SUNY, Studies in Technical Communication

Delves into how individuals tactically exist within communicative systems, carving out spaces for themselves in places they don't necessarily fit. In 1984, Michel de Certeau described the terms "strategies" as how institutions communicate their wants/demands/desires and "tactics" as how individuals navigate these potentially hostile, unwelcoming systems. A little over two decades later, Miles A. Kimball solidified the idea of tactical technical communication, laying the foundations for a new area of inquiry and scholarship. Today, many academics and researchers have imbued the concept of tactical technical communication with their own ideas and perspectives. This essay collection spotlights a meaningful diversity of tactical technical communication scholarship, exploring topics like the feminist punk magazine BIKINI KILL, the phenomenon of copwatching, the usage of fictional narratives in technical writing courses, and the challenges of LBGTQ+ visibility in local libraries. In many ways, the contributors are partaking in their own forms of tactical communication as they carve out spaces for themselves and their ideas within the academic discourse.

Traces the linguistic, rhetorical, historical, cultural, and economic origins of our most basic beliefs and practices for successful technical writing to initiate a reckoning about who they serve and who they harm. Busting the Myth of the Communication Metaphor is a transdisciplinary approach to making visible and explaining the multiple origins of why our most basic beliefs about what makes scientific and technical writing successful are wrong, ineffective, and harmful. These tacitly held beliefs and practices, collectively called the Communication Metaphor, stand in as symbolic for a messier, more reality-based understanding of how writing and communication works. By starting from conventional statements made by scientists, technical professionals, and standard textbooks that "successful technical writing is short and to the point, with the facts only, no opinions," the book traces the histories and structures of the multiple elements of the Communication Metaphor. The text synthesizes survey results, multiple strands of scholarship, personal experience, and original illustrations into a powerful argument for imagining a more just approach to scientific and technical writing.

Visual Vestiges explains how information design evolved over the centuries to make practical information clear, credible, and emotionally engaging. In Visual Vestiges Charles Kostelnick analyzes the role of the past in understanding, studying, deploying, and teaching visual language in business, technical, and professional communication. He explores how information designs-text, pictures, icons, charts, and graphs-evolved to develop their rhetorical power and the many ways in which their vestigial forms permeate contemporary design. To explain these temporal dynamics, he examines the forces that underpin them: cultural shifts in aesthetics, taste, and values; social changes that redefine how we relate to one another rhetorically; and innovations in technology that transform the tools and channels we use to visualize and interpret information. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, art history, and historical and contemporary examples, Kostelnick explores the rhetorical role of time in bridging past and present design forms-by constantly regenerating them through visual conventions, by heightening pathos appeals through sentiment and nostalgia, and by bolstering ethos, amplifying epideictic displays, and narrating stories with text, pictures, and charts.