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.

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 investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowdfunding campaigns on the platform Kickstarter to develop an understanding of characteristics of successful campaigns. The authors scraped 327,586 campaign pages, analyzing the multimodal elements of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. They found that successful campaigns featured more images, links, and gifs and more frequently included a project video than did unsuccessful campaigns. Images, links, and the presence of a project video had a positive impact on success while gifs and project galleries did not. These findings give business communicators practical guidance, develop theoretical aspects of Kickstarter research, and validate previous findings with a larger data set.

To investigate the generic features of firm-generated advertisements (FGAs) in cross-cultural contexts, this study analyzed 327 FGAs by Dell Technologies and the Lenovo Group on Twitter and Sina Weibo. Integrating affordances and multimodality into genre analysis, the study showed that the FGAs were characterized by (a) flexible move structure, (b) persuasive language, (c) visual illustration, and (d) hyperlinks, hashtagging (#), and mentioning (@) functions. The FGAs on Sina Weibo, compared with those on Twitter, tended to use more language play, emojis, and contextual product pictures and show more emphasis on the niche of products, incentives, and celebrity endorsement.

The Eating Well With Canada’s Food Guide (CFG), which represents Canada’s official dietary guidelines, is designed to address high rates of obesity and diet-related chronic disease in Canada. This article presents a qualitative study of the social and ideological actions that the CFG performs. The study draws on the concepts of antecedent genres and uptake from rhetorical genre studies, applying them in a multimodal analysis of the CFG and interviews with the CFG’s producers and registered dietitians (RDs) who work with vulnerable populations. Findings reveal that scientific representations play a profound role in the social and ideological actions that the CFG performs. The author demonstrates how representations of scientific evidence from nutrition science, as exemplified in the concept of the Food Guide Serving, are taken up by the CFG and, in turn, how these scientific representations influence RDs’ use of the CFG and dominate, rather than facilitate, discussions about healthy eating. The study suggests that the CFG, instead of being an enabling resource, is a limiting document: It limits who can make healthier food choices and how such choices can be made.

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.

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.

Corporate documents increasingly rely on visual rhetoric to complement text. Although previous studies have indicated that companies’ local culture may be reflected in the images they employ, scholars have never systematically investigated the use of visual rhetoric as it is used across different business cultures. This study analyzes visual rhetoric using a new model of visual metadiscourse—a set of devices that designers use to convey meaning in order to influence the audience’s interpretation of the text. The study compares the visual metadiscourse in photos used in English management statements in the annual reports of Dutch and U.K. companies. The results show that metadiscourse is inherent not only in the written text of a corporate document but also in the visuals that a design team chooses to include. The results also indicate that despite some similarities, Dutch-based and U.K.-based statements contain differences in their use of visual metadiscourse. Several of these differences can be attributed to cultural differences between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The study underlines the applicability of the new model and warns international text designers not to overlook cultural differences in visual metadiscourse.

This article explores how a doctoral student in theoretical physics constructs computational simulations and reports his work within the constraints of an academic dissertation. The author specifically identifies principal elements of the work ensemble that the student deployed to complete different tasks and analyzes two dissertation chapters in order to examine the semiotic resources that the student used to warrant the outcomes of his research. The study finds that these are not instrumental procedures in which the researcher represents material objects in a mimetic sense; they are epistemic practices through which he generates digital objects that do not have an experimental counterpart and must therefore be justified through references to technical production. Based on these findings, the author argues that theorizing writing as coextensive with the practical work of science demonstrates what makes it powerful as a semiotic resource and constructive rhetorical activity.

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.

In 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commemorated its 50th anniversary by launching an anniversary Web site, which includes links to a photographic timeline, videos, and documents that the agency views as important in telling its history. This article uses concepts from narrative theory and visual rhetoric to analyze the images used in the NASA History Timeline, paying special attention to why certain images were selected as historical markers over other photographs that are more widely published and televised. Specifically, the author uses arguments from Sontag’s On Photography and Barbatsis’s “Narrative Theory” to explain how NASA’s photographic narrative provides a story with a plot that spans from triumphs and tragedies in space exploration to pioneering efforts in racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.

Based on a quantitative survey of Norwegian business travelers, this study compares their use of face-to-face (FTF) meetings and videoconferences (VCs). The study finds that access and use of VCs are determined mainly by industry and the geographical structure of the enterprise. It also finds that VCs and FTF meetings differ along several dimensions, suggesting that these two modes of communication fulfill slightly different needs. Based on the survey results, the authors propose a framework to understand the emerging role of VCs. This framework would address both relational and task-based dimensions.

It has been suggested that teaching professional writing students how to think visually can improve their ability to design visual texts. This article extends this suggestion and explores how the ability to think visuospatially influenced students’ success at designing visual texts in a small upper-division class on visual communication. Although all the students received the same instruction, students who demonstrated higher spatial faculties were more successful at developing and designing visual materials than were the other students in the class. This result suggests that the ability to think visuospatially is advantageous for learning how to communicate visually and that teaching students to think visuospatially should be a primary instructional focus to maximize all student learning.

This article documents a novel yet theory-informed process of preparing research reports designed for government officials who are concerned with creating adult-literacy policy. The authors use cartoons that include verbatim dialogue from the transcripts of interviews with research participants with low functional literacy. This dialogue, which depicts positive messages about the participants’ moral character, strengths, and resilience, is set against photographic backdrops of the participants’ lived environment to give a sense of real people in a real place. Inclusion of such images is an attempt to change policy-report readers’ thinking about adult literacy because creative visual communication offers ways to approach this challenge that text alone cannot.

This article investigates the contribution visual rhetoric and rhetorical genre studies (RGS) can make to health care education and communication genres. Through a visual rhetorical analysis of a patient record used in an optometry teaching clinic, this article illustrates that a genre's visual representations provide significant insights into the social action of that genre. These insights are deepened by an insider analysis of the patient record that highlights how content analyses of visual designs need to be elaborated by contextual considerations. A combined visual rhetoric and RGS analysis shows that clinical novices learn to interpret the record's visual cues to safely traverse the complex requirements of this apprenticeship genre. The article demonstrates that visual rhetoric research can meaningfully contribute to the understanding of genres by presenting an enriched contextual analysis achieved by consulting with context insiders.

Scholarly conversation within the field of professional communication increasingly has focused on the practice, research, and pedagogy of visual rhetoric. Yet, visual thinking has received relatively little attention within the field. If our programs produce students who can think verbally but not visually, they risk producing writers who are visual technicians but are unable to move fluidly between and within modes of communication. This article examines the literature and pedagogical practices of visually oriented disciplines to identify strategies for helping students develop the ambidexterity of thought needed for the communication tasks of today's workplace.

In teaching a technical communication course, I introduced document design principles before discussing traditional verbal rhetoric. A comparison of the writing of two students—a competent writer and a weak one—before and after the design discussion indicates that a basic understanding of design principles helped them improve document macrostructure. They saw the need to involve the audience, to provide an introduction and a forecast, and to organize and highlight information using headings. The design discussion, however, appears to have had little effect on document microstructure. Although more research needs to be conducted to better understand the relationship between verbal and visual rhetoric in technical communication, integrating document design principles early appears to be a promising pedagogical technique.

This article describes German correspondence styles in order to assist American managers. In the coming years, more and more American managers will find that they must correspond with their German counterparts either as colleagues within international organizations or as associates representing collaborative and competing businesses. The article explains typical conventions of both memo and letter formats, emphasizing the need to appreciate differences between formal and informal modes of communication. American managers who know and respect these differences can communicate more clearly and persuasively with their German contacts.

Visual design has played an important role in the historical development of professional communication. The technology of laser printing has reestablished the importance of visual language in functional communication, transforming contemporary document design and redefining its relation to the traditions of handwritten, typewritten, and printed text. During this period of transition, three factors will shape the new visual language: (a) the development of a visual rhetoric that represents design as an integral part of the message rather than merely as external “dress,” (b) the rediscovery of aesthetics as a legitimate factor in text design, and (c) the use of empirical research—particularly context-specific research—to guide the document design process.

This article reviews selected gender scholarship that informs the study of professional communication as well as some recent articles on professional communication that make use of gender studies. The article also suggests future research directions that include a merger of gender and professional communication scholarship. Topics covered include gender and communication and gender identity, along with gender and writing, reading, speaking language choice, visual communication, collaboration, content analysis, management, history and case studies.