Practices of Technical Communication is a textbook website used for the technical communication courses taught by Dr. Tracy Bridgeford at UNO. It includes all course documents required for class discussions, in-class exercises, workshops, and assignments.

You should consider this textbook as a work in progress. Not all links are available yet.Some links are intended for a tuture class.

Focus

This textbook emphasizes the practices of technical communication, that is how works gets done and the contexts of that use, including audience analysis, documentation, collaboration, and assessment. These practices, although similiar across communities, differ in the particular exigencey (urgency of the communication) that grows out of a specific community of practice.

Content Categories

The tabbed links at the top link to each course I teach..When a specific course is clicked, a special tab will appear at the bottom of the right-hand navigation providing links and information to the identified semester's course.

The categories on the right link to all information needed for all classes I teach, including instructor contact information, course policies, forms for assignments, and resources. The second category includes chapters I use for classroom discussion and assigned reading. The third category list any links specific to a class.

Traditional Textbooks

I typically don't have students buy traditional textbooks for several reasons: 1) They cost too much. I think that $80 is too much to spend on a textbook that we'll likely only use five chapters; 2) I don't agree with the content somewhat--many are based on old-fashioned ideas about technical communication; 3) They don't match my communities-of-practice pedagogy; and 4) We are forced to buy the latest versions even though not much has changed.

However, some students do like to have a textbook, to have something to refer to as a reference. In that case, the textbook I like more than the others is Michael Markel's Technical Communication, St. Martin's Press. The current 9th edition sells for $84.50 new, but that edition is not much different from the 8th edition, which I see sells on amazon.com used for $18.59. The 7th edition sells for even cheaper.