George F. Hayhoe

Educating reflective practitioners

One of the marks of true professionalism is the ability to learn from reflection on practice. Observing the practice of themselves and others provides practitioners with essential knowledge in addition to the core knowledge of the profession. Programs in technical communication, especially graduate programs, should foster the habits and skills of reflecting on practice. This panel discussion will demonstrate ways we have incorporated reflection on learning into our degree programs in technical communication at Mercer University.

What Does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions' Readers Want to Read?

Research Problem: Investigate the match between content published by the Transactions and content sought by its readers. Research Questions: What content does the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication publish? How does that compare to the content published by other journals in the field? And what content do readers of the Transactions want to read? Literature Review: Researchers in most fields occasionally analyze the entire body of literature within a discipline to assess the current state of the literature, identify leading works, assess the state of the literature, provide a basis for changing the direction of a journal, and assess alignment among parts of the literature. Methodology: To identify what journals published, researchers used the STC Body of Knowledge schema and a list of categories of research methods that classify all peer-reviewed articles published between January 2006 and December 2010 in the Transactions, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly. To identify reader preferences of the Transactions, researchers surveyed members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society about their preferences for content and types of research. Results and Discussion: In terms of the topics covered, the three most widely covered topics in the Transactions were: (1) Deliverables, (2) Information Design and Development, and (3) Academic Programs. Readers prefer (1) About Technical and Professional Communication, (2) Information Design and Development, and (3) Research Theory, and Practice. The three least-covered topics were (1) Business Knowledge, (2) About Technical Communication, and (3) Technical Communication Standards. Of least interest to participants were: (1) Deliverables, (2) Quality Assurance, (3) Management, and (4) Technical Communication Standards. The Transactions primarily publishes experiments, surveys, and tutorials while readers prefer case studies, literature reviews, and tutorials.

Focus group workshop

This highly interactive workshop reviews the theory and practice of focus group methods, and shows how technical communicators can use focus groups to understand the issues and needs of audiences, users, and customers. The workshop covers focus group theory, design considerations, capturing and analyzing data, and validating data through member checking.

ISO standards for software user documentation

During the past five years, a working group of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has produced the first-ever international standards for software user documentation. Four of these standards are directed at various audiences involved in producing user documentation (documentation designers and developers, managers, testers and reviewers, and acquirers and suppliers), while the fifth addresses the unique challenges of producing documentation in an agile software development environment. These standards have also been adopted by the IEEE Standards Association. This workshop will briefly describe the process used to develop the five standards and provide an overview of their content. Then it will examine in detail how managers can use these standards to ensure the quality of documentation their organizations produce and advance respect for documentation within the larger organization.

Designing a sustainable usability program

One of the biggest problems associated with establishing a routine usability program in many companies is the perception that such programs are invariably expensive and time-consuming, that the value they yield is not worth the investment of time and money required, and that failure to institute and sustain such a program does not place them at a competitive disadvantage. However, such assumptions are neither valid nor productive. This presentation will outline a management approach to designing usability programs that are a routine part of the product development methodology, are cost effective, and help ensure user satisfaction.

Transforming your conference paper into an article for the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication

This workshop is intended to help graduate students and junior faculty successfully prepare a manuscript for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication based on a conference presentation.

A Diamond Milestone for a Winning Combination

One perquisite of being a Professor Emeritus is the opportunity to teach an occasional course, and last fall, my department chair asked whether I would be interested in teaching a graduate course titled “The History and Theory of Technical Communication” this spring. Because the history of the profession has always interested me, I agreed. And because I had not taught the course since 2010, I have done a great deal of reading to prepare for it.

Boom, Bust, and Beyond: My Experience as a Technical Communicator

One of the benefits of age is perspective, the ability to draw back from the immediate and perceive the relationships of events and milestones over time. As I approach retirement, I’ve been thinking about the development of technical communication as a profession over the past 75 years and particularly about the ways in which my working life has been affected by the trajectory of the field. My work as a technical communicator began like that of many others of my generation: through the back door, as a second career. During my undergraduate years, I decided that I wanted to teach literature on the college level. A scholarship and my savings afforded me the chance to complete my master’s degree in 1 year, but paying for the PhD and supporting myself while I studied required me to serve as a teaching assistant for 4 years. Although my first love during that time was William Faulkner’s fiction and textual editing, I realized from teaching freshman composition and tutoring in the writing center that studying rhetoric not only contributed to my understanding of literature and the process of recovering texts, but would also give me an advantage in the job market of the late 1970s. After all, this was a time when we joked that the question most often asked by newly minted PhDs in English was “Do you want fries with that?” So while many of my grad school colleagues had problems finding a job in field, I was fortunate to be hired as director of the writing center at a large state university, and I continued to read about and teach rhetorical concepts, as well as literature, and to edit literary texts. When I abandoned academe several years later after a negative experience with department politics, I pursued jobs in Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 2015, Vol. 45(4) 342–353 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0047281615585748 jtw.sagepub.com

Extended abstract: A professional communication course for engineering freshmen

Technical Communication faculty at Mercer Universitys School of Engineering have created a new professional communication course for engineering freshmen designed to give them experience in library research, introduce them to major challenges for 21st_ century engineers, and give them practice in designing communication products in genres that they will use in their coursework and as engineers in industry. Results of a survey of students who took the course in 2013-14 indicate that the course is achieving the desired outcome by equipping students with theory and techniques that enable them to be more effective writers, speakers, and presenters, as well as providing them with practical strategies for research, team work, and problem solving.

Negotiating the border between classroom and workplace: Approaches to teaching usability

This workshop focuses on teaching usability at the undergraduate and masters level, and emphasizes the potential of such courses to bring the classroom and workplace together, aid student learning, and allow businesses to influence the training of the next generation of professional communicators.