This corpus-based study investigates the grammatical stance constructions in CEO statements within the annual reports of U.S. and Vietnamese banks from 2020 to 2022. The findings indicate that modality is the dominant stance type followed by attitudinal and epistemic stance markers. Both groups of bank leaders favor desire/intention/decision verbs with infinitive complement clauses, certainty/likelihood verbs controlling complement clauses, and volition/prediction modality. But variations exist in the specific stance devices employed to shape corporate image and engage with stakeholders. These findings provide insights into cross-cultural corporate discourse in the banking sector and have valuable implications for business writing and professional communication.

This study uses an online questionnaire survey to investigate Chinese social media users’ acceptance of firm-generated credibility-building posts (FGCPs) on Sina Weibo. The findings show that heuristic cues related to content (i.e., topics regarding competence, benevolence, and integrity) and source (i.e., firm nationality and industry types) along with the moderating role of topic, account, and platform familiarity cues significantly influence users’ acceptance level of such posts. After incorporating the insights gained from participants’ responses to open-ended questions in the questionnaire, this study concludes with practical recommendations for crafting effective FGCPs on social media platforms like Sina Weibo.

This study investigates the social media strategies that Chinese museums use in communicating on Weibo, focusing on the ways these museums engage with the public and the effectiveness of their online interactions. Combining grounded theory and content analysis, the authors analyze 319 posts from six major museums and 842 posts from 36 smaller museums. Their findings suggest that although museums effectively use social media for educational purposes, there is room for more interactive and diverse content to enhance public engagement. The study provides practical insights on how museums can optimize their social media strategies by emphasizing audience-centered communication and greater interactivity in order to foster deeper connections with the public.

International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

Request emails are vital in workplace communication. This study uses a three-round Delphi method to investigate the types, frequencies, and perceived burdens of request emails in Korean organizations. Fifty workers from large corporations identified and evaluated 32 common email scenarios, revealing that the most frequent requests are sent to superiors asking for approval, feedback, and document reviews whereas the most burdensome requests are sent to colleagues asking them to perform tasks. Highlighting the hierarchical dynamics of Korean workplaces and the importance of culturally appropriate communication strategies, the findings from this study can inform global training programs and curricula on workplace communication.

This article builds a heuristic that raises the artificial intelligence (AI) literacy of Latine students. Nefarious people are exploiting marginalized Latine communities by using AI in creative partnerships, similar to those described in technical communication research, to build social profiles of Latines. These people are rhetorically using AI in passive-income and voice-over scams that target Latines who are insecure about their financial and citizenship situations. The heuristic offered here guides instructors on how to increase Latine students’ AI literacy by making these students aware of the rhetorical relationships between nefarious individuals and AI.

This article explores the benefits of the use of standard versus virtual reality (VR) video when teaching ethics in communication and business courses. It presents a two-semester classroom study in which during one semester, students were given a case analysis and shown either a standard or a VR video, and during the next semester, students were given the same case study but were shown both a standard and a virtual video and engaged in group deliberation. The authors relate their findings from this study to practical wisdom about ethics and offer recommendations for the pedagogical leveraging of visual literacy in communication and business courses.

Indian technology start-ups have flourished in the past decade in sectors such as ride-hailing, hotel-booking, and at-home personal services, which have been supported by national programs and Silicon Valley ideas of market disruption. Drawing on Miller’s foundational work on “technological consciousness,” this article demonstrates how start-up origin stories construct an ethos that is aligned with nationalist and casteist privilege, which are the closed system's principal values. Expanding northern hemispheric exclusionism, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of entrepreneurial, professional, and technical communication with a critical view of how globalized discourses legitimize individual entrepreneurship by strengthening and obscuring the ideological tension between casteism and meritocracy.

This article presents survey data from a study on trends in technical and professional editing that focuses specifically on inclusive and accessible editing practices in the workplace and in the classroom. Scholarship focusing on inclusive communication and design practices is growing, but the role of technical and professional editing, though not excluded, remains underdeveloped. Frameworks for developing and maintaining editorial guidance must be designed to more explicitly incorporate concerns for accessible and inclusive content. Although editing instructors and researchers often look to the industry for such answers, this is an opportunity for them to take the lead.

Mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) is an extractive industry that exploits both humans and nonhumans. The extractive underpinning of mainstream AI systems means that technical communicators must be careful when advocating for accessibility and inclusivity in AI because those efforts may expose marginalized groups to further exploitation. Extractive AI also necessitates that technical communicators reconsider how their own discipline may be complicit in the damaging logics and practices of extraction.

Management practices are changing globally due to rapid workplace digitalization. The COVID-19 pandemic has created new demands for management and affected how information and communication technology and communication channels are used in everyday work. Despite the centrality of competent communication in the workplace, little is known about how managers can conduct technology-mediated communication appropriately and effectively. This article presents a problematizing review that develops and articulates a theoretical framework of managers’ technology-mediated communication competence (TMCC). The framework is based on business, management, and communication research that presents managerial TMCC as a critical process influencing individual, group, and organizational outcomes.

As global disasters such as COVID-19 continue to disrupt lives, this article calls on professional communicators, practitioners, and volunteers who work during a crisis to rethink their crisis-communication and disaster-response strategies in order to address the needs of marginalized and vulnerable communities. To expand such strategies, the author presents an analysis of interviews with 30 feminist grassroots organizers and volunteers from Nepal, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago who were disaster responders and crisis communicators during COVID-19. She illustrates how inclusive, intersectional disaster management and advocacy-based crisis communication are required when responding to any kind of disaster.

This study examines how metadiscourse resources are used to achieve persuasiveness in Apple's earnings conference calls from 2013 through 2022. Adopting a corpus-assisted discourse study approach, the study reveals that self-mentions, transitions, and boosters are the three most frequently used metadiscourse resources by Apple executives. The authors detail how different types of metadiscourse contribute to the construction of three interactive roles that enhance persuasiveness. The study contributes to current studies of persuasion as a form of strategic communication. Business practitioners may benefit from learning the language practices of leading companies in order to optimize their own corporate communication strategies.

This article responds to the need for studies on the proposal-writing process within nonprofit organizations. The few empirical studies within the technical communication field and nonprofit studies have focused on job satisfaction and compensation rather than the writing process. Based on a nationwide survey ( n  = 580) and interviews ( n  = 18) of members of several professional organizations for proposal writers, this study describes the differences between academic and nonprofit proposal writers, writers’ experiences learning their job duties, and how long it takes to feel confident in their position. The study also reports three areas of study that writers said are important to their job: research methods, project management, and personnel management. The author provides suggestions to professors of proposal-writing coursework and recommends that they pair with local professional organizations to develop strong connections with the profession.

This study uses grounded theory to explore Korean professionals' experience with communication in Business English as a lingua franca (BELF). The author collected data for the study by conducting semistructured interviews with 12 Korean professionals, resulting in 120 concepts, 33 categories, and 14 main categories in the coding process. The findings highlight the significance of accommodation, which affects the success of BELF communication and serves as a major action for resolving problems. The study emphasizes that BELF dynamics should be understood as a multifaceted and interactive process in which various factors are intricately interconnected, giving rise to fluid and complex BELF phenomena.

Environmental discussions have increased on social media, along with the rising interest in sustainability. This study introduces a modified procedure for a deliberate metaphor analysis of environmental metaphors in two U.S. energy companies’ Twitter (now X) accounts. Its findings suggest that the two U.S. companies used HUMAN, WEALTH, COLOR, JOURNEY, WAR, SPORTS, STEWARDSHIP, EVIL CREATURE, FOOD, and CRIME metaphors to fulfill publicizing, commercial, persuasive, evocative, and interactive functions, as well as to communicate their inherent environmental identities as protectors, stewards, competitors, and collaborators. These findings provide insights into corporate environmental communication and offer new perspectives on the communicative functions of deliberate metaphors.

This article explores four different topics of conversation in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship that overlap and connect with contemporary issues in generative artificial intelligence (AI): process and iteration, theory and power, actors and activity, and the social justice turn. The authors offer four nonexhaustive reviews of these conversations, offering insight into key issues and texts that have animated discourse in the field and can directly or indirectly address the complex relationship between TPC work and generative AI.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are already being implemented for a variety of writing tasks in workplaces, where individual (human) authorship is valued less than the efficient production of text. But policies regarding AI use in higher education continue to prioritize academic integrity, focusing on narrowly defined notions of authorship that do not reflect the realities of workplace writing. Through an analysis of 100 university policies on AI, this article shows how AI tools create a tension for faculty in technical and professional communication who must operate within institutional or departmental policies for AI use but must also prepare writers for workplace authorship.

This article examines issues of authenticity involved in using generative AI to compose technical and professional communication (TPC) documents. Authenticity is defined through an Aristotelian understanding of ethos, which includes goodwill ( eunoia), practical wisdom ( phronesis), virtuousness ( arete), and Fromm's concepts of true self and pseudo self. The authors conducted an initial analysis of AI affordances that align with TPC concerns—genre, plain language, and grammatical/mechanical correctness. The preliminary results show that these affordances may be limited by issues of inauthenticity. The authors suggest that in order to address AI's limitations, writers should adopt a rhetoric of authenticity via real-world engagement, human centeredness, and personal style.

Generative AI tools allow anyone without web-design experience to have a business website created when the user provides a few specifications about the business, such as its name, type, and location. But the resulting websites not only fall short of the business's basic needs but they also raise major concerns about their accessibility for disabled users. This study specifically examines whether these AI generated websites are accessible to screen-reader users with visual disabilities. It presents data about the usability and accessibility of the products of three generative AI website builders, highlights the specific problems found by an expert screen reader test along with an automated machine scan of these sites, and discusses some causes of and recommendations for solving these problems.

This article focuses on the unique ways that technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can study artificial intelligence (AI) models that challenge the idea that humans and machines are separate yet equal entities. The authors present a brief definition of AI, a recap of HCI research paradigms, and a description of how AI models challenge traditional HCI research and how TPC researchers might respond to these challenges in their studies. Rather than presenting clear-cut methods for studying AI, the article highlights questions that researchers need to consider as they develop approaches for studying AI.

This article considers the rhetorical risks of using generative AI to compose organizational communication during crises or in the aftermath of tragedies. It focuses on a case study in which representatives of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development disclosed their use of ChatGPT to write a response to a school shooting at another university. The author argues that although generative AI can often be useful in technical and professional communication, it can also undermine perceptions of “rhetorical humanity” if its use is disclosed or discovered, making it rhetorically risky in certain contexts. Thus, knowing when not to utilize AI is an important aspect of AI literacy for practitioners.

This article assesses the data practices of Grammarly, the prominent AI-assisted writing technology, by applying data principles that advocate for empowering Indigenous data sovereignty. The assessment is informed by the authors’ work with an Inuit tribal organization from rural Arctic Alaska that generated data and metadata about potentially sacred tribal activities. Their analysis of Grammarly's large-language modeling practices demonstrates how technical communication can hold businesses to principled data practices created by Indigenous nations and communities that understand how to create more just futures.

The concept of a public—a group of strangers drawn together through their mutual attention to a text—has historically been tied to the notion of human intentionality. The recent popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (such as ChatGPT) destabilizes this connection. When large language models generate text, they may inadvertently form stochastic publics—groups pulled together through the randomization of biased data patterns drawn from AI training material. This exploratory study draws on a three-phase dialogue with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 to identify the risks of stochastic publics and suggest human-originated interventions grounded in feminist care ethics.

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

This study investigates the communication skills expected of recent construction engineering graduates as portrayed in job ads and conveyed by employers. A content analysis of 100 job ads showed that teamwork, leadership, and interpersonal communication skills were the specific categories of communication skills listed most frequently. Subsequent interviews with 11 employers showed that although they considered the written communication skills of recent college graduates as sufficient, they found that many recent graduates had insufficient skills in assertiveness, email communication, relationship building, and audience adaptation, indicating that additional coursework or assignments in oral communication skills would benefit construction engineering majors.

This study describes the pathways by which prospective users of a website for natural hazard communication experienced agency as user-centered design (UCD) participants. Formative interviews with residents, community managers, and outreach professionals revealed two pathways for agency during the design process—by directly influencing design changes and by indirectly affecting developers’ understanding of user needs—and previewed users’ potential agency during real-world use. Findings reveal how agential opportunities were constrained by UCD structure and choices of the development team. The authors discuss how supporting user agency during UCD can improve design and support buy-in for humanistic methods in interdisciplinary research teams.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has disrupted approaches to writing in academic and professional contexts. While much interest has revolved around the ability of LLMs to generate coherent and generically responsible texts with minimal effort and the impact that this will have on writing careers and pedagogy, less attention has been paid to how LLMs can aid writing research. Building from previous research, this study explores the utility of AI text generators to facilitate the qualitative coding research of linguistic data. This study benchmarks five LLM prompting strategies to determine the viability of using LLMs as qualitative coding, not writing, assistants, demonstrating that LLMs can be an effective tool for classifying complex rhetorical expressions and can help business and technical communication researchers quickly produce and test their research designs, enabling them to return insights more quickly and with less initial overhead.

The ability to work with data is an important skill for students enrolled in technical and professional communication programs, but students with limited mathematical and computer programming literacies might find it difficult to do basic data analysis or customize data visualizations. This article examines the extent to which ChatGPT can make data analysis and visualization more accessible for students with limited technical proficiency. The results suggest that although the tool is poised to have a substantial impact in helping students create effective data visualizations, its efficacy as a data analysis tool is more limited.

It remains unclear if perceptions of academic dishonesty concerning artificial intelligence writing technologies (AIWTs) present new challenges or if they reflect prior, non-AI concerns. To structure this problem, we used a randomized control survey experiment. We compared student ( n = 603) and instructor ( n = 312) attitudes toward dishonesty in collaborations involving humans versus AIWT in 10 writing-related scenarios. Results suggest similar perception patterns among students and instructors, with both populations expressing significant differences in perceived dishonesty between AI and human collaborators in some scenarios. This experiment structures the problem of AI writing and academic dishonesty for future research in this emerging field.

The authors analyze the ability of ChatGPT to generate effective instructions for a consequential task: taking a COVID-19 test. They compare the output from a commercial prompt for generating these instructions to those provided by the test manufacturer. They also analyze the input, the prompt itself, to address prompt-engineering issues. The results show that although the output from ChatGPT exhibits certain conventions for documentation, the human-authored instructions from the manufacturer are superior in most ways. The authors conclude that when it comes to creating high-quality, consequential instructions, ChatGPT might be better seen as a collaborator than a competitor with human technical communicators.

How should instructors adapt technical editing courses to account for generative artificial intelligence (AI)? This article addresses what generative AI means for technical editing pedagogy. While AI tools may be able to address rote editing tasks, expert editors are still needed to provide accessible, ethical, and justice-oriented edits. After reviewing impacts of generative AI on editing praxis, the author focuses on the microcredentials that she built into an editing course in order to address these impacts pedagogically. The goal was to enable students to understand AI, argue for their expertise, and edit from ethical and social justice perspectives.

This case study offers examples of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools at a small nonprofit workplace dispute resolution center. It explores the limits and strengths of these AI tools, as well as the mediation field's concerns around using AI as a replacement for mediation work. Further, it explores the implications of AI tool use for the ethos of the writer and the AI tool itself as well as for the current pedagogy deliberations occurring in the technical writing field at large.

Artificial intelligence tools are being increasingly used to do content analysis in technical and professional communication (TPC). The authors consider some of the affordances and constraints of these tools and suggest that construct validity is an underdiscussed form of validity within TPC research that will become more important as artificial intelligence research tools become increasingly prevalent. But construct validity is an important idea for graduate programming on research methods regardless of the type of method, technique, or tool used—whether qualitative or computational. Thus, training in construct validity is important for strengthening graduate research preparation in TPC.

This study employs a one-group pretest and posttest design to assess the written and oral technical communication (TC) skills of students in vocational colleges in China. Fifty-nine 1st-year students in automotive engineering participated in a 3-week implementation of a TC module. To measure learner differences, students took oral and written tests before and after the intervention, respectively. Results showed that the module effectively improved students’ written and oral TC skills. In addition, findings from interviews with participants and English teachers indicated that the TC module is suitable from a pedagogical perspective.

The diversity and inclusion (D&I) report is an important element in the corporate public reporting genre; however, as an emerging genre, it receives little attention from scholars interested in public discourse, so there are few guidelines on what should be included in a D&I report. This study helps to fill this gap in the research by examining 10 D&I reports from information technology and banking industries, exploring the reports’ rhetorical purpose and identifying their typified rhetorical moves. The author concludes by recommending what aspects of the current genre's substance and form should be improved to help meet the needs of stakeholders.

Business communication students should be taught how to innovate because the ability to do so is an important skill for business success. Despite knowing that business communication students need to learn how to innovate, instructors are not always equipped with the proper tools to teach students how to innovate based on sound principles. This article provides one such tool by translating the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) principles into specific practices designed to help students innovate. By understanding these practices, instructors will be well-equipped to foster student innovation in their own classrooms based on SoTL principles.

Using narrative inquiry to analyze the Fair Fight website, this article illuminates how localized lived experience becomes an important tool to fight electoral injustice. The author provides an assemblage of narratives from disenfranchised voters to argue that although election technologies and processes (e.g., address systems, voter registration, absentee or mail-in ballots, voter queues), poll workers, and officials may seem neutral or apolitical, they can potentially be tools of disenfranchisement.

Employers are increasingly turning to innovative artificial intelligence recruiting technologies to evaluate candidates’ online presence and make hiring decisions. Such social media screening, or social profiling, is an emerging approach to assessing candidates’ social influence, personalities, and workplace behaviors through their publicly shared data on social networking sites. This article introduces the processes, benefits, and risks of social profiling in employment decision making. The authors provide important guidance for job applicants, technical and professional communication instructors, and hiring professionals on how to strategically respond to the opportunities and challenges of automated social profiling technologies.

This article presents a case study of an online class in technical and professional communication pedagogy (the teaching of technical and professional writing) that uses digital video technology for discussions. Because students in the class share their experiences using the video technology, the study uses a collaborative autoethnography framework to learn if the digital technology, Flipgrid, would enhance students’ experiences with discussions in an online class compared to their experiences with discussions on traditional discussion boards. Providing such exposure to a new technology tool can help students gain the confidence that is necessary for learning new technologies in the workplace. When the technology did not provide the hoped-for results after a few weeks, the class stopped using it, returning to the traditional discussion board in the learning management system, which can be more effective when teachers participate and organize students into small groups. Reflecting on what happened, students in the class collaborated on this article to share their experiences.