Solving Problems in Technical Communication

Stories They Tell

“…Business and technical communication scholars explore communication in different “centers of production” (Durack, 1997) that constitute the “world of work” (Miller, 2004). The nature of these centers of production (or workplaces) has shifted dramatically as business and technical communication work has grown (Blythe, Lauer, & Curran, 2014; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2013; Longo, 2000; Pigg, 2014). As the nature of workplace changes, it is fitting to consider how shifting workplace contexts have affected their associative communication artifacts.…”

Race and the Workplace

“…Especially inspirational to this project, Han Yu and Gerald Savage's Negotiating Cultural Encounters: Narrating Intercultural Engineering and Technical Communication is a collection of real-world stories written by technical communicators who narrate the complicated rhetorical and cultural dynamics at play when working in multicultural teams, and each story is followed by a list of related publications and discussion questions (Yu and Savage 2013). Finally, and most recently, the contributors to Solving Problems in Technical Communication, edited by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber, employ contemporary research in the discipline to solve contemporary real-world technical communication problemsincluding those associated with new media, but most notably ethics and intercultural communication-in order to bridge the academicpractitioner and theory-practice splits (Johnson-Eilola and Selber 2013).…”

When Is a Solution Not a Solution? Wicked Problems, Hybrid Solutions, and the Rhetoric of Civic Entrepreneurship

“…Most understandings of entrepreneurship describe it as largely a process of identifying problems, reframing them as opportunities for intervention, and developing innovative solutions that enact change for the benefit of stakeholders (Johnson, 2013; Shane, 2003; Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990). Likewise, Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2013) characterized the technical communicator as one who finds and solves problems. With rapidly changing technologies and the need for a wide range of cross-disciplinary expertise in the workplace, they suggested,technical communicators do not merely learn skills; they must also learn how to learn [emphasis added] new skills, upgrading and augmenting their abilities as they mature in careers, analyzing the matches and mismatches between what they currently know and what a communication situation demands.…[They] must learn to become reflective problem solvers.…”