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The evolution of technical communication conventions in America is more anthropologically complex than the traditional linkage to the scientific plain-style tradition suggests. Analysis of leading ideas in early 20th-century engineering writing textbooks and other primary sources demonstrates that disciplinary discourse conventions develop from an intricate nexus of human motivations, beliefs, and social activity. This article explores currents in American social and intellectual history that explain this complex, sophisticated view of language, which combines a rhetorically sensitive formalism with the ideas of professional literacy and cultural reading to facilitate communication with various audiences and to reinforce the status and dignity of the emerging profession.

An experimental investigation was conducted into augmentation of forced convection heat transfer in air by mechanical removal of the boundary layer. A rotating blade element passing in close proximity to a flat plate convective surface was found to increase the rate of convective heat transfer by up to eleven times in certain situations. The blade element effectively scrapes away the boundary layer, thus reducing the resistance to heat flow. Parameters investigated include scraping frequency, scraper clearance, and type of boundary layer. Increased coefficients were found for higher scraping frequencies. Significant augmentation was obtained with clearance as large as 0.15 in. (0.0038 m) between the moving blade element and the convective surface. The technique appears most useful for laminar and transitional boundary layers, although some improvement was obtained for the turbulent boundary layers investigated. The simple surface renewal theory developed for scraped surface augmentation in liquids was found to approximately predict the coefficients obtained. A new relation is proposed which gives a better prediction and includes the effect of scraper clearance.

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of “suggestion letters” written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

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