Abstract
Bridgeford's edited collection, Teaching Content Management in Technical and Professional Communication, provides a meaningful, necessary foundation for content management pedagogy. Overall, the collection provides strategies, assignments, and pedagogical support that teachers and practitioners will find useful across a variety of contexts. Published as part of the ATTW book series in technical and professional communication (TPC), this collection fills several needs at once. Current teachers will find detailed class assignments fitting for 1st-year TPC courses. Graduate teaching assistants and program directors will discover core readings to support the growth of graduate teacher training programs, and employed practitioners will find testimonies, narratives, and institutional analysis strategies to both expand and localize their expertise.
Bridgeford breaks the 12-chapter collection into four single-word sections: Definitions, Teaching, Tasks, and Community. Each chapter has key takeaways and includes subheadings and tables that summarize foundational approaches to TPC and content management, making the book impactful and generally digestible, as far as academic readings go. Bridgeford's introduction affirms single-source authoring and a need to shift how we approach the craft tradition, advocating for a more collaborative, networked agency as part of a “system built on trust gained through the construction of shared content models and standards” (p. 2).
The two chapters in the first section include meaningful histories and definitions of content management. In the first chapter, Pullman and Gu compare the “old” and “new” forms of technical products and give a brief summary of content management software to help readers shift focus. They also highlight the need to separate form and content and advocate for single-source authoring by better defining and parsing out content and related terminology. In the second chapter, Carliner builds on these ideas with vignettes of the possible divergent experiences of technical communicators. Each vignette is designed to show students a different way that they may have to apply their expertise. Anchoring to the competencies for technical communicators laid out by the Society for Technical Communication while highlighting their limited nature, Carliner includes multiple tables to draw connections to the broader competencies needed and how these could appear in a TPC course.
The five chapters in the second section focus on developing expertise with particular components of content management: Content strategy, topic-based writing, usability studies, extensible markup language (XML), and social media (SM) tools. Each chapter provides well-articulated and substantive activities. First, Potts and Gonzales provide connections between content strategy and technical writing alongside assignments designed to better connect academia with emerging industry practices. They walk through their selected readings interspersed with assignments focused on landscape/competitive analysis, tone and style guides including student-generated templates, and a multistep content-strategy document with both a metadata strategy and a governance plan followed by reflective analysis.
Next, Cleary advocates for a topic-focused strategy based on Baker's every page is page one (EPPO) approach. Cleary contextualizes a minimalist approach and opens a deeper conversation about structured content
Then Gesteland's chapter focuses on a 4000-level course in content management. The course sequence develops XML proficiencies and advocates for a hand-coding practice with a sense of professional responsibility. While extremely practical, the chapter also provides a well-articulated list of readings for each step of the course. Gesteland not only presents these readings in a one-page list but intersperses them throughout the various activity explanations, providing both a helpful outline and a roadmap with step-by-step directions. Finally, Hurley and Hea's chapter provides an effective introduction to the content management of SM, recommending SM aggregating technologies (Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer), discussing effective dashboard use and analytics strategies followed by three unique assignments (SM analysis, SM technology quick reference cards, and SM campaign design). This chapter helps us to continue shifting focus to single-source authoring and seeing the technical communicator as a project and content manager who makes data-driven and kairotically effective decisions for particular platforms.
The two chapters in the third section focus on providing heuristics of engagement for technical and professional communicators. Davis and Eble's chapter articulates processes and provides sample scenarios for inclusive audience analysis. The authors supplement the larger conversations in the discipline surrounding equity and inclusivity that have been reinforced by the ATTW's 2022 theme of reimagining just futures and provide groundwork for St.Amant's chapter in the final section. Davis and Eble apply a content management system (CMS) ecologies heuristic to engage community partners and conduct content audits in order to ensure inclusive practices based on language and culture and socioeconomic access. They provide a six-step approach and application scenario, closing with two student-targeted scenarios for increasing student awareness. In the following chapter, Swarts, with his expected acumen, continues the DITA conversation, explaining the bilocational and translocation affordances of this expertise. He advocates for a project-based approach, reinforcing Gesteland's previous encouragement of lived experience practicing the language. Swarts pushes students deeper by asking them to consider metastructures and common information types across genres. He advocates visual mapping of DITA concepts, tasks, and references to help students gain greater literacy with the structuring language. Next, he encourages students to reuse the content in order to enhance bilocational awareness and then practice writing context-free content through modeling, mapping, and metadata in order to develop a translocational orientation. Swarts substantiates the benefit of DITA-structured authoring of context-free content despite some objections, sharing that “while the technology can hamper some elements of creativity, it can also open new possibilities for rhetorical expression” (p. 171).
The three chapters in the fourth and final section step beyond content creation. First, Hart-Davidson and Lauren's chapter provides a macro perspective case study of a newly promoted manager, Addie, paralleling the style of Carliner's vignette to illuminate the role of the technical writer as a content steward or manager of texts, people, and projects. Reinforcing themes found in other parts of the collection, the authors discuss the professional valuing of distributed writing and present the practical comparison of technical writers to gardeners or chefs. Turning to Carolyn Miller's foundational TPC article, they reinforce the humanity of TPC, sharing that a “writing steward … finds a new priority…: keeping a content team healthy, happy, and productive” (p. 188). The authors include a few versatile activity prompts for students to consider how others contribute to TPC projects and how to manage that interaction effectively. Finally, the chapter presses readers to present students with a longitudinal trajectory of TPC work beyond just content generation.
Next, St.Amant's chapter, like Davis and Eble's chapter, addresses global and cross-cultural concerns about a CMS. He emphasizes variations in cultural credibility, changing expectations, and requisite genre shifting. The author also engages these ideas at the organizational level, where, for quality assurance, writing stewards might need to establish clear guidelines about the distributed production of content and the approval process, including restricting final publishing authority. St.Amant lays out an assignment sequence and sample questions for an online comparative analysis that is designed to include cultural interviews. The chapter concludes by highlighting the value of single-sourced, distributed writing for more effective cross-cultural communication design.
The final chapter is an Afterword, in which Evia and Andersen look at possible futures for TPC pedagogy and beyond and the larger professional responsibility of technical writers. Building on the work of Gollner, they articulate the trajectory of Content 1.0 to 4.0 and its application to industry. The authors also describe key forces that will continue to influence technical writers, content managers, teachers, and students across the branches of the discipline: Force 1, publishing to many channels and many devices; Force 2, providing a seamless content experience; Force 3, redefining our relationship to the subject matter; and Force 4, continually developing content. They describe a synthesizing approach that introduces ContentOps as well as a more granular approach for content strategy, engineering, and management. The chapter and collection closes with a call to continued responsibility: Evia and Andersen remind us of TPC's unique (among its peers) need to stay at the forefront of industry and technology. That is, TPC has a unique position and exigency to leverage the educational enterprise and embody the mission of lifelong learning. I cannot help but read this collection and the last chapter without considering the technological and cultural forces surrounding me: Writers Guild striking in response to GPT4, OpenAI and the Associated Press holding contract negotiations, and my own institution launching its first bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Professional communicators are now more than ever entering constantly shifting contexts, and the need to teach content management and flexible approaches to more than just text and content generation has never seemed more necessary.