[IEEE IPCC 2005. Proceedings. International Professional Communication Conference, 2005. - Limerick, Ireland (July 7, 2005)] IPCC 2005. Proceedings. International Professional Communication

2005 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings

0-7803-9028-8/05/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE.

Technical Communication and Cross Cultural Miscommunication: Usability and the Outsourcing of Writing

Joseph Jeyaraj Baylor University [email protected]

Abstract

Writing is a culturally situated activity. When writing is outsourced to other cultures, because of a lack of knowledge of the users’ culture and also because of influences from the writer’s local culture, those doing the writing and designing, despite various strategies adopted for overcoming the disadvantage of not knowing the users’ culture, may not know how to culturally situate writing. It is, therefore, important that bicultural people, who know the users’ culture, as well as the culture of those doing the outsourced work, give writing teams feedback about the users’ culture. Doing so can make outsourced writing more culturally situated.

Keywords: writing, outsourcing, cultural situatedness

Writing is a culturally situated activity. When writing is outsourced to other cultures, because of a lack of knowledge of the users’ culture and also because of influences from the writer’s local culture, those doing the writing and design, despite various strategies adopted for overcoming the disadvantage of not knowing the users’ culture, may not know how to culturally situate writing. It is, therefore, important that bicultural people, who know the users’ culture, as well as the culture of those doing the outsourced work, give writing teams feedback about the users’ culture.

While cultural differences depend on various categories like ethnicity, nationality, and profession, my essay focuses on the cultural miscommunication caused by nationality, partly because, in outsourcing, nationality is an important category that causes cultural miscommunication and partly because it would take too much space to

deal with the cultural differences caused by other categories. My essay, therefore, examines writing situations in places like India where writing is outsourced. I study the impact local influences from the culture doing the outsourced work can have on the outsourced writing. I also examine how those doing the writing attempt to sanitize their writing of local influences and, by doing so, deal with the problem of lack of cultural situatedness in the writing. While doing so, I examine outsourced documentation that offers evidence of the difficulties users may have while dealing with such culturally unsituated texts. As a solution, I suggest that bicultural people who know both the users’ culture and the culture of those doing the outsourced work act as resource people to help those doing the outsourced writing understand the users’ culture. Finally, I give examples of culturally situated documentation and point out how, in contrast to culturally unsituated documentation, documentation that is cultural situated greatly helps users.

Outsourcing Writing and Design

In recent times, because of advances in technology, it has become possible to outsource various business processes. What initially began as body shopping increased in scope when North American corporations realized that, instead of bringing people from other cultures to work in the United States, they could, based on advances in telecommunications, take jobs overseas and do more of the same on an expanded scale. The success of such outsourcing also enabled corporations to realize that if people overseas can have the expertise to maintain complex North American business operations from a distance, then advanced intellectual work involving research and design could also be outsourced.

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Hence, big North American corporations like Microsoft, Oracle, General Electric, and others, to name a few, have established cutting-edge research laboratories in places like India. On the other hand, corporations from other parts of the world, such as Cognizant, an Indian I-solutions company based in Madras, have also started producing products for consumers in North America. Cognizant, for instance, has produced a banking product called Flexcube for North American banking operations. It is an application that enables those in the banking industry to bring together data from different banking operations and slice and dice the data for different purposes. This trend has resulted in corporations realizing that if they can find people with good writing skills overseas, then it would be equally easy to outsource the documentation accompanying various outsourced business processes and the documentation for various products developed overseas.

As a result, increasingly we have a form of globalization where people in one culture may not only be maintaining business processes and designing new products for those in another, but also producing the documentation for those products and business processes. According to a report filed by an Indian technical writer, Marakand Pandit, on STC’s India chapter’s website, in a country like India where much of the outsourcing is happening, there are about 2,500 technical writers with scope for 10,000 more. According to this technical writer, Indian technical writers do tasks such as writing Installation and Configuration Guides, User’s/Administrator’s Guides, Context Sensitive Help, Application Programming Interface Documentation, and other Product Support Materials. In more recent times, Indian technical writers have also been asked to design company profiles, test applications, and review user interfaces for inconsistencies. Hence, we have numerous situations where those who do not know the user culture are designing products and writing the documentation for those products. Since both documentation and product development are culturally situated activities, outsourced writing and product development can greatly suffer in usability if those doing the product development and the documentation accompanying those products do not have an understanding of the users’ culture.

Local Influences and Pedagogies Some data has emerged to confirm that this is a problem when writing is outsourced to countries like India. The education system in India is a legacy of the colonial educational system created by the British. A large body of scholarly literature, such as Gauri Viswanthan’s Masks of Conquest,argues that the British taught Indians English with the goal of training Indians to function well in a British colonial system. This educational system, therefore, focused on the study of literature and grammar, and this approach was widely adopted in most Indian universities even for the English courses that were prerequisites for all university students. Although some attempts have been made to make the English curriculum more suited to today’s needs in postcolonial India, still not a lot of change has occurred to the literary focus of the English curriculum.

A case in point is Madras University located in the Madras metropolitan area, a major site for business process outsourcing and overseas product development. Madras University supplies thousands of graduates for the many organizations located in Madras doing the work outsourced from countries like the United States. If one were to examine the English curriculum for the mandatory English courses for this university, one notices the dominance of literary study in the curriculum. A major aspect of the curriculum includes the study of various British literary works. Coming from such a pedagogical tradition, Indian writers are influenced by writing models from British literary culture from another time. The study of this literature is complemented by the study of grammar so that students are knowledgeable about the mechanics of writing correct English.

However, it should be kept in mind that these literary texts were written to represent, from a certain perspective, certain aspects of twentieth and nineteenth century British culture. When students analyze these texts, they cannot do so without becoming deeply involved in the worlds these texts from nineteenth and twentieth century British culture encode. This pedagogy, therefore, operates on the premise that a study of these texts exposes students to sophisticated English language texts and that such exposure, by making second language and replacement mother tongue speakers of English familiar with sophisticated literary

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usage, can also increase their English language skills. This curriculum also operates on the premise that, since such literary analyses develop thinking skills, doing these analyses will enable writers to think creatively in other intellectual situations including those involving professional writing.

I am not saying that any of these assumptions are invalid. Reading literary texts may improve students’ English and analyzing them may also make students intellectually creative. However, considering the manner in which technology has developed in our time, increasingly most human beings deal with technology of some complexity in different walks of life. Technical writing has, therefore, increasingly acquired specialized forms in order to help users use these complex technologies. Hence, just reading sophisticated literary texts and writing responses to these texts will not, in themselves, teach students to become skilled technical writers who can communicate effectively with specific audiences. Furthermore, since outsourced product development and the technical documentation for such products is being done for users in contemporary Western cultures, studying British texts from a different era will not teach students the cultural codes of users’ cultures. As a result, the curriculum, such as the one at Madras University, operates on the premise that technical writing does not require any specialized knowledge of user culture and as long as one can read and write good English one should also be able to produce good technical documentation. Such a curriculum, therefore, also operates on the premise that language is a transparent medium that can communicate content seamlessly across cultures as long as one focuses on writing simple, clear, plain English. That is why it is not a problem if Indian students study literary texts from a different time and culture. This approach does not acknowledge that there are aspects of language that are mediated by culture and that if one wants to write across cultures one should be aware of such cultural mediations and situate writing to take into account those mediations.

Such a lack of a good curriculum to prepare international technical writers is further compounded by the fact that some of the negative practices associated with technical writing in North America have been transplanted into those international writing situations as well. In the early stages of the development of technical writing in North America, because of a lack of understanding

of the importance of writing, many without a writing background were asked to write technical documentation. As corporations outsource in the hope, among other things, of keeping costs down, they have, in the same manner, been replicating these outdated practices by trying to recruit technical writers without much discrimination. For instance, a job advertisement for a technical writer from STC India’s blog is as follows:

“Posted by kiruba Comments 2 - Apr 22, 2004Job Opening at Dhyan Infotech – ChennaiHere are the details * No of Position: 1 * Position: Technical Writer * Start Date: Immediate * Work Experience: 2 to 3 yrs * Qualification: MBA Data Analysis & possess very good communication skills. You can get in touch with ...Kavitha Jayaprakash, ([email protected] )”

As this advertisement shows, what the organization required was a Masters Degree in Business Administration and good communication skills. Those advertising did not have enough understanding of writing to ask for people with good writing skills, much less knowledge of the users’ culture. Hence, according to a report in TheTimes of India, one of India’s leading English language newspapers, in India people consider “technical writing as a back-door entry to the once glamorous software industry. Others infer that technical writing is taken up by those people whose writing is not good enough to get them writing jobs and who are technically not sound enough to become programmers. Within the software community, technical writing is relegated low down in the hierarchy, even below the quality assurance guys.” That is why in a roundtable discussion involving representatives from STC, the Bay Area Publication Managers Forum, the National Writers Union, and the Director of San Jose State’s Technical Writer Certification Department on the offshoring of technical writing, those participating in the discussion brought up the point that when writing is offshored, one should expect “multiple rewrites and a long learning curve even with good documentation process in place because of using writers” with, among other things, “communication/cultural differences.” Gurudutt Kamath, senior international technical writer, therefore, complains that “one of the

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biggest frauds being perpetuated in India is that it is a must for technical writers to know certain tools. If you do not know FrameMaker you are not a technical writer! If you do not know RoboHelp you don’t stand a chance as a technical writer!”

Local Strategies and Cultural Unsituatedness

Lacking knowledge of rhetoric and writing, these technical writers have followed an approach based on functionality and simplicity in order to make the writing clear and simple. However, since usability is culturally situated, the manner in which products are used and the ease with which documents are read depend on the extent to which products and the writing of documentation to explain those products are culturally situated. That international technical writers lack knowledge of users’ culture can be seen from advice offered by some international technical communicators. Anjali Patil, an Indian technical writer, in her PowerPoint presentation on Twin-India, India’s first online technical writing website, suggests that technical writers should know who the reader is, how much information the reader needs, what the readers’ “knowledge base” is, the readers’ purpose for the information, what the “reader’s sensitivities” and “biases” are, and the amount of time the reader has. However, there is not much information on who these readers are and the manner in which the document should be culturally situated to their needs.

Instead, Patil further offers a series of suggestions that operate on the principle that language can, as a transparent medium, communicate content without any problems across cultures. Most of these suggestions this writer gives are abstract principles. The author does not explain how these principles should be applied in particular cultural contexts. For instance, the author suggests that following a chronological, psychological, general to specific, problem to solution, whole to parts, most important to least important, comparison/contrast, cause/effect, or a spatial approach would be good strategies to consider for organizing documents. Similarly, when this writer offers advice for designing documents, she suggests that writers consider using, enumerated lists, visual elements, shorter sentences, headers and footers, white space, etc. If one were to make these suggestions culturally situated, one will need to explain how users, based on their cultural situatedness, will respond to these strategies in

different contexts. The only advice offered by this writer, which showed a semblance of knowledge of cultural situatedness, involved cultural data that could be easily quantified and packaged. She advises other Indian writers to use spell check for British or American spelling and to avoid biases based on race, gender, and ability.

In order to keep the documentation simple and clear, she advises writers to be themselves and not imitate experts, use simple words and simple and short sentences, repeat nouns for avoiding ambiguity, avoid euphemisms, use bias-free communication, keep the text concise, etc. This same emphasis on simplicity, in order to avoid committing any mistakes, is also evident in the suggestions given by other Indian technical writers on this website. By focusing on such abstract principles and emphasizing simplicity and clarity, these writers, without really knowing the users’ culture, try to avoid as many cultural mistakes as they can. To some extent they are partially successful because, in doing so, they are able to avoid obvious mistakes that may arise from cultural differences that are the product of the writers’ pedagogical tradition and culture.

For instance, a report titled “Writing Technically with a Flourish” claims that the circumlocutory prose Indians typically write is the product of a Victorian/banyia (business) English peculiar to postcolonial Indian discourses. Furthermore, this report also claims that because Indian languages tend to emphasize nouns, Indian English, influenced by these languages, also tend to do the same. An approach based on functionality and simplicity has the potential to eliminate some of these obvious Indian cultural influences. However, as a strategy, it is only partially effective. Gurudutt Kamth, a senior Indian technical writer, makes this point in an article titled “To Err in English” in TheIndian Express, another of India’s leading English language newspapers. He points out that if technical writing by an Indian writer is reviewed by “a good American editor,” because of the “many Indianisms in English” many “errors will spew out” and the “page will be riddled with revision marks and question marks” with “some usage not understood at all.” He also points out that one of the biggest problems among Indian technical communicators is their lack of understanding of audience.

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A case in point is, therefore, the abstract suggestions offered by Patil, the Indian technical writer I quoted earlier. Among other things, she suggests that technical communicators should use visual elements. Visual text, as in the case of any other text used for communicating meaning, is culturally situated. For instance, the colors one uses can have culture-specific meanings and culture-specific associations that could affect a documents’ usability. A color used in one context in one culture may have certain meanings that, if used in a different context, may connote inappropriate meanings. For instance, Huatong points out that red as a color means danger in American culture. However, as a color it is also an “eye catcher.” So how can one use red appropriately in documentation for North Americans without first knowing North American culture?

Similarly, the manner in which products are used are also culturally situated, and if a product’s design is not culturally situated, then the writing, while instructing users, needs to help them by pointing out the difficulties caused by the product’s lack of cultural situatedness. In American culture, it is important to give feedback. In any walk of life ranging from teaching to having conversations, Americans do a fair amount of reality testing by getting feedback on those activities. In conversations, for instance, Americans may typically ask listeners if they are being tracked or if everyone is on the same page. Hence, it could reasonably be argued that Americans expect immediate feedback while using processes and expect confirmation that they are completing these processes successfully.

Bicultural Resource People and Cultural Situatedness

Recently, while filling out the application form for a conference, I was using screens produced by the Indian software company Tata Consultancy Services. Page one asked me to fill out my personal information and page two asked me to fill out information from my credit card to pay for the conference registration. Once I filled out my credit card numbers in the appropriate boxes, I clicked on the final box titled “submit.” Following that I exited the process and there was no confirmation in the form of a message to confirm that my credit card number had been accepted and that the process had been successfully completed. In such a situation, the instructions on the page for

registering for the conference could have mentioned that clicking the submit button was enough and that one need not expect another screen confirming the registration. Even though this may seem to be a minor inconvenience, mentioning that there would be no confirmation would, by making concessions to aspects of the users’ culture, make the instructions more culturally situated. It would remove any anxiety in the users’ mind as to whether they had successfully registered for the conference. (Many North American online conference registration forms, following electronic registration, will automatically send confirmation through e-mail.) However much one may instruct writers to use simple and clear language to write instructions, those instructions cannot be culturally situated unless writers have an in-depth understanding of the users’ culture and know when product design is not culturally situated and what they need to do to compensate for lack of such cultural situatedness.

It would, therefore, be very productive to have someone who is bicultural and can work with writers from the culture doing the outsourced work to give inputs that will make outsourced documentation culturally situated. Knowledge of the users’ culture would be indispensable for someone to give this kind of input. Knowledge of the culture doing the outsourced work would be an added bonus because it would enable such a person to understand why there are differences between both cultures and offer explanations to the writers as to why these cultural differences exist. Being able to offer such explanations will enable writers to apply these concepts intelligently whenever necessary in different situations instead of needing the bicultural person to blindly tell them what to do whenever they encounter such situations.

For example, it would be good if a bicultural person could explain to Indian technical writers why it is important for Americans to expect feedback and, following that, why if product design does not offer users proper feedback, they need to make up for such lacunae in product design. Doing so would defuse potential user anxiety by pointing out that in such cases it is okay if they do not get feedback confirming successful completion of the process. The bicultural person could explain to Indian technical writers that, because in Indian culture people may not receive feedback to the extent they do in American culture, Indian writers may not realize that the lack of

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feedback in product design may cause anxiety and hence, as writers, their writing, if it is to be culturally situated, should deal with such anxieties.

A variety of people have the potential to serve as bicultural resource people for helping international technical writers produce culturally situated documentation for North American users. The most obvious examples of those who could be bicultural writers would be those from the culture where the outsourced work is being done who come to the users’ culture to pursue their education. When students move from one culture to another, they experience a certain amount of cultural reframing. Many students from countries like India are able to get educated in North America because of graduate assistantships. These assistantships, whether they involve teaching or research, force these foreign students to learn salient aspects of the host country’s culture. This is especially the case if non-native graduate assistants are asked to teach. Usually universities give them a modest amount of cultural training, training that has the potential to build in them templates and categories to read differences between their culture and the new culture.

Many of these international students eventually graduate and take jobs in various North American organizations, thus further developing their understanding of North American culture. I am not saying that many of these immigrant students will become completely fluent in North American culture. Although it is impossible to become culturally literate like the natives, many of these former students will acquire different levels of fluency in the host culture, fluency that has enabled them to function successfully in North American culture. If one can select such bicultural people who, irrespective of their disciplinary background, have good writing skills and have functioned successfully in American culture, I would argue that they have enough cultural literacy to know enough about the users’ culture to serve as resource people and reviewers for international writers producing outsourced technical documentation for North American users. In fact, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that, among other things, an important reason why it is easier to outsource to India, as opposed to other destinations, is the availability of such bicultural Americans. Many new ventures that outsource work to India have many of these former students working for these ventures. As bicultural

workers, these students can help overcome situations where cross-cultural miscommunication can happen.

Alternatively, it would also be helpful to have as resource people those native to the culture outsourcing the work who have had experiences in the culture where the outsourcing is taking place. If those native to the host culture spend a lot of time in the culture where the outsourcing is happening, then just like the bicultural students from the cultures doing the outsourced work, they too will be forced to learn about the culture where the outsourced work is being done in order to function successfully in that culture. Or even if they have worked with groups of people from specific parts of the world over time, then they will have the opportunity to know the obvious cultural differences that exist between people from those cultures and the users’ culture. Such bicultural people will, because of their awareness of differences between cultures, have the templates and categories for identifying such differences even if they were asked to work in other new cultures.

Jennifer Rush, one such bicultural person, gives examples of how she was able to help in situations where cross cultural miscommunication was happening. At its simplest, cross-cultural miscommunication can occur because of erroneous word choice, something that neither international spell check nor grammar check can catch. In one such case of cross-cultural miscommunication, Pakistani accountants were confused when the documentation for accounting software used the term “posts.” This bicultural person who knew American English but who also had experience working through cultural differences with people from different cultures had the skill to figure out that for the Pakistanis posts were something that one stuck in the ground, and the term that communicated for them the meaning of the word post from American English was position.

Or as Kuusto, quoting Kenneth Keniston, points out, if bicultural resource people were to work for technical writers producing documentation for products used in Argentina, they would know that because of the communal nature of this country’s culture people from this country’s culture are comfortable doing group work. They would, therefore, also know that programs that encourage such group work would work very well in that

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culture. Hence, if they were to help create the documentation for a culturally unsituated software program for school students that emphasized individual and not group behavior, it would be easy for such bicultural people to understand the difficulties students from this communal culture would have using such a program. They could, therefore, help the technical writers incorporate measures the documentation could take to deal with these difficulties. It would have been better if, in the first place, the program’s design had been culturally situated, but, if it is not, then those writing the documentation can use their cultural understanding to improve the program’s usability by offering explanations for overcoming such a lack of cultural situatedness in design.

There is a belief in international technical communication that if one strives for simplicity then that will result in erasure of alien cultural features that will confuse users. Simplicity may, as I have already pointed out, enable writers to weed out obvious alien cultural features such as the Indianisms that I referred to earlier. Simplicity, as a strategy, can, therefore, help the writer avoid sins of commission, but it cannot proactively improve usability because it cannot deal with the sins of cultural omission. Such sins of omission involve aspects of communication that would be more difficult to quantify in the form of a tip or some other clearly-defined piece of information. For instance, many writers from countries belonging to the British Commonwealth write a version of British English. As Rush points out, since the British tend to be more formal in their speech, that feature spills over into their writing as well. On the other hand, Americans prefer direct communication, something that can be perceived as rude by those used to British English and culture. Hence, phraseology, which is the product of cultural situatedness, is hard to quantify and having bicultural people work with international writers writing outsourced texts will enable these writers from the former British colonies to get feedback on using American phraseology. Or, as I mentioned earlier, red as a color can mean danger in American culture. However, as a color it is also an “eye catcher.” While creating graphics, if one follows the rule of simplicity and uses just black and white and avoids using colors, one can lose the chance of improving usability by using colors proactively. Because of its “eye catching” qualities for American audiences, depending on the context,

it may be possible to use red proactively in order to improve the interface’s usability.

Culturally Situated Texts: A Text for Dummies

The popular American series for Dummies on different topics is a case in point. This series produced in North America takes full advantage of various cultural features familiar to United States audiences and produces narratives that, in being proactive in its attempts to culturally situate documentation, help audiences deal with different applications and topics. Because of its proactive approach, this instructional material not only avoids sins of commission, but also sins of cultural omission. Hence, this series has become so popular that one can find a book for dummies on almost any topic, including sex, and one can even find these books prescribed at universities as course textbooks. Here is a short passage from the book Word 2000 for Dummies involving a situation where those using the software application Word 2000 cannot undo an action they have completed. This passage partially illustrates how this book proactively situates itself culturally:

“Can’t Undo? Here’s why . . . Sometimes it eats you alive that Word can’t undo an action. On the menu bar you even see the message Can’t Undo. What gives?

“Essentially, whatever action you just did, Word can’t undo it. This result can be true for a number of reasons: There is nothing to undo; not enough memory is available to undo,’ Word can’t undo because what you did was too complex; Word just forgot; Word hates you; and so on.

“I know it is frustrating, but everyone has to live with it” (p. 58).

There are many rhetorical features in this short passage that are very appealing for American users. By positioning itself as a book for dummies, the book, in seeming to make fun of users, is actually saying with humor that it is going to work hard to be nice to readers. Within the passage itself, there is a high level of informality that most international technical communicators would find shocking. The phraseology, based on colloquial American English, is punctuated with humor. Most international technical communicators would say

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that the humorous fictitious reasons the narrative offers for why Word cannot undo the action is just redundant and should not be in the text. But the text, in allowing such redundancies for the sake of including local humor, communicates to the reader that it understands the users’ frustration when poor product design prevents users from undoing something. In doing so, it also exhibits another American cultural trait: it is okay to be vulnerable and acknowledge design problems in the product if there are any. By doing so, for users the instructions are not only understandable and enjoyable but also trustworthy.

Such cultural situatedness defines all aspects of this book’s content. Hence, among the other subcategories it has for organizing content, it even has a subcategory titled “technical stuff” for non essential information. Even the visual icon indicating this category, has a box with a cartoon figure of a “nerd,” a uniquely American stereotype of those considered bookish and brainy. By doing so, the narrative tells users that if they do not care about the features dealt with in this subcategory that it is no slur on their character because only boring, bookish people who are not very practical in the first place would find those aspects of the application useful. I am not saying that international technical writers should be able to necessarily produce narratives that are so culturally well situated. However, I believe that if bicultural communicators work with international technical writing teams, they can begin improving usability by not only avoiding obvious sins of cultural commission but also proactively avoiding even sins of cultural omission.

Cultural situatedness is necessary if technical documentation is to score high on usability. Bicultural people, in having an understanding of the users’ culture and the culture doing the outsourcing, have the potential to serve as reviewers and resource people for those writing the outsourced documentation. If bicultural people are able to give useful cross-cultural inputs, they can not only enable international technical communicators to avoid committing cultural faux pas, but, in addition, can also teach them to proactively incorporate aspects of the users’ culture to better facilitate communication. Doing so will greatly enhance the documentation’s usability.

References

[1] Anjali Patil, “Technical Writing Process.” May 2002. Available: http://www.twin-india.org/Download.html

[2] Dan Gookin, Word 2000 for Windows for Dummies. Chicago: IDG Books, 1999.

[3] Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest:Literary Study and British Rule in India. NewYork: Columbia UP, 1989.

[4] Gurudutt Kamath. (2003, Jun. 23). Writing Right: “I Can Learn.” Indian Express. Expressitpeople.com [Online]. Available: http://www.expressitpeople.com/20030623/careers1.shtml

[5] ---. (2002, Aug. 12). To Err in English. Indian Express [Online]. Available: http://www.expressitpeople.com/20020812/careers1.shtml.

[6] Huatong Sun, “Why cultural contexts are missing: A rhetorical critique of localization practices,” in Proc. 49th Society for Technical Communication Conf. 2002, pp. 90-95. Available: http://www.stc.org/confproceed/2002/PDFs/STC49-00090.PDF.

[7] (2004, April 22). Job Opening at Dhyan Infotech – Chennai. Available: http://techwriting.blogdrive.com/

[8] Rush, Jennifer, Write Globally, Use Locally. TWIN, Technical Writers of India Available: http://www.twin-india.org/Global.html.

[9] H. Marjo Kuusto, “English in Technical Communication – Global Language, Global Culture?” in Proc. 48th Society for Technical Communication Conf. 2001, pp. 141-146. Available:http://www.stc.org/confproceed/2001/PDFs/STC48-000141.PDF

[10] Makarand Pandit. (2003, Mar.). “Technical Writing in 1993 and 2003.” STC India INDUS [Online]. Available: http://www.stc-india.org/indus/032003/mpandit.htm.

[11] Bay Area Publication Managers Forum, “Offshoring of Technical Writing: Roundtable

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Meeting Abridge Notes – July 24th 2003.” Available:http://www.bapmf.net/2003/TWritingOffSHNoteK1.pdf

[12] Suresh Nair. (2002, Mar. 16). “The Write Stuff,” The Times of India [Online]. Available: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com//articleshow/msid-3900424,prtpage-1.cms?

[13] “Writing Technically with a Flourish.” Ians. Available:http://www.newindpress.com/Newsitems.asp?ID=IEN20021126230849&Page=N&Title=Infotech&rLink=0.

About the Author

Joseph Jeyaraj, Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University, received his Ph.D. from Illinois State University. He has created the new field of postcolonial technical communication by using postcolonial theory to study important aspects of technical and professional writing. He also does research in the area of pedagogical theory and teaches Technical and Professional Writing and Postcolonial Literature at Baylor University.

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