This article offers an example case of technical communicators integrating the social bookmarking site Delicious into existing work environments. Using activity theory to present conceptual foundations and concrete steps for integrating the functionalities of social media, the article builds on research within technical communication that argues for professional communicators to participate more fully in the design of communication systems and software. By examining the use of add-ons and tools created for Delicious, and the customized use of Rich Site Syndication (RSS) feeds that the site publishes, the author argues for addressing the context-sensitive needs of project teams by integrating the functionality of social media applications generally and repurposing their user-generated data.

This article examines the characteristics of collaborative work and overlapping activity systems in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Using genre theory and activity theory as frames to work out the genre ecology of gameplay, the article focuses on how players coordinate ad hoc grouping activity across and through genres. It articulates the related development of open systems in online gaming in a discussion of interface modifications (AddOns) and online information databases that players generate, drawing on De Certeau's formulation of strategies and tactics and Warner's discussion of publics and counterpublics. The article concludes by discussing implications of online gaming for an open-systems approach to information design in professional communication and for professional communication in general.

Genre use entails a rhetorical response to an exigence in the writer's context. In one category of genres, which the author calls temporal genres, linear time constitutes a major exigence to which writers must respond. Temporal genres, such as annual reports and status reports, call for writers to publish texts because a certain amount of time has passed, even if they are not yet ready to do so. The first annual report of the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security reveals an ineffective ethos and discontinuities between the mission of the office and that of the department. But the second annual report reveals a more effective ethos and greater harmony between the missions. This study shows how the requirement to report can force writers to decide existential issues of identity and mission.

Student compositions traditionally are written for the teacher. Yet instructors of professional communication genres have discovered that students' motivation may be enhanced when they write assignments for audiences of peers within the classroom or professionals outside the campus. Yet client-based projects require writing students who have never yet written for an external audience to make a leap beyond the classroom. To bridge the gap between writing for classroom peers and writing for professional clients, this article describes a third and intermediate choice of audience, namely, external peers in cross-classroom collaborations that occur via telecommunication. The author places this intermediate-audience strategy within the larger conversation about the impact of audience on student writing outcomes, applies the strategy to professional writing pedagogy, and reports the results of a small pilot study that provide some preliminary support for the strategy.

Internal institutional genres can become fertile terrain for public policy debate when what Birkland called “focusing events” or ruptures extricate these genres from their contexts and subject them to public scrutiny. This study examines consequences for the local instantiation of the police use-of-force policy genre in the wake of a controversial shooting in Denver, Colorado, and traces ways in which the formation of a multi-interest task force charged with revising the police department's policy altered the policy's conventional activity system. In doing so, the public participated in remapping the local policy instantiation's relationship to the use-of-force policy genre and the routinized social action it performed.

The authors report on a 3-year action-research project designed to facilitate public involvement in the planned dredging of a canal and subsequent disposal of the dredged sediments. Their study reveals ways that community members struggle to define the problem and work together as they gather, share, and understand data relevant to that problem. The authors argue that the primary goal of action research related to environmental risk should be to identify and support the strategies used by community members rather than to educate the public. The authors maintain that this approach must be supported by a thorough investigation of basic rhetorical issues (audience, genre, stases, invention), and they illustrate how they used this approach in their study.

In the discipline of design, the most common presentation genre is the critique, and the most central aspect of this genre is the feedback. Using a qualitative framework, this article identifies a typology of feedback, compares the frequencies of feedback types between different levels of design studios ranging from novice to expert, and explores what the feedback reflects about the social and educational context of these design studios. Results suggest that the feedback socialized students into egalitarian relationships and autonomous decision-making identities that were perhaps more reflective of academic developmental stages or idealized workplace contexts than of actual professional settings—therefore potentially complicating the preprofessional goals of the critique.

This article discusses the development of a unified social theory of genre learning based on the integration of rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and the situated learning perspective. The article proposes that these three theoretical perspectives are compatible and complementary, and it illustrates applications of a unified framework to a study of genre learning by novice engineers. The author draws examples from a longitudinal qualitative study of a group of novice engineers who developed their professional genre knowledge through both academic and workplace experiences. These examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the study of professional genre learning.

Because communication specialists often lack the power and prestige of other knowledge workers, such as engineers and product designers, managers who direct the work of communication specialists face unique challenges. This study, based on interviews with 11 communication managers, found that their agency and identity were determined both by the structure of the organizations in which they worked and by their use of genres, technologies, and regulatory techniques. With their work undergoing transition because of globalization, outsourcing, and rapid technological change, the stories that these managers tell demonstrate the importance of studying management as it specifically applies to communication specialists.

This article reports a case study of three multinational companies that work together in a consortium, focusing on intercompany and intracompany variation in writing products and processes. The authors discuss variation in two genres: meeting minutes and internal memos. Adopting a social constructionist, communities of practice (CofP) approach, they argue that the companies form overarching constellations of CofP. Although the participants broadly work with the same genres of written documents, the form of these documents varies according to the local context, audience, and purpose. The authors discuss the implications of their findings, with particular reference to the difficulty writers face when they make the transition from writing for one community of practice to writing for another.

Recently, scholars of new media have been exploring the relationships between genre theory and new media. While these scholars have provided a great deal of insight into the nature of e-genres and how they function in professional contexts, few address the relationship between genre and new-media theories from a designer's perspective. This article presents the results of an ethnographic-style case study exploring the practice of a professional new-media designer. These results (a) confirm the role of dynamic rhetorical situations and hybridity during the new-media design process; (b) suggest that current genre and new-media theories underestimate the complexity of the relationships between mode, medium, genre, and rhetorical exigencies; and (c) indicate that a previously unrecognized form of hybridity exists in contemporary e-genres.

This article investigates the contribution visual rhetoric and rhetorical genre studies (RGS) can make to health care education and communication genres. Through a visual rhetorical analysis of a patient record used in an optometry teaching clinic, this article illustrates that a genre's visual representations provide significant insights into the social action of that genre. These insights are deepened by an insider analysis of the patient record that highlights how content analyses of visual designs need to be elaborated by contextual considerations. A combined visual rhetoric and RGS analysis shows that clinical novices learn to interpret the record's visual cues to safely traverse the complex requirements of this apprenticeship genre. The article demonstrates that visual rhetoric research can meaningfully contribute to the understanding of genres by presenting an enriched contextual analysis achieved by consulting with context insiders.

This article explores the nature of epideictic rhetoric in science through a close textual analysis of three Nobel lectures. It examines the effects of the genre shift from original research reports to ceremonial speeches, revealing significant differences from Fahnestock's analysis of the genre shift from forensic research reports to epideictic articles in the popular press, especially a move toward greater candidness about the research process. Epideictic scientific rhetoric, therefore, can be said to celebrate the scientific method in general as much as it does the particular line of research at hand.

The traditional distinction between writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines (WID) as writing to learn versus learning to write understates WID's focus on learning in the disciplines. Advocates of WID have described learning as socialization, but little research addresses how writing disciplinary discourses in disciplinary settings encourages socialization into the disciplines. Data from interviews with students who wrote lab reports in a biology lab suggest five ways in which writing promotes learning in scientific disciplines. Drawing on theories of situated learning, the authors argue that apprenticeship genres can encourage socialization into disciplinary communities.

Borrowing from the ethnographic genre that Van Maanen (1988) called the confessional tale, this commentary reflects on the political, ethical, and professional concerns that arise when critical intellectuals work in a government installation that maintains the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The authors suggest that the future is, as Haraway (1997) argued, ineluctably technological and that the best way to engage this cultural formation is from within, eschewing the easy politics of the science wars and articulating critical projects with the hard work of science. The modernist ideal of unconflicted ideological positions and research—stories of good guys and bad guys—is a disabling illusion. Practicing rhetoricians face a kind of “worldliness” that Hall (1989) described as a necessary counterpart to the “clean air” of theory. The authors invite their colleagues to join them in grappling with political and ethical analyses in a world of impure identity in which knowledge and power circulate promiscuously.

This article demonstrates how students in a disciplinary writing study conducted at Miami University's business school failed to understand writing assignments based on the names of the assignments. It proposes effective writing-assignment names as prompts to connect students to previous writing experience and reinforce students' acquisition of disciplinary writing skills and genres. In addition, the article suggests that writing-assignment names offer a pedagogical tool for integrating learning across a discipline; that is, naming writing assignments encourages faculty to identify and define the types of disciplinary writing and critical-thinking skills that students should learn.

A genre's continuing success after migrating to a new medium may be due in part to whether the genre secures a place within a viable genre system. To explore the role of genre systems, this study examined the well-established genre of the résumé in its new position on self-published Web sites. Results from surveying 100 authors of self-published Web résumés revealed that many respondents used their résumés for the previously overlooked purpose of attracting clients for their self-employment. These self-employed respondents rated their résumés as significantly more useful than did those who had not used their résumés for this purpose. The self-employed were more likely to publicize their sites through such business-related genres as business cards and advertising material, and in turn, their sites drew in communication from more socially distant populations. These alternative publicity measures and communication networks suggest that the self employed were able to situate their Web résumés within viable alternative genre systems.

In a pediatric teaching hospital, the authors examined 16 novice medical case presentations that were classified as instances of a hybrid apprenticeship genre. In contrast to strict school and workplace genres, an apprenticeship genre results from the sometimes competing activity systems of student education and patient care. The authors examined these novice case presentations for the amount and patterns of time devoted to student learning and expert teaching, the difficulties created for participants, the sometimes misunderstood implicit messages delivered by experts, and the opportunities to address educational objectives. This study offers professional communication researchers a model that combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess the effects of competing activity systems in the development of communication expertise.

This article discusses a longitudinal case study of a novice engineer who has successfully challenged a workplace genre. The study shows that a combination of the novice’s family background, a university engineering communication course, and workplace experiences helped him achieve success. It also provides evidence that, even though genres may differ from workplace to workplace, experienced professionals do recognize and accept superior communication practices imported from elsewhere. Thus, best practices may be taught apart from local contexts. The case study allows technical communication instructors and researchers to refine current understanding of what mastering genres means and indicates directions for the development of new pedagogies.

This article examines medical treatment forms as boundary genres, drawing on genre and disciplinary studies theories to argue that medical forms represent a commingling of the business, science, and medical professions in ways that show evidence of tension and conflict between the disciplines.

This article explores the value of rhetorical genre theory for health care and professional communication researchers. The authors outline the conceptual resources emerging from genre theory, specifically ways to conceptualize social context, professional identity formation, and genres as functioning but hierarchical networks, and discuss the way they have used these resources in two separate but complementary health-care studies: a project that documents the ways regulated and regularized resources of the genre of case presentations shape the professional identity formation of medical students and a project that extends this theoretical work to observe that genres, especially policy genres, function to regularize or control other genres and shape the identity formation of midwives in Ontario, Canada. The authors also observe that the implications of rhetorical genre theory have impelled both of these studies to develop an interdisciplinary trajectory that includes members of health-care communities as participating researchers.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

A set of discourse-based methods—genre theory, genre analysis, and discourse analysis—can provide a descriptive basis for a critical analysis of the multiple connections between discourse practices and their underlying concepts and categories within professions. To illustrate this theoretical and methodological project, this article analyzes prognosis in the discourse of medicine. Using Goffman’s (1959) distinction between front-stage and back-stage discourse, the author suggests that a back-stage discourse of prognosis points to problems with prognosis in the front-stage discourse of medical encounters between oncologists and patients who have been diagnosed with cancer. The analysis shows that the oral genre of treatment discussion in oncology encounters is organized to allow practitioners to do, appear to do, or avoid doing difficult work like presenting a prognosis. The article suggests that discourse-based methods have the potential to become the basis for productive critical engagement between practitioners and researchers in professional communication.

This article uses the notion of genre repertoire to examine electronic-mail communication exchanged in a period of three years by an interorganizational community of software developers (727 e-mail messages in total). It analyzes the development of this virtual work community by considering the use of communicative genres with respect to (1) the resources offered by the electronic-mail system, (2) the temporal development of the project in which the participants were engaged, and (3) the developing relationship between community members. The study shows that the community organized its communicative interactions mainly as informal exchanges between peers rather than as formal exchanges that followed the structure of an interorganizational project. The messages were strongly affected by the use of a system of electronic mail and changed as the community members' relationships developed.

In courses within technical disciplines, students are often asked to give oral presentations that simulate a professional context. Yet learning to speak like a professional in this academic context is a process often laden with complications. Using activity theory and situated learning as theoretical frameworks, this article explores the teaching and learning of one of the most common oral genres in technical fields—the design presentation. A study of the teaching and learning of this oral genre in three sequential engineering design courses reveals critical academic and workplace contradictions regarding audience, identity, and structure. Results of this study show that in the teaching and learning of design presentations, audience and identity contradictions were managed by a primary deference to the academic context whereas structural contradictions were addressed by invoking both workplace and academic activity systems.

An environmental impact statement (EIS) is supposed to ensure that a government agency thoroughly evaluates a project's impacts, studies feasible alternatives, and gives all stakeholders an active role in project-related decisions. Previous rhetorical studies of the EIS describe a failed or subversive genre routinely used to advance the strategic aims of an agency seeking to implement a project despite significant opposition. This article contends that an EIS motivated by a genuinely persuasive purpose can serve as the discursive focus of democratic decision making about major projects and substantially achieve Habermas's norms of communicative action. This may happen, for example, when a local transportation agency develops an EIS for a federal transportation agency. To illustrate this possibility, two EISs involving distinct federal-local relationships in Puerto Rico are evaluated using criteria proposed by John Forester for investigating the degree to which public decision-making processes fulfill Habermas's norms of communicative action.

Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication.

Using activity theory as a supplement to genre studies, this article explores a case of the disintegration of a traditional engineering firm. It focuses on the causes of such disintegration and the role of different types of communication in serving as sites where contradictions can be brought to visibility and resolution. The authors’ goal is both to show the power of activity theory in illuminating issues of tension, contradiction, and dissonance that lead to the breakup of the original organization into two separate firms and point to fundamental differences in the cultures of traditional engineering firms and software design enterprises.

Discourse theories frequently emphasize the importance of understanding audience but seldom delve into how writers form conceptions of their audiences, especially in organizations. This study examines computer documentation writers’ tactics for conceiving of their audiences. Based on two ethnographic case studies and insights from activity theory, the author describes and evaluates technical communicators’ tactics for understanding audiences, constrained and supported by their organizations. She discusses the advantages and limitations of each tactic, looking at how each tactic might answer questions about audience. This research should be useful to technical communication educators as they expand students’ options for audience research in nonacademic settings. In addition, the findings of this study can enhance theories about the ways writers create images of their audiences.

This limited case study examines the situated-language practices associated with the production of negative letters in an insurance company. Using genre and sociocultural theories, the study combines textual analyses of a set of negative letters together with writers’ accounts of producing these letters to identify effective (as defined by the company) strategies for composing this correspondence. These letters are examples of generic action, and they demonstrate that genres function as constellations of regulated, improvisational strategies triggered by the interaction between individual socialization and an organization. Moreover, these constellations of resources express a particular chronotopic relation to space and time, and this relation is always axiological or value oriented. In other words, genres express space/time relations that reflect current social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of human individuals in space and time. The article identifies some of the strategies that characterize effective negative messages in this organization. It also critiques this text type for enacting a set of practices and related chronotopic orientation that are against the interests of its readers and writers.

Focusing on the case write-up within the Harvard case method of instruction, this study provides historical and empirical evidence for the theory of genre systems. The Harvard case literature and interviews at a case-based business school in the Harvard tradition show that the purpose of this largely ignored written genre is to prepare students to participate in the primary genre, oral classroom discussion of the case. The case genre system provides highly conventionalized conductor-choreographer roles for instructors and blunt, detached consultant roles for student writers/speakers who repeatedly enact decisive, adversarial personae affirming practices and values of the business school.

Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary-policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.

Despite the prevailing assumption that narrative and scientific discourse are incompatible genres, in this article the authors show that scientific texts typically follow a narrative pattern. This simple observation that narrative and scientific texts are similar is not all that surprising when we recognize that scientific discourse, like all narratives, describes what happened and what it meant. Indeed, scientific texts are almost always accounts of scientists' experiences in reality. After developing a vocabulary of narrative, the authors analyze the works of Newton and Einstein, using narrative analysis to illuminate scientific texts as stories.

Postmodern assumptions employed by some organizational theorists recognize that “administrators' greater power lies not in their ability to control resources but in their ability to manipulate symbols—the ceremonies, rituals, images, and language of the organization” (Graham and David 9). Thus, even a genre that is often considered neutral and objective, such as meeting minutes, can become a tool of managerial control. This article presents data from an ethnographic case study that describes how an administrator in a theater organization manipulated language by using the minutes from a board of directors meeting to influence board members to vote to disband the organization.

Carolyn Miller's definition of genre as “social action” has become widely accepted in writing studies; this acceptance has prompted troubling questions about the teaching of professional genres. Because current research emphasizes Miller's reconceptualization of “exigence” as a socially construed need for particular kinds of writing and talk (155-58), some researchers now suggest that unless a genre's social exigence can be fully replicated in the classroom, the genre cannot be taught effectively. Genres, however, entail several kinds of exigence: social exigence that prompts generic writing; social exigence that is reflected in the generic text; textual exigence that shapes the rhetorical situation; and what I call educational exigence, an exigence that prompts writers to learn explicitly how to compose generic texts. Educational exigence was evident in the writing processes of two technical translators who composed in a variety of genres, both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The translators not only responded to educational exigence but also followed a well-considered strategy for gathering information about generic texts.

Drawing primarily on theories of situated learning, this study compares novices learning written genres in two different institutional settings within similar disciplines: university students in public administration courses and graduate student interns placed in government agencies. Observational and textual analyses of novices learning to write the genres necessary for these settings point to differences in writing goals, guide-learner roles, text evaluations, and learning sites. The results show that when students move from the university to the workplace, they not only have to learn new genres but they need to learn new ways to learn these new genres.

Expert legal reports exhibit what Carolyn Miller calls the “pragmatic dimension” of genre, namely, a capacity to engage in two very different kinds of discursive activities simultaneously: The first, what I call the strategic function, “helps virtual communities, the relationships we carry around in our heads, to reproduce and reconstruct themselves,” and the second, what I call the tactical function, “help[s] real people in spatio-temporal communities to do their work and carry out their purposes” (75). This article examines two psycholegal reports, showing how these strategic and tactical activities work together in a way that is complementary and ideological: complementary, because the relationship is one of foreground to background, with the strategic activity of the report predominating—and thus covering over—its tactical operations; ideological, because both activities serve to naturalize and reproduce the status of experts and of the law generally.

The report for decision making shares some common ground with the proposal, the report of scientific experiment, and even the persuasive essay, yet these genres differ. Recognizing these differences is necessary for effective inquiry, pedagogy, and decision making. The genres are means of solving different types of problems: practical, empirical, and theoretical. They serve different aims: action, demonstration, and conviction. The proposal, like the report, may solve practical problems, but the proposal advocates, whereas the report inquires. These genres all embody assumptions about problem solving and inquiry in their forms. Applying the problem-solving goals and methods of the proposal, experimental report, or essay to the report for decision making compromises the quality of the inquiry and of the resulting decision. Complex problems for decision making require a rhetorical method of inquiry based on Aristotle's special topics. The report genre reflects the invention heuristics and analysis in its form.

Despite the fact that letters and memos are the most prevalent forms of written discourse in the business community, there has been little theoretical study of professional correspondence as a distinct rhetorical genre. A theory of correspondence as a form of dialogue can, however, be constructed with the help of two very different scholars, Erasmus and Bakhtin. Erasmus, the Renaissance humanist, offers a pragmatic guide to the practice of dialogue in correspondence, and Bakhtin, the twentieth-century Russian philosopher of language, provides theoretical concepts that define the nature of dialogical communication. The present article combines the ideas of both scholars into a unified theory of business correspondence and then presents both a set of guidelines and a model for the practice of dialogical correspondence.

This article identifies problems in the computer-supported group writing of MBA students who are both novice strategic report writers and novice users of technology that supports group work. These problems consist of lack of attention to readers' needs, attitudes, and expectations; poor conflict management; leadership problems; genre confusion; shaky definition of the strategic problem; poor commitment and attitudes toward use of new technology; poor computer policies and practices; and conflicting hardware and software preferences. The article suggests several reasons for these problems, draws implications for instruction of computer-supported group writing, and suggests topics for further research.