Communicators have greatly influenced the fields

communicators have greatly influenced the field's current pedagogical resources as is
evidenced by the many advanced textbooks on publications management, the
documentation process, and usability testing.
For a view on how technical communication educators are preparing students for
success in the workplace, I have tumed to, among other sources, the Allyn and Bacon
Series in Technical Communication. This is an appropriate source because of the breadth
of topics covered, the target audiences, and the recent publication dates of books within
the series. The series covers topics including editing, software documentation, usability
testing, international communication, ethics, web design, oral presentations, technical
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marketing, proposals, style, and visual language. These topics include many of the areas
technical communication practitioners and educators alike have identified as essential for
success in the workplace.
The range of topics covered is impressive; however, the target audience and how
the books in the series view that audience are more important for to my research.
According to the series editor, Sam Dragga, the primary audience for the series is
undergraduate and graduate students in technical communication programs. This
audience moves beyond the audience that constitutes the majority of students taking a
technical communication course. The series is focused on students who are likely to enter
the workforce as technical communicators and, according to Dragga, they need an
education that is grounded in both theory and practice. The books in this series are "a
direct response to both the educational needs of students and the practical demands of
business and industry." This series reflects a change in the way we view our students and
the realities of the workforce. Our students have the opportunity and potential to impact
the workplace in exciting ways—"to operate effectively .... today's students require
extensive training in the creation, analysis, and design of information for both domestic
and international audiences, for both paper and electronic environments" (xix). Notice
that the editor's focus is on creation, analysis, and design; this focus reflects an important
shift in technical communication education away from the single page and clear
transferring of information to making practitioners an integral part of the larger
management and production process. This points to a larger, more connected role for
technical communicators that gives them a contextual and systems orientation.

Viewing the practitioner's role in such an expansive way has been discussed for
many years, and the books in this series make this connection very concrete and current.
All of the advanced books in this series have been published since 1998, with five
published in 2002. Most of the books (Dombrowski, 2000; Rude, 2002; Kostelnick &
Roberts, 1998; Farkas & Farkas, 2002; Hamer &. Zimmerman, 2002; Johnson-Sheehan,
2002) have a strong focus on process, complexity, and problem solving and, although