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

In this article, the author theorizes the process that a World Health Organization work group used to update yellow fever risk maps published in the Yellow Book, a handbook created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for international travelers, from a “wicked problems” perspective. She argues that using this model highlights the complexity of nonexperts’ risk assessment practices in this context and that the work group's decision to create vaccination maps demonstrates an increased awareness of the embodied decision-making practices that nonexperts perform, aligning with and contributing to the growing emphasis on creating user-centered risk information that can be seen in some risk communication.

Scrum is an increasingly important project management framework that has had limited study in technical communication (TC) and TC classrooms. While research has found student collaborations to be both frustrating and challenging, it has found Scrum to be a scaffolding framework that can improve student interactions and outcomes. Therefore, to determine whether Scrum affects the peer assessments of collaborative teams as well as project grades, this quasi-experimental classroom study compares the midproject and postproject peer assessments and grades of advanced TC students who used Scrum as a framework for collaboration against those students who did not use Scrum in their collaborations. The study found that students who used Scrum rated their team members significantly higher on some peer assessment measures and earned significantly higher grades than did those students who did not use Scrum. Additionally, students in the Scrum protocol reported satisfaction with their group experience broadly but did not report satisfaction with Scrum itself.

More than 20 years ago, Elizabeth O. Smith published her points of reference that documented the research trajectory of technical communication from 1988 to 1997. Her results indicated a focus on rhetorical analyses, a decrease in collaborative research, and a disproportionate representation of male authors. This study builds on these points with a quantitative content analysis of 1,271 articles that were published in five leading technical communication journals and Intercom, the trade magazine for the Society for Technical Communication, from 1996 to 2017. The results show that both the research journals and Intercom have pivoted to process-driven rather than product-driven content. The results also suggest that the primary topics of communication strategy and collaboration might be the most likely places to foster future industry–academic ties and that the greatest division between the two populations is the primary topic of rhetoric. This study offers an updated baseline for future investigations by offering an evaluation of disparate content foci between the publication types.

Communicating risk amid moments of scientific ambiguity requires balance: Overdelivering certainty levels can cause undue alarm whereas underdelivering them can lead to increased public risk. Despite this complexity, risk assessment is an important decision-making tool. This article analyzes the circulation of the term “risk” in a corpus (74,804 words) of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention communications regarding COVID-19 from January 1 to April 30, 2020. Tracking collocations of the 147 instances of risk in this corpus reveals that experts initially framed risk away from individuals, complicating people’s differentiation between public and personal impacts. Recommendations are offered for how institutions can reframe subjectivity to promote vigilance during pandemics.

Functional complexity is a widespread and underresearched phenomenon in Web sites. This article explores a specific case of functional complexity by analyzing the content of UNESCO World Heritage Web sites, which have to meet demands from both World Heritage and tourism perspectives. Based on a functional analysis, a content checklist was developed and used to evaluate a sample of 30 World Heritage Web sites. The results show that World Heritage Web sites generally fall short in all content categories. A cluster analysis reveals three types of World Heritage Web sites based on their emphasis on World Heritage content versus tourism content: (a) less well-developed Web sites (no emphasis), (b) Web sites of World Heritage Sites with touristic possibilities (emphasis on World Heritage), and (c) Web sites of touristic attractions with outstanding cultural or natural value (emphasis on tourism). In all, the findings show that functional complexity poses serious threats to the exhaustiveness of a Web site’s information and that evaluation approaches based on functional analysis can be useful in detecting blindspots in the content provided.

Government-published documents often fail to communicate clearly—not only with citizens but also with professional readers such as civil servants. Visual or multimodal approaches remain rare. This is a particularly unhelpful practice in regard to legal–bureaucratic instructions (e.g., contracts, rules, policies), which exist to guide compliant behavior. This study explores the development and experimental evaluation of a diagrammatic guide of terms and conditions for public procurement that is addressed to civil servants. Results show that the diagrammatic format, compared to prose, significantly enhances comprehension accuracy and answering speed and is perceived as more appealing and functional by users.

Online learning modes can provide convenience and flexibility to students. But communicating the value of online education in technical and professional communication should not end there. Program directors should rearticulate the narrative about the value of online graduate education beyond flexibility and convenience by reevaluating the ways that program assessment is designed and implemented. This pilot study suggests that a community of inquiry framework can help to communicate the value of the online learning environment to a variety of stakeholders, including prospective and current students, administrators, instructors, and potential employers.

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 reports the background, methods, and results of a 7-year project (2007–2013) that assessed the writing of undergraduate business majors at a business college. It describes specific issues with writing assessment and how this study attempted to overcome them, largely through a situated assessment approach. The authors provide the results of more than 3,700 assessments of nearly 2,000 documents during the course of the study, reporting on scores overall and for each rubric criterion and comparing the scores of English and business assessors. They also investigate how two curricular interventions were evaluated through this assessment project. Although overall, the writing of these business majors was assessed as good, results showed noteworthy differences between the scores of English and business assessors and a noteworthy impact for one of the curricular interventions, an effort to improve the material conditions of writing instruction. The authors conclude by discussing some next steps and implications of this project.

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.

Using a narrative–semiotic approach, this article explores the decisions, plans, and actions involved in dealing with organizational risks and crises. It describes a model, or methodological framework, for crisis analysis as well as for organizational learning aimed at crisis management and prevention. The model is based on the interrelational positioning of the relevant agents (project managers, project team members, and stakeholders), the discourses produced by these agents, and their actions. This model is valuable for understanding the situations, goals, motivations, and anxieties that underlie the risk assessment and actions taken during crises. To illustrate the theoretical discussion, the article analyzes the Columbia Space Shuttle accident of 2003.

This study investigates important questions for any emerging high-technology firm attempting to obtain funding: Does the design of the presentation and the perceived passion and preparedness of the presenter influence expert reviewers’ assessment of the merits of the firm’s proposal? The authors analyzed 22 videotaped presentations to reviewer panels at a U.S. Department of Defense technology transfer consortium and compared the panels’ assessments of the presenting firms’ proposals both before and after the formal presentations. The data showed that, on average, higher levels of perceived entrepreneurial passion and presenter preparedness and presentation designs that effectively captured the audiences’ attention resulted in higher ratings by decision makers on the firm’s technology merit, management ability, and commercial potential.

Corporate social responsibility is a topic that is increasingly incorporated into business school curricula. This article describes a study of undergraduate business majors who wrote about an environmental topic in response to an Analytical Writing Assessment question in the Graduate Management Admission Test™. Of 187 students, only 76 mentioned natural resources in their responses. The study examines this smaller corpus for stance, framing, and argument. The results indicate that the majority of those 76 students supported sustainable practices but were less adept at presenting their perspectives, invoking a personal frame over a professional one. The authors suggest ways to help students develop stronger skills in writing about corporate social responsibility.

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.

Web sites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of the content by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. Little is known about users’ abilities to provide such feedback. To guide the development of evaluation tools, this study examines to what extent users with various background characteristics are able to provide useful comments on informational Web sites. Results show that it is important to keep the feedback tools both simple and attractive so that users will be able and willing to provide useful feedback on Web site pages.

This article explores the role of students’ prior, or antecedent, genre knowledge in relation to their developing disciplinary genre competence by drawing on an illustrative example of an engineering genre-competence assessment. The initial outcomes of this diagnostic assessment suggest that students’ ability to successfully identify and characterize rhetorical and textual features of a genre does not guarantee their successful writing performance in the genre. Although previous active participation in genre production (writing) seems to have a defining influence on students’ ability to write in the genre, such participation appears to be a necessary but insufficient precondition for genre-competence development. The authors discuss the usefulness of probing student antecedent genre knowledge early in communication courses as a potential source for macrolevel curriculum decisions and microlevel pedagogical adjustments in course design, and they propose directions for future research.

In an advanced technical and professional writing course, a pair of in-class exercises integrates the teaching of teamwork with other class topics of project management and observation-based research. The first exercise introduces teamwork in a positive way, by raising awareness of strategies for solving problems successfully. The second exercise follows up on the first, focusing on assessment of problem-solving teamwork. The pair of exercises is memorable and effective, showing students in an engaging, thought-provoking way that they have control and responsibility for the success of their teamwork. The materials for conducting the exercises, provided here, encourage reflection and discussion.

Many students see instructor commentary as not constructive but prescriptive directions that must be followed so that their grade, not necessarily their writing, can be improved. Research offering heuristics for improving such commentary is available for guidance, but the methods employed to comment on writing still have not changed significantly, primarily because we lack sufficient understanding of how students use feedback. Usability evaluation is ideally equipped for assessing how students use commentary and how instructors might adapt their comments to make them more usable. This article reports on usability testing of commentary provided to students in an introductory technical writing course.

This article describes a pilot effort for an accreditation-driven writing assessment in a business college, detailing the pilot's logistics and methods. Supported by rubric software and a philosophy of “real readers, real documents,” the assessment was piloted in summer 2006 with five evaluators who were English instructors and four who worked or taught in business environments. The nine evaluators were each given 10 reports that were drawn from a sample of 50 reports completed in a writing-intensive course. They created 88 individual assessments using a 10-category rubric. While the overarching purpose of the pilot was to determine the effectiveness of the methods used, the results may also be of interest to those involved with the assessment of writing.

This article investigates the introductions of 40 professional speeches from a rhetorical perspective to address the problems audiences seem to have with presentations about engineering. The authors use an exordial model that they derived from classical manuals on rhetoric. This model enumerates and groups rhetorical exordial techniques into 3 main functions: attentum, benevolum, and docilem . The study shows that rhetorically complete introductions are rare. Most of the speakers seemed to prefer a content-oriented, direct approach ( docilem) in their introductions and seldom used techniques to garner the audience's attention ( attentum) or sympathy ( benevolum). The article concludes with an evaluation of the exordial model and a discussion of the study's pedagogical implications.

As college instructors endeavor to integrate technology into their classrooms, the crucial question is, “How does this integration affect learning?” This article reports an assessment of a series of online modules the author designed and piloted for a business communication course that she presented in a hybrid format (a combination of computer classroom sessions and independent online work). The modules allowed the author to use classroom time for observation of and individualized attention to the composing process. Although anecdotal evidence suggested that this system was highly effective, other assessment tools provided varying results. An anonymous survey of the students who took this course confirmed that the modules were effective in teaching important concepts; however, a blind review of student work produced mixed results.

Research suggests that book reviews in academic journals tend to be positive but that readers prefer book reviews that include negative and positive evaluation. In this study, the author examines 48 books reviews from three business communication journals to determine whether these reviews are mainly positive. She counts compliments and criticisms, analyzing their location and topics. She also analyzes the force of the criticisms and strategies that reviewers use to mitigate criticism.

A brochure that had been revised on the basis of feedback from readers using the plus-minus evaluation method was evaluated again using the same method. This article compares the results of these two successive evaluation studies to examine the dynamics of evaluating and revising using a troubleshooting method based on verbal self-reports. The findings show that the plus-minus method does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the number of problems readers find in a revised document. But the types of problems readers find are significantly different. For example, after the brochure was revised, it had fewer clarity and structural problems, and readers could focus more on credibility issues.

This article describes the authors’ progress in establishing the validity and reliability of the Listening Styles Inventory (LSI) following their initial report in an earlier study (Barker, Pearce, and Johnson). The LSI provides managers with a self-administered tool for determining their own perceived listening effectiveness. The authors examined the data provided by 359 respondents in diverse managerial groups using factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha, Spearman’s rank order coefficient, structured interviews, expert observation, the Statistical Analysis System General Linear Model (GLM) procedure (analysis of variance), and a Tukey Student Range (honestly significant difference or HSD) test. The results yielded further evidence of the validity and reliability of the LSI as a self-administered diagnostic listening tool. The authors conclude that the LSI in its present form can serve as a guide for assessing a manager’s perceived listening effectiveness, but further research is needed to refine the instrument and to test other managerial groups.

This article proposes ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach for resolving the structure-agency binary and for treating the activities of writers in organizations as simultaneously embedded in and constitutive of organizational context. Structure is defined as those elements of social circumstances that writers orient to as relevant to their immediate writing task. In orienting to these elements, writers reproduce them as external and constraining social facts. The value of ethnomethodology is illustrated with data from a study examining the social practices that surrounded the writing of an evaluation report by two managers in an educational institution.

Research activity is an integral component in the formation of professions. Evidence shows that business and technical communication specialists conduct research in both academic and practitioner career fields. In other disciplines, course work has been recognized as the primary means for preparing students to conduct and consume research. Yet, no publications document the status of research methods course work for U.S. students specializing in business and technical communication. This study provides a descriptive basis for assessing three areas in those courses: research methods topics, required readings, and teaching or assessment methods. An analysis of the results leads to a proposed agenda for preparing students specializing in business and technical communication for their future work roles in both academe and industry.

The literature on formative text evaluation pays scant attention to the revision phase following data collection. This article describes a small-scale experiment in which five professional writers were asked to revise brochure fragments on the basis of feedback from readers. The feedback consisted of readers' comments, selected from the results of a pretest of the brochures, regarding their acceptance of the information and their appreciation of text elements. Despite the wide variety of solutions that resulted, some interesting tendencies were found: In response to problems with factual acceptance, writers often decided to add information; in response to problems with normative acceptance, they often chose to substitute material; and in response to appreciation problems, they either deleted the problematic passage or substituted a different phrase.

In this article, the review process is described as a method of formative evaluation of texts. The description is based on three empirical studies of professional writing practices. It includes the goals of review, the actors involved in the process, the moments in the text production process that review is taking place, and the procedures followed. The studies make clear that review serves more goals than just improving the text. For improving the text, other methods than review probably produce better and more reliable results, especially when the goal is to improve the usability of the text. But review also has the function of having the information checked by experts and of building consensus and commitment in the organization. Because in most organizations review is taking place anyway, all remarks about the quality and acceptability of the document that are collected in the review process can be considered additional information that writers could use—with caution.

This article analyzes the use of focus groups for the evaluation of a safety manual. To avoid one of the possible disadvantages of using focus groups, namely, sequencing or dominance problems, the method was combined with a troubleshooting text evaluation method: the plus-minus method. The combined approach produced valuable information about complex acceptance and relevance problems—information that could not easily have been obtained with other methods—part of which became available only after extensive discussion, during which opinions often changed. Information from the focus groups appeared to form a solid basis for decisions on revising or maintaining the text. Group discussion of critical remarks clarified whether the problems were related to the text or the company situation in which the manual functioned. In this way, problems with the text could sometimes be avoided by changing the situation or by explaining the situation to the readers.

This article presents a review of the literature on reader-focused text evaluation. First, an account is given of the document characteristics that can be evaluated. Then the possible functions of evaluations are considered, a distinction being made between verifying, troubleshooting, and choice-supporting research. Finally, an overview is presented of methods appropriate for the various document characteristics and evaluation functions. Relevant research findings on the methodological strengths and constraints of each method are discussed.

The recent addition of a writing performance assessment to the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) means that many students now enter business school with a writing assessment score and perhaps even a heightened awareness that writing matters in some way to the successful completion of an MBA degree. This situation presents teachers of business and managerial writing with a new opportunity and pressure to provide students with writing tools that are directly relevant to their business studies and professional careers. The Analysis of Argument Measure and the Persuasive Adaptiveness Measure introduced here are assessment tools that may be used to explain holistic assessment scores (which students receive on the GMAT writing component) and may assist students in understanding and evaluating their writing, both in school and in the workplace. Designed to evaluate managerial documents that are persuasive and directorial in nature, these measures were developed through a series of pilots and used to assess a selected sample of managerial memorandums that were also scored holistically. Correlating the holistic and analytic scores revealed a positive association, and interrater reliability achieved good agreement beyond chance. These results suggest that the measures may be reliably employed to assess characteristics valued in managerial writing. Examples of how these analytic measures may be employed for teaching and research are also described.

What is the role of conventions in business writing? Too often, textbook samples of business writing are removed from their original contexts. If we invite students to analyze these models for specific textual features, we teach them methods of formalist evaluation, but we fail to teach them ways in which they can learn to analyze and respond to specific contexts, see the subtle ways in which texts are inflected with many voices, and actively participate in the cultural conversation of the business community. This article moves from a critique of conventions to theories of context and intertext; these theories are applied to case studies of both professional and student business writing practices to analyze how rhetorical exchanges shape conventions and communication.

This article describes a dual grading process, initiated to expose students to collaborative evaluation and to verify instructor evaluation. Each group was assigned a case, with directions to print five copies of its response. I evaluated one copy, then distributed four blank copies to another group for evaluation. The group reviewed the paper and assigned a grade. I collected the graded responses, attached my graded copy, and returned the two graded copies to the composing group. Receiving feedback from both teacher and students reinforced the students' confidence in the evaluation process while teaching them important lessons on audience expectations.

Recommendations to the developer of an undergraduate desktop publishing course are given concerning scholastic level and prerequisites, purpose and objectives, instructional resources and methodology, assignments and evaluation, and a general course outline. By using desktop publishing, students gain experience in preparing documents that are professional in form and content. After students master the hardware and software, instructional emphasis shifts to page layout and graphic design principles that students apply to the development of documents commonly prepared in the workplace.

Previous research in computer-mediated communication in both the classroom and the workplace has found that patterns of interaction may differ between individuals communicating face-to-face versus communicating via a computer network. This present study, using a case study methodology, sought to analyze and compare the language of groups of business writing students as they communicated both face-to-face and on a real-time computer network. The study found that during network meetings, participation was more equal, responses tended to be more substantive and text specific, and students were more willing to offer direction than during face-to-face meetings. In addition, students reported a more positive evaluation of their network sessions.

The study demonstrates the language skills value added by business writing instruction. Descriptive Tests of Language Skills of the College Board (DTLS) covering sentence structure and usage were administered as a pretest/posttest assessment to students enrolled in two business writing courses. Instruction in business writing resulted in improved language skills as measured by the DTLS.

Although the number of comprehensive studies that outline methods for incorporating collaborative writing into the professional writing classroom has increased, most studies discuss only one or two assignments throughout the term. This article describes an entire course focused on shared-document writing. Over a four-year period, students indicated that they valued the time allowed to coordinate groups and to understand and complete assignments. Structuring such a course necessitates assigning work that is related to a single topic and providing students with choices, including a voice in group formation and evaluation.

An assessment system for collaborative-writing projects helps create a positive learning experience for all group members by rewarding each individual for his or her participation. Unlike assessment systems that evaluate only the group product, the system proposed here balances product and process, the lat ter embracing individual skills at interacting and contributions to the collaborative composing. The results of a systematic study of students' atti tudes toward their classroom experiences seem to corroborate our perspective as practitioners: With this assessment system, group members felt that they participated fully and practiced effective interactional behaviors, that they be came involved in the collaborative-writing process, and that the reward system was fairer than a single group grade.