This article considers the rhetorical risks of using generative AI to compose organizational communication during crises or in the aftermath of tragedies. It focuses on a case study in which representatives of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development disclosed their use of ChatGPT to write a response to a school shooting at another university. The author argues that although generative AI can often be useful in technical and professional communication, it can also undermine perceptions of “rhetorical humanity” if its use is disclosed or discovered, making it rhetorically risky in certain contexts. Thus, knowing when not to utilize AI is an important aspect of AI literacy for practitioners.

The social media account for Steak-umm, a frozen food product, achieved notoriety in 2020 for its messages about how to evaluate the quality of information. Bogomoletc and Lee proposed that the positive reaction to these messages being posted by a brand account resulted from expectancy violations and verified their idea with an analysis of 1,000 randomly selected tweets responding to Steak-umm's tweets. This comment responds to their work from a public health perspective and asks whether the expectancies that were violated were also those of nonscientists in general, allowing the tweets to serve as relief amidst a cavalcade of misinformation about COVID-19.

Drawing on public comments and drafts of an environmental impact statement, this article examines public participation in policy making via the federal Web site Regulations.gov . Aiming to be our “voice” in federal decision making, Regulations.gov encourages citizens to submit comments on proposed actions. Drawing on Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s “hybrid forum,” the author suggests that ethical and effective participatory policy making should be hybrid in scope, inclusion, and agency. While public participation in policy making is commonly positioned as an antidote to the crisis of trust in science, the author argues that such participation gone wrong could have off-target impacts, raising questions about the promise of Regulations.gov .

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.

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.

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 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 study examines the type of edit that amateur editors called Advisors used in their comments on Epinions.com product reviews and the extent to which their editing-related comments might have motivated reviewers to revise and update their reviews. Advisors made substantive-type suggestions most frequently, but for the most part, reviews that received editing-related comments were not updated more often than were those with nonediting-related comments. Unlike professional editors, Advisors lack gatekeeping control that compels writers to revise their work, but as companies recognize the value of quality user-generated content, they may use amateur editors more often, perhaps in conjunction with professional technical editors.

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.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how organizations communicate with external stakeholders, such as consumers. Recent studies have looked specifically at consumer response to the use of English in advertising texts in a number of different European countries. The use of English in such texts is part of a commonly used marketing strategy to standardize advertising campaigns that builds on the assumption that English is not only neutral but also widely understood. This article presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of Emirati consumers toward the use of English in advertising texts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The survey findings are discussed in terms of the unique social and cultural fabric of the modern-day UAE, as well as of the Emirati community as an economically powerful Muslim population.

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.

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

A decade ago, my colleagues and I (Geisler et al., 2001) published an IText manifesto in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication to call attention to the impact of information technologies with texts at their core. These ITexts, we claimed, represented ‘‘a new page in the story of the coevolution of humanity, culture, and technology,’’ promising to change both the nature of texts and their role in society. The manifesto arose out of discussions in May 2000 at the annual meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America on the future of research on text-making activities and how they affect and are affected by new information technologies. About 14 months later, the IText manifesto was published in the pages of this journal. Three years later, a special issue of JBTC illustrated ‘‘the ubiquity of IText’’ with articles on Web technologies, dictation, screen capture, and text visualization (Geisler, 2004).

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.

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.

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.

Many engineering undergraduates receive their first and perhaps most intensive exposure to engineering communication through writing lab reports in lab courses taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Most of the TAs' teaching of writing happens through their comments on students' lab reports. Technical writing faculty need to be aware of TAs' response practices so they can build on or counteract that instruction as needed. This study examines the response practices of two TAs and the ways the practices shifted after the TAs began using a grading rubric. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in focus and mode, some reflecting best practices and some not. It also indicates encouraging changes after the TAs started using the grading rubric. The TAs' marginalia became more content focused and specific and, perhaps most important, less authoritative and more likely to reflect a coaching mode. The article concludes with implications for technical writing courses.

As a response to research about both the work space of professional writers and the pedagogy using workplace simulations, a professional writing course was adapted for a high-tech conference room equipped with electronic meeting tools. This experiment improved students’ learning of course content, which included collaborative writing strategies, project management, and teamwork; research methods; presentation and design skills; and organizational culture and professional development. Students also better understood workplace realities and distinctions between academic and workplace environments. In addition, the experiment facilitated students’idea sharing and communication as well as their preparation for transitioning to the workplace. The teaching experience was more creative and rewarding, too.

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.

This review identifies technical communication programs outside the United States and comments on such features as their location in the university structure, links with public relations, the inclusion of internships or practicums, the balance of theory and practice, and typical course offerings. It also provides a listing (including Web addresses) of a dozen major programs in seven countries. The review concludes that programs abroad share many features and goals with programs in the United States and suggests how international programs can illustrate the value of technical communication in the global marketplace.

This article looks at how two offices changed their informal work relationships and patterns in response to a major technological innovation in their field. This inductive study involves a cross-case analysis with field studies covering a two-year period. The research applies the models suggested by social action theory to help explain outcomes. By the end of this study, one office had lost its funding and was eliminated, while the other has survived and grown. The article examines whether the differing organizational responses to new core technology were related to each office's ability to survive.