Karla Saari Kitalong

A web of symbolic violence

Abstract Many new electronic technologies of writing are quickly becoming part of everyday practice, but are not as yet so fully integrated that they have become indistinguishable from the fabric of everyday life. Although these new technologies are still visible, still strange, we are afforded an opportunity to examine them against a backdrop of commonplace practices and beliefs. In this article, I illustrate how a new technological writing practice, World Wide Web publishing, meshes and clashes with what academics have meant by plagiarism. I apply sociologist Pierre Bourdieus theories of capital and symbolic violence to examine some ways Web publishing challenges and complicates our taken-for-granted ways of controlling and punishing plagiarizers.

Influences on Creativity in Technical Communication: Invention, Motivation, and Constraints

ABSTRACT Interviews with 14 technical communicators reveal that skills in rhetorical invention help them creatively address communication problems. They define creativity in relation to four interrelated exigencies of invention: thinking like a user, reinvigorating dry content, inventing visual ideas, and alternating between heuristic and algorithmic processes. They recognize intrinsic factors such as curiosity and sympathy as motivations for their creativity, while being conscious of the external factors (people, money, and time) that may restrain creativity.

“You Will” Technology, Magic, and the Cultural Contexts of Technical Communication

Technology is commonly described in magical terms, not only in advertising but also in journalism and technical communication. This article provides some background on the use of magical language in technical contexts, gives examples of magical discourse in technology advertisements and newsmagazine articles, and proposes a technical communication pedagogy of media analysis. The proposed pedagogy involves students in conducting diagnostic critiques of media texts and affords them the opportunity to examine critically their own unwitting use of magical language in technical discourse.

Sharing Our Intellectual Traces [Book Review]

This collection of 11 narratives is a well-crafted assemblage of stories that illustrate diverse experiences in the technical communication academic program offices at colleges and universities across the country. This book is intended for those who are responsible for creating and administering technical communication programs and aims to provide its readers with lessons learned from the field. The readers of this book will come away with some thoughtful points to consider as they work within the framework of their own academic resources, whether it involves multidiscipline departmental influences, or resistance to change from long established traditions.

Virtual Peer Review: Teaching and Learning About Writing in Online Environments. Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. 183 pp

talk with students about the challenges of conducting user research and developing content for those who have yet to enter co-ops or the workplace. Project-based learning can provide some of this situated knowledge for students, but I would expect a text written by someone with over 10 years of experience in the field to offer insights that can only come from long-term insider status. There are glimpses of this in the many sidebars to be sure, but often they come in the form of “we learned the hard way that this didn’t work because ...” rather than as the voice of a successful, seasoned expert. At the very least, I had hoped the text would be a potentially useful addition to a graduate seminar reading list on usability or Web development, or to my own scholarly or consultancy work. However, beyond some highly practical examples, a few helpful nuggets buried deep within the text, and the great number of citations used throughout the book, I confess that this is a book I probably would not use in any of these contexts.

Book Reviews : The inmates are Running the Asylum Alan Cooper. Indianapolis: SAMS, 1999. 261 pages

As he notes in the passage quoted above, the population of technology users has rapidly been expanding and changing, as have the contexts for technology use, especially since the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s. But software development processes have not changed appreciably to accommodate the needs of these new users. Nor have teachers of technical, professional, or business communication altered how we address audi-

Book Reviews : Case Studies in International Technical Communication Nancy L. Hoft. 1997. Web site: www.world-ready.com/cases/

IN THE HIGH-TECH PRODUCT AND SERVICE MARKET, competition for international customers is escalating. When companies move into the global marketplace, they need reliable, high-quality resources to help them manage the complex processes of international technical communication. One of these resources is an International Technical Communication Web site developed by Nancy L. Hoft, author of International Technical Communication: How to Export Information about High Technology (John Wiley and Sons, 1995, 372 pages, paper, ISBN: 0-471-03743-5). Hoft’s approach to international technical communication takes into account both logistical and cultural issues without losing sight of corporations’ need for profitable and therefore cost-effective operations. In the preface of her book, Hoft broadly defines technical communicators as &dquo;anyone who develops information products&dquo; and designates a range of information products that includes everything from technical reference manuals, user interfaces, and context-sensitive online help to training manuals, marketing communications and busi-

The novice user enters the discourse community: implications for technical writers

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to critique existing definitions of computer literacy and the approaches to computer literacy instruction that such definitions engender, to suggest an enriched approach to computer literacy based on the sociolinguistic notion of the discourse community, and to outline some of the technical communications issues that arise when computer literacy and sociolinguistics are considered in tandem. The main conclusion that is reached in the paper is that, as communications professionals working in computing environments, technical writers and trainers need to pay increased attention to the contexts in which computing takes place, the linguistic conventions of language used in computing contexts, and the specific needs of computer users, in order to act effectively as a “bridge” between computing community “insiders” and “outsiders,” or expert and novice members. Existing Computer Literacy Definitions and Models Traditionally, the distinction between novice and expert computer users has centered on their respective levels of “computer literacy,” a term that has been widely used in computing circles since 1972. The term “computer literacy” is credited to Arthur Luehrman, former director of computing at Dartmouth College (McCorduck, 1985). Numerous defmitions of computer literacy have been proposed; a representative sample is offered here. For Luehrman, to whom the term is credited, computer literacy means mastery: the ability to make a computer perform a variety of functions. In his refined definition of computer literacy, which he published more than a decade after he coined the phrase, Luehrman called for skills that an individual can generalize across many contexts: the ability to use the computer for a wide variety of applications, and the ability to make the transition from one application and system to another (McCorduck, 1985). For Deborah L. Brecher, education director of the Women’s Computer Literacy Project, “Computer literacy is similar [to literacy in general]--it means you can read (and understand) books about computers” (Brecher, 1986, p. 7). Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material Is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial sdvrntage, the ACM copyrlght notlce snd the tltle of the publication and Its date appear, and notice Is glven that copying Is by permlssion of the Assoclatlon for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish. requires s fee sndlor speclflc permission.