Technical communication is grounded in research: technical communicators often work closely with subject matter experts (SME) to articulate complex information to a non-expert audience. Further, technical communicators often must conduct their own research, both to inform their approach to a given communication task and to create their content. Research happens at various stages of the communication process, and informs the work that technical communicators do.

Research, proper citation of sources, and ethical and accurate use of data, are key components of technical communication. Because technical communicators work to explain things to a target audience, research is a crucial part of that work. In the previous section, we focused on the importance of receiving feedback during the revising and editing stages of a project. This type of feedback can also be framed as research, since technical communicators are gathering data and then making decisions based on what this data suggests. So, they use research to inform their approach to a given task. Technical communicators also must gather research when developing genres such as proposals, reports, and instructions in order to be sure that they are communicating accurate, appropriate information to their audience. You can read more about these genres in Section 4.4 and Section 4.5 of this text.

In this section, we consider two key frameworks through which to understand research and citation in technical communication:

1. Citations are an “ethos building” practice. Conducting research and using sources in your writing is a rhetorical move as much as it allows you to build your content and information.
2. Research is an ethical practice; it is important to consider how your research is engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how it considers social justice and representation.

We discuss research, and citation practices, as a way to develop ethos below. First, let’s consider the second point: Research is an ethical practice.

How is research ethical? When conducting research in the past, have you considered how your research practices and inclusion of sources intersects with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Research is related to ethics both in how you conduct research and in how you choose to include or represent data in your work. As technical communicators, it is important to always consider whether the research you’ve conducted includes a variety of voices. It is important to note, however, that including diverse voices does not mean that all opinions are equally valid! In fact, as researchers, we work to back up an opinions and personal experiences with data–something that we can observe or measure and that helps us to make sense of the world around us. Including a variety of voices, experiences, and world views does not mean that we stop evaluating those sources for credibility (which we discuss below). Instead, it means that we are careful to include credible sources from a variety of perspectives even when those perspectives do not match our own.

Including a variety of voices as we conduct research also means that technical communicators must acknowledge the ways in which certain voices have been systemically or historically excluded and work to revise claims or approaches that are rooted in that exclusion. Including a variety of voices means that technical communicators consider who they include when they collect their data (ie does their research subject population only white, middle-class men? only white men and women with a college level of education?) and that they consider which secondary sources (see below for information on primary and secondary sources) they seek out and read when conducting their research.

As an example, consider that you are conducting usability testing on your organization’s website in order to make sure that the information contained in that website is accessible. As you recruit participants, what would happen if all participants (or most participants) are part of the same cultural, sexual, age, language, or class demographic? When specific groups are excluded from usability testing, can you really determine whether your website is accessible?

As another example, consider that you are conducting research for the content you’ll include in that website. Part of that research includes library searches, and part of your research also includes conducting surveys with folks across the Twin Cities. Why might it be so important to recruit a diverse demographic for your surveys? How can you conduct research in a way that considers what various groups and individuals have already published, researched, or found related to your topic?

Nearly all instances of technical and professional communication involve research. While the type of research involved in technical and professional communication might look different than academic research, there are some consistent principles related to using and evaluating data, supporting claims, developing a persuasive or trustworthy ethos, and avoiding plagiarism.

Think back to the rhetorical situation and the three rhetorical appeals: ethos, paths, and logos. Research is an important part of understanding a given rhetorical situation and in developing the appeals. Research, very broadly speaking, allows us to better understand what it is we want to convey, question, or communicate and make choices about how to best do that work for a specific audience.

Research involves, often, asking a question and finding credible, reliable sources to help you find an answer (or, sometimes, to validate that there is no adequate answer). At the beginning stages of a writing task, research can help you to better assess the rhetorical situation. For example, in order to understand the context in which your problem or question exists, you might conduct secondary research using the library or Internet in order to see what others have said or are currently saying about this question.

Research can help you to make choices related to rhetorical appeals, because it helps you better understand your audience by finding out what you can about who is likely to interact with your writing. Further, the way you use research in your writing can appeal both to ethos and to logos. Research appeals to logos because data (particularly numbers) often appeals to a reader’s sense of logic and reason. Research appeals to ethos because it lends credibility to your writing: citing reliable, credible, or expert sources makes your reader more likely to “buy in” to your claims. And, of course, technical communicators want to clearly and accurately communicate information, which requires conducting and evaluating various types of research.

Primary and secondary research

Secondary research refers to finding published articles, books, and other sources of research that have been completed and compiled by someone else. This type of research is often referred to as library research, and it is likely what you’ve done in the past for research papers. Secondary research is useful because, once again, technical communication is collaborative. As a technical communicator, you can build off the research that others have done before you without needing to start each project “from the very beginning.” Secondary research allows you to understand what the “current conversation” about a certain topic already looks like in a given field. For example, imagine that you need to work with doctors and nurses at a local clinic to develop a brochure about cold and flu season. Where can you begin? Perhaps you have never developed such a brochure, but chances are many others have. Start your project with some research that allows you to get a better sense of how this topic has been approached in the past before you choose how to approach it yourself.

As another example, imagine that you are a technical communicator working for a small nonprofit, and your nonprofit wants to apply for a state-wide grant. The grant will help your nonprofit with their goal of increasing pollinator gardens in empty lots across the city. As part of the grant application process, you need to articulate the specific need or problem that your project is responding to. Secondary research–seeing what experts have found during decades of research about pollinators, local pollinator plans, the connection between pollinator gardens and climate change, etc.–allows you to get a sense of the ongoing “conversation” happening across space and time among various researchers and subject matter experts. Of course you can also collect your own data, but seeing what others have found allows you to know where to begin your own work.

Some more examples of secondary research include:

• Using a library database to find published articles on a certain topic
• Searching for literature reviews on a particular topic or research question
• Finding information published on a government or organizational website
• Reading books to learn more about current practices or conversations in a particular field

As a student, you have countless experiences conducting secondary research. As a technical communicator, these research skills continue to be useful. Knowing where to look for accurate and credible sources and knowing how to evaluate sources are important. As you conduct secondary research and consider where and how you can be sure that your sources are accurate, appropriate, and credible, consider the following questions:

• Who is the author of this source? What is their primary purpose or goal?
• How did this author conduct their research? How transparent are they in their own research methods?
• How does this author present their findings? Do their claims match their actual data (and can I access that data myself)?
• Where was this source published? What is the primary purpose or goal of the publisher?
• Does the information provided in this source directly (or indirectly) relate to my own research question?
• In what ways is this source biased or bound by its own context?
• Is this source transparent about its own limitations? Are the claims nuanced, or are the “black and white” (considered the difference between a source making a claim about all college students vs. a claim about many college students, or many college students between the ages of 18 and 22 who live in the upper midwest, etc.).

To read more about using and evaluating secondary sources, take a look at this book chapter “Finding and Evaluating Research Sources” from the book Technical Writing Essentials by Suzan Last.

Primary research refers to research that you conduct yourself: you develop a question, method, collect data, and make some meaning out of that data. Empirical research refers to collecting and analyzing your own data gathered through various research methods. As a technical communicator, you will often need to do primary research and collect your own data. Your primary research can be informed by secondary research: you can use what others have done to help develop your question, help frame your data, and help decide which research methods to use. You might also conduct primary research to try to replicate research done previously. For example, if someone published research in the year 2007 that included surveys and interviews to assess technology literacy among 18-22 year olds, you might repeat a similar project to compare their findings to the findings from surveys and interviews that assess technology literacy among 18-22 year olds currently. You might even use some of the same questions or techniques if your goal is to compare data gathered in 2007 to data gathered in 2021.

Unlike with secondary research, when you conduct primary or empirical research, you are not relying on how others interpret data. Instead, you are gathering and interpreting your own data. Primary and empirical are not completely interchangeable terms; however, one important distinction here is between research based on your own collection of data or observations or experiments, and research based on a summary and synthesis of other sources (data or observations or experiments gathered and conducted and analyzed by other researchers).

Some examples of primary research include:

• Surveys
• Interviews
• Case studies
• Ethnographies
• Rhetorical analysis

You can find more information on conducting primary and secondary research in cluster 4.5 when describing the common genre of technical reports.

Part of considering research ethics, including access and inclusion, means understanding academic integrity. As a technical communicator, you are tasked with weaving together and accurately representing various voices as you work to communicate with your target audience. Technical communicators frequently build off existing research and conversations by using both primary and secondary research, and it is important to continually reflect on how to do this work both rhetorically and ethically (you can read more about ethics in section 2). Part of ethical research also means that technical communicators must balance the ideas that:

• Research and data, gathered by humans, are never completely objective. It is important to understand how the bias of the researcher and subjects are part of the data we gather.
• Knowing that research is subjective does not mean that “anything goes” or that “there are two sides to each story.” Rather, it means that when presented with new data, we can revise our understanding of the world.
• Technical communicators must still work towards information that is accurate, credible, and appropriate while also remembering that many fields of study have a problematic history of oppression, bias, and silencing certain voices.

Take a look at the following video on academic integrity and scholarly conversations from the University of Minnesota Libraries:

You can also read more helpful tips on how to evaluate sources of information at the Purdue OWL. You’ll notice that, in their guidelines for evaluating sources, you are once again analyzing elements of the rhetorical situation!

APA citation style

One important aspect of using research in your writing involves citing your sources, or letting your reader know where data, claims, arguments, or illustrations come from.

This text goes over the basics of APA citation style. However, it is worth noting that you will not necessarily use APA (or MLA, or Chicago) style when writing technical and professional documents. In fact, it’s very difficult to say which citation style you will use, as the style guidelines tend to change from one workplace to another.

So why learn APA style? Even though you may use a variety of styles, it’s useful to become familiar with–and to understand the rhetorical function–of a widely used, standard style like APA. APA stands for American Psychological Association, and this style evolved in psychology research. When psychology was still an emerging field, clearly regimented citation style allowed researchers to ground their work in a body of researchers. APA style is now widely used, beyond the field of psychology, through the social sciences and throughout academic research writing. Becoming familiar with such a widely used citation style is useful, even if you are asked to document research differently in the future, because 1) learning one citation style provides a framework for citing sources, making it easier to use other citation practices or to develop your own when needed and 2) learning APA style allows us to practice the rhetorical move of citing sources, avoiding plagiarism, and constructing ethos.

Anytime you cite a source, you should create 2 citations: an in-text citation, and a reference page citation.

To cite most types of courses in your text, use an author’s last name and publication year. You can either cite by referring to the author as part of your sentence (say the author is your subject) or you can cite parenthetically. For example:

According to Johnson (2020), technical communication relies on research.

Or

Technical communication relies on research (Johnson, 2020).

If there is no individual author, you might cite a corporate author. For example:

According to the World Health Organization (2020), wearing a mask decreases the risk of contracting the virus.

Or

Wearing a mask decreases the risk of contracting the virus (World Health Organization, 2020).

When deciding how to cite your source in your text, consider what you want to emphasize. If the author is your sentence’s subject, you emphasize the source. If you cite parenthetically at the end of a sentence, you emphasize the information.

Either way, you will show your reader where your information comes from and build your ethos as credible and reliable (if you use credible, reliable sources!).

You should cite a source any time you think it’s necessary so as to avoid confusion. In other words, if your reader might ask “where does this information come from?” then go ahead and cite the source. You’ll often cite the same source multiple times.

Each source citing in your text will appear once on your reference list. To cite on your reference list, you’ll include the following elements:

Author’s name. (Publication date). Title of source. Publisher information.

These elements “look” different depending on the type of source. So, an article from a journal will look different than a webpage or a book or a manual.

For detailed, up to date information on how to cite sources using APA style, check out the following websites:

• Purdue Owl
• American Psychological Association

Why cite sources?

It’s very likely that you already know about the importance of citing someone else’s work in your own writing: you want to be sure to give credit where credit is due, and you want to be very sure to avoid plagiarism. There are a variety of articles that dig into the impact the Internet on plagiarism: it’s easier to plagiarize, but the importance of your digital footprint and the fact that it’s also easier to detect plagiarism makes working to avoid plagiarism even more important. One easy way to avoid plagiarism is to be sure to cite your sources, be sure to paraphrase, and be sure to cite your sources correctly.

So, it’s important to cite sources in order to avoid plagiarism. It’s also important to properly paraphrase and summarize, and to understand the difference between these things. Take a look at the Purdue OWL’s resource on when to quote, paraphrase, and summarize research.

Paraphrasing means taking content and rewriting it completely. You may recall being told to rewrite something “in your own words.” Paraphrasing is often challenging, because it can be hard to read something and then try to say the same thing differently. And, if you don’t say it “differently enough,” you may still be plagiarizing content.

One trick to paraphrasing is to rewrite what you’ve read or learned without looking at the original source. Try not to just swap out each word in a sentence or paragraph, but rather imagine that you are explaining something to a friend. How would you explain it? How does this information fit with your own research question or purposes?

If you want to draw attention to how something was originally written–not just what was written–then you may consider using a direct quote. Consult the links above for APA style guidelines on when and how to quote.

So, paraphrasing means restating something so that you capture the content or meaning but so that the tone, words, language, and style fit your own paper. Summarizing means to take a longer text or a lot of information and condense it. So, you are doing some of the “putting into your own words” when you summarize, but you are ALSO condensing, or writing something with fewer words.

So, when you summarize, you try to capture the most important or most relevant information and might leave out some of the details. Consider movie and book summaries. Or again, imagine that you just saw a movie and your friend asked you what it was about. How would you condense a 2 hour film into a 10 minute conversation?

Getting back to the reasons for citing sources: we want to avoid plagiarism. But why do we need to rely on sources–why summarize and paraphrase what others have written–at all? Research, and incorporating reliable, credible, relevant research into your writing, is important because it helps you to develop your ethos, as mentioned in the “Key Takeaway” exercise above. Not only does including and conducting research contribute to ethos, but ethos is wrapped up specifically in how and when you choose to cite your sources. In other words, reliable sources that are properly cited can make your own claims more credible and more convincing.

In the previous section, we mention the importance of following a particular style guide. Some of your ethos development depends not only on using accurate and appropriate research, but also on citing that research in a way that conforms to your audience’s expectations. So, if your organization follows a particular style, be sure to adhere to those stylistic conventions. If you are asked to use either APA or MLA, be sure that you know where to look for style guide information and pay close attention to how you cite sources. Finally, if you are not sure of a particular style guide, consider that citation’s main purpose should be to make information accessible to your reader.