The ability to work with data is an important skill for students enrolled in technical and professional communication programs, but students with limited mathematical and computer programming literacies might find it difficult to do basic data analysis or customize data visualizations. This article examines the extent to which ChatGPT can make data analysis and visualization more accessible for students with limited technical proficiency. The results suggest that although the tool is poised to have a substantial impact in helping students create effective data visualizations, its efficacy as a data analysis tool is more limited.

Through a case study of a popular food and recipe blog (Pinchofyum.com), this article details how two content creators practicing an advertising-based business model built a loyal audience and profitable business. A content analysis of the income reports published by the site's creators found that their advertising-based business model incentivized them to (a) segment their audience, (b) surveil their audience, and (c) automate interactions with their audience. This incentive structure led the content creators to employ an inconsistent and often problematic persona of their intended audience as they aimed to scale their ability to build trust with a rapidly growing audience. These findings provide guidance for aspiring online entrepreneurs and technical communicators desiring to understand the implications of distributing their content on platforms funded through advertising.

In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause a crisis in the first place. Drawing from literature on crisis communication and the experiences users described in the Zoom CEO’s blog post, the author concludes that while Zoom did indeed have technical issues that contributed to its privacy crisis, users also experienced its technology in unexpected ways, and the company underestimated the privacy expectations of its new users. Zoom’s privacy crisis ultimately provides a useful discussion of why it is increasingly important for companies to incorporate privacy by design and to be frank about their privacy practices with a public who has a growing interest in, and dissatisfaction with, corporate privacy practices.

In this article, the authors answer the call of the IText manifesto to use ITexts to explore fundamental issues of writing, describing instant messaging (IM) as a form of interactive networked writing (INW) and showing how IM writers discursively construct contexts. Specifically, they argue that writers use (a) deixis to build and maintain material contexts and (b) intertextuality to construct sociocultural contexts. Four intact IM transcripts were coded for instances of four kinds of deixis—space, time, person, and object—and for instances of intertextuality. Results showed that IM writers use all four kinds of deixis and that deictic elements made up almost 10% of the total words of the transcripts. In addition, two kinds of intertextual elements— direct quotation and cultural referents—were used to invoke, build, and sometimes undermine social and cultural contexts. The authors also discuss some of the material affordances and constraints of writing and conclude by arguing that INW is literally dialogic.

In argumentative texts, authors must choose between two presentation orders: providing the decision or claim first and then the explanation (direct order) or providing the explanation first and then the decision (indirect order). This study addresses which presentation order is most effective when the decision entails bad news by discussing two experiments that evaluate Dutch letters and e-mails. The first experiment evaluates denial letters from insurance companies and rejection letters to job applicants in which the presentation order is manipulated. The second experiment replicates the first, using a different medium (e-mail) and other instances of bad news. The results of both experiments indicate that readers perceive texts with the indirect order as more comprehensible and agreeable and its writer as more competent and empathic. Readers are also more inclined to comply with the decision in such texts when the explanation is presented first.

This article discusses public policy writing as a genre of technical communication and, specifically, public policy development as a technological process. It cites DeGregori’s theory of technology to demonstrate the shared invention processes of technology and public policy, the work of public policy scholars to describe the policy-development process, and the work of human—computer interaction scholars to identify cognitive models of public policy development as a technological process. The article concludes with a discussion of e-rulemaking Web sites and the role of technical communicators in creating these blended spaces.

This article argues for a rhetoric of networked exchanges that focuses on the response. Working from Spinuzzi's call for a rhetoric of horizontal learning, it examines two kinds of online writing spaces in order to propose such a rhetoric. After surveying conflicting, academic attitudes regarding networked exchanges, the article proposes the response as a type of professional communication. A specific message board thread and a series of blog carnivals serve as examples of the rhetoric of response, a way that horizontal learning produces a specific type of networked writing identity. The article concludes with a call for response-based communication practices.

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.

This study explores social processes associated with e-mail overload, drawing on Sproull and Kiesler's first and second-order effects of communication technologies and Boden's theory of lamination. In a three-part study, the authors examined e-mail interactions from a government organization by logging e-mails, submitting an e-mail string to close textual analysis, and analyzing focus group data about e-mail overload. The results reveal three characteristics that contribute to e-mail overload— unstable requests, pressures to respond, and the delegation of tasks and shifting interactants—suggesting that e-mail talk, as social interaction, may both create and affect overload.

When mixed-gendered student teams collaborate on technical writing tasks, a single male often emerges as the group computer expert. The effects of this trend on perceptions of workload are unknown. This article reports the results of a study in which 12 mixed-gendered teams answered questionnaires on the division and perceptions of labor in their teams. Detailed case studies of four teams supplement the questionnaires. Findings suggest that computer work was highly visible, highly valued, and dominated by men. By contrast, writing was less visible and selectively recognized. Some men were credited with strong writing skills even though they did not produce writing for the project. Moreover, some students explicitly leveraged their computer expertise to avoid writing; furthermore, these computer experts rarely shared technical expertise with others in the context of the team project.

Many colleges and universities have begun to create structures that foster sustainable partnerships with neighboring communities. As part of such efforts, these institutions often use IText—written texts mediated by information technologies such as the World Wide Web, e-mail, databases, and online bulletin board systems. Using content analysis and interviews, the author explores the ways that IText is used in campus-community partnerships. The author concludes that at this early point in partnership efforts, the best uses for IText are to build trust and share information, even though such uses raise questions about the egalitarian potential of partnership efforts.

Word processing programs now allow instructors to provide online personalized, detailed critiques of students’ writing assignments. The article discusses the advantages of online critiquing assignments using the Track Changes, Comment, and AutoCorrect functions. It provides guidelines for online critiquing and grading of student assignments, including preparing students for online grading, preparing for online critiquing, setting policies, orienting students to sending e-mail attachments, avoiding pitfalls, and developing time-saving strategies for online critiquing of student assignments.

This research provides a framework identifying dynamic tensions that occur as subordinates try to maintain a sufficient degree of politeness while reporting to superiors on workplace tasks. Building on politeness theory, the framework suggests how conventional politeness dimensions, such as deference, solidarity, and non-imposition are challenged by organizational obligations and workplace tasks requiring confidence, direction, and individuality. The framework evolved from a series of analyses of two samples: one consisting of e-mail between international project teams and their domestically located supervisors, the other of Asian and U.S. business undergraduates' responses to two workplace scenarios involving critiquing a superior's work. Analyses revealed competing communicative dimensions relevant to subordinate-to-superior interactions, including dimensions that are underdeveloped in politeness literature. Examples from these data suggest that managing a sufficient equilibrium between these dimensions requires a substantial knowledge of rhetorical and linguistic alternatives.

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

This article examines employee sentiments concerning the use of e-mail. An exploratory study at one state agency was used to create a survey of employee perceptions of e-mail use. The survey was then administered to a second state agency. The survey findings show that although most employees found e-mail to be highly useful, they also complained of information overload. The findings also suggest that employees perceive peer misuse and lack of peer training to be culprits of e-mail overload. The article discusses the theoretical implications of the study and makes recommendations for improving e-mail training.

This article investigates the ways in which a subset of technical communicators acquired electronic literacy from 1978 to 2000, a period during which personal computers became increasingly ubiquitous in the United States in educational settings, homes, communities, and workplaces. It describes the literacy autobiographies gathered from 55 professional communicators participating on the Techwr-l listserv, focusing on the large-scale trends that these autobiographies reveal. To supplement the findings from these autobiographies, the authors conducted face-to-face interviews with four case-study participants: a faculty member, a professional communicator, and two students of different backgrounds majoring in technical communication. The article concludes with observations about the development of technical communication instruction in the twenty-first century.

Online communication technology makes intercultural communication faster and more direct than was ever before possible, but, in doing so, it may also amplify cultural rhetorical differences. Communication scholars, therefore, need to begin examining potential areas of conflict in international cyberspace to anticipate and to resolve potential cross-cultural misunderstandings related to online exchanges. This commentary proposes that researchers need to compare the communication patterns noted in the computermediated communication (CMC) literature and in the intercultural communication literature to see where these communication patterns collide.

Most people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in text-centered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we create and refer to the appointments and notes in our personal digital assistants, we use texts. Texts are deeply embedded in cultural, cognitive, and material arrangements that go back thousands of years. Information technologies with texts at their core are, by contrast, a relatively recent development. To participate with other information researchers in shaping the evolution of these ITexts, researchers and scholars must build on a knowledge base and articulate issues, a task undertaken in this article. The authors begin by reviewing the existing foundations for a research program in IText and then scope out issues for research over the next five to seven years. They direct particular attention to the evolving character of ITexts and to their impact on society. By undertaking this research, the authors urge the continuing evolution of technologies of text.

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

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

This article explores the design choices for Network Earth, a museum exhibit that introduced the general public to computer networks and related issues. The exhibit was one of three studied in a larger research project to develop a grounded model of design for learn-ing in museums. Network Earth was developed by a team that had neither formal train-ing nor academic credentials usually associated with museum exhibits. Although the design process and some of the general goals were similar to those at other sites studied and in the literature, certain practices differed. The team excluded historical objects, let donors influence content, and used different terminology. These differences appear to be cultural. With a limited affiliation with the occupational culture of museum exhibit design, the Network Earth team made choices that were more consistent with the culture of high technology—the subject of the museum and the industry that provided most of its financial support.

A brief examination of the evolution of virtual reality devices illustrates how the development of this new medium is influenced not only by emerging technologies but also by marketing pressures. In a situation parallel to that of the earliest computers, both military and game applications seem to be the driving forces in virtual reality development. Understanding these influences may help us prepare for the role of technical communica-tors in building virtual reality applications for education and industry and aid us in pre-dicting and influencing both the technology and the ways we prepare communicators for the future.

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.

Hypertext is presented and understood as an intricate, open web of interrelated information, both intertextual and interactive, as reader and writer work together to create the text. However, it may be driven by an organizational metaphor that limits the users' access and may not be open to the free associations it implies. Organization is important in hypertext, just as it is in print documents, both rhetorically and practically. Metaphors, links, and buttons aid users in identifying the organizational patterns, allow users to access information successfully, and provide connections that users may not make on their own.

The purpose of this study is primarily twofold: (1) to determine what factors, if any, are predictors of computer anxiety among business communication students and (2) to explore alternative teaching strategies suggested by the literature to effectively reduce computer anxiety in business communication classrooms. Participants consisted of 431 students enrolled in business communication courses during the 1995 spring semester at three state-supported universities in three southern states. Statistical analyses revealed that gender, keyboarding skill, age, socioeconomic status, and self-directedness are adequate predictors of computer anxiety in business communication students. Teaching strategies for reducing or eliminating computer anxiety in business communication classrooms are discussed.

This article considers on-line documentation's place in a two-year college's technical communication program. Such a course can be successful if instructors (1) emphasize design principles rather than a particular software package; (2) build on rhetorical skills students already possess, while developing the new skills necessary for authoring documents for the computer screen; and (3) acknowledge the need for their own professional development.

Computer-based instruction (CBI) using multimedia and hypermedia is a new approach to teaching that is becoming increasingly popular in academic and nonacademic settings. Because the technical communication profession has developed a disciplinary culture uniquely suited to evolve along with communication technology, technical communicators experienced in creating instructional materials for technical products are well-positioned to become effective designers of this innovative form of instruction. However, as designers, they must become proficient in the early design stages of audience analysis, goals analysis, and control analysis to master multimedia and hypermedia CBI. In this article, the authors review findings from several fields to help technical communication teachers and practitioners (a) explain the value of audience analysis, goals analysis, and control analysis; (b) accomplish those analyses effectively; (c) use the results of their analyses to create effective multimedia or hypermedia CBI; and (d) set priorities for further related research.

Computer-mediated communication on the Internet offers new challenges and opportunities for technical communication. The cases of Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper chip illustrate the specialized nature of technical communities on the Internet and suggest that when technical messages are not overly complex, the process of reposting may widen community appeal but also promote inaccurate information. Yet, when technical messages are highly complex, audiences may not repost such messages; this preserves accuracy of information but at the same time limits how many people will read the information. Finally, these cases strengthen recent arguments that rhetorical delivery is an increasingly important component of technical communication.

Hypertext, an electronic communication medium in which information is structured and accessed according to the audience's needs and interests, is increasingly used in business and technical communication. That use may justify curricula expansion in the development of the ability to communicate in hypertext from specialty courses to a variety of business and technical courses, including the foundation course. This article provides a concise overview of hypertext for instructors who may be considering this expansion but who need to become more familiar with the medium. The basic information that is provided includes the definition, uses, and advantages of hypertext. In addition, the terminology, theoretical bases, and essential structure of hypertext are discussed. Of particular concern to business and technical communication instructors who may be considering adding hypertext to their courses are the problems that the medium presents. Discussion includes considerations of linguistic design, computer capabilities, and human performance. Finally, behaviors that business and technical communicators should exhibit to encourage the use of hypertext are presented.

Establishing a course in desktop publishing at the college level is an enterprise that requires important and sometimes difficult choices, such as selecting hardware and software, textbooks, and types of assignments. For faculty members who are involved in making those decisions, the need for information from people who have had experience in teaching desktop publishing is critical. Experience shows that a sound course in this area can be created with these elements: IBM-compatible computers, color monitors, mice, a scanner, one or two laser printers, Aldus PageMaker®, CorelDRAW™, Microsoft® Windows™, Harvard Graphics®, a couple of good textbooks, both practice and original projects, and an emphasis on principles of good design.

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.

With the advent of electronic networking, writing pedagogy has moved into the arena of computer-supported collaborative writing, using collaborative writing as an instructional means to promote a more social view of the writing process. Therefore, as business and technical communication researchers and instructors, we need to ask the following questions: What kinds of software have been developed to aid computer-supported collaborative writing in the workplace and in the writing classroom? What benefits and problems have resulted from the design and use of this software? What research issues should be addressed as we approach the next decade of computer-supported collaborative writing? In this article the author explores these questions, highlighting five computer-supported collaborative writing systems from the workplace and five such systems from the writing classroom.

Developing a course in desktop publishing is a technological, as much as a pedagogical, undertaking. Although a background in layout, document design, and typography is necessary, teaching these subjects with computers inevitably means teaching a particular combination of hardware and software. Students with little prior experience using computers must receive training in computer basics. Thus considerable familiarity, not only with desktop publishing software but also with personal computers, is necessary to teach a desktop publishing course.

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