (Stewart and Bennett). For example, cross-
cultural researchers have examined how people construct their own
conceptions of humanity, with people on one extreme of a continuum
valorizing an individual construction (individualism) and people on
the other extreme valorizing a social or family construction (collectiv-
ism) (see the next section for a better discussion of these variables).
When comparing these differences within the shared contexts, most
researchers are careful to argue for a continuum of behavior in which
prominent bell curve differences mark major intercultural differences
(see Trompenaars; Hofstede). Different ways of relating to each other
are often categorized along a continuum from particularism to uni-
versalism (Trompenaars; Hofstede). Other researchers have looked at
different conceptions of time (Hall; Levine) and nature (Stewart and
Bennett). More important for professional communication, though,
many researchers have studied cross-cultural organizational behav-
ior (Hofstede, Trompenaars), noting significant differences in author-
ity, leadership, and work relationships, whereas others have exam-
ined differences in writing patterns across cultures, or contrastive
rhetoric (see Connor).
Although these larger sociological, linguistic, and organizational
behavior studies have been criticized for being too broad and often
outdated (Lovitt; Driskill), they are a useful starting point for under-
standing rhetorical purpose in cross-cultural settings. For example,
the work in contrastive rhetoric has provided considerable evidence
of more flexible organizational patterns in Latin American Spanish
prose (see Connor). Thus, Letter O (see Figure 1) is not an intentional
blurring of meaning through circumlocution, as might be the inter-
pretation of a US researcher unfamiliar with the work in contrastive
rhetoric. The level of formality and careful articulation of relation-
ships in Letter O reflect the collective and hierarchical values in Ecua-
dorian society. Thus, whereas an uninformed US scholar would char-
acterize the rhetoric as flowery and pretentious, Ecuadorian
collective and ascriptive values encourage such sensitivity to social
structures and position. Furthermore, for the US reader, the names,
dates, places, and events seem like unneeded information that should
be pruned, but in Ecuador’s high-context culture, this “contexting”
(Hall 85-128) is critical. In other words, for US readers, Letter O seems
indirect, circumlocutory, and pretentious, whereas for many
466 JBTC / October 2001

Ecuadorians, it is direct and persuasive—two very different assump-

tions about rhetorical purpose that are understood only because of
the broad historical and cultural framework. Confusing these gener-
alized rhetorical patterns with personal differences is obviously a
problem of validity.
Therefore, for intercultural researchers to validly compare two or
more cultures, they must focus on the more generalized patterns in
each culture, which does not permit a close-up, ethnographic analysis
of the differences in each culture. This focus obviously opens up room
for critiques about overgeneralization and oversimplification, espe-
cially in light of the postmodern valorization of difference. One of the
strengths of cross-cultural research, however, is that the broad cul-
tural comparisons often elucidate how common discourses have
tended to structure or encourage corresponding cultural values, a
highly self-reflexive understanding that cannot often be brought to
light in difference-focused, ethnographic research (see, e.g., Thatcher,
“Writing”).
These broader patterns, however, are a useful starting point only if
they are understood not as “internally driven, culture-specific rhetor-
ical patterns” (Leki 244) but as rhetorical strategies that originate in
larger cultural-historical contexts and serve as a repertoire of strate-
gies that writers appropriate and individualize to make sense of
everyday rhetorical situations. Often, these strategies become stan-
dardized in a particular way in an organizational culture, becoming
genres of professional communication based on the organization or
profession. Thus, understanding the local organizational culture of
the intercultural context is essential (see, e.g., Lovitt; Perkins). Fur-
thermore, people appropriate these professional and organizational
patterns to serve their own purposes and are constantly revising
them; therefore, intercultural researchers need to assess how personal
appropriations of the strategies are influencing the dialogic develop-
ment of these broad or organizational patterns (see, e.g., Lovitt;
Perkins; Thatcher, “L2”). At these organizational and personal levels,
the use of more-ethnographic methods (Sullivan and Porter) can be
effective because the concrete differences are now embedded in the
larger, comparative framework. Thus, just as confusing a personal
pattern with a larger historical pattern is a validity problem for
researchers, assuming that organizations and their personnel cannot
revise these general patterns in their own ways and for their own uses
is invalid.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 467

In conclusion, starting with the larger cultural patterns and then

moving to the organizational and personal levels of analysis permits a
more ethical and accurate basis for cultural comparison and for situat-
ing the organizational and personal patterns. This approach ensures
greater validity in the literature review, design of methodology, data
gathering, and, especially, data analysis. It also helps construct viable
theories of intercultural professional communication, distinguishing
major cultural patterns from genre differences in professional com-
munication, local organizational constraints, and personal
preferences.
Although starting with the ethnographic or personal level of anal-
ysis and then moving to a larger, comparative framework is possible,
this approach, according to Bhawuk and Triandis, requires native
researchers from each culture to work together to ensure the appro-
priateness of research methods and to extract ethically the emic
details into an etic or comparative framework. Consequently, because
of the need for careful, effective cross-cultural collaboration on the
research design, implementation, and interpretation, “the amount of
work that is needed increases considerably and makes the approach a
daunting venture” (25). The trade-off for this additional work seems
to yield much more specific details about cross-cultural traits, but the
validity pitfalls already mentioned are still present. Much more
research needs to assess the strengths and weaknesses of both starting
points for intercultural research and to determine what intercultural
research designs most effectively and ethically assess these specific-
general, or emic-etic, relationships.
Also, these general cultural patterns constantly change when sub-
jected to international, local, and organizational dialogic processes
(Driskill; García Canclini; Martín Barbero); therefore, further research
needs to interrogate these broad cultural generalizations to assess not
only their accuracy but also how they are changing with the growing
economic and cultural interdependency. Why are the larger cultural
and rhetorical patterns changing. That is, what factors, such as com-
munication media and global economics, are contributing to this
change? Further research also needs to address issues of cross-cultural
hybridity (García Canclini). What kinds of hybrid rhetorics develop at
the intersection of contrastive cultural, organizational, and personal
rhetorics? What are the predominant factors for the strengthening or
weakening of some types of rhetorical features in the development of
hybrid rhetorics? And as explored next, what roles might new com-
468 JBTC / October 2001

munication technologies have in influencing broad cultural and rhe-

torical patterns?

RHETORICS, CULTURES, AND

COMMUNICATION MEDIA

Letter O and Letter R exhibit distinct textual organizations that cor-

respond to distinct cultural patterns, but that is not the only signifi-
cant intercultural difference. Professional communication research-
ers need to understand that cultures tend to use the forms of
communication (such as orality, writing, e-mail, and hypertext) dif-
ferently based on how the rhetorical features of the forms correspond
to the larger cultural patterns. This understanding will help US
researchers avoid the problems of inaccurately assessing rhetorical
purposes and patterns based on US conceptions of communication
media. In this section, I overview the debate about media-culture rela-
tionships and then explore how the rhetorical features of orality, writ-
ing, e-mail, and hypertext relate to four major intercultural variables.
This comparison enables cross-cultural researchers to understand
how the media might influence cross-cultural interactions and the
eventual recasting of the generalized intercultural variables.
The scholarly debate about the relationship of cultural patterns
and communication media has been a long and fruitful one. Plato
originally argued that writing—the newest and most significant com-
munication medium—would have serious deleterious cultural and
rhetorical effects because of its inherent differences from orality
(Phaedrus). Later, in the twentieth century, Walter Ong traced the evo-
lution of oral to literate societies, arguing that the development of
writing radically changed cultural and rhetorical patterns. In the
1960s, Marshall McLuhan offered similar deterministic accounts of
communication media; that is, the media created distinct social and
cultural patterns. In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin American scholars
such as Armand Matellart and Ariel Dorfman, concerned with US
imperialism, began arguing that movies and television, for example,
were Americanizing Latin American culture.
In the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, many scholars, however,
began to discount the simplicity of these deterministic theories, argu-
ing instead for mutually constitutive patterns based on the degree of
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 469

commonality and difference between the cultural patterns, the rhe-

torical features of the communication media, and the specific socio-
historical context in which the media are associated. Jesus Martín
Barbero, a Colombian communication scholar, and Lawrence Gross-
berg, a US scholar, moved away from the simple deterministic theo-
ries of media-culture relationship and argued for exploring the ways
local cultures appropriate, resist, and even reject cultural patterns asso-
ciated with both the content and rhetorical features of communication
media. David Kaufer and Kathleen Carley similarly posited theories
of mutually constitutive relationships between cultural patterns and
the rhetorical features of communication media, and they explored
the social and cultural dynamics reinforced—but not determined—
by the print media. Rarely does one medium supplant another one, as
Ong originally argued; instead, the rhetorical patterns of one medium
correspond to—and reinforce the patterns of—a culture more than
another medium does. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin further ex-
plored this relationship with their conception of remediation. The
rhetorical features of new technology do not supplant the rhetorical
features of older technology—they remediate them, influencing types
of relationships between communicators and older media that are dif-
ferent from those before. This type of media-culture work is also
growing quite common in rhetoric and professional communication
(Dautermann and Sullivan), with a variety of scholars exploring how
the rhetorical features of e-mail (Moran and Hawisher) and hypertext
(Kress) correspond to and reinforce certain social and rhetorical
patterns.
In light of these media-culture relationships, then, I outline the
basic rhetorical features of orality, writing, e-mail, and hypertext.
Ong, Kaufer and Carley, and a variety of other scholars (see Kaufer
and Carley) have argued that orality tends to encourage a rhetoric
that is narrative in structure, emphasizing repetition and aids to
memory. To convey meaning, this medium relies on the presence of
both a speaker and a hearer as well as on the communication context.
It has a greater propensity for concrete and visual imagery, influenc-
ing what Stewart and Bennett called “horizontal” or “perceptual”
thinking rather than analytical thinking. On the other hand, writing
has been associated with more analytical thinking patterns, distanced
interpretation skills, and abstract and more conceptual cognitive rela-
tionships (Ong; Kaufer and Carley), reinforcing what Stewart and
470 JBTC / October 2001

Bennett called deep and analytical thinking (23-25). The development

of writing also is correlated with “more developed” forms of commu-
nities (Kaufer and Carley).
The rhetorical features of e-mail and hypertext are more difficult to
define, perhaps because they are newer media. According to Charles
Moran and Gail Hawisher, e-mail tends to have a decided private/
public duality. Although the communicator is isolated and alone
when communicating, the communication can be exceedingly public.
Also, technological issues such as ease of storage, retrievability, and
speed encourage certain rhetorical characteristics. Moran and
Hawisher argued that e-mail fosters illusions of intimacy perhaps
because of its immediacy and ostensible privacy. However, e-mail is a
highly decontextual medium because it does not offer many of the
contextual cues that orality or other media offer.
Hypertext has been distinguished from text communication by its
lack of linearity—the interlinkings of information create the web met-
aphors. Gunther Kress argued that hypertext is more audience driven
than are many communication media; that is, readers can create their
own unique paths, offering some semblance of authorship to readers.
Hypertext integrates written text with graphics and sounds in ways
that are impossible for orality and writing. Hypertext is uniquely
contextualized by its links to other sites, forming complex ideological
and social relationships with these sites (Kress). Through the World
Wide Web, hypertext is perhaps the most explicitly global medium.
These rhetorical features of orality, writing, e-mail, and hypertext
correlate differently with four critical intercultural variables: the rela-
tionship of the individual to the other (individualism vs. collectiv-
ism), application of norms (universalism vs. particularism), role of
context in communication (high context vs. low context), and legal
traditions.

Individualism versus Collectivism

The first critical intercultural variable is how the individual relates
to others, or individualism versus collectivism (Hofstede;
Trompenaars; Stewart and Bennett). Generally, individualism exists
when people tend to define themselves, see the world, and negotiate
life based on individual identities and efforts. Thus, in individualist
societies, personal space, freedom, creativity, self-celebration, and
personal judgments are emphasized. The self tends to be measured by
how directly it effects change, and individuals tend to see themselves
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 471

against or outside the world. Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars,

Edward Stewart and Milton Bennett, and others argued that the
United States consistently ranks as the most individualist country,
with Australia, South Africa, and other Western European–Protestant
countries having high individualism scores as well. Prominent rhe-
torical features of individualism are expressive (Stewart and Bennett),
using personal intimacy cues to signal accessibility to the social rela-
tionship. They also tend to be direct in situating the discourse topic
and emphasizing personal authorship.
Collectivism exists when people define themselves, see the world,
and negotiate life based on social or familial groups. The person’s
place in society is usually defined by birth, with no significant
chances for social mobility. Sharing traditions and interests, acting for
the good of the in-group, and maintaining face are emphasized.
Often, the self is measured by how well it orchestrates relational soli-
darity. Hofstede, Trompenaars, Stewart and Bennett, and others
argued that many countries in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle
East are generally the most collective. Rhetorical patterns in collective
cultures tend to be indirect with complex and subtle invocations of
social networks, interpersonal relationships, and personal intentions.
Argumentative structures and arguments for cause and effect are
complex, based on a social, horizontal logic (Stewart and Bennett).
Individualism and collectivism seem to combine very differently
with the rhetorical features of the four communication media. First,
one of the traditional arguments about orality (Ong) is that it rein-
forces cultural collectivity. Orality is the mechanism of sharing tradi-
tions and maintaining face and relational solidarity. In individualist
cultures, orality seems to have a much weaker role, one that is per-
haps relegated to expressing personal opinions and beliefs; it is cer-
tainly not the backbone of society, as in many collective cultures.
On the other hand, writing seems to correlate very strongly with
individualist cultures, most notably those with strong Protestant
foundations. Writing seems to represent the distance, isolation, and
personal space of individualist cultures. Often, writing and written
communication become the backbone of the laws, rules, and regula-
tions that allow individualist cultures to flourish (Stewart and
Bennett). Writing does not have the same influence in collective cul-
tures. Although writing can be a means of sharing traditions and
maintaining face and relational solidarity, the preferred—and the
most effective—medium is still orality.
472 JBTC / October 2001

Knowledge of these media is critical for cross-cultural research. For

example, as I explored in two cross-cultural organizations in Ecuador,
the rhetorical patterns of many South Americans were more oral, con-
textual, particular, and narrative, whereas the patterns of US person-
nel were more written, acontextual, universal, and analytical (“Cul-
tural”). But more significant, these patterns corresponded to
contrastive roles and purposes for writing and orality. Many of the US
communicators initiated discourse based on circumstances that they
thought writing usually solved, further reinforcing their individual-
ist values. Thus, the audience-author interactions, information needs,
document design, and content organization seemed to be developed
from and for written literacies. On the other hand, many South Amer-
ican personnel initiated discourse based on situations that they
thought orality should address, further reinforcing their collective
and interpersonal approach to organizational behavior. Thus, they
often assessed information needs, document design, and content
organization based on this oral literacy.
The relationship of individualism or collectivism with e-mail and
hypertext seems not as clear-cut as it is with orality and writing, per-
haps pointing to new cultural values that might be a product of these
newer remediations (Bolter and Grusin). E-mail seems to maintain
the distance and isolation valued in individualist cultures while
simultaneously promoting the senses of intimacy, dynamism, and
community that are more valued in collective cultures. Research
addressing how e-mail mediates this cultural variable is important.
Of interest, the web metaphor for hypertext communication actu-
ally symbolizes the collective approach, the person at the center
orchestrating relational solidarity. Hypertext also integrates audiovi-
sual elements, which are more characteristic of orality and collective
cultures. Again, research addressing these relationships is important,
especially for understanding how these two new media remediate the
traditional distinctions between individualism and collectivism, per-
haps influencing more complex versions of each.

Universalism versus Particularism

The next major intercultural variable is the application of norms
and standards, or universalism versus particularism. Universalist
cultures idealize a rules-based society. Standards are set to define
what is moral and right in spite of the social standings of individuals.
The ideal—rarely achieved—is to apply the standards to all with no
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 473

exceptions. In particularist cultures, however, what is moral and right

depends on social relationships—on who did what to whom—and
exceptions are the rule. Hofstede, Trompenaars, Stewart and Bennett,
and others linked universalism with individualist cultures and
particularism with collective cultures. Universalist approaches seem
to provide the rational, rules-based context for individual expression,
achievement, and isolation. On the other hand, because the social net-
works in collective cultures are the mechanisms for social, economic,
cultural, and legal relationships, the logic of those networks becomes
the logic for applying particular norms and standards.
Knowing how universalism and particularism relate to communi-
cation media is especially important for cross-cultural research. In my
research in South America, many of the South American personnel
preferred orality because it facilitated a particular, case-by-case
approach to the applications of norms and procedures. This value
was so entrenched that most of the South American personnel in one
organization had never worked from written policies and procedures
(“Cultural,” “Writing”). Writing serves a critical role in the legal pro-
cess in Latin America (“Symposium”), but this process is so tied to
particular, or rule-of-will, outcomes that it tends not to function well
in most professional contexts. On the other hand, the US personnel
working in these South American contexts automatically correlated
writing with universalism. Writing a document such as a policy or
procedure and accepting it meant universalizing it; it meant develop-
ing the distance to analyze and create a policy or procedure that
would be objective and equally applicable to all. The US personnel
experienced great difficulties in developing oral policies and proce-
dures based on personal relationships and case-by-case scenarios (see
“Writing”). The two media, however, were not deterministic. Many of
the South American personnel brought their oral—and particular—
rhetorics to the writing situation, and conversely, many of the US per-
sonnel brought their written—and universal—rhetorics to the oral
situation. This lack of correspondence, however, between the
medium and rhetorical purpose created even greater intercultural
communication problems. Thus, US researchers working in more
particularist-collective cultures need to understand that writing
probably does not have the same constitutive, normalizing force that
it does in many universalist cultures (Thacker “writing”).
The ways that the rhetorical features of e-mail and hypertext relate
to universal and particular cultural values are important to profes-
sional communication researchers. Because writing is so closely
474 JBTC / October 2001

related to universal, precedent-setting values and orality to particu-

lar, case-by-case norms, researchers need to consider carefully the
influence of these two electronic media, which tend to be situated the-
oretically between writing and orality (Moran and Hawisher; Kress).
Given the boom of Internet commerce, for example, the legal debate
about whether e-mail is writing is becoming critical. In the United
States, only recently has e-mail been designated as legally binding—
and only when the authentication of signatures is possible. Canada
similarly recognizes e-mail as writing for e-commerce and other con-
tract purposes. However, a recent survey of Latin American countries
shows that only Colombia recognizes e-mail as writing for legal con-
tracts—and only when authentication is guaranteed. According to
this survey, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico do
not—and have no plans to—consider e-mail as writing. As the survey
explains, many legal, cultural, economic, and technological reasons
exist for not considering e-mail as writing in Latin America (“Sympo-
sium”). Thus, US professional communication researchers obviously
cannot assume the same purposes, exigencies, and author-audience
relationships in intercultural e-mail regarding policies, laws, and
other standardizing efforts.
Furthermore, many US legal scholars consider hypertext commu-
nication as “soft,” or as not having the legal contractual ability of tra-
ditional print communication. They question, for example, whether a
link to another corporation’s Web site is cause for copyright infringe-
ment or whether linking to certain Web sites and avoiding others is a
reason for collusion. Thus, the US legal system is trying to articulate
the logic of legal responsibility in Internet communication (Prentice,
Richardson, and Scholz; “Symposium”). Many other countries are
considering similar legislation to clarify the actual legal authority of
internet/hypertext communication. Interesting, in most of Latin
America, hypertext communication, like e-mail, is not considered to
be as legally “hard” as written communication (“Symposium”). US
professional communication researchers need to consider the highly
complex and dynamic nature of hypertext in their cross-cultural
research without presupposing US cultural and rhetorical values.
Questions that need to be addressed include, “What kinds of research
designs can measure the universalizing or particularizing of media-
participant relationships in hypertext and e-mail communication?”
and “Are both of these electronic media creating new conceptions of
universal and particular categories, essentially remediating these
terms?”
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 475

High Context versus Low Context

The third intercultural variable is the role of context in the commu-
nicative interaction. Edward Hall originally developed the distinc-
tions of high and low context to study these roles. In low-context com-
munication, the meaning of the communication resides primarily in
the explicitly coded part of the communication rather than in the sur-
rounding context. Thus, the focus of the communication is on infor-
mation that is specific to the individuals at hand, which effectively
increases the involvement of a few select people. Ulla Connor and
John Hinds similarly labeled this type of writing as “reader friendly,”
or writing that assumes a reduced reliance on the reader to bring in
contextual cues and create transitions to understand the writing. In
other words, the communication contains obvious organizational
and transitional strategies to guide readers through the writing. From
this view, good communication is focused on the accuracy and inter-
pretation of the explicitly coded text.
On the other end, high-context communication assumes a strong
reliance on contextual and social cues for meaning. Here, good com-
munication focuses on information that elucidates the influence of the
social context on meaning. Connor and Hinds labelled this type of
writing as “reader-responsible” (Connor 42), or writing in which the
reader is expected to fill in the information and create the transitions.
High-context communication also tends to be more nonverbal and
indirect, using complex overtures and concrete sensory stimuli to
evoke the physical, social, and interpersonal contexts that add mean-
ing to the discourse. In addition, the organization and development of
high-context communication also varies much more based on prior
knowledge of the context. As Hall explained, when high-context com-
municators mutually understand the context, their communication
can be very quick and agile, often needing no more than a word or a
glance. However, when they do not mutually understand the context,
high-context communicators tend to articulate or evoke painstak-
ingly into the coded text all the fine nuances of the context before com-
municating the main message. David Victor explained that many
Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries tend to be high-
context cultures, whereas German and German-Swiss cultures tend
to be low context. The United States tends to be a mid- to low-context
culture.
The rhetorical features of high- and low-context communication
relate differently to the four communication media. High-context
476 JBTC / October 2001

communication cultures seem to correlate very closely with orality,

whereas low-context communication cultures correlate more closely
to writing. For example, the Ecuadorian Letter O (see Figure 1) con-
tains much evidence of its oral context, such as narrative, dates, and
names of policies, agencies, and people involved. Letter R (see Fig-
ure 2), however, contains obvious reader-friendly rhetorical strate-
gies, such as a good introduction, clear transitions, and information
that is conceptual and procedural, not relying as much on the context
for correct interpretations or for understanding how to develop the
written communication. Hinds made a similar argument that Japa-
nese ESL (English as a second language) writers at US universities
bring higher context and reader-responsible strategies to their Eng-
lish compositions, approaches that directly contradict many tradi-
tional approaches to what good writing is in the United States. Profes-
sional communication researchers need to understand that the typical
reader-friendly, decontextualized US rhetorical approaches are cul-
turally produced and, therefore, not transferable to many other cul-
tural contexts.
The roles of context in e-mail and hypertext communication are
critical areas for rhetorical inquiry as well. Moran and Hawisher
argued that e-mail is a decontextual medium, perhaps more so than
written communication; therefore, many e-mail communicators have
developed the use of emoticons, or graphically codified symbols, to
represent emotions and context, a logical approach in a medium that
is too decontextual for the communicators’ needs. Unfortunately,
very little research on how e-mail influences the rhetorical strategies
of high-context cultures has been done.
In contrast, hypertext incorporates audiovisual features such as color,
photographs, graphics, voices, and sounds, which perhaps invoke the
context better—and in different ways—than do writing and orality. A
Chilean and a Mexican legal scholar argued that e-commerce is diffi-
cult in their countries because Chileños and Mexicans like the rela-
tional, social solidarity associated with regular commerce (“Sympo-
sium”). One could argue, however, that because of its many
communicative features, hypertext has the potential to best represent
the complexity of the sociality of Latin American commerce. Much
more research is needed to address these issues, especially as they
relate to cross-cultural communication via e-mail and hypertext.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 477

Legal Traditions
The final intercultural variable examines the relationships between
legal traditions, communication media, and cultural values. Compar-
ative legal scholars argue that in Western Europe and the United
States, legal traditions and institutions have profoundly influenced
the prevailing cultural and rhetorical patterns, but in China and other
Asian countries, legal traditions have had a remarkably smaller influ-
ence (Lubman 13-32). Thus, US communicators working in other cul-
tures need to understand how US legal philosophies and practices
structure their own rhetorical assumptions and how these compare
with other legal and cultural systems.
In the United States and Western Europe, two remarkable distinc-
tions in the legal systems create different communicative assump-
tions in professional contexts, especially as the traditions relate to
orality, writing, e-mail, and hypertext. The civil law is the basic legal
system in all the countries in Latin America and most of Europe
(except for the United Kingdom). The civil-law tradition is based on a
long tradition that dates back at least to the Roman Empire, when Jus-
tinian developed a remarkable set of codes (Rosenn, “Comparison”;
Eder). The United States and the United Kingdom (and their former
colonies), however, rely on a common-law tradition that was devel-
oped in England and began as unwritten assumptions about appro-
priate conventions and behaviors.
In the civil-law tradition, the legislature is responsible for creating
comprehensive and deductive legal frameworks or codes that are to
be applied by judges to each case at hand, independent of previous
cases. This approach emphasizes a correct understanding of the par-
ticularities of the comprehensive deductive frame to ensure correct
interpretations. In fact, the original purpose of this system was
designed to be judge-proof. As Phanor Eder explained, “Latin Amer-
ica inherited from Spain a lack of confidence in the judiciary. It is for
that reason that its hands are tied . . . by the rigid formalism of the
Codes of Procedure” (145). Thus, judges in Latin America have histor-
ically been subordinated to the legislature in creating laws (Rosenn,
“Comparison”). On the other hand, the common-law tradition is an
inductive system based on case, or common-law, precedents. Legal
interpretations are based on previous cases of similar situations, or
what has been commonly accepted as proper or legal conduct. Judges
478 JBTC / October 2001

tend to have significant creative power in linking the case at hand

with previous precedents, thereby continuously extending and refin-
ing the law case by case. Thus, the inductive approach assumes more
time and creativity in extrapolating the law from the basic precedents
than in understanding the complex intricacies of the precedent itself.
These different legal approaches imply different expectations
about certainty and ambiguity, especially as they relate to written
communication. One principal purpose of the civil law is to obtain
certainty in judicial decisions. John Merryman explained that “there
is a great emphasis in the literature of the civil law tradition on the
importance of certainty in the law. . . . It has come to be a kind of
supreme value, an unquestioned dogma, a fundamental goal” (50). In
this search for certainty, then, the codes or legal frameworks devel-
oped for judges in the civil-law systems have become exceedingly
complex and ostensibly comprehensive, trying to cover as many con-
tingencies as possible (Alcalde; Rosenn, “Success”). They are also
unwieldy and difficult to adapt to new situations. In contrast, the US
legal tradition is best characterized as a loose framework of principles
and guidelines. Ambiguity can be good because it can invite effective
interpretation and application of laws. The US legal system, however,
can be described as just as unwieldy because it has fostered a very liti-
gious culture (Alcalde).
The rhetorical features of these two different legal approaches cor-
respond differently to the rhetorical features of orality, writing, e-
mail, and hypertext. As I argued elsewhere, in my study of US/South
American professional communication (“Writing”), implicit in the
rhetorics of US professional communication are valorizations of writ-
ing as a creative mechanism of regulating behavior. That is, writing
becomes the common mechanism for exploring, developing, decid-
ing on, and finally regulating organizational behavior. Part of this
mechanism assumes a US judge-like hermeneutic—good policy writ-
ing is seen as a basic and universal precedent that can be adapted to a
great variety of situations. Thus, individual employees were expected
to understand and extrapolate appropriate organizational behavior
based on the one general written precedence. However, many South
American personnel in this international organization in Ecuador
seemed predisposed to think of personal interactions as a mechanism
of regulating behavior. Thus, orality tended to be the primary refer-
ence point for understanding appropriate organizational behavior.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 479

When dealing with written policies and procedures documents, the

South American personnel also drew on a civil-law hermeneutic.
They expected very specific and comprehensive guidelines to ensure
correct application and gave themselves little or no room for personal
interpretation (“Writing”). Thus, for US professional communication
researchers, widespread claims about the roles of writing to construct,
mediate, or regulate organizational behavior need to be contextualized
in the predominant rhetorical values of the organizational context.
The rhetorical relationships of civil- and common-law traditions
with e-mail and hypertext are more complex. For example, because e-
mail and especially hypertext often encourage nonlinear discussions
involving multiple voices rather than a case-precedent approach,
how might these two media reinforce a civil-law approach to policies
and procedures communication? Would they reinforce the civil-
law approach of developing deductive codes to guide behavior or
precedent-setting cases of common law? Or might the mass-mailing
capability of e-mail or mass-audience potential of hypertext predis-
pose a normalizing approach from a common-law, or precedent-set-
ting, tradition? Does the ability of communicators to copy and
respond to messages in e-mail correspond more closely with that of
judges in common-law legal systems to revise and extrapolate inter-
pretations continuously? What kinds of rhetorical spaces for interpre-
tation does e-mail or hypertext tend to encourage in civil-law tradi-
tions versus common-law traditions? All of these questions—and
many more—need to be addressed in further intercultural research.
In this article, space limitations have allowed for a comparison of
only four intercultural variables with orality, writing, e-mail, and
hypertext. Other intercultural variables such as organizational lead-
ership, religion, political systems, masculinity and femininity, educa-
tion, and assumptions about technology all influence differently the
rhetorical assumptions and uses of these communication media. The
discussion of these four variables should be sufficient to demonstrate,
however, that US researchers cannot bring their naturalized assump-
tions about the roles of orality, writing, e-mail, and hypertext when
researching other cultures. Each cultural tradition corresponds to dif-
ferent uses of these media; therefore, a study of cross-cultural com-
munication also implies a study of the different uses of the media as
well, a doubly complex and challenging inquiry indeed.
480 JBTC / October 2001

VALIDITY AND ETHICS IN

CONFIGURING RESEARCHER ROLES

Just as each culture uses communication media differently, so does

each culture distinctly construct interpersonal relationships, which
intercultural researchers need to understand to design valid and ethi-
cal participant-researcher relationships. Recently, many scholars
have focused on the importance of researcher-participant relation-
ships in empirical research designs. Patricia Sullivan and James Por-
ter, and Gesa Kirsch and Peter Mortensen, stressed the need for
greater researcher and participant involvement as a way to improve
the validity, ethics, and emancipatory potential of the research pro-
cess (see, e.g., Kirsch and Mortensen xxi). As notable critics of this
position, Ellen Barton and Davida Charney (“Logocentrism,”
“Empiricism”) maintained that researchers with this type of involve-
ment assume a singular research design, often have a precarious
intention, and may easily romanticize the research participant and
that detached researchers can be as, if not more, ethical and
constructive.
All these design issues are relevant for intercultural empirical
designs; however, regardless of the position taken by the researcher,
one critical adaptation needs to be considered. US conceptions of
interpersonal relationships and authority might not be valued and are
most likely misunderstood in other cultures; thus, using them in
intercultural studies could be forcing US values on research partici-
pants. In addition to the ethical question, this forcing of US values
calls into question the validity of the research methodology itself.
Intercultural researchers, therefore, might consider taking a more bal-
anced approach to researcher-participant relationships (Smart) and
understanding the logic of interpersonal relationships in the cultures
they are studying and design their researcher-participant relation-
ships accordingly.
US values of equality, empowerment, and individual agency are
not readily shared in other cultures. For example, in cross-cultural
research on organizational behavior, Hofstede has constructed the
term “power distance” to account for differences in equality and
agency in work-related contexts. Power distance measures “the inter-
personal power or influence between B and S as perceived by the least
powerful of the two, S” (71). In other words, power distance measures
the ability for two people of different power and authority to influ-
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 481

ence each other. According to Hofstede, a low power-distance score

means subordinates have a reasonably good chance of influencing
their superiors, and consultative managerial styles are preferred,
close supervision is disdained, disagreements are less feared, and
problem solving and decision making are shared (92). In Hofstede’s
surveys of 44 nations, the United States scored 40, a mid- to low-range
score. Austria, Israel, and Denmark scored the lowest. Fons
Trompenaars, another organizational researcher, similarly concluded
that in the United States, strong values of equality and personal
agency undergird achievement. Trompenaars connected this achieve-
ment orientation with the Protestant work ethic, thus demonstrating
why low power distance is more prominent in Protestant cultures
(107). Stewart and Bennett argued that US Americans clearly “func-
tion most effectively on an interpersonal level of equality. They are
often confused when confronted with persons of a different status—
particularly when that status has been achieved through a legacy of
special privileges” (91).
Some Western European countries, Canada, and Australia share
similar values of equality with the United States, but most other coun-
tries radically differ, demonstrating why US conceptions of participa-
tory research will most likely not work there. In Hofstede’s survey of
power distance, the scores of most Latin American countries sharply
contrast with the scores of the United States. Mexico and Venezuela
tied for the second highest score of 81, second only to the Philip-
pines, an original Spanish colony. Colombia scored 67, Peru 64, and
Chile 63. Other high power-distance countries include India, Singa-
pore, and France. These scores strongly suggest a significant differ-
ence in their power relationships: Obedience to authority starts in the
home and continues in the workplace; conformity is highly valued,
authoritarian attitudes are the social norm, both subordinates and
superiors prefer managers to make decisions autocratically and
paternalistically, work is closely supervised, employees fear disagree-
ing with the boss, and employees are reluctant to trust each other
(Hofstede 92). Hofstede also argued that in high power-distance cul-
tures, theoretical models of participation are strongly pushed but de
facto participation is greatly resisted. Likewise, Trompenaars argued
that in cultures with predominantly Catholic, Buddhist, and Hindu
populations, ascriptive models based on social, educational, and pro-
fessional differences tend to regulate relationships and motivate the
realization of organizational goals. In China, for example, the pur-
482 JBTC / October 2001

pose of the hierarchical order, under Confucianism, “was to preserve

natural harmony through the promotion of ethical behavior . . . con-
ducted by men who behaved like the ancient sages and set high moral
examples for their subjects to follow” (Lubman 13-14).
Although both the ascriptive/high power-distance and achieve-
ment/low power-distance models can effectively motivate participa-
tion and regulate behavior, which may seem counterintuitive to many
US researchers, their assumptions about how to do so are diametri-
cally opposed. Low power-distance models assume that people will
participate when barriers are broken down, when equal opportunity
for achievement exists, when participation is more democratic, and
when achievement of results is the focus of both the evaluation crite-
ria and the process itself. High power-distance, or ascriptive, models
assume that people will participate when lines of authority are clear,
when the structure of the situation and work process are explicitly
outlined and supervised, and when the work itself correlates with
and reinforces the status markers of the participants (Trompenaars
106-22).
Thus, research participants in other cultures might not want—or
be capable of participating in—the empowering mechanisms of par-
ticipatory research if the role is based on an achievement, or low
power-distance model, as are most US theories of participatory roles.
Kirsch and Mortensen, for example, argue that recognizing the hierar-
chies of power and authority in researcher-participant relationships is
critical. This recognition could easily represent both the ascriptive or
achievement model, but in the case of Kirsch and Mortensen, its pur-
pose seems to be for the equalization of power, or “equity” (xxii), and
almost every interpersonal mechanism for achieving this equity
assumes low power-distance, or achievement, logic. Valorizing a US
conception of equality seems to be so naturalized in the field of rheto-
ric and composition that thinking otherwise is perhaps anathema.
Ironically, however, the very emancipatory approaches that are val-
ued by US researchers might in fact be methods of Americanizing
research participants who are from higher power-distance cultures. A
more critical view might argue that this participatory research rein-
forces US individualism, a value strongly correlated with low power
distance, equality, and emancipatory social processes. Obviously, the
ethics of this Americanization need to be debated.
Another problem with such participatory research is that it also
could yield invalid data, leading to not only flawed conclusions but
also flawed mechanisms for improving the situation. Because the very
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 483

validity argument of most the ethnographic, participant-centered

research rests on a lower power-distance logic (a universalizing of US
American values), the data gathered with the same model in a high-
power-distance context cannot be valid. Jorge Castañeda, for exam-
ple, argued that US policy makers frequently bring such a strong
lens of equality and individualism when analyzing Mexico that they
frequently misread the significance of high power-distance relation-
ships in Mexican societies, mistakenly believing that low power-
distance emancipatory processes are needed when, in fact, high
power-distance restructuring would be more useful. Not surpris-
ingly, the history of US researchers’ attempts to understand and
empower local populations through their individualist participatory
research is fraught with exemplary disasters (Stewart and Bennett).
Despite this history of flawed research designs, US researchers can
develop valid intercultural methods and improve the lives and situa-
tions of their participants with a more distanced (Charney, “Empiri-
cism”; Barton; Smart) and culturally sensitive approach. The more
distanced, or balanced, approach assumes a substantial familiarity
with the second culture but does not presume participation based on
low power-distance relationships and, therefore, that the researcher
understands how to empower and emancipate. Instead, the
researcher relies on the participants at crucial moments and in cultur-
ally ethical and sensitive ways and then, through careful collabora-
tion, helps them make conclusions about what the data mean for their
own communities (see Smart; Charney, “Empiricism”).
Researchers also can have close relationships with participants
that are based on the interpersonal logic of the second culture. For
example, many Latin American researchers argue for more participa-
tory approaches to research, but they do so not in terms of equality
and individualism but in terms of community solidarity and commu-
nity good, using ascriptive mechanisms of motivation and relation-
ships. This research in popular education and communication in
Latin America stresses grassroots involvement of the research process
so that education in areas of health, safety, education, and nutrition is
more constructive and effective. This movement has decades of nota-
ble successes in Latin America, and some non–Latin American
researchers have used the methods successfully (see Centro).
Obviously, a great deal of research and theory is needed to under-
stand how to get the level of participation necessary to ensure ethical
and valid data gathering in cross-cultural researcher-participant rela-
tionships. How well, for example, can an outsider call on methods of
484 JBTC / October 2001

leadership and motivation in the target cultures? What are the practi-
cal and ethical dilemmas of this process?
In addition to the problem of participant-researcher relationships,
cross-cultural research is plagued with the problem of romanticizing
participants. As Charney explained (“Empiricism,” “Logocentrism”),
ethnographic research models in monocultural studies can just as eas-
ily essentialize and romanticize the research participants as can more
quantitative or distanced methods. I think that can be even more evi-
dent in cross-cultural research. When teaching in Ecuador, I had the
opportunity to meet with a number of US researchers who came to
Quito while researching in Ecuador. I was most struck by these
researchers’ dismissal of most of the daily, sense-making behaviors of
my middle-class Ecuadorian students, most of whom were of the
same class as were the students from the US researchers’ home uni-
versities. Instead, most of the researchers were more interested in
going to visit the natives in the Amazon basin or the very poor in the
shantytowns and were quick to romanticize the good or bad of these
situations and postulate egalitarian, US-conceived—and conse-
quently unworkable—methods of addressing the situation.
In intercultural research, this romanticizing problem is widely rec-
ognized. Bhawuk and Triandis, for example, argued for teams com-
posed of researchers from both cultures to combat the romanticizing
of the natives. For those in professional communication, intercultural
research teams would be ideal, but their multiplicity complicates the
ethnographic modes of inquiries, and researchers from other cultures
who are schooled in composition and rhetorical theory are scarce. For
example, in Latin America, La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
Mexico, in Mexico City, has the only well-developed faculty in rheto-
ric and composition. Professional communication is well developed
in parts of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and perhaps Japan,
but in other countries, researchers will have difficulty finding coun-
terparts. Thus, they might try, as I did in Ecuador, to work with profes-
sors, students, and practitioners of journalism, literary studies, adver-
tising, and organizational behavior—fields that have enough in
common with professional communication to allow for some fruitful
collaboration.
Just as important as collaboration is knowledge of the second cul-
ture. As mentioned earlier, cross-cultural research assumes some dis-
tance because it focuses on more generalized similarities and differ-
ences, intentionally ignoring the strictly emic approaches that are so
important to ethnographic participatory-research models. Thus, lin-
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 485

guistic fluidity and cultural expertise are not essential, but some lin-
guistic and cultural knowledge seems necessary. Therefore, a critical
research question is How much linguistic and cultural knowledge of
the second culture is necessary to carry out a valid intercultural
study?
A lot more work needs to be done on researcher-participant
involvement in cross-cultural studies. Key questions focus on the
needs for literacy in the second culture, relationships with partici-
pants, and help from local personnel in constructing conceptions of
cross-cultural rhetorics.

CONCLUSION

One of the most compelling reasons for researching writing and pro-
fessional communication in other cultures is the self-understanding
that this process brings, an understanding that can be especially use-
ful for designing intercultural research methodology. As this article
explores, many US research methods are based on US cultural values
and, therefore, might not be valid or even ethical in cross-cultural con-
texts. First, the current state of empirical research methods in profes-
sional communication is monocultural and monolinguistic, despite
the move toward cultural studies. Thus, exploring how these meth-
ods serve as terministic screens in monocultural professional commu-
nication research might be interesting. How do US values of individu-
alism, universalism, equality, and democracy influence monocultural
research methods? For example, how clearly do democratic and
emancipatory research methods encourage a US-like individualism
and low power-distance relationships? How do common law
approaches to writing and reading in organizations influence the
types of research methods?
In addition to a better understanding of our research methodolo-
gies, we also could use better methods for assessing the new relation-
ships of communication media and cross-cultural contexts. Are the
new media such as e-mail and hypertext creating different concep-
tions of individualism and collectivity or of particularist or universal-
ist applications of norms? And how are these different conceptions
influencing intercultural interactions? What are the new media doing
to assumptions about the roles of context in general communication
patterns, and how are these assumptions influencing intercultural
486 JBTC / October 2001

interactions? What methods can be developed to assess these

relationships?
Finally, the history of US research blunders across the globe (Stew-
art and Bennett), and the fact that many professional communication
research methods are based on predominant US values should cause
the US researcher to examine critically the participant-researcher rela-
tionships in both monocultural and intercultural contexts. What if, for
example, a US researcher proposes an emancipatory research process
in a US organization that is predominantly high power distance
(although rare, such US organizations do exist)? How well can those
participants liberate themselves through critical processes? As in
other high power-distance situations, might the most effective
method be to address the inequalities within the organizational hier-
archy (an approach in high power-distance cultures) rather than to
liberate at the grassroots level? These critical approaches to research
need to be examined critically and situated according to the inequities
and power structures that they are best or least equipped to assess and
change.

REFERENCES

Alcalde, Javier. “Differential Impact of American Political and Economic Institutions

on Latin America.” The U.S. Constitution and the Constitutions of Latin America. Ed.
Kenneth W. Thompson. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. 97-123.
Andrews, Deborah, ed. International Dimensions of Technical Communication. Arlington,
VA: Society for Technical Communication, 1996.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Art and Answerability.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophi-
cal Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Ed. Michael Holquist and
Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophi-
cal Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Ed. Michael Holquist and
Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
. “Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art.” Art and Answerability: Early Philo-
sophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Ed. Michael Holquist and
Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans.
Vern McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986.
Barton, Ellen. “More Methodological Matters: Against Negative Argumentation.” Col-
lege Composition and Communication 51 (2000): 399-416.
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in the American Colleges, 1900-1985.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 487

Bhawuk, Dharm, and Harry Triandis. “The Role of Culture Theory in the Study of
Culture and Intercultural Training.” Handbook of Intercultural Training. 2nd ed. Ed.
Dan Landis and Rabi Bhagat. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. 17-34.
Blyler, Nancy. “Taking a Political Turn: The Critical Perspective and Research in Profes-
sional Communication.” Journal of Technical Communication Quarterly 7 (1998): 33-51.
Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Castañeda, Jorge G. The Mexican Shock: Its Meaning for the US. New York: New Press,
1995.
Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Comunicación Para América Latina.
Educación Popular en América Latina. Quito, Ecua.: CIESPAL, 1986.
Charney, Davida. “Empiricism Is Not a Four-Letter Word.” College Composition and
Communication 47.4 (1996): 567-93.
. “From Logocentrism to Ethnocentrism: Historical Critiques of Writing
Research.” Journal of Technical Communication Quarterly 7 (1998): 9-32.
Connor, Ulla. Contrastic Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second-Language Writing.
Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Driskill, Linda, ed. “How Can We Address International Issues in Business and Techni-
cal Communication.” Spec. Issue of JBTC 11.3 (1997): 249-392.
Eder, Phanor J. A Comparative Survey of Anglo-American and Latin-American Law. New
York: New York University Press, 1950.
García Canclini, Nestor. Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad.
Mexico City, Mex.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1989.
Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get out of This Place: Popular Culture and Postmodern Cul-
ture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Hall, Edward. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 1976.
Hinds, John. “Reader versus Writer Responsibility: A New Typology.” Writing across
Languages: Analysis of L2 Text. Ed. Ulla Connor and Robert Kaplan. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1987.
Hofstede, Geert. Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1984.
Hoft, Nancy, ed. “Global Issues, Local Concerns.” Spec. Issue of Technical Communica-
tion 46 (1999): 132-290.
Jorgenson, Jane. “The Student as Researcher in International Organizations.” Exploring
the Rhetoric of International Professional Communication. Ed. Carl R. Lovitt and Dixie
Goswami. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1999. 293-304.
Kaufer, David, and Kathleen Carley. Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print
on Sociocultural Organization and Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993.
Kirsch, Gesa, and Peter Mortensen, eds. Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of
Literacy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.
Kress, Gunther. “Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Medi-
ated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text.” Page to Screen: Taking
Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. New York: Routledge, 1998. 53-79.
Lauer, Janice, and William Asher. Composition Research: Empirical Designs. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
Leki, Ilona. “Cross-Talk: ESL Issues and Contrastive Rhetoric.” Writing in Multicultural
Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan Guerra, and Johnnella Butler. New York: Modern
Language Association of America, 1997. 234-44.
488 JBTC / October 2001

Levine, Robert V. “The Pace of Life.” Sociocultural Perspectives in Social Psychology: Cur-
rent Readings. Ed. Letitia Anne Peplau and Shelley Taylor. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1997. 386-94.
Longo, Bernadette. “An Approach for Applying Cultural Study Theory to Technical
Writing Research.” Journal of Technical Communication Quarterly 7 (1998): 53-69.
Lovitt, Carl R. “Rethinking the Role of Culture in International Professional Communi-
cation.” Exploring the Rhetoric of International Professional Communication: An Agenda
for Teachers and Researchers. Ed. Carl R. Lovitt and Dixie Goswami. Amityville, NY:
Baywood, 1999. 1-16.
Lovitt, Carl R., and Dixie Goswami, eds. Exploring the Rhetoric of International Profes-
sional Communication: An Agenda for Teachers and Researchers. Amityville, NY:
Baywood, 1999.
Lubman, Stanley. Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China after Mao. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
Lucy, John. “The Scope of Linguistic Relativity: An Analysis and Review of Empirical Re-
search.” Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Ed. John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson.
Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Luque, Jose Plaza. “La Comisión de Tránsito de la Provincia del Guayas: A la
Cuidadanía.” El Universo [Guayaquil, Ecua.] 19 Apr. 1993.
MacNealy, Mary Sue. Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing. Boston: Allyn & Bacon,
1999.
Martín Barbero, Jesus. Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to
Mediations. Trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White. Newbury Park, CA: Sage,
1993.
Matellart, Armand, and Ariel Dorfman. Para leer al Pato Donald. Mexico City, Mex.: Siglo
Veintiuno Editores, 1981.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto, Can.: University of Toronto Press,
1962.
Merryman, John H. The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Western
Europe and Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969.
Moran, Charles, and Gail Hawisher. “The Rhetorics and Languages of Electronic Mail.”
Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. New York:
Routledge, 1998. 80-101.
Ong, Walter. Oralidad y Escritura: Tecnologías de la Palabra [Orality and Writing: Technol-
ogies of the Word]. Trans. Angélica Sherp. Mexico City, Mex.: Fonda de la Cultura
Económica, 1987.
Perkins, Jane M. “Communicating in a Global, Multicultural Corporation: Other Meta-
phors and Strategies.” Exploring the Rhetoric of International Professional Communica-
tion: An Agenda for Teachers and Researchers. Ed. Carl R. Lovitt and Dixie Goswami.
Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1999. 17-38.
Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz. New York: Macmillan,
1956.
Prentice, Robert, Vernon Richardson, and Susan Scholz. “Corporate Website Disclosure
and Rule 10b-5: An Empirical Evaluation.” American Business Law Journal 36 (1999):
1-36.
Rosenn, Keith. “A Comparison of Latin American and North American Legal Tradi-
tions.” Multinational Managers and Host Government Interactions. Ed. Lee Tavis. South
Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. 127-52.
 Thatcher / INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 489

. “The Success of Constitutionalism in the United States and its Failure in Latin
America.” The U.S. Constitution and the Constitutions of Latin America. Ed. Kenneth
Thompson. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. 53-96.
Smart, Graham. “Mapping Conceptual Worlds: Using Interpretive Ethnography to
Explore Knowledge-Making in a Professional Community.” Journal of Business Com-
munication 35 (1998): 111-27.
Stewart, Edward, and Milton Bennett. American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Per-
spective. Rev. ed. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1991.
Sullivan, Patricia, and Jennie Dautermann, ed. Electronic Literacies in the Workplace: Tech-
nologies of Writing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.
Sullivan, Patricia, and James Porter. Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical
Research Practices. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1997.
“Symposium—Responding to the Legal Obstacles to Electronic Commerce in Latin
America: General Questionnaire.” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative
Law 17 (2000): 1-66.
Thatcher, Barry L. “Cultural and Rhetorical Adaptations for South American Audi-
ences.” Technical Communication 46 (1999): 177-95.
. “L2 Professional Writing in a U.S. and South American Context.” Journal of Sec-
ond Language Writing 9.1 (2000): 41-69.
. “Orality and Writing in Latin American and USA Professional Communica-
tion.” Diss. Purdue University, 1997.
. “Writing Policies and Procedures in a U.S. and South American Context.” Tech-
nical Communication Quarterly 9 (2000): 365-99.
Trompenaars, Fons. Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Busi-
ness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Victor, David. International Business Communication. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Barry Thatcher is an assistant professor of rhetoric and professional communication at

New Mexico State University. He lived in Ecuador for four years, where he taught orga-
nizational and professional communication. His research interests include rhetorical
theory, history of rhetoric in Latin America, and intercultural professional and technical
communication. His e-mail address is thacker@ohiou.edu.
JBTC / October 2001 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD

Although scarcely explored to date, US patent records provide numerous opportunities

for research in technical and scientific communication. This article reviews disciplinary
research that taps this rich archive of information, describes ways in which patents act as
moral and social barometers to technological change, and provides readers with a brief
guide to basic information needed to initiate research using patent records.

Research Opportunities
in the US Patent Record
KATHERINE T. DURACK
Miami University

magine an immense public archive of contemporaneous docu-

I ments describing US technical and scientific achievement over

the past 200 years, including drafts as well as final versions
written by the principal people involved (inventors, attorneys, exam-
iners, etc.). Embedded in these and related documents are debates
about national policies concerning technology and science, legal
issues, business practices and priorities, and the nature of the archive
itself. Just such an archive exists in US patent records, a vast resource
that has scarcely been tapped by scholars interested in technical and
scientific communication. After briefly describing what a patent is, I
discuss existing research with patent records that hints at the exciting
opportunities awaiting our attention. Then I explore how the patent
record might inform current interest in technical communication and
social aspects of technology. Finally, I present a guide to some of the
basic information that readers might need to embark on a study.

WHAT ARE PATENTS?

When we speak of patents, most frequently we refer to the

approved patent: the final, published version of a document that
began as the inventor’s application and has survived examination by
the US Patent and Trademark Office. A patent is a special grant of
monopoly power for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure
of an invention. Rather than the ticket to riches we might believe it to

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 490-510
© 2001 Sage Publications

490
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 491

be, a patent is like a “hunting license,” useful for going after infring-
ers, those who use a patented technology without the permission of
the inventor or patent owner. Although costly to obtain, the patent “is
usually worthless . . . unless you also get the invention into wide-
spread commercial use” (Pressman 1/8).
The first US Patent Act was passed in 1790, but because of per-
ceived inadequacies, the law was variously amended and changed
until the Act of July 4, 1836, established the present patent system
(Story 6). Although the earliest patents underwent examination by a
board of three US Cabinet members (including Thomas Jefferson),
that practice was abandoned for various reasons in 1793. In contrast to
modern patents, patents granted from 1793 to 1836 were not exam-
ined by the Patent Office. Instead, the office merely accepted and pro-
cessed applications, leaving it to the courts to decide merit and settle
disputes (Skolnik; Walterscheid).
The types of inventions eligible for patent protection have
expanded over the years, following changes from an agrarian society
through the industrial revolution to an information society. In 1839,
the Patent Office gained responsibility for acting as a clearinghouse
for information on agriculture (Story 7). Design patents were autho-
rized in 1842 (8), plants became patentable in 1930 (23), and on April
12, 1988, the first animal patent was awarded to Harvard University
(42). Court decisions periodically allow new areas of technology to be
patented: Some recent examples include biotechnology and genes (in
1980), software (in 1981), and business methods (in 1998) (“Patent
Wars” 75). Today’s debates about patentability cover the controver-
sial patenting of parts of human DNA (Wheeler) or business methods
captured in computer code (e.g., Amazon.com’s “one-click” Internet
shopping [Stross; see also “Who Owns”; “Patent Wars”]).

Author’s Note: Many people helped shape this article, and I would like to acknowledge their
support and helpful advice. I am particularly grateful to Paul V. Anderson, of Miami Univer-
sity, for his thoughtful suggestions for revising an early draft; Marjorie Ciarlante, at the
National Archives and Records Administration, for her comments and the information she pro-
vided on patent records; and guest editor Davida Charney and the anonymous reviewers of the
article for their suggestions for revision. I also thank my friends Elena Linthicum, Gail
Lippincott, and Sue Shay for our long and provocative discussions about patents, the law, and
technical communication. Thanks also to Kathy Franz, a historian who suggested numerous
valuable readings on patents and who reviewed an earlier version of this article, and Shashank
Upadhye, a patent attorney who referred me to the invaluable work of Edward Walterscheid.
Finally, I would like to thank Kimberly Harper and Anna van der Heijden, each of whom brought
to my attention recent articles on patents and patenting.
492 JBTC / October 2001

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION
RESEARCH USING PATENTS

The first mention of patents in the technical communication litera-

ture appears to have been in 1979, in a special issue of the IEEE Trans-
actions on Professional Communication dedicated to the discussion of
patents. The explicit goals of this issue were twofold: “to encourage
engineering innovation and patenting by dispersing some of the fog
through which engineers and scientists often view legal and business-
decision procedures related to invention” and “to turn the technical
community on to the information value of patents as engineering and
scientific communications” (Joenk 46). Articles in this issue were
written by a number of patent experts and cover such matters as
advice on writing patents and keeping lab notebooks, a brief history
of the patent system, and other subjects of interest to persons charged
with inventing new technologies and writing or editing patents.
Examples of various patents also are included.
Among the first to build on this information, R. John Brockmann
has argued that patents are important to historical research in techni-
cal and scientific communication for several reasons. For example,
patents represent a reasonably continuous (and, therefore, rare)
record of technological and scientific innovation (“Does Clio” 299).
Also, as a genre, patents have had the same audience and purpose
since the first patent act was passed (300): To receive the property
rights vested in a patent, the inventor is expected to reveal to the pub-
lic the secrets of an invention. However, as Brockmann suggested and
as recent histories of Patent Office policies and practices note, the pur-
pose and audience for the written specification has evolved signifi-
cantly over time (“Does Clio”; see also Walterscheid; Lubar).
Brockmann’s longitudinal study of patent documents as technical
texts offers readers evidence that “objective-impersonal style is a key
element in technological communication” rather than a passing fancy
(From Millwrights 139). In addition, the selection of patents
Brockmann examined offers readers a small taste of the incredible
variety of subjects patents cover, ranging from a 1797 patent for a
“Teeth Extractor” (141) to a 1975 “Teaching Device” (144).
More recently, Brockmann observed that “some of technical com-
munication’s most interesting research has examined how communi-
cators choose between rhetorical alternatives” (“Oliver” 63). In “Oli-
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 493

ver Evans and His Antebellum Wrestling with Rhetorical

Arrangement,” he demonstrated how patent decisions directly
affected inventor Oliver Evans’s finances as well as the rhetorical
choices Evans made in composing several different technical texts. In
this extension of the investigation of Evans’s writing style begun in
From Millwrights, Brockmann’s research is informed both by Evans’s
own writings on his patents and by documents pertaining to Con-
gress’s refusal to grant an extension for Evans’s patented flour mill.
Although some patents make their owners rich, Evans, similar to
many other patentees, had difficulty recovering adequate reward for
his inventions (see also Walterscheid 348). To remedy the situation, he
requested that a flour-milling patent be extended so that the proceeds
from the extension could be used to fund a book based on another of
his inventions, a steam engine. Evans pleaded his case both before
Congress and in two publications Brockmann cited: Oliver Evans to
His Counsel Who Are Engaged in Defense of His Patent Rights and Patent
Right Oppression Exposed, or Knavery Detected. Brockmann revealed the
effect of this unsuccessful request for patent extension in his analysis
of Evans’s The Abortion of the Young Steam Engineers Guide, a stark con-
trast to Evans’s earlier, more successful work, The Young Mill-Wrights
and Millers Guide (“Oliver”).
In another recent historical study, Charles Bazerman revealed how
patents were strategically employed by Thomas Edison as he sought
to gain and maintain influence over the evolving electric utility indus-
try. Bazerman analyzed Edison’s patents as speech acts and legal
objects, focusing on successful and failed patent applications signifi-
cant to the invention and dissemination of electric light technology.
Bazerman described the general form of the patent as it existed in Edi-
son’s day, and then he related the difficulties of transforming an often
half-formed idea “into an ownable piece of property” through its
expression in text and graphics (90). Then as today, a key challenge for
profiting from any complex, rapidly evolving technology is to own
the key patents; yet patent protection frequently must be applied for
before the significance of a particular invention is even known (89).
As in the case of the electric light, matters of technological importance
are often played out in the courtroom years after patents have been
granted. Bazerman demonstrated the tenuous power of patents as
speech acts as the meaning in these documents is challenged, both
earlier in the process, by patent examiners, or later, by competitors in
494 JBTC / October 2001

the courts. Bazerman traced these “challenges to would-be patents

and already-accomplished patents” to demonstrate “how patents sit
on top of complex contexts, giving order, meaning and certainty to
arrangements of benefit to particular parties” (239).
My own interest in patent records stems from research about gen-
der, technology, and the history of technical writing, specifically as
they pertain to the sewing machine and sewing pattern industries in
the nineteenth century. Having discovered patent numbers on old
paper sewing patterns (and having argued elsewhere that we should
consider such documents in the history of technical writing [see
“Redefining,” “Gender,” Documentation]), I determined to discover
the extent to which women might have contributed to developing
instructional material for household sewing tasks. Having observed
patent numbers on antique sewing patterns in my own small collec-
tion, I added patent numbers listed in Claudia Kidwell’s history of
dressmaking techniques. Then I referred to abstracts in the Patent
Office Gazette to narrow the list for patents to order from the US Patent
and Trademark Office (Documentation 48). From these patents, I
learned not only that a woman, Hannah Millard, invented the instruc-
tion sheet but that, at one time, competing pattern companies held the
rights to the key communicative devices we rely on today as part of
the home-sewing pattern genre (“Patterns”). For years, competitors
barred one another from using each others’ proprietary inventions—
so, for instance, only the Butterick Company could enclose a separate
instruction sheet with its patterns. Consumers had to wait for more
usable design in sewing patterns until patent rights expired or chal-
lenges to validity were settled.
These three examples suggest how the study of patents and related
texts can enrich our understanding of how specific inventors, such as
Oliver Evans and Thomas Edison, use patents for strategic communi-
cation to achieve their goals; how industries, such as the emerging
electric power industry, capture and contest meaning in patents to
gain social, economic, and technical power; and how technical and
scientific genres such as the patent function within legal and business
milieus. Such studies of inventors, industries, and genres represent
but a small sampling of the types of research that might be informed
by historical or contemporary research using patents. In the following
section, I describe how research using patent records might produc-
tively address issues recently raised in our field.
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 495

PATENTS AS MORAL AND SOCIAL

BAROMETERS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Patents are legal instruments important to establishing and main-

taining business and commercial power over technological advances.
Despite the objective, impersonal style in which they are written, pat-
ents and patent practices represent a kind of moral and social barome-
ter of technological change that is perhaps unique for both its con-
temporary as well as its historical value. Patent records offer
communication researchers a window into the social realms of tech-
nology that Laura Gurak and Sam Racine called for scholars to exam-
ine. In this section, I highlight the ways in which patent records and
related texts can answer questions about the “contextual, ethical,
legal, and other issues related to technology and our social condi-
tions” that Gurak and Racine raised (261). First, I explain how stan-
dards for patentability have changed over time.
Although the major laws establishing formal criteria for patent-
ability have been few, the practical standards applied to these official
criteria have changed significantly—and often controversially—over
time. Some aspects of these changes are highlighted in Table 1.
For an idea to be patentable, an inventor must succeed in establish-
ing that the invention is new, useful, and nonobvious. These first two
criteria, novelty and utility, were introduced under the 1790 law;
according to Steven Lubar, the third criterion, nonobviousness, was
introduced in the early 1950s to “[do] away with the ‘flash of genius’
standard for newness” that the courts had gradually imposed (15).
Authors of patents have had to anticipate and respond to important
questions of interpretation from those charged with evaluating the
appropriateness of granting or upholding patents:

• When is a technological change an invention, not just a minor improve-

ment or obvious extension of existing technology?
• In what ways is the invention useful?
• How does the invention differ from the existing state of the art?

Social values and political agendas have clearly influenced

patentability: Lubar stated that “the decision to grant or uphold
patents . . . has always reflected morals, politics, and economics” (16).
Our society has changed greatly since 1790; so have the rhetorical
challenges faced by inventors. The following examples speak to pos-
496

TABLE 1
Changes in Standards for Patentability
Year Instituted Key Question of Years Standard
Criteria by Law Interpretation Standard Practiced

Useful 1790 In what ways is the An invention does not need to be extremely useful or the most useful of its early 1800s
invention useful? type; it simply must have utility.
Patentable inventions should be socially useful, leading to economic develop-
ment and thereby to public gain.
Patentable inventions should not hurt society; they should be moral.
Considerations of usefulness should protect against unfair corporate uses of 1850 forward
patents that unreasonably support monopoly interests and restrict trade.
The inventor’s or assignee’s control over an industry should be considered in 1940s-1950s
evaluating usefulness to ensure public good.
New 1790 When is a technolo- An invention need not be the product of “inventive genius” to be patentable. 1825
gical change an Inventions require demonstrated skill or ingenuity beyond that of an ordinary 1850
invention, not practitioner in the related art or science.
just a minor An invention requires a “flash of genius” to be patentable. 1880
improvement or An invention requires a creative flash of genius to be patentable. 1941
obvious extension To be patentable, an invention should advance scientific knowledge. 1950
of existing
technology?
 Nonobvious 1952 How different is the The flash-of-genius standard is eliminated. 1952
invention from Nonobviousness is determined according to procedures in which the examiner 1966
the existing state (1) determines state of the art, (2) examines differences between prior art and
of the art? claims at issue, and (3) resolves the level of ordinary skill in the art.
“Mr. PHOSITA” (Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art) is established as the
standard for resolving the level of skill. post 1966
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is established to hear patent cases. 1982
Determination of nonobviousness involves greater emphasis on secondary crite-
ria such as how commercially successful the invention is, how long the inven-
tion has been needed, how many inventors have tried to solve the problem at
hand, and how immediately an invention is recognized as useful.

NOTE: Based on information from Steven Lubar (8-16).

497
498 JBTC / October 2001

sibilities for historical and contemporary research in technical and sci-

entific communication.

The Challenge of Moral Utility

From the early 1800s, inventors of socially suspect technologies
were obligated to establish the morality of their inventions: “An
invention to poison people or to promote debauchery . . . would not be
patentable” (Lubar 12). This belief has persisted in many areas of tech-
nical and scientific endeavor. For instance, the Atomic Energy Act of
1954 prohibits patenting of inventions to be used for atomic warfare
(Joenk 48), and, according to Lubar, “the Patent Office still hesitates
before granting patents for gambling equipment or for devices for
illegal drug use.” Views of morality also have influenced the
patentability of technologies that affect the actions of certain groups
of citizens: “Birth-control devices could not be patented for most of
the nineteenth century,” Lubar noted (12).
Consider the idea that the invention described in a patent meets
standards for moral utility if the patent is granted. For example,
Rachel Maines discussed the electromechanical vibrators that were
routinely used by late nineteenth-century physicians (and later by
consumers in the privacy of their homes) to treat female hysteria. The
cure involved “vulvular massage” to the point of “crisis” or “hysteri-
cal paroxysm”; with regular treatment, female patients reported relief
from symptoms such as “pelvic congestion and insomnia” (4). Maines
noted that the “camouflage of the apparently sexual character of such
therapy was accomplished through its medical respectability and
through creative definitions both of diseases for which massage was
indicated and of the effects of treatment” (3). The respectability of the
treatment was preserved by a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand
through innuendo and indirection in advertisements in publications
such as Home Needlework Magazine, Hearst’s, Woman’s Home Compan-
ion, and the 1918 Sears Roebuck catalog. The acceptability of the treat-
ment did not wane until the 1920s, when vibrators began to appear in
erotic films (4).
Maines’s work raises several questions pertinent to research in
technical communication. First, we might observe that Maines
refered to the work of George Henry Taylor, a prolific nineteenth-cen-
tury author on the subject of physical therapies for pelvic disorders.
Taylor was also an inventor, and, according to Maines, he held at least
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 499

two patents for pelvic-massage mechanisms: “Improvements in Med-

ical Rubbing Apparatus,” US Patent No. 175,202, dated March 21, 1876,
and “Movement Cure,” US Patent No. 263,625, dated August 29, 1882
(Maines 11). By examining Taylor’s various works, then, we might
find answers to several interesting questions about morality and eth-
ics in technical and scientific communication:

• Given that patent applications typically have had to define a problem

solved by a new invention, what was the technical or medical nature of
the problem that was ameliorated by these technologies as described in
the actual patents?
• Were inventors aware of the sexual nature of the cure, and if so, did the
same rhetorical strategies Maines observed in advertisements for these
inventions also appear in patent applications? How were ethical and
moral challenges addressed in patent-related texts?
• As vibrators became dissociated from medical treatment, what, if any,
actions did the Patent Office or the courts take? Did views on the
patentability of vibrator technology change? Were existing patents chal-
lenged on this basis, or did the precedents established by previously
granted patents allow for continued improvement of this controversial
technology?
• How did the dimension of gender affect the patentability of technolo-
gies to meet personal needs? Were comparable ailments defined and
implements designed for men?

Although these are just a few of the questions we might ask pertaining
to this specific technology, what about other technologies that have
changed in social value? Did technologies of slavery receive patents
in the early days of our country? Did inventions pertaining to alcohol
production or consumption meet with resistance from the Patent
Office during Prohibition? Have controversial inventions been selec-
tively categorized and redefined to meet existing standards of social
appropriateness? Patent records are one source we might use to arrive
at some answers.

The Rhetorical Nature of Novelty

Novelty, or newness, is yet another criterion used to determine
patentability, and the requirement that an invention must be com-
pletely new throughout the world is one of the significant and unique
characteristics that has distinguished US patent law (Walterscheid).
As Carolyn Cooper put it:
500 JBTC / October 2001

In the granting and maintaining of patents, the nub of the process was
to get people—examiners in the Patent Office or witnesses in law-
suits—to compare two things and say yes, gizmo x and y are the same in
relevant respects, or no, gizmo x is significantly different from gizmo y.
(967)

Cooper’s thoughtful analysis of patent litigation pertaining to

Thomas Blanchard’s lathe and other inventions demonstrates the
extent to which social processes determine whether the invention
described in a patent is sufficiently new and different from others.
Her research also suggests the importance of documentation to the
rhetorical strategies of later inventors:

Since the Patent Office and the courts kept records of these actions
[decisions regarding similarity and difference], subsequent inventors
who wanted patents were able to get information about previous
inventions and to build on them, being of course careful not to imitate
them too closely. How close was “too close” became a matter of social
construction through patent management. (968)

Cooper’s analysis of inventor Thomas Blanchard’s arguments for his

patented lathe are particularly enlightening about the rhetorical
nature of novelty.
Blanchard was among those inventors who took advantage of a
nineteenth-century Patent Office policy that allowed revision and
subsequent reissue of a patent if the original specification was
thought to inadequately convey the essence of an invention (see
Dood, “Pursuing”). Cooper stated that in revising the specification
for reissue, Blanchard likely “informed himself . . . about four other
machines” related to his invention and explicitly disclaimed features
of competing inventions such as Azariah Woolworth’s last-making
machine (975). Cooper compared the two inventions, arriving at the
similarities and differences shown in Table 2. This comparison reveals
the rhetorical challenge inventors faced as they sought to profit from
their inventions: What strategies and evidence are most successful
given a need to establish the similarity or difference between compet-
ing inventions?
Cooper reported that not only did Blanchard revise his patent for
reissue but he also was able to persuade Congress to extend the origi-
nal 14-year term twice by special acts, resulting in protection for a
total of 42 years (979). From her study of litigation associated with
Blanchard’s lathe over this period, Cooper concluded that certain
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 501

TABLE 2
Comparison of Blanchard’s Lathe and
Woolworth’s Last-Making Machine #2
Similarity Difference

Both use a tracing mechanism to copy Blanchard’s machine uses one model;
a model. Woolworth’s machine uses two.
Both have separately powered cutters, Blanchard’s cutter is rotary; Woolworth’s
different from ordinary lathes. is reciprocating.
Both workpiece and model(s) are keyed Blanchard’s model and workpiece rotate
together to rotate simultaneously. continuously; Woolworth’s models and
workpiece rotate intermittently.
Both machines can turn out irregular Blanchard’s lathe creates irregularly
objects such as lasts. shaped objects by cutting a single
continuous spiral path around the
workpiece; Woolworth’s last-making
machine cuts a series of parallel paths
lengthwise along the object.

NOTE: Based on information from Carolyn Cooper (977).

types of arguments about similarity and difference “emerged as more

persuasive than others.” Specifically, she observed that “evidence for
sameness that sounds naïve to us today, such as the fact that both
machines made lasts, gradually dropped out” and that “distinctions
that now sound more sophisticated stayed in use. For example, the
more-or-less expert witnesses tended over time to emphasize process
more than product and the kinematics of the machines more than
their components” (983). In addition, Cooper traced how the defini-
tion of Blanchard’s lathe and its key characteristics evolved over the
unusually extended time of patent protection. Cooper observed the
irony that “under treatment as a piece of intellectual property,
Blanchard’s invention had expanded in concept to include by 1850 all
the features of a machine that Blanchard had explicitly disclaimed at
the beginning in 1820” (989).
Cooper continued with an analysis of arguments surrounding yet
another Blanchard invention, a wood-bending machine. In this case,
having been charged with infringing a patent by John C. Morris,
Blanchard withdrew and revised his patent in 1859 and obtained a
reissue; Morris responded

by obtaining a reissue of his patent in 1862, in which he distinguished

two types of bending: “inward” and “outward” . . . . He very much ex-
502 JBTC / October 2001

panded his claim to originality within the class of “outward”-bending

machines, which he had just defined. (992)

Cooper provided diagrams of the “outward-bending” and “inward-

bending” mechanisms for these two machines (995), and she chal-
lenged readers to judge them: Are they largely the same, or are they
significantly different? In this instance, the classification of the inven-
tion seems to play a critical role in determining novelty. Cooper stated
that

the implicit rules for originality . . . gradually became more refined in

subcategories [of types of inventions] where there were more machines
to be compared with one another. Patent Office reclassification was one
manifestation of this social construction. Where the Patent Office recog-
nized twenty-two classes for patents for most of the 19th century, in
1870 it recognized 145 classes, because of subdivision of former classes
as well as creation of new ones. (985)

This practice of continually revising the classification method

(Dood, “U.S.” 95; Cooper 985) continues in the Patent Office today
and is important because this system is intended to “facilitate
searches for patents relevant to a particular technical subject when no
other information about the patents is known” (Dood, “U.S.” 98). Classifi-
cation, then, becomes strategic, and errors in classification become
suspect: As Autumn Stanley observed, those list makers who have
compiled information about women’s inventions at times
misclassified the inventions in trivializing ways (xxx). Further
research might address these questions:

• How do various classification practices function rhetorically? Whose

interests are served by reclassification?
• Has classification been used strategically to conceal or minimize the
contributions of certain groups of inventors?
• How have arguments for establishing similarity and difference evolved
since Blanchard’s time? Whose interests do these strategies serve?
Whose voices do they conceal or subvert? Who is authorized to make
these arguments?

Finally, given that global practices are merging (“Patent Wars”), we

might ask, What evidence for newness throughout the globe has been
required over time? How have global interests and policies affected
interpretations of novelty in patents challenged by overseas competi-
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 503

tors? How have patent applications by foreign nationals been

received and interpreted in this country?

The Nonsense in Nonobviousness

Through the first decades of the twentieth century, the courts grad-
ually narrowed the definition of invention to control corporate abuses
of the patent system. When a 1950 decision set “a standard for new-
ness so high that few inventors could meet it” (Lubar 14), a new law
was established in 1952 to replace judgments about the “flash of
genius” in an invention or its contribution to the “advancement of sci-
ence” with a set of facts on which patent decisions could be made.
Nonobviousness, then, became the third of the modern criteria for
patentability, and by 1966, the US Supreme Court had established the
procedure by which nonobviousness might be determined:

1. A patent examiner should determine the state of the prior art (by
reviewing files for previous patents, scientific articles, and the exam-
ples of “prior art” submitted by inventors with their applications);
2. The examiner should look at the difference between the prior art and
the claims in the patent application.
3. The examiner should “resolve the level of ordinary skill in the art”
(Lubar 15).

This final requirement involved determining

the educational level of the inventor and of other workers in the field,
the types of problems typically encountered in the art, prior solutions
to those problems, the speed with which innovations were being made
in the field, and the sophistication of the technology. (Lubar 15)

According to Lubar, this “person having ordinary skill in the art”

(“Mr. PHOSITA”) had, in addition to “ordinary” skills, extraordinary
knowledge, encompassing all prior art, all tools and practices used in
all areas of a field, and “all patents in the field in all countries the
instant they were available.” The result was that rather than clarifying
patentability, “court decisions on nonobviousness became increas-
ingly complex and confusing” (15). In response, the Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit was created, and this court “overcame the
problem of defining invention . . . by putting a greater emphasis
on . . . secondary criteria in determining the patentability of an inven-
504 JBTC / October 2001

tion.” Among these criteria are factors such as how successful com-
mercially the invention is, how long the invention has been needed,
how many inventors have tried to address the need, and how rapidly
an invention is recognized as useful (16).
Today, critics of the patent system claim that “patents no longer
reflect, and protect, technological advance, but rather reward the
commercial prowess of their inventors or the companies they work
for” (Lubar 16). IBM gains 10 new patents every day (“Patent Wars”
76); for the seventh straight year, this one company received more
utility patents than any other (“IBM”). The expansion of patent pro-
tection to software and business methods has resulted in a “gold
rush” in which “the Internet’s early communalist enthusiasm for
open-source s o f t w are —w h ich is f re e , u n pat e n t e d , an d
uncopyrighted—has now given way to a land-grab” (“Patent Wars”
76).
Through vehicles such as the Web site <www.bustpatents.com>,
critics point to recent patents such as US Patent No. 5,862,223 for
“Selling Professional Advice over the Internet” (granted January 19,
1999) or “Group Buying on the Internet” (pending) as examples of
bad patents on either or both of two grounds: somebody else “got
there first” or “the idea was too obvious to deserve protection.”
Although the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office admit-
ted that a problem exists, he voiced the belief that “the problem should
self-correct as more software is patented” (“Patent Nonsense”).
Gurak and Racine remarked that we live “in an age in which the
technologies of cell phones, high-definition television, the Web, e-mail,
and instant messaging have become almost invisible” and that for this
reason, “communication researchers need to seek out critical under-
standing and offer critical readings of the ways that business and
technical communication shapes and is shaped by the wired nature of
modern life” (261). Today, the Internet is both the object of debate
about patentability and the slate upon which much of the argument is
inscribed: What richer resource might we seek to understand the role
of technical and scientific communication in mediating social aspects
of technology than patents and patent-related texts?

CODA: A BRIEF GUIDE TO AVAILABLE RECORDS

In the preceding pages, I have suggested numerous possibilities

for research using patents and patent-related texts as information
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 505

resources. In this final section, I offer readers a brief guide to some of

the available records here because having some idea of the kinds of
records that might be available can be helpful in establishing a
research agenda. Having only recently become aware of the value and
richness of these records to my own research, I draw on the expert
knowledge of those archivists and historians who have worked
extensively with these materials.

What Official Records Are Available?

The vast majority of the earliest US patent records were destroyed
by fire in 1836; as a result, the record of patents from 1790 to 1836 is
discontinuous and has many gaps. Furthermore, because the recon-
structed records are primarily copies of original records that are no
longer available, inaccuracies in the record are certainly possible. In
contrast, patent records for applications submitted from 1836 to the
present are nearly continuous and more comprehensive than earlier
records (Reingold 158). As the previous examples have demon-
strated, patents themselves represent just a subset of texts associated
with the patent process that may be useful to the researcher. The fol-
lowing descriptions are drawn from an article by Nathan Reingold
and are included here because of their significant value to the
researcher. (See Reingold for additional detail about the strengths and
deficiencies of these records for historical investigations.)
The first set of records Reingold described are those pertaining to
the control of applications (indexes recording such information as the
inventor’s name, the title of the invention, the date received by the
Patent Office, the date forwarded to an examiner, etc.). Other types of
administrative records include issuance records (notifications of pat-
ents granted), assignment records (pertaining to the transfer of the
patent rights from the inventor to another party), and general control
records (pertaining to the organization and classification of the patent
records).
Ex parte records are those documents pertaining to the “Patented
File” (the file of a successful patent). The Patented File includes both
the original application as well as any intermediate rejections from
the examiner and responses from the applicant by which perceived
deficiencies with the application are identified and addressed. The
Patented File also includes a copy of the final printed patent. Reingold
noted that these records “resemble an editorial conference in which
the editor (the patent examiner) and the author (the inventor or his
506 JBTC / October 2001

patent attorney) have a dialogue about the revision of a text (the speci-
fication)” (161). Also discussed under ex parte records are “Reissued
Patented Files” (records of patents reissued because the original pat-
ent grant was inadvertently defective) and files of “Added Improve-
ments” (records pertaining to addenda to patents, allowed for a time
until a section of the 1836 statute was repealed). Reingold also dis-
cussed “Abandoned Files” (a scant collection of files for unsuccessful
patent applications).
“Inter Parte and Appeals” records cover the settling of disputes
when two or more inventors claim the same invention (a situation
referred to as an interference). Files exist for both uncontested and con-
tested interferences; contested interferences may include briefs, dis-
positions, affidavits, and exhibits. Reingold also included in this dis-
cussion “Extension Files,” records pertaining to patents that have
been granted extensions should a patentee fail to receive, during the
term of the patent, sufficient remuneration for the invention. Finally,
records of internal and external appeals pertaining to the actions of
the Patent Office can be found in volumes such as the Commissioner’s
Decisions, Appeals to Examiner-in-Chief, and Appeals to Commissioner
and Court.
Also of potential interest are documents recording the inventions
of women and persons of color. These include “Women Inventors to
Whom Patents Have Been Granted by the United States Government,
1790 to July 1, 1888” (Stanley 654); a 1986 film “From Dreams to Real-
ity: A Tribute to Minority Inventors,” produced by the Patent Office
and several other cooperating organizations (Story 40); and a US Pat-
ent Office “List of Colored Inventors in the United States as Furnished
for the Paris Exposition, 1900,” including names added to the original
list in 1937 (Ciarlante).

Where Are Patent Records Located?

Official records of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
are split between the National Archives and Research Administration
(NARA) and the USPTO. Some full records and limited finding aids
are available on-line; other records are available only onsite. Patent
depository libraries and state libraries are another source; in addition,
some information about patents may be available in other govern-
ment documents and company archives.
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 507

United States Patent and Trademark Office

A wealth of information about patents and matters significant to
present-day patents as well as access to patent databases are available
from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Its Web site
<www.uspto.gov> is particularly useful for background information
and recent patent history. Some types of information available on the
Web site include the following:

• a table of issue years and patent numbers for patents issued from 1836 to
the present <www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/issuyear.
htm>
• information about the US patent classification system and classification
definitions <www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/def/
index.htm>
• patent databases <www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html>.

This latter item includes a fully searchable text database of patents

granted from January 1, 1976 to the present and image files for all
extant patents granted since 1790 (viewable only with a special TIFF
plug-in; sources for plug-ins are also indicated on this Web site).
Online help addresses more common questions about the full-text
patent database <www.uspto.gov/patft/help.htm>.
Copies of printed patents not available online can be ordered from
the US Patent and Trademark Office provided you can supply a pat-
ent number. The fee for copies is nominal, and orders can be placed
via postal mail or the Web site.

The National Archives and Records Administration

NARA houses patent records from 1790 to 1979 in Record Group
(RG) 241, Records of the Patent and Trademark Office. The on-line
Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States
<www.nara.gov/guide/> discusses two major groups of records:

• 241.2 Records of the Patent Office (Reconstructed Records), 1837-87,

pertaining to patents obtained prior to the Patent Office fire of 1836, and
• 241.3 Records of the Patent Office Relating to Numbered Patents, July 13,
1836-1973. Among these, the most frequently accessed records are the
Patented Application Files, from July 1836 through December 1950; Pat-
ent Assignment Digests, from 1837-1957; and Liber Volumes, from 1837-
1954.
508 JBTC / October 2001

Record group 241.1 in the Guide is just an administrative history of the

Patent and Trademark Office, and 241.4 merely refers back to 241.2
and 241.3. The on-line guide provides a general description of these
record groups and available finding aids.
Also available at the NARA Web site is a working prototype data-
base, the NARA Archival Information Locator (NAIL), by which it is
possible to search more widely among different holdings within the
National Archives (note, though, that this database accesses only a
fraction of NARA’s holdings). Three other locations within the NARA
Web site are particularly useful resources for preparing research:

• How to Do Research at NARA (currently under development; see

<www.nara.gov/research/tools/howto.html>)
• Information for Researchers (includes regulations, procedures, and
planning advice; see <www.nara.gov/research/all/all.html>)
• To Obtain Reproductions (<www.nara.gov/research/ordering/
ordrinfo.html>).

Images of a very few actual source documents pertaining to patents

are available on-line from NARA; a search on NAIL turned up the
petition of Eli Whitney requesting that his cotton gin patent be
renewed (NWL-233-PETITION-12AF112-1).

Other Sources
Although NARA and the USPTO are undoubtedly the best sources
for information pertaining to patents, a number of other sources out-
side of Washington, DC, are available to the researcher. Some of these
sources include the following:

• patent depository libraries

• state libraries
• company archives
• legal records
• journals such as Scientific American, Journal of the Franklin Institute, and
Journal of the Patent Office Society.

Long prior to the advent of the Internet, the US government recog-

nized the need to distribute information to the public about the intel-
lectual property described in and protected by patents. For this rea-
son, selected public, state, and academic libraries are designated
Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries. These libraries provide
 Durack / RESEARCHING THE US PATENT RECORD 509

information and assistance to citizens in various regions throughout

the country. For a list of Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries
or to learn more about the Patent and Trademark Depository Library
Program, visit <www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/ptdl>.

REFERENCES

Bazerman, Charles. The Languages of Edison’s Light. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Brockmann, R. John. “Does Clio Have a Place in Technical Writing?” Journal of Technical
Writing and Communication 18 (1988): 297-304.
. From Millwrights to Shipwrights to the Twenty-First Century: Explorations in a His-
tory of Technical Communication in the United States. Creskill, NJ: Hampton, 1998.
. “Oliver Evans and His Antebellum Wrestling with Rhetorical Arrangement.”
Three Keys to the Past: The History of Technical Communication. Ed. Teresa C. Kynell
and Michael G. Moran. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. 63-89.
Ciarlante, Marjorie. E-mail to the author. 6 Oct. 2000.
Cooper, Carolyn C. “Social Construction of Invention through Patent Management:
Thomas Blanchard’s Woodworking Machinery.” Technology and Culture 32 (1991):
960-98.
Dood, Kendall J. “Pursuing the Essence of Inventions: Reissuing Patents in the 19th
Century.” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 999-1017.
. “The U.S. Patent Classification System.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Com-
munication PC-22 (1979): 95-100.
Durack, Katherine T. Documentation and Domestic Technology: Household Sewing Technol-
ogies and Feminine Authority. Diss. New Mexico State University, 1998.
. “Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Communication.” Technical
Communication Quarterly 6 (1997): 249-60.
. “Patterns for Success: A Lesson in Usable Design from U.S. Patent Records.”
Technical Communication 44 (1997): 37-51.
. ”Redefining Redefinition: What’s Sexist about Technical Writing.” Council of Pro-
grams in Technical and Scientific Communication’s Annual Meeting. Houghton,
MI. 28-30 Sep. 1995.
Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States. 30 Apr. 2001 <http://
www.nara.gov/guide>.
Gurak, Laura J., and Sam J. Racine. “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Social Realms of
Technology.” JBTC 14 (2000): 261-63.
“IBM Repeats at Top of PTO’s Annual List of 10 Organizations Receiving Most Pat-
ents.” United States Patent and Trademark Office. 30 Apr. 2001 <http://www.uspto.
gov/web/offices/com/speeches/00-03.htm>.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication PC-22, 1979.
Joenk, R. J. “Patents: Incentive to Innovate and Communicate.” IEEE Transactions on Pro-
fessional Communication PC-22 (1979): 46-59.
Kidwell, Claudia B. Cutting A Fashionable Fit: Dressmakers’ Drafting Systems in the United
States. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979.
Lubar, Steven. “New, Useful, and Nonobvious.” American Heritage of Invention and Tech-
nology 6 (1990): 8-16.
510 JBTC / October 2001

Maines, Rachel. “Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechani-

cal Vibrator.” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine June 1989: 3+.
National Archives and Records Administration. 30 Apr. 2001 <http://www.nara.
gov>.
“Patent Nonsense.” The Economist 8 Apr. 2000: 78.
“Patent Wars.” The Economist 8 Apr. 2000: 75+.
Pressman, David. Patent It Yourself. 7th ed. Berkeley, CA: Nolo Press, 1998.
Reingold, Nathan. “U.S. Patent Office Records as Sources for the History of Invention
and Technological Property.” Technology and Culture 1 (1960): 156-67.
Skolnik, Herman. “Historical Aspects of Patent Systems.” IEEE Transactions on Profes-
sional Communication PC-22 (1979): 59-63.
Stanley, Autumn. Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Tech-
nology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
The Story of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Washington, DC: Patent and Trademark
Office, 1988.
Stross, Randall E. “Patently Absurd Claims.” U.S. News and World Report 20 Mar. 2000:
56.
United States Patent and Trademark Office. 30 Apr. 2001 <http://www.uspto.gov>.
Walterscheid, Edward C. To Promote the Progress of Useful Arts: American Patent Law and
Administration, 1798-1836. Littleton, CO: Rothman, 1998.
Wheeler, David L. “Will DNA Patents Hinder Research? Lawyers Say Not to Worry.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education 16 Jul. 1999: A19.
“Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?” The Economist 8 Apr. 2000: 17.

Katherine T. Durack is an assistant professor in the Technical and Scientific Communi-

cation program at Miami University. Her interest in patents stems from her research on
early instructions for home sewing by machine and from her work experience in the com-
puter industry. Her e-mail address is durackk@muohio.edu.
JBTC / October 2001 Harner / STC FUNDS TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

COMMENTARY

STC Funds Research in

Technical Communication
SANDRA HARNER
Cedarville University

he Society for Technical Communication (STC) offers

T research grants to talented individuals with a desire to help

bridge the gap between those who create ideas and those
who use them. STC is interested in basic and applied research about
topics that concern and interest STC’s mainstream membership: prac-
titioners. To date, nearly $300,000 has been awarded for research
grants.
STC offers the academic community the unique opportunity to
combine two of the things they do best: research and publish. Our
profession has gained a great deal from the previous research pro-
jects, especially when the results of these projects appear in books or
in journals such as Technical Communication. With more than 25,000
subscribers, most of whom are practitioners, Technical Communication
offers the researcher an audience of people eager to find answers to
the questions they face daily. As the profession continues to expand,
practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of
research data that will help them to perform their roles more effi-
ciently and effectively. They learn much about current research from
Technical Communication. For example, the August 2000 issue of Tech-
nical Communication is unique because

for the first time in 47 years of publication the entire content of an issue
can be readily applied by large numbers of technical communicators on
the job. In other words, the seven articles contained in this special issue
on Web communication represent a significant contribution by
researchers to the practice of our craft. . . . Research should enrich prac-
tice and practice should enrich research. (Hayhoe 289)

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 511-515
© 2001 Sage Publications

511
512 JBTC / October 2001

Although practitioners are interested in research, Elizabeth

Tebeaux suggested that perhaps academics are overlooking the prac-
titioner audience:

Academics seem more concerned with describing past and current

communication practices and trying to theorize a paradigm for these
issues than with predicting future communication environments and
determining the best communication solutions for those prob-
lems. . . . Research in nonacademic writing needs to begin with the
workplace—the writing problems of the workplace as articulated by
managers, trainers, and communication specialists who deal with
workplace writing on a daily basis. Using the workplace as a point of
departure will help ensure the relevance of the research—its usefulness
in helping prepare students and technical writers for nonacademic
writing and anticipating changes in high-tech workplace communica-
tions that should inform university curriculum planning. (44)

Since its beginning in 1982, the STC Research Grants Program has
sought to fund practice-oriented research, encouraging the recipients
of the grants to communicate their findings in terms that all audiences
can understand. To accomplish this goal, STC has created a research
advisory panel to establish a research agenda of topics that would be
of most value to STC’s members—90% of whom are practitioners. The
advisory panel lists the following topics on which STC is eager to
fund research:

• audience analysis and understanding

• collaboration and team-based projects
• designing for visualization
• designing new documentation processes
• hard copy and online evaluation
• information dissemination tools
• professional, social, and environmental trends affecting technical
communicators
• research models for technical communication
• settings for writing and internationalization
• the value of technical information products

To qualify for STC grant funding, the research must be a controlled

activity through which the researcher can learn and communicate
new information to STC members. Student members, regular mem-
bers, and nonmembers of STC may submit proposals. The STC
Research Grants Committee reviews each proposal, examining such
 Harner / STC FUNDS TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 513

elements as the background, research design, proposal statement,

and organization of the project, and determines if the budget is rea-
sonable, additional support exists, and the proposer has sufficient
experience and qualifications.
Helene Schultz, former manager of the STC Research Grants Com-
mittee, explained the 10 most common reasons why the committee
rejects grant proposals:

1.The proposal does not meet STC’s requirements. (The committee does
not even see proposals that are missing required sections; the STC office
automatically rejects them.)
2.The proposed research will not add anything to the existing literature.
3.The researcher lacks the experience or necessary skills to complete the
research.
4.The research budget is unreasonable (i.e., either too high or too low,
budget items are not justifiable, or essential budget items are not
specified).
5.The research topic does not interest STC members and practitioners of
technical communication.
6.The control variables in the study are insufficient.
7.The proposal gives insufficient detail about the measurements to be
used.
8.The research methods are unclear, incomplete, or insufficiently related
to the stated research objectives.
9.The literature review is incomplete, misses key citations, or does not
relate well to the hypothesis or research design.
10.The proposal contains spelling errors, typos, and grammar mistakes.

Every year, STC receives and funds an increasing number of

research proposals of value to practitioners. The following research
projects that have been approved by STC since 1997 are excellent
examples of the positive impact of STC funding on research in techni-
cal communication:

• on-line editing by technical editors: studying technical editors’ use and

knowledge of on-line editing tools, their attitudes toward on-line edit-
ing, and the value organizations place on the technical editor’s work as
it moves from hard copy to on-line application—David Dayton, Texas
Tech University;
• effectiveness of screen captures in software documentation: testing
manuals with different kinds and amounts of screen captures and ana-
lyzing the results in light of existing principles and guidelines—Hans
van der Meij, University of Twente, the Netherlands;
• minimalist principles applied to on-line help: testing three of John
Carroll’s principles of minimalist instruction (originally developed for
514 JBTC / October 2001

hard copy manuals) so that technical communicators can more effec-

tively apply minimalist principles to the design of online help systems—
Jean A. Pratt, Utah State University;
• effectiveness of document design principles in creating health question-
naires: comparing the effectiveness of questionnaires prepared using
document design principles with those currently used in health care so
that people who design such questionnaires can make them more effec-
tive—Jessica Schultz and Beverly Zimmerman, Brigham Young Univer-
sity, and Charles Cox, University of South Florida;
• clarity and reading comprehensibility for international audiences: test-
ing the reading comprehension of native speakers of French, German,
and Chinese as they read instructions in English; comparing text as writ-
ten by technical writers with text translated into simplified English to
determine whether the simplified English texts will actually be more
difficult for the nonnative English speakers to understand and to guide
future writers of international technical documents—Emily A. Thrush,
University of Memphis;
• creation of a set of usability heuristics for Web site design: studying
what users want in an effective website—a team of international
researchers working with a research participant team of international
students (see Ramey)—Judy Ramey, University of Washington;
• evaluation of consumer attitudes toward online shopping experiences:
examining how design elements of e-commerce sites carry out the rhe-
torical function of persuasion—Wendy Winn, Clemson University;
• form-filling behavior of people completing electronic forms: comparing
the problems people have completing electronic forms versus paper
forms—Michael Steehouder and Ivo d’Haens, University of Twente, the
Netherlands;
• management portfolios of large technical communication departments:
describing the management of communication projects, the people who
carry them out, and the finances that support them—Saul Carliner,
Bentley College;
• Web-browsing behavior of users searching for information via a
handheld computer: examining what characterizes users’ behavior
when they search for information by using a palm handheld computer
and which design suggestions can be abstracted from this knowledge—
Michael Albers and Loel Kim, University of Memphis.

As you can see, the committee has funded many excellent research
proposals from researchers throughout the world who have learned
of the STC Research Grants Program. The more people who know
about this program, the more STC will be able to sponsor worthwhile
research on a wide variety of interesting and relevant topics. Detailed
guidelines for this program are available on the STC Web site at
<www.stc.org>.
 Harner / STC FUNDS TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 515

REFERENCES

Hayhoe, George. “Useful Research Is No Myth.” Technical Communication 47 (2000):

289-90.
Ramey, Judy. “Guidelines for Web Data Collection: Understanding and Interacting
with Your Users.” Technical Communication 47 (2000): 397-410.
Tebeaux, Elizabeth. “Nonacademic Writing into the 21st Century: Achieving and Sus-
taining Relevance in Research and Curricula.” Nonacademic Writing: Social Theory
and Technology. Ed. Ann Hill Duin and Craig J. Hansen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1996. 44.

Sandra Harner is a professor and director of the Technical and Professional Communica-
tion major at Cedarville University, Cedarville, Ohio. She serves the Society for Techni-
cal Communication as the assistant to the president for Academic and Research Pro-
grams. She may be reached by e-mail at harners@cedarville.edu.
JBTC / October 2001 Harner / STC FUNDS TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
ANNOUNCEMENTS

ANNOUNCEMENTS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Dedicated to teaching and learning beyond traditional disciplines

and interests, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on
Learning (JAEPL) invites submissions for its seventh annual issue. We
solicit theory-grounded manuscripts that discuss pedagogical con-
cerns focusing on topics that extend beyond currently accepted atti-
tudes toward, and paradigms of, language. We invite an exploration
of subjects that range over a spectrum of interests, including, but not
limited to, emotion, imagery, kinesthetics, ecofeminism, situated
knowledge, meditation, healing, and inspiration.
Send by January 31, 2002 four copies of letter-quality manuscripts
(attach postage for mailing three copies to readers), MLA style (elec-
tronic submissions are welcome), approximately 12 to 15 pages
including works cited to Linda Calendrillo, coeditor of JAEPL,
Department of English, 1 Big Red Way, Western Kentucky University,
Bowling Green, KY 42101 (e-mail: linda.calendrillo@wku.edu).
Send editorial inquiries to Kristie S. Fleckenstein, coeditor of
JAEPL, Department of English, Ball State University, Muncie, IN
47306 (e-mail: kflecken@gw.bsu.edu).
Visit our Web site at <http://www.bsu.edu/english/jaepl>.

TECHNICAL AND SCIENTIFIC

AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED

The Committee on Technical and Scientific Communication of the

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has announced the
winners of its 2000 Awards for Excellence in Technical and Scientific
Writing.
The awards were presented during the 2001 Annual Convention of
the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a con-
stituent group within NCTE.
Following are the 2000 award winners:

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 516-517
© 2001 Sage Publications

516
 ANNOUNCEMENTS 517

Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Commu-

nication: Susan Harkness Regli, “Whose Ideas? The Technical Writer’s
Expertise in Inventio,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
29.1 (April 1999)
Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Techni-
cal or Scientific Communication: Isabelle Thompson, “Women and
Feminism in Technical Communication: A Qualitative Content Analy-
sis of Journal Articles Published in 1989 through 1997,” Journal of Busi-
ness and Technical Communication 13.2 (April 1999)
Best Article Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Techni-
cal or Scientific Communication: Glynda Hull, “What’s in a Label?
Complicating Notions of the Skills-Poor Worker,” Written Communica-
tion 16.4 (October 1999)
Best Collection of Essays in Technical or Scientific Communication:
Dan Riordan, editor, “Redefining the Technical Communication Ser-
vice Course,” a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly 8.3
(Summer 1999)
Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication: Anne Beaufort,
Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work, New
York: Teachers College Press (1999)
 BOARD OF REVIEWERS

We wish to thank the following reviewers for generously donating

their time and expertise:
Jo Allen Patricia Hagen Rodney P. Rice
Nancy Allen John Hagge William E. Rivers
Deborah C. Andrews Thomas Hajduk David Roberts
Tracey Alison Baker Craig J. Hansen Lilita Rodman
Philippa Benson Michael J. Hassett Priscilla S. Rogers
Ann M. Blakeslee Dixie Elise Hickman Mary Rosner
Deborah S. Bosley Penny L. Hirsch Philip Rubens
Joel P. Bowman Lee Honeycutt Carolyn Rude
R. John Brockmann Johndan Johnson- David Russell
Stuart C. Brown Eilola Marilyn Sandidge
Kim Sydow Campbell William M. Karis Beverly Sauer
Douglas M. Catron Donna Kienzler Karen R. Schnakenberg
Joseph F. Ceccio Susan D. Kleimann Stuart A. Selber
Scott A. Chadwick Mary M. Lay Annette Shelby
William B. Chapel Carol Leininger John C. Sherblom
Carol Chapelle Carol Lipson Barbara L. Shwom
William O. Coggin Richard Louth Elizabeth O. Smith
Susan Conrad David A. McMurray Craig Snow
Scott Consigny Michael Mendelson James F. Stratman
Carol David Barbara Mirel Dale Sullivan
Dan Dieterich Patrick Moore Patricia Sullivan
W. Tracy Dillon Margaret Morgan Gail Fann Thomas
Dan Douglas Cynthia Myers Isabelle Thompson
Sam Dragga James S. O'Rourke IV Emily A. Thrush
Philip Eubanks Cezar M. Ornatowski Leonard Tourney
Helen Rothschild Anthony Paré Roberta Vann
Ewald Donald Payne Iris I. Varner
Janis Forman John M. Penrose David A. Victor
Richard Freed Jane M. Perkins Gretchen N. Vik
Aviva Freedman James E. Porter David Wallace
Steven P. Golen Paul Prior Timothy Weiss
Patricia Goubil- Richard Raymond Gregory A. Wickliff
Gambrell Louise Rehling Dorothy A. Winsor
Margaret Graham Peter J. Reilly Kristin R. Woolever
Laura J. Gurak Fred Reynolds Art Young

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 518
© 2001 Sage Publications

518
JBTC / October 2001 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Types of Submissions
JBTC publishes several types of submissions: article-length studies,
approaches and practices, commentaries, book and software reviews, and
comments and responses.
Article-Length Studies: Article-length studies, which should present the
results of research, are usually 15 to 35 typewritten, double-spaced pages
although longer articles will be considered. Reports of empirical research
should include details of the research design and methodology, either in the
text or in an appendix.
Approaches and Practices: Approaches and practices are short pieces—
5 to 15 typewritten, double-spaced pages—published in a section of the jour-
nal devoted to pedagogical tips and industrial how-to's.
Commentaries: Commentaries—which may range from 5 to 10 typewritten,
double-spaced pages—are opinion pieces addressing issues of importance to
the profession.
Book and Software Reviews: Book and software reviews critically examine
recent additions to the book and software market. Software reviews should
include the tasks for which the software was developed, the types of tests
reviewers conducted, and the results. Both book and software reviews may
range from five to eight typewritten, double-spaced pages.
Comments and Responses: Comments and responses are exchanges
between readers and authors about pieces that have appeared in JBTC. These
submissions should not exceed six typewritten, double-spaced pages.

Manuscript Preparation
Article-length studies, approaches and practices, and commentaries should
be submitted in triplicate. The title of the manuscript, the name(s) of the author(s),
and the affiliation(s) of the author(s) should appear on a separate cover sheet and
not on the first page of the manuscript. (If you employ a subtitle, do not use a
colon after the main title; place the subtitle on a separate line below the main
title.) Any acknowledgments should be located at the bottom of the cover
sheet. Also submit, on a separate page, an autobiographical note of about 40
words. A 100-word abstract, located on a separate page, should accompany all
article-length studies and approaches and practices. Documentation should
conform to the MLA Handbook (1999) and should be placed on a page labeled
“References” at the end of the manuscript. Substantive footnotes should be

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 519-520
© 2001 Sage Publications

519
520 JBTC / October 2001

incorporated in the text whenever possible. Place all tables and figures on
separate pages. Indicate where figures or tables should be inserted in the text
by typing on a separate line—in all capital letters—INSERT TABLE/FIGURE
ABOUT HERE after the paragraph where the table/figure is first mentioned.
Everything in the manuscript, including cover page, abstract, autobiographi-
cal note, indented quotations, notes, and references, should be double-
spaced. Employ the same point size and the same font style throughout the
manuscript, and leave the right margin unjustified. In addition, do not end
lines with a hyphen.
Authors are responsible for submitting all visuals for accepted manu-
scripts in camera-ready copy suitable for publication. (Specifications for pre-
paring visuals will be furnished on acceptance.) Authors are responsible for
obtaining the necessary permissions and for the accuracy of all references, fig-
ures, and tables.
Include a self-addressed manila envelope with unattached postage sufficient to
cover three first-class mailings of the manuscript. Authors submitting manu-
scripts from outside the US need to include only the self-addressed envelope,
not the postage. Please mail submissions to Rebecca Burnett, Editor, JBTC, 203
Ross Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011.
All article-length studies, approaches and practices, and commentaries
are refereed, and readers' reports are routinely provided to authors. This
review process takes approximately three months. At least one round of revi-
sion is common for accepted manuscripts.
Submission of a manuscript implies commitment to publish in the journal.
Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously
submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published
elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content.
Authors in doubt about what constitutes prior publication should consult the
editor.

Book and Software Reviews: Book reviews should be submitted directly to

the book review editor at the following address:

Kelli Cargile Cook

Department of English
Utah State University
Logan, UT 84322

Headings for book reviews should include the following information: title of
book, author or editor, place of publication, publisher, and date of
publication.
Software reviews are the responsibility of JBTC's editor and should be sub-
mitted directly to her.
JBTC / October 2001 INDEX

INDEX

to

JOURNAL OF
BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL
COMMUNICATION

Volume 15

Number 1 (January 2001) pp. 1-128

Number 2 (April 2001) pp. 129-264
Number 3 (July 2001) pp. 265-404
Number 4 (October 2001) pp. 407-524

Authors:
ALRED, GERALD J., “A Review of Technical Communication Programs outside the
United States” [Commentary], 111.
ARTEMEVA, NATASHA, and AVIVA FREEDMAN, “ ‘Just the Boys Playing on Com-
puters’: An Activity Theory Analysis of Differences in the Cultures of Two Engi-
neering Firms,” 164.
BARTON, ELLEN, “Design in Observational Research on the Discourse of Medicine:
Toward Disciplined Interdisciplinarity,” 309.
BAZERMAN, CHARLES, see IText Working Group.
BREUCH, LEE-ANN M. KASTMAN, MARK ZACHRY, and CLAY SPINUZZI,
“Usability Instruction in Technical Communication Programs: New Directions in
Curriculum Development” [Approaches and Practices], 223.
CHARNEY, DAVIDA, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Prospects for Research in Techni-
cal and Scientific Communication—Part 1,” 267.
CHARNEY, DAVIDA, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Prospects for Research in Techni-
cal and Scientific Communication—Part 2,” 409.
CHARNEY, DAVIDA, see Paul, D.
CHIAVIELLO, ANTHONY R. S., “Ethics in Technical Communication, by Paul Dombrowski”
[Book Review], 254.
DAVID, CAROL, “Mythmaking in Annual Reports,” 195.
DOHENY-FARINA, STEPHEN, see IText Working Group.
DURACK, KATHERINE T., “Research Opportunities in the US Patent Record,” 490
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 October 2001 521-524
© 2001 Sage Publications

521
522 JBTC / October 2001

FISHER, DAVID, see Fox, C.

FOX, CATHERINE, and DAVID FISHER, “A Comment on Greg Wilson’s ‘Technical
Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Com-
munication Pedagogy’ ” [Comment and Response], 241.
FREEDMAN, AVIVA, see Artemeva, N.
GEISLER, CHERYL, see IText Working Group.
GUINIVEN, JOHN E. “The Lessons of Survivor Literature in Communicating Deci-
sions to Downsize,” 53.
GURAK, LAURA, see IText Working Group.
HAAS, CHRISTINA, see IText Working Group.
HAAS, CHRISTINA, and STEPHEN P. WITTE, “Writing as an Embodied Practice: The
Case of Engineering Standards,” 413.
HARNER, SANDRA, “STC Funds Research in Technical Communication” [Commen-
tary], 511.
ITEXT WORKING GROUP, CHERYL GEISLER, CHARLES BAZERMAN, STEPHEN
DOHENY-FARINA, LAURA GURAK, CHRISTINA HAAS, JOHNDAN
JOHNSON-EILOLA, DAVID S. KAUFER, ANDREA LUNSFORD, CAROLYN R.
MILLER, DOROTHY WINSOR, and JOANNE YATES, “IText: Future Directions for
Research on the Relationship between Information Technology and Writing,” 269.
JOHNSON-EILOLA, JOHNDAN, see IText Working Group.
KAUFER, DAVID S., see IText Working Group.
KENDALL, AIMEE, see Paul, D.
LEVINE, MARTHA, “Guide to Managerial Communication: Effective Business Writing and
Speaking, by Mary Munter” [Book Review], 252.
LIMAYE, MOHAN R., “Some Reflections on Explanation in Negative Messages”
[Commentary], 100.
LITTLE, JOSEPH, “Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Peda-
gogy, edited by John T. Battalio” [Book Review], 116.
LUNSFORD, ANDREA, see IText Working Group.
MILLER, CAROLYN R., see IText Working Group.
NEUWIRTH, CHRISTINE M., see Wolfe, J. L.
PAUL, DANETTE, DAVIDA CHARNEY, and AIMEE KENDALL, “Moving Beyond
the Moment: Reception Studies in the Rhetoric of Science,” 372.
RICKLY, REBECCA, “Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy, by
Kathleen E. Welch” [Book Review], 119.
SPINUZZI, CLAY, see Breuch, L.M.K.
SUCHAN, JIM, “The Effect of Interpretive Schemes on Videoteleducation’s Concep-
tion, Implementation, and Use,” 133.
THATCHER, BARRY, “Issues of Validity in Intercultural Professional Communication
Research,” 458.
TOLBERT, JANE T., “Seventeenth-Century Technical and Persuasive Communication:
A Case Study of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc’s Work on a Method of Deter-
mining Terrestrial Longitude,” 29.
WILSON, GREG, “Conversations about Postmodernism, Technical Communication,
and Pedagogy: A Response to Catherine Fox and David Fisher” [Comment and
Response], 248.
WILSON, GREG, “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a
Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy” [Approaches and Practices], 72.
WINSOR, DOROTHY, see IText Working Group.
 INDEX 523

WINSOR, DOROTHY A., “Learning to Do Knowledge Work in Systems of Distributed

Cognition,” 5.
WITTE, STEPHEN P., see Haas, C.
WOLFE, JOANNA L., and CHRISTINE M. NEUWIRTH, “From the Margins to the
Center: The Future of Annotation,” 333.
YATES, JOANNE, see IText Working Group.
ZACHRY, MARK, see Breuch, L.M.K.

Approaches and Practices:

“Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical
Communication Pedagogy,” Wilson, 72.
“Usability Instruction in Technical Communication Programs: New Directions in Cur-
riculum Development,” Breuch et al., 223.

Articles:
“Design in Observational Research on the Discourse of Medicine: Toward Disciplined
Interdisciplinarity,” Barton, 309.
“The Effect of Interpretive Schemes on Videoteleducation’s Conception, Implementa-
tion, and Use,” Suchan, 133.
“From the Margins to the Center: The Future of Annotation,” Wolfe and Neuwirth, 333.
“Guest Editor’s Introduction: Prospects for Research in Technical and Scientific Com-
munication—Part 1,” Charney, 267.
“Guest Editor’s Introduction: Prospects for Research in Technical and Scientific Com-
munication—Part 2,” Charney, 409.
“Issues of Validity in Intercultural Professional Communication Research,” Thatcher,
458.
“IText: Future Directions for Research on the Relationship between Information Tech-
nology and Writing,” IText Working Group (Geisler et al.), 269.
“ ‘Just the Boys Playing on Computers’: An Activity Theory Analysis of Differences in
the Cultures of Two Engineering Firms,” Artemeva and Freedman, 164.
“Learning to Do Knowledge Work in Systems of Distributed Cognition,” Winsor, 5.
“The Lessons of Survivor Literature in Communicating Decisions to Downsize,”
Guiniven, 53.
“Moving Beyond the Moment: Reception Studies in the Rhetoric of Science,” Paul et al.,
372.
“Mythmaking in Annual Reports,” David, 195.
“Research Opportunities in the US Patent Record,” Durack, 490.
“Seventeenth-Century Technical and Persuasive Communication: A Case Study of
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc’s Work on a Method of Determining Terrestrial
Longitude,” Tolbert, 29.
“Writing as an Embodied Practice: The Case of Engineering Standards,” Haas and
Witte, 413.

Book Reviews:
“Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy, by Kathleen E. Welch,”
Rickly, 119.
524 JBTC / October 2001

“Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy, edited by John T.
Battalio,” Little, 116.
“Ethics in Technical Communication, by Paul Dombrowski,” Chiaviello, 254.
“Guide to Managerial Communication: Effective Business Writing and Speaking, by Mary
Munter,” Levine, 252.

Comment and Response:

“A Comment on Greg Wilson’s ‘Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Con-
sidering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy,’ ” Fox and Fisher, 241.
“Conversations about Postmodernism, Technical Communication, and Pedagogy: A
Response to Catherine Fox and David Fisher,” Wilson, 248.

Commentary:
“STC Funds Research in Technical Communication,” Harner, 511.
“A Review of Technical Communication Programs outside the United States,” Alred,
111.
“Some Reflections on Explanation in Negative Messages,” Limaye, 100.