By Sam Dragga | Senior Member
I have four news items to share with Intercom readers about STC’s quarterly research journal, Technical Communication.
Article Award
The Conference on College Composition and Communication (the higher education division of the National Council of Teachers of English) will give Technical Communication the 2016 award for Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Technical and Scientific Communication for the article “Dangerous Neighbors: Erasive Rhetoric and Communities at Risk” by Drs. Sam Dragga and Gwendolyn Gong, published in the May 2014 issue. This is a nice recognition of the journal and STC’s support of it; CCCC awards typically go to articles in Sage’s Journal of Business and Technical Communication and Journal of Technical Writing and Communication or Routledge’s Technical Communication Quarterly. Dr. Menno de Jong was the journal editor at the time this article was published.
Cover Competition
The quarterly competition to create the illustration for the journal’s cover is generating growing interest and attention. The February issue’s winning cover is a collaborative effort by Benjamin Lauren, Adam Taylor, and Rebecca Tegtmeyer, all of Michigan State University. The May competition on the topic of “Social Media in Technical Communication ” has closed, but the August competition is still running with a deadline of 1 April for submissions. This time, “Accessibility and Universal Design ” is the topic. Potential illustrations might emphasize ideals and principles of accessibility and universal design, techniques and strategies for implementation, legal and ethical implications, noteworthy successes or failures in achieving accessibility or cultivating universal design, cultural and technological challenges to accessibility and universal design, or unanswered questions and remaining opportunities.
Please submit your illustration (approximately 20×20 cm or 8×8 inches) as a high-resolution (300 dpi) jpg file by April 2016 to tceditor@stc.org with a brief explanation (100-200 words) of how your illustration addresses the topic. Submissions will be anonymously reviewed, and a jury of peers will select the issue’s cover. Honorable mentions will be published inside the journal.
More information is available at the journal’s website at http://techcomm.stc.org/propose-a-cover-illustration.
Special Issues
The November 2016 and February 2017 issues of the journal will be guest-edited special issues. Mike Albers of East Carolina University is already working through the proposals submitted on the subject of “Communication of Research Between Academic and Practicing Professionals ” for the November issue.
Guiseppe Getto of East Carolina University and Huatong Sun of University of Washington Tacoma are accepting 400-word proposals on the subject of “Globalizing User Experience: Strategies, Practices, and Techniques for Culturally Sensitive Design” with a deadline of 15 April. Proposed articles might be on applied research or theory, case histories/studies, tutorials, and/or annotated bibliographies and address a wide array of questions:
- How should technical communicators attend to issues related to user experience within the organizations they work in, and around the products they help deploy, in terms of collaboration, communication, complexity, and change?
- What can technical communicators teach their UX colleagues about cross-cultural and international communication and product deployment?
- How should technical communicators work as user advocates to develop more culturally sensitive design and research methods to address the digital divide between the global north and south?
- What expertise do technical communicators bring to informing innovative practices of work and design to develop a more diverse workplace and a more heterogeneous society?
- How do political, legal, economic, and/or technological issues affect the ways that information products are deployed within local cultures?
- How do cultural differences relating to intellectual property and copyright affect technical communication practices—particularly practices involving globally distributed teams?
In your proposal, please include your name, affiliation, and email address as well as a working title for your proposed article. Direct your completed proposal or questions about proposal topics or this special issue to Guiseppe Getto and Huatong Sun at tc.special.issue@gmail.com.
Q&A
Finally, I’ll acknowledge a failure of mine and that is to generate questions from you about the articles in the journal. I still hope that Q&A will develop as a regular section of the journal, publishing your substantive questions about the articles and allowing authors to answer your questions carefully and thoughtfully. I think this interactive Q&A section would make clear that the articles in Technical Communication are intended to stimulate thinking and conversation across the field and across STC. This section would allow authors and readers to engage each other in rewarding extensions and clarifications of the original article that would inform the practice and teaching of technical communication.
I think questions could easily be 100-200 words, and I anticipate answers of 500-1000 words. As you read through the articles in the journal, please consider questions you would like to ask the authors and email your questions to tceditor@stc.org.
And, as always, if you have questions about the journal (or praise or criticism), I would appreciate getting your message at tceditor@stc.org.
