Nonprofit organizations have long used the personal experience narratives of clients, staff, and stakeholders in their communications. This study explores digital-age practices with this text form, analyzing 82 collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs) housed at or linked to Web sites of nonprofit organizations. Results are reported on the variety and frequency of the modes, featured constituencies, narrative perspectives, and digital interface features in the sample. Overall, the nonprofit DPEN collections sampled showed limited use of new digital production and distribution possibilities. Practice, however, differed notably between two segments of nonprofits: networks and service organizations. To explore these results, the article discusses key examples of DPEN collections from each segment.

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.

This study reports the results of 12 recent interviews with nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) authors who have conducted research and written articles on health and medical subjects. Analyzing the interview transcripts through the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of capital, this study expands on previous research by offering a more precise and theoretically grounded understanding of how NNES authors perceive the value of English proficiency in relation to their success as scientific researchers. This theorization of the varying ways in which authors perceive the value of English proficiency affords new perspectives on the inequities that NNES authors encounter in the global publishing economy and their rhetorical strategies for overcoming these inequities. The study concludes by reflecting on theoretical and practical implications for researchers, teachers, and other stakeholders in the global publishing industry.

White papers are commonly produced by for-profit organizations to market high-tech products and services and are often created by technical writers. But writers of this genre have little evidence-based research to guide them. To fill this void, the authors tested a rhetorical move structure with a sample of 20 top-rated marketing white papers and found that, despite the lack of industry standards for white papers, those written for marketing purposes display similar rhetorical moves: introducing the business problem, occupying the business solution niche, prompting action, establishing credibility, and providing disclaimers or legal considerations. Based on the results of this study, the authors advance guidelines for writers of this genre and suggest areas for future research.

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.

This study theorizes genre from within actor-network theory. The net work (spelled intentionally as two words) function of genre proposes a solution to the inherent incommensurability in applying the notion of genre as social action within the posthumanist and postsocial perspective of actor-network theory. The study proposes an approach to genre analysis informed by the net work genre function and demonstrates its affordances by analyzing two conventional workplace genres. Performing genre analysis from a net work perspective has value for assimilating writers, both students and workplace professionals, into a new professional domain or organization.

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.

With their timely, interactive nature and wide public access, social media have provided a new platform that empowers stakeholders and corporations to interact in crisis communication. This study investigates crisis communication strategies and stakeholders’ emotions in response to a real corporate crisis—the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214—in order to enhance our understanding of socially mediated crisis communication. The authors examine 8,530 responses from Chinese stakeholders to crisis communication on the Chinese microblogging Web site Sina Weibo. Their findings suggest that the integrated use of accommodative and defensive communication strategies in the early stage of postcrisis communication prevented escalation of the crisis.

Situated learning theory postulates that the environment in which learning occurs is foundational to understanding the outcomes of that learning. Taking classes in a nontraditional classroom, therefore, might have a noticeable effect on learning outcomes. This study examines three structures of the same general education course to understand the potential impact of mediated learning on students’ public speaking and writing apprehension and self-efficacy. Although situated learning theory suggests that the three structures (face-to-face, partially face-to-face, and fully online) should demonstrate differences, the results of this study are mixed, suggesting a complicated picture for situated learning’s ability to speak to differences based on technology use while highlighting the differences in how such technology might affect oral skills versus written skills. The application of situated learning principles to technologically mediated courses demonstrates the need to consider the interplay between environment and content.

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.

This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

This study focuses on dominant terms whose usage generates a specific identity in the craft beer industry: revolution and crafty. Actors who engage these terms—brewers, writers, and consumers—create a narrative about the industry that gives craft beer a professional identity. The study explores how specific industries depend on the circulation of taxonomies in order to establish an identity with both a customer base and each other.

On October 22, 2012, six scientists and one civil servant were convicted of manslaughter for failing to properly warn the people of L’Aquila, Italy, of an impending earthquake that resulted in over 300 deaths and 1,500 injuries. This article investigates a key event leading up to this conviction: An emergency meeting of scientists, civil servants, and politicians to determine whether or not an advanced warning should be issued to the residents of L’Aquila. The following investigation of this emergency meeting uses functional stasis analysis to identify the primary breakdown in deliberation that ultimately led to a message of calm and reassurance immediately prior to the devastating earthquake. The results provide insights into not only the events in L’Aquila but also broader issues of risk, uncertainty, fact, and value in science-policy deliberation.

Previous research on the readability of annual reports is based mainly on English narratives and has found them difficult to read. Although the results of such research cannot be generalized to different contexts, accounting narratives written in non-English languages have seldom been analyzed in this respect. More important, few studies have longitudinally examined the evolution in readability of such narratives. This study focuses on the readability evolution of annual report narratives written in Spanish, applying an adapted version of the Flesch readability formula to two sets of documents from different companies over most of the years of the 20th century. The results confirm that the reports are indeed difficult to read but show an improvement in readability over the years. The study tested several variables that might influence readability, including profitability.

Corporate documents increasingly rely on visual rhetoric to complement text. Although previous studies have indicated that companies’ local culture may be reflected in the images they employ, scholars have never systematically investigated the use of visual rhetoric as it is used across different business cultures. This study analyzes visual rhetoric using a new model of visual metadiscourse—a set of devices that designers use to convey meaning in order to influence the audience’s interpretation of the text. The study compares the visual metadiscourse in photos used in English management statements in the annual reports of Dutch and U.K. companies. The results show that metadiscourse is inherent not only in the written text of a corporate document but also in the visuals that a design team chooses to include. The results also indicate that despite some similarities, Dutch-based and U.K.-based statements contain differences in their use of visual metadiscourse. Several of these differences can be attributed to cultural differences between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The study underlines the applicability of the new model and warns international text designers not to overlook cultural differences in visual metadiscourse.

In this article, the authors confront challenges faced in public planning projects when the desire to implement participatory design is complicated by the need for mass quantities of data. Using one case of participatory design in urban planning, they suggest that planners struggled to effectively employ participatory design methodology because they neglected to collect the tacit knowledge generated through their participatory processes. Coupling participatory design with a listening rhetoric, they suggest that participatory processes that include tacit knowledge and representative citizen participation might augment public planning projects that hope for both big data collection and democratic approaches to urban planning.

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.

This article examines the Guide to Kuan Hua, arguably the world’s first business Chinese textbook series, exploring how a group of business communication experts in late 19th-century China created instructional materials that allowed foreigners to function efficiently in China’s business and bureaucratic environment. Rather than simply focusing on the mechanics of language, editors of the series fostered in students a set of literacies that would help them cope with the tumultuous change in 19th-century China. This study suggests that the experience of 19th-century textbook editors may inform our approach to complex intercultural communication challenges in today’s globalized world.

This article presents data from an electronic survey asking 101 entrepreneurs in Wisconsin and North Alabama about the documents they write before opening and while operating their businesses, the writing skills they value, and the audiences they consider when writing. The results demonstrate that entrepreneurs highly value writing and rhetorical skills, produce a huge range of documents, and require distinctive genres at different stages of their ventures. The results can help professional communication instructors, entrepreneurship and small-business consultants, and aspiring entrepreneurs to more effectively anticipate and meet the rhetorical challenges of opening and operating a business.

This study examines how a supervisor’s delivery of negative feedback affects employees’ tendency to respond by either voicing their ideas or remaining silent. The results show that approbation, or the use of praise to soften face threat, was the most effective facework message for the supervisor to use when providing negative feedback. When employees felt more threatened, they reported that they would be less likely to use voice to help others and more likely to use silence defensively as a response, but as their perceptions of threat decreased, they generally reported that they were more likely to use voice to help others. The article discusses implications of these results, limitations of the study, and future directions of this research.

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.

Medical cartography became an important data visualization tool in the 19th century. In this article, the author argues that early yellow fever maps invoked power and authority over diseased space through their visual conventions and scientific authority as statistical graphics as well as by visually reinforcing underlying Western ideologies about disease, illness, and health. Further, the creation of these maps established a visual precedent for invoking this authority that continues today. As public health continues to move toward a global health perspective in the 21st century, understanding how mapping constructs and shapes knowledge about disease, illness, and health will become increasingly important.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

Many studies have examined organizations’ use of specific types of online media, but few studies have examined how organizations generate dialogues and develop relationships by using multiple online communication platforms. This study takes an integrated approach by examining how top global organizations incorporate brand Web sites, Facebook, and Twitter to cultivate relationships with stakeholders. Its findings suggest that those particular online media are used similarly, that is, more for information dissemination than user engagement and more for one-way than two-way communication. The findings also suggest that the types of products promoted can affect the way that organizations use different online media to develop relationships.

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 study applies three models of attribution to examine the public’s responses to corporate crises. Using Kelley’s covariation model and Coombs’s situational crisis communication theory, the study shows that distinctiveness information has strong and robust effects, consistency information has some effects, and consensus information has no effects on attributions of corporate responsibility, purchase intentions, and punitive opinions. Based on Weiner’s model, this study finds that attributions of corporate responsibility result in punitive opinions guided by retributive rather than utilitarian motivations.