Book Review: Content Strategy in Technical Communication by Giuseppe, G., Labriola, J.T., & Ruszkiewicz, S.

Abstract

The scholarly field of technical communication became interested in the emerging areas of content development and content management nearly 20 years ago, when Albers and Mazur (2003) introduced “content” as an available term to describe information artifacts (or architecture) and express the complexity in the ways these artifacts are created and consumed. Yet, a quick keyword search within the top academic journals for technical and professional communication yields surprisingly minimal returns on researched discussions about content practices—Rebekka Andersen and Tatiana Batova (2015) published an integrative review that reported only 22 mentions of content management from scholarly sources. The lack of academic resources “to establish firm best practices and suitable pedagogies for this emerging discipline” (p. 1) is what Guiseppe Getto, Jack Labriola, and Sheryl Ruszkiewicz aimed to address in their edited collection, Content Strategy in Technical Communication. As Series Editor Tharon Howard revealed, this collection is the first edited volume about content strategy that included not only the term in its title but more importantly a collection of scholarly voices by those who research and teach content strategy. This collection promised to showcase innovative practices and pedagogies, and identify best practices to meet the current and future needs of technical communication. In their introduction, the editors defined the practice of content strategy as “[planning] for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable information in a repeatable manner by creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet audience needs” (p. 2). This lengthy description in Chapter 1 is used as the basis for the applications, research, and assessment of content strategy work throughout the book. Also included in the editors’ introduction is a preliminary set of best practices based on the pieces curated in this volume. These best practices were sorted into three categories: (1) “strategies for developing and deploying content,” (2) “use of emerging technologies and systems for managing and publishing content,” and (3) “usability and Book Reviews