ABSTRACT
Gathering, shaping, and delivering information-these are the critical processes of technical communication. Rapid advances in technology make teaching these processes both easier and more complex. Whereas teachers and students have ready access to efficient distribution tools like e-mail and the Web, any given audience has varied levels of access, experience, and confidence using e-mail or viewing web pages. Thus, keeping both rhetorical approaches and modern design problems in mind is vital, as Honeycutt and McGrane (chap. 4) point out in this text. And as Salvo (chap. 3) and Pullman (chap. 2) argue in their chapters, technical communicators must be taught how to be information architects. Technical communicators must know how to organize vast amounts of information to build complete and rich presentations of data sets. Indeed, technical communicators must gather, shape, and deliver information kairotically.
