Technical Communication and the Content Discipline

This book explores how workflows and technologies that treat content as computable data are changing the roles, work activities, and outputs of professional technical communicators.

It describes how the need for disciplinary approaches to design, manage, and deliver content has given rise to "the content discipline" - content strategy, content design, content engineering, content operations - that increasingly defines a facet of technical communication work in modern organizations. The book draws on extensive research of the content discipline and dozens of interviews with industry leaders, hiring managers and academic administrators, educators, and alumni. These first-hand accounts outline how roles and activities in content organizations are changing, how these changes are impacting hiring needs and practices, and what skills and qualities students and early-career professionals now need to obtain content-related jobs and advance to strategic positions. This book also offers guidance for building curricular pathways that prepare students for work in the content discipline, introduces strategies for partnering with university programs and includes recommendations for onboarding practices.

A thorough assessment of the implications of the content discipline for technical communication, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of technical writing, professional and public writing, content strategy, content marketing and information design.