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

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

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

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

This article presents a multimodal genre analysis of crowdfunding proposals, an emerging web-based genre for raising funds from internet crowds for a project or venture. Based on an analysis of nine most-funded Kickstarter crowdfunding proposals, the authors describe the generic move structure using a semiotic approach and examine the role of visual images in constructing meaning within and across moves. The analysis shows that visual images facilitate potential backers’ sense-making in basically two dimensions: rhetorically, functioning to persuade by establishing ethos, logos, and pathos, and compositionally, helping achieve cohesion within and between moves and facilitate move mixing, embedding, and positioning. This study also attests a case-based approach to examining multiple influences on genre emergence.

This article explores science communication in the context of COVID-19 through a case study of a January 31, 2020, bioRxiv preprint publication that led to conspiracy theories by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the laboratory through genetic engineering. Analysis will consider the initial preprint, the scientific critique that led it to be withdrawn, the conspiracy theories that continue to circulate, and the larger debate that this example has sparked among advocates and critics of open science.

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

Networks have a remarkable ability to bring people together in communities, both online and offline, but such community building is not the only possible result of network use. This article examines the case of a tagging network on Twitter, the online social networking service characterized by short messages. Although Twitter has many social features that foster interaction between users, the use of hashtags to signal the topic of a message exists outside of the site’s primary social structures, creating a unique writing environment. This article analyzes a hashtagged exchange surrounding the 2009 health care debate in the United States, examining the social features of this exchange and how participants used it to communicate about that debate. While traditional social features were certainly present within the exchange, they were not prominent or common; rather, users engaged the network properties of this exchange to make connections with other networks, drawing on a form of network power called switching. The analysis focuses on how the Twitter network’s structural features affect communication between users.

This study examines the corporate environmental reports of 100 companies listed in the 2009 Fortune 1000 in order to illustrate how this type of genre communicates a green corporate ethos to audience members who are trying to distinguish between greenwashing tactics and true environmental concerns. The authors analyze how corporate environmental reports are constructed at macro and micro discursive levels to promote a socially responsible image to in-group (e.g., employees and stockholders) and out-group (e.g., consumers) members. The results of the analysis show how these reports use ideological persuasion to influence or change audience members’ opinions about corporate environmental sustainability.

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.

One of the most distinctive stylistic virtues of speechwriting is characterization, the art of capturing a client’s voice in a believable and engaging manner. This article examines characterization in the context of corporate communication, interweaving an interview with veteran executive speechwriter Alan Perlman with accounts from the ancient rhetorical tradition. As the analysis shows, Perlman’s approach to characterization confirms long-standing rhetorical wisdom yet incorporates insights that reflect the contemporary corporate context in which he has worked. The analysis also calls attention to enduring tensions in characterization—tensions between imitation and representation, effectiveness and ethics, and dramatic character and trustworthy ethos.

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.

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.

This study examines how a very light jet start-up, Eclipse Aviation, changed its ethos appeals in order to survive the loss of its principally declared innovation, a jet aircraft engine. Eclipse Aviation's corporate transformation from a spin-off company to a convergence-of-innovation company hinged on modifying an early marketing strategy. To overcome the loss of the jet engine, employees had to radically modify earlier expert representations and adopt rhetorical appeals that more closely parallel what Miller described as “cyborg discourse.” To understand how Eclipse Aviation survived the typically fatal loss of a stated primary innovation and to explore the implications that this particular start-up's rupture has for technology transfer and technical marketing, this study centers its analysis on a Web site that marketers used to “ventilate” the company and prevent financial collapse. The transformation in the company's marketing strategy illustrates how cyborg ethos appeals aggregate and discipline distributed stakeholder roles.

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.

This article invokes Habermas's ideal speech situation to analyze the controversy surrounding a recent study of pain relief for women in labor. Using Habermas's concepts, the authors argue that distortion of scientific and medical information originated in the New England Journal of Medicine article that first reported the study's results. Thus, their analysis aims to complicate the assumption that such distortion starts only with public reporting and to expose the ways that scientific or medical research from the beginning can be reported to either facilitate or preclude public debate and understanding of complex issues.

This article investigates how Confucianism inspires an indirect style in professional communication in China. Particularly, the author examines two major philosophical principles of Confucianism, Li (rituals/rules) and Ren (love/benevolence), and discusses how they encourage individuals to establish proper human relationships, to humble themselves, and to shun pure personal profits. Dictated by Confucianism, Chinese writers often focus on interpersonal relationships, humble themselves, and avoid personal profits before discussing pertinent business issues. As a result, Chinese writers are indirect in their style. They often employ the indirect style to accommodate two pragmatic acts: (a) establishing their ethos that helps create a strong bond between individuals at a more personal level and (b) building a harmonious social structure at a more societal level. Such a style is conducive to successful business transactions. So, it should not be explained as ineffective or as mere digressions.

This article examines the authors’ arduous struggle to develop a professional communication program that would not only meet their students’ professional and intellectual needs but also achieve an identity consistent with their goals as scholars and teachers of composition. Ultimately, the authors argue that a professional communication program that combines in its teaching the ethos of a liberal arts tradition along with the practical skills needed by writers in the workplace is both desirable and possible but that it must be flexible enough to allow for ongoing curricular and philosophical negotiations to meet changing contextual demands.

Recent scandals in the business community have alerted professional writing teachers to the importance of highlighting ethics in the curriculum. From former experiences in teaching courses emphasizing ethics, the authors have adapted the curriculum to include a limited discussion of ethical approaches and terms and assigned group writing projects that consider the effects of business on the broader community. As a result of the integration of this ethical component into the entire course, students learn major ethical approaches; gain a vocabulary of ethical terms they can apply in the business world; interrogate the larger questions of business and its interactions with the local, national, and international community; and engage in the kind of dialectical discussions that require critical thinking.

Writers often address letters to people with whom they have few if any personal connections. To increase understanding of rhetorical decision making in such noninterpersonal settings, this article analyzes letters to a United States senator. The analysis draws from three bodies of research on persuasion: situational context, persuade package, and personal constructs. On the basis of that theoretical grounding—and using deliberative democracy theory and the strategic-choice model—the authors develop hypotheses linking situation attributes and writer attributes to letter attributes. The results show that topic, position, sex, and technology are significantly related to the writer’s choice of appeals, argumentative complexity, and structural directness. They also demonstrate a strong link between technology and message length. These results raise several possibilities for further study, such as whether advocates sometimes address messages to an accessible person while aiming their argumentation at an archetypal authority figure.

Hypertext, in its most available manifestation, the World Wide Web, is being sold as a force for liberation. One must differentiate the varieties of freedom to better understand how different interests manipulate the freedom mythology to achieve different ends. This study examines the scholars who have framed the hypertext debate and the rhetoric employed by the companies that want to sell it to locate a more complex picture of how these interests use the freedom myth. Such consideration leads to discussion of what might shape hypertext's emergence as more than an information-dispersal system.

A new orientation toward intercultural and international communication will demand a redefinition of the professional communicator and professional communication: Translation—understood in a broad sense—will become a crucial skill. Analyzing what is absent from contexts and messages will become just as important as editing and refining what is present in them. This article considers the process of translation in the framework of the postmodern debate about language and reality as well as the economic, cultural, and social phenomena that have transformed the communication landscape during the past 50 years.

This article uses the cross-cultural concepts of context and time to examine the rhetoric of German university students in an English business writing course. This participant-observer account, which includes numerous student examples and observations, provides a fresh perspective for American teachers in increasingly multinational, multicultural classrooms. It also suggests how Aristotle's concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos together with the case method and group work can help teachers respond to the challenges in such classrooms. The article concludes by suggesting that understanding the rhetoric of culture is an important step in accepting and negotiating cultural differences.

This article argues for the long-term value of client-based group projects in an introductory technical communication course. Survey results are presented from 73 former technical communication students with two to seven years of workplace experience. Lasting five to six weeks, these projects are a compromise between a briefer conventional case method and a more lengthy individualized internship or cooperative education experience. The projects reinforce research, analysis, and reporting skills, such as interviewing specialists and conducting survey research, that graduates continue to value highly even after years of workplace writing. When framed as such, client-based projects also encourage students to define and debate public policy issues.

Rhetorical voice is rarely discussed in business, professional, or technical communication textbooks, despite its strategic importance in aligning writer and audience so that persuasion can occur. This article identifies those aspects of the rhetorical situation that shape voice and presents a heuristic that writers can use to identify the components of voice and to construct their personae.

This article analyzes the recognition, development, and use of the power of persuasion in American sales letter from 1905-1920, as well as two other business-writing traditions which developed during this period: the “you” viewpoint and the five C's. Examples will show how these two traditions changed the language used in business letters, allowing these letters to play a dual role by making these letters easier for the consumer to read and understand and by using these letters to pursue the growth in national character of American business. The article concludes with a call for further research, to help prepare writers to produce the letters of the future.