The design of online interactive visualizations is an ongoing area of research within technical communication, with recent work focusing on visualizations in risk-based contexts. This article shares the results of a large-scale user experience study on a popular interactive sea-level rise viewer aimed at facilitating decision making for individual users in coastal communities. Using this viewer, participants performed three major tasks related to individual property, community impacts, and future projections and gave feedback on the design, use value, and functionality of the tool. The participants were assessed on their ability to complete the three major tasks. The author discusses the implications of these results on the continued design of interactive risk visualizations and argues for a vision of user agency that is more constrained within the larger ethical paradigms of environmental communication.

This study examines user support issues concerning open-source software in computational sciences. The literature suggests that there are three main problem areas: transparency, learnability, and usability. Looking at questions asked in user communities for chemistry software projects, the author found that for software supported by feature-based documentation, problems of transparency and learnability are prominent, leading users to have difficulty reconciling disciplinary practices and values with software operations. For software supported by task-based documentation, usability problems were more prominent. The author considers the implications of this study for user support and the role that technical communication could play in developing and supporting open-source projects.

This study investigates the themes that drive persuasive recruiting appeals, or stories, designed to attract new, entrepreneurial workers in the direct selling industry. It offers a rhetorical perspective informed by fantasy theme analysis on the themes present in the recruiting content on the corporate Web sites of three direct selling companies (Mary Kay, Stella & Dot, and Scentsy). The analysis indicates that rhetorical agency is a core theme in the persuasive recruiting stories for these companies. Offering a means for business and technical communication scholars to explore agency or other persuasive story themes in context, this study addresses how a rhetorical perspective is useful to assess recruiting appeals in shifting, entrepreneurial work contexts.

This article describes a 12-month qualitative study that analyzes how a company’s transition to component content management (CCM)—a set of methodologies, processes, and technologies that allows working with texts as small components rather than complete, static documents—influences the work motivation of its technical communicators. The analysis is based on actor-network theory and the theories of work motivation from economics. When technical communicators felt that CCM’s only focus was efficiency and savings and that they were not recognized and connected to the fruits of their labor, their motivation decreased. But their motivation increased when they were engaged in job crafting—reshaping their understanding of the fruits of their labor and gaining recognition through prosocial behavior.

Claims abound about passives and the impersonal style they create. Few studies, however, check the claims with a large, systematic analysis of texts from either academia or industry. Motivated by the need to teach effective workplace writing skills to undergraduate engineering students, this study investigates the use of passives and associated impersonal style features in 170 practitioner reports, journal articles, and student reports from civil engineering. Using multidimensional analysis (a technique from corpus linguistics) and interviews of practitioners, students, and faculty, the study found that, as expected, engineering texts, compared to nontechnical texts, have a frequent use of impersonal style features; however, they use passives for a wider range of functions than is typically described in technical writing literature. Furthermore, compared to the journal articles and student reports, the practitioner reports use significantly fewer features of impersonal style. The findings inform teaching materials that present a more realistically complex picture of the language structures and functions important for civil engineering practice.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

Big data is one of the most hyped buzzwords in both academia and industry. This article makes an early contribution to research on big data by situating data theoretically as a historical object and arguing that much of the discourse about the supposed transparency and objectivity of big data ignores the crucial roles of interpretation and communication. To set forth that analysis, this article engages with recent discussion of big data and “smart” cities to show the communicative practices operating behind the scenes of large data projects and relate those practices to the profession of technical communication.

This article examines the teaching of a multimodal pedagogy in an online technical communication classroom. Based on the results of an e-portfolio assessment, the authors argue that multimodality can be taught successfully in the online environment if the instructor carefully plans and scaffolds each assignment. Specifically, they argue for an increased emphasis within the technical communication classroom on teaching the e-portfolio as a genre that not only exemplifies students’ multimodal literacies but also establishes their identities as technical communicators in the 21st century. This article provides a model for teaching multimodal composition in the online technical communication classroom and calls for more scholarship on teaching the e-portfolio in the digital environment.

This article reexamines Henry’s 2006 proposal for training technical communicators as “discourse workers,” as a solution within a certain postmodern problematic, in which changing economic conditions in the late 1990s and early 2000s made workers vulnerable to exploitation, outsourcing, and layoffs. Henry used postmodern and critical theory to describe discourse as a medium of leverage for enabling workers to define new workplace agencies. Even though Henry’s discourse worker is an appealing concept buttressed by solid theory, it did not become a widely implemented model for pedagogy or workplace practice. To reexamine Henry’s concept, the authors exchange late 20th-century postmodern theory for the more recent articulation of “post-postmodern” theory proposed by Nealon and explore the implications of swapping out the postmodern puzzle piece for a post-postmodern puzzle piece in Henry’s formulation of the discourse worker.

Alibaba’s Graphic Media (GM) is the first and only Internet content source that uses infographics to educate Chinese e-commerce merchants. This study investigates target audiences’ attitudes toward GM infographics. Two focus groups perceived GM as a practical information source that aided them in decision making and daily business operations. They preferred viewing graphics to texts and particularly favored statistical graphics. They also identified issues with viewing GM infographics on mobile devices. Based on the study’s findings, the author proposes three areas that communicators can address when designing infographics in similar contexts: content, usability, and overall visual appeal.

Major trends, such as outsourcing and offshoring, and field-specific factors, such as the advent of content management systems, have fundamentally changed technical communication in recent years. These changes have been widely discussed in the literature of the field, and this article traces their impact on technical communicators in Finland, a high-cost country where downturns in the export industry and the downsizing of major employers are currently coinciding. Through the framework of activity theory, the article looks at the historical changes in the industry as sources of tension and contradictions that need to be understood in order to support professionals in the industry. With the help of interview data, the authors explore the tensions experienced by technical communication professionals in the face of such changes. This analysis leads to the formulation of a hypothesis of historical contradictions currently at play in the field of technical communication. Developmental potentials stemming from these contradictions are outlined as potential ways forward for technical communicators who notice similar tensions in their own environments.

Advances in digital media have made an impact on traditional rhetorical culture, thus shifting expectations and norms associated with orality and public presentation. Technology, entertainment, and design (TED) talks represent a new genre of presentation characteristic of Jamieson’s notion of electronic eloquence in that presenters weave together an engaging narrative complete with a strong visual presence. This study applies Bandura’s social cognitive learning theory to explore how students make sense of TED talks. Students responded to two questionnaires in two different classes: a basic public speaking course and a technical communication course. The results suggest that students learn vicariously through viewing mediated presentations, thus shaping their view of public speaking as a coproduced, networked, and engaging narrative. The authors offer recommendations for communication practitioners related to electronic eloquence and the rhetorical tradition.

This article examines the oral communication training that took place in Eloqi, a virtual language-learning community. Eloqi (a pseudonym) was a for-profit start-up that built and operated a proprietary Web-based, voice-enabled platform connecting English-language learners in China with trainers in the United States. While it existed, Eloqi’s unique platform was used to deliver short, one-on-one lessons designed to improve students’ oral English communication skills. Using the ethnography of communication and speech codes theory, a theoretical–methodological approach, the author presents an analysis of the speech code, or code of communicative conduct, employed at Eloqi. This code of English logic, which Eloqi’s community members associated with native English speech, comprised six locally defined rules for oral English speech; namely, speech had to be organized, succinct, spontaneously composed rather than rehearsed, original and honest, proactively improved, and positive. This article discusses the significance of this code, particularly as it pertains to cultural communication, and concludes with some implications for researchers and practitioners in business and technical communication.

Women decide on about 80% of the goods that their household buys. But marketers often sell products, especially technical ones, that are designed by men and therefore are oriented largely toward their needs. Consequently, assembly instructions for these products are also oriented toward men’s needs. To illustrate the impact of gender orientation in assembly instructions, this study investigates whether theoretical cognitive or psychological gender differences have a practical influence on the usability of assembly instructions. This study has direct implications for technical writers who strive for a more universal design for such instructions.

This article introduces apparent feminism, which is a new approach urgently required by modern technical rhetorics. Apparent feminism provides a new kind of response that addresses current political trends that render misogyny unapparent, the ubiquity of uncritically negative responses to the term feminism, and a decline in centralized feminist work in technical communication. More specifically, it suggests that the manifestation of these trends in technical spheres requires intervention into notions of objectivity and the regimes of truth they support. Apparent feminism is a methodology that seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for feminist critique of contemporary politics and technical rhetorics. It encourages a response to social justice exigencies, invites participation from allies who do not explicitly identify as feminist but do work that complements feminist goals, and makes apparent the ways in which efficient work actually depends on the existence and input of diverse audiences.

This article reports the results of an experiment that was conducted to determine the impact of media synchronicity theory (MST) training on media-fit behavior, communication quantity, communication quality, and group effectiveness. MST training introduces students to a framework for assessing a media’s capabilities and matching those capabilities to a particular task. From three technical communication courses, 80 participants were randomly divided into two groups and compared using a between-subjects design. The MST training group reported significantly higher levels of media-fit behavior, communication quantity, and the communication-performance qualities of discussion quality, richness, and openness. The article discusses practical ways to implement MST training into technical communication group projects.

This article proposes a more complex consideration of the idea-generation stage of the document design process. Survey data collected from multiple sections of graphic design and technical communication classes show that design software and other technology can help students generate solutions to design problems by enabling them to realize design options that they may not have known exist and to adopt a bricolage approach to design that facilitates the process. The author makes several recommendations for how instructors can negotiate the sketching-software divide in their classrooms to ensure that the invention process is optimized for all students.

Although most technical communication pedagogy provides students with solid advice on how to visualize particular numerical representations, it underproblematizes the rhetorical decisions we make in choosing which numbers to display in the first place. This pedagogical reflection uses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of interpretative level to foreground the rhetorical choices that underlie our decisions on how to summarize, aggregate, and synthesize the data we visualize. It then describes two informal classroom activities that emphasize the importance of interpretative level and help students see the recursive nature of data visualization and invention.

The design of interactive applications for online communication is an ongoing area of research within technical communication. This study reports on the development of an interactive sea-level rise (SLR) viewer, a data visualization tool that communicates about the potential effects of SLR along coastlines. It describes the formative evaluation of a location-specific SLR viewer created via integral stakeholder engagement. Participants performed a series of tasks, answered questions about the tool's usability and communicative effectiveness, and made suggestions for ways to improve its application to desired tasks. The authors discuss the implications of this study for visual risk communication and make recommendations for others developing similar interactive data visualization tools with audience input.

This article provides a critical overview of the challenges that content management poses for technical communicators who work on multilingual projects. These issues include determining whether to translate or to localize, resolving the problems presented by the decontextualizing and repurposing of text, managing the complexities of the localization industry’s work practices and tools, and handling the linguistic idiosyncrasies of particular languages. The authors draw on their experience with content management and the translation–localization industry in seeking to problematize increasingly standardized practices that deserve further investigation.

This article considers how technical communication practitioners and teachers can approach Donald Schön’s notion of problem setting as rhetorical and reflective work that offers us a richer, more precise language for articulating the technologies, narratives, and values from which problems appear as problems in the first place. The author posits that problem setting, when foregrounded in our work, adds value to the knowledge we make in practice rather than the knowledge we gain from stepping back and abstracting. After briefly describing problem setting as a significant yet invisible practice already underlying technical communication, he then describes a vignette from a digital marketing and design firm to foreground problem setting as creative, on-the-spot reflective work that we often use to invent, rather than discern, problems in unstable situations. The larger goal of this article is to further investigate Schön’s past construction in order to examine how the practice of problem setting affects our ability to act within the instability of digital, divergent, and knowledge-intensive settings—the kinds of settings we regularly face in the workplace and the classroom.

Drawing on a survey of the content management (CM) discourse, the author highlights CM trends and articulates best practices in content strategy that CM thought leaders are helping organizations adopt. These trends and practices are changing the nature and location of rhetorical work in organizations that produce intelligent content. In these contexts, rhetorical work is located primarily in the complex activity of building content strategy frameworks that govern text-making activities. The author highlights the need for a praxis-based collaborative model for technical communication education and research, and she offers some preliminary considerations for ways that the field might move in this direction.

Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagog-ical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

Technical communication increasingly occurs in distributed, cross-cultural, and cross-organizational environments in which stakeholders may have widely disparate—even conflicting—perspectives. Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) is one such environment. Balancing complex and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups is a challenge, and unstable stakeholder participation is a widespread problem in ICTD projects. The study presented here shows that stakeholders’ participation in a project was sustained most easily when the value that the stakeholders would gain from such participation was congruent with their respective national and organizational cultures. This study has implications for technical communicators working on cross-organizational projects, particularly projects that occur in distributed, cross-cultural environments.

This experimental study investigates the impact of short-messaging service (SMS)—text messaging—on social connectedness and group attitude in student technical communication projects. It also investigates message types and communication medium preferences. Using a between-subjects design, the experiment compares two student groups: SMS only and non-SMS. The results indicated several statistically significant differences. Compared to students in the non-SMS group, students in the SMS-only group (a) communicated more, (b) felt more connected, and (c) sent more questions, answers, and nonproject-related messages. These results provide empirical evidence for using SMS in team contexts.

Novice Web developers and other technical communicators need to learn not only accessibility standards but also factors that make designs usable to audiences with disabilities. One challenge of teaching accessibility to novices is creating exigency; another is emulating experiences of users with disabilities. This article tackles teaching novices to create Web sites for visually impaired audiences using a five-stage, recursive approach. Teaching best coding practices is only one stage: Instructors should create exigency by introducing real users and their experiences. They should also check for accessibility and emulate screen-reader output using tools such as WAVE and FANGS, respectively. Furthermore, novice developers should examine how different tools can be used in combination to provide a variety of feedback.

This article highlights the creation of professional electronic portfolios (eportfolios) in an upper-division technical writing course (Writing for Interactive Media) so that students can profile their work. This application emphasizes the professional aspect of eportfolios in order to help students develop multiple literacies as they transition into the job market. The author proposes administering a four-part assignment series that leads to the production of a professional eportfolio: (a) proposal, (b) design document, (c) script, and (d) professional eportfolio. Following each assignment, she discusses its limitations and assessment criteria.

This article engages disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) conversations at the intersections of race, rhetoric, technology, and technical communication and offers a case study of curriculum development that supports disciplinary inquiry at these complex interstices. Specifically, informed by a decolonial framework, this article discusses the status of cultural and critical race studies in technical communication scholarship; tentative definitions of race, rhetoric, and technology; the cultural usability research conducted and located accountability in the process of designing a graduate course that studies rhetorics of race and technology; and the implications of this inquiry for the discipline, field, and practices of technical communication.

Developing effective workplace safety and risk communication materials for Latino construction workers poses a challenge for technical communicators. These workers are at a disadvantage because of culture and language differences on many job sites. Furthermore, low levels of literacy in any language and lack of proper training compound their job site communication problems. This article builds on cultural studies-based recommendations to develop discourse in workplace safety and risk that these workers can fully understand. The authors in this study used direct creative input from Latino construction workers in order to create safety and risk communication products that were evaluated as effective and culturally relevant for these workers and their peers.

Using tracings from a 1924 technical writing class, this article follows some normally unmarked processes of teaching and learning in order to highlight the humanities–utility binary from the perspective of the shadows of instructional practice. First, the article situates the humanities–utility debate as it is being addressed in postwar America, and second, it offers evidence of how far-reaching the resolution might have been, evidence taken from the margins of a copy of Watt’s (1917) The Composition of Technical Papers. Both the professional discussions and this textbook’s philosophy are reflected in jottings made by a technical writing student. This article suggests that tracing these issues through this underside of pedagogical history offers a type of evidence that is difficult to recover but worth seeking.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linchpin of analysis in the empirical case. Yet the notion of object has expanded methodologically and theoretically over time, making it difficult to reliably bound an empirical case. In response, this article outlines the expansion of the object, diagnoses this expansion, and proposes an alternate approach that constrains the object for case-study research in writing studies.

A decade ago, my colleagues and I (Geisler et al., 2001) published an IText manifesto in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication to call attention to the impact of information technologies with texts at their core. These ITexts, we claimed, represented ‘‘a new page in the story of the coevolution of humanity, culture, and technology,’’ promising to change both the nature of texts and their role in society. The manifesto arose out of discussions in May 2000 at the annual meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America on the future of research on text-making activities and how they affect and are affected by new information technologies. About 14 months later, the IText manifesto was published in the pages of this journal. Three years later, a special issue of JBTC illustrated ‘‘the ubiquity of IText’’ with articles on Web technologies, dictation, screen capture, and text visualization (Geisler, 2004).

The authors describe two pedagogical strategies—rhetorical sentence combining and rhetorical pattern practice—that blend once-popular teaching techniques with rhetorical decision making. A literature review identified studies that associated linguistic and rhetorical knowledge with success in engineering writing; this information was used to create exercises teaching technical communication students to write Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) reports. Two pilot studies report promising results: Preliminary findings suggest that students who were taught this method wrote essays that were perceived as significantly higher in quality than those written by students in a control section. At the same time, however, the pilot studies point to some challenges and shortcomings of exercise-oriented pedagogies.

Previous research has suggested the need for developing technical communication education in Chinese universities. Following this suggestion, this article examines the possibility of integrating technical communication into China’s English major curriculum. Based on findings from two universities, the article discusses the design of China’s English major curriculum and Chinese teacher and student perspectives on technical communication. The author suggests that China’s English for Specific Purposes (ESP) education provides a promising home for integrating technical communication and that this integration can enhance China’s current ESP education. The author presents three integration models and discusses questions for future research.

This case study investigates how a group of novice technical communicators used appeals to support their design decisions during group meetings. The results of this ethnographic study suggest that although these technical communicators were well acquainted with user-centered design (UCD) concepts and claimed to actively practice UCD, their appeals often did not reference data collected within user-centered research and instead referenced designer-centric appeals to support their claims. This group’s overall use of appeals to support their design decisions suggests that more empirical study into UCD theory and practice as well as students’ argumentation skills is warranted.

Even a cursory glance at the daily news will provide ample testimony to the importance for professional communication of the contributions to this special issue of Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC). Indeed, as recent events have made abundantly clear, the most pressing challenges and crises we face—be these economic or environmental crises or social justice issues—are global. And yet, despite their global nature and their far-reaching consequences for local communities, much deliberation and decision making about these issues has been shifted to global economic

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.