Memorandum
To: Editing Technical Publications (Eng 4/575) participants
From: Roland Nord
Date: July 28, 2016
Re: Documentation exercise 11—author-year style (Documentation11.docx)
The following exercise is based on the text and reference (works cited) list in
Dragga, Sam, and Dan Voss. 2003. “Hiding humanity: Verbal and visual ethics in accident
reports.” Technical communication 50:61–82.
Read the explanatory information; then, modify the memo headings above, this introductory
section, and the page header; then, complete the exercise (the last section). Save your file as
Documentation11_y3i.docx (e.g., Documentation11_rdn.docx), replacing the y3i with your
three initials.
Citing sources in the article
In the body of the article, when Dragga and Voss cite a source, they place the author’s name
and the year of publication in parentheses. If they use the author’s name as part of the
sentence, they place only the year in parentheses. Note the following paragraphs:
Studies of the Challenger disaster aside (for example, Dombrowski 1991; Winsor 1990),
the writing of accident reports has received limited attention in the field of technical
communication. A pertinent exception would be Beverly Sauer’s research on mining
accidents. She noticed that the language of official narratives “silences the horror of
human suffering and the loss of human life” (Sauer 1993, p. 72), whereas the discussion
of causes is likely to privilege “objectified scientific analysis in which the analyst is an
independent, distanced observer who can rationalize a system in which he is subject
rather than object” (Sauer 1994, p. 405).
Textbooks in the field either ignore the writing of accident reports altogether (for
example, Burnett 2001; Lannon 2000; Lay and others 2000; Pearsall, Cunningham, and
Smith 2000; Pfeiffer 2000; Woolever 1999), give it the briefest of mentions (for instance,
Locker 2000; Markel 2001), or collapse the topic with the discussion of incident reports
on such issues as customer complaints and ma-chine repairs (such as Gerson and
Gerson 2000; Kolin 2001; VanAlstyne 1999). Of all the books we examined, Judith
VanAlstyne’s Professional and technical writing strategies and Philip Kolin’s Successful
writing at work offer the fullest coverage: two pages of guidelines and a one-page sample
accident report. Both encourage writers to be “objective” but to cover all the necessary
details of human injuries; however, in neither of their sample accident re-ports are
people injured, and thus their advice is unsup-ported by practical examples. (61-62)
Your Name
Documentation exercise 11
Page 2
Listing bibliographical entries
When compiling their list of references (or works cited), authors typically list their sources in
alphabetical order, beginning with the author’s last name. The date of publication is always
the second element listed. In addition, authors typically include

the title (of the article and journal, the book, or the presentation and proceedings
title)

the publication information (such as volume, number, and pages; place of
publication and publisher; the conference, city and publisher)
The order of the information varies less than the conventions for capitalization and
punctuation. The best you can do is pay attention to the examples provided in the style guide
that you are to follow or the publication for which you are writing.
Sample entries
I have reproduced the following entries from Dragga and Voss’s list of references:
Dragga, Sam, and Dan Voss. 2001. “Cruel pies: The inhumanity of technical illustrations.”
Technical communication 48:265–274. See also the correspondence in subsequent issues, 48:379
–381 and 49:9 –12.
Markel, Mike. 2001. Technical communication 6th ed. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
National Transportation Safety Board. 1999. Overflow of gasoline and fire at a service station-convenience
store, Biloxi, Mississippi, August 9, 1998. Hazardous Materials Accident Report NTSB/HZM99/02. Washington, DC.
Note that in this journal, titles of articles follow sentence capitalization and appear inside
quotation marks. Many journals and style manuals (such as APA and Chicago style) no
longer require quotation marks around titles of articles; some require title capitalization and
italics for the titles of journals but require sentence capitalization and italics for the title of
books.
Exercise
Using the bibliographic entries above as your guide, correct the following entries. Each entry
contains one or more errors.
Dombrowski, Paul. 1991. The Lessons of the Challenger Investigations. IEEE transactions on
professional communication 34:211–216.
Kolin, Philip C. 2001. Successful writing at work. 6th ed. Boston MA: Houghton mifflin.
Lannon, John M. 2000. Technical Communication 8th ed. New York, NY: Longman.
National Transportation Safety Board. 2000a. Derailment of Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway
Company intermodal freight train S-CHILAC1–31, Crisfield, Kansas, September 2, 1998. Railroad
Accident Report NTSB/RAR- 00/01. Washington, DC.
Sauer, Beverly. 1993. “Sense and sensibility in technical documentation: How feminist
interpretation strategies can save lives in the nation’s mines.” Journal of business and technical
communication 7: 63-83.