This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

This study examines interaction between corporate representatives and critical consumers in today’s social media environment. Applying a microanalytical form of discourse analysis to a data set of corporate Facebook page discussions, the study contributes to a better understanding of the communicative resources that organizations use as part of their impression management (IM) for upholding their acceptability and promoting their credibility. The study also reveals the complexity of the work of corporate Facebook representatives, who need to align their individual IM with that of the organization while adjusting to the technologically mediated context.

This article examines two discursive events during a major reorganization at Health Canada in 2000: a new leader’s informal speech to senior managers and his first formal memo to staff. Seen through the dual lens of systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, these events provide a perspective on the role of discourse in institutional settings. The events particularly illustrate the ways in which a leader’s discursive choices demonstrate conflicts between management styles: the command-and-control style of the old capitalism and that of the new capitalism, which defines the leader as a coach, mentor, facilitator, and motivator rather than as a commander. Unpacking leadership discourse can shed some light on how concealed messages contribute to the success or failure of discursive events, specifically at a time of organizational transformation when such discursive events are particularly important.

A set of discourse-based methods—genre theory, genre analysis, and discourse analysis—can provide a descriptive basis for a critical analysis of the multiple connections between discourse practices and their underlying concepts and categories within professions. To illustrate this theoretical and methodological project, this article analyzes prognosis in the discourse of medicine. Using Goffman’s (1959) distinction between front-stage and back-stage discourse, the author suggests that a back-stage discourse of prognosis points to problems with prognosis in the front-stage discourse of medical encounters between oncologists and patients who have been diagnosed with cancer. The analysis shows that the oral genre of treatment discussion in oncology encounters is organized to allow practitioners to do, appear to do, or avoid doing difficult work like presenting a prognosis. The article suggests that discourse-based methods have the potential to become the basis for productive critical engagement between practitioners and researchers in professional communication.

This article reviews recent studies of legal discourse and nonacademic writing and presents the results of a historical case study of an environmental public policy. The author examined the rhetoric of public sector communication to show how an Indiana water quality standards administrative law was socially constructed as it was written collaboratively in two cycles by members of a text-centered legal discourse community. Key findings describe a dynamic discourse community with changing writing roles among government employees, lay members of the audience, and water pollution control board members. The social and political context surrounding this collaborative effort delayed formal adoption of the water quality standards in the public sector. Controversial provisions of the law stimulated social and political actions, including legislation, and in the process delayed rulemaking.

To help students enter a professional discourse community, teachers must assess how accurately they both understand the community's discourse practices. Our research investigated how job recruiters seeking to fill positions in mechanical engineering or marketing were influenced by the quality of writing in student résumés. The résumés varied in elaboration, sentence style, mechanics, and amount of relevant work experience. The recruiters rated the résumés to indicate their willingness to interview the students. We found that recruiters in the two fields—engineering and marketing—valued quite different writing features. When we subsequently asked students in business writing and technical writing classes to rate the same résumés, we found that they underestimated the importance of various writing features. Generally, however, students' ratings resembled those of the recruiters in their respective disciplines. This study documents how students can improve their résumés and provides insight into the variations of discourse practices in professional disciplines.