Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

Designing For A Japanese High-Context Culture: Culture's Influence On The Technical Writer's Visual Rhetoric, Russell Carpenter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the challenges technical writers face when designing documents for high-context cultures, such as the Japanese. When developing documents intended to cross cultural gulfs, technical writers must take into consideration cultural expectations, preferences, and practices in document design and communication. High-context cultures, such as Japan, design documents using drastically different design strategies than those used in the United States. Japanese communication habits are more ambiguous than communication in the United States. Thus, the Japanese often use visuals for their aesthetic appeal, not for their ability to complement the text that surrounds the visual. The ambiguous nature of high-context …

The Technical Communication Industry : A Study Of Today's Job Requirements In The United States, Maria Conte

Theses

Technical communication, "the process of gathering information from experts and presenting it to an audience in a clear, easily understandable form," (Society for Technical Communication) has grown more popular in the last decade, even as an academic discipline (Staples and Omatowski xi).

The growth of the technical communication profession has led to an increase in skill requirements needed to obtain a position as a practitioner.

This study, using Glaser and Strauss' Grounded-Theory approach, identified the requirements of today's technical communication job candidates by examining recent technical communication job advertisements in ten of the top newspapers in the United States. The …