How Academics and Practitioners Evaluate Technical Texts: A Focus Group Study.

How Academics and Practitioners Evaluate Technical Texts: A Focus Group Study

C. Abbott and P. Eubanks. 2005. Journal of business and technical communication 19:171-218.

"In this study, six focus groups comprising technical communicators and technical communication instructors evaluated and discussed two versions of an instructional manual and two versions of a memo. Findings reveal that the practitioners and academics relied on similar metaphors (including the Conduit Metaphor), metonymies, and constructed scenarios. Although their ways of evaluating texts were broadly similar, practitioners exhibited greater awareness of task-related rhetorical variables whereas academics were more likely to be concerned with textual features and general principles that apply to technical writing tasks. Differences between the groups were particularly evident in discussions of the memo."