The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has disrupted approaches to writing in academic and professional contexts. While much interest has revolved around the ability of LLMs to generate coherent and generically responsible texts with minimal effort and the impact that this will have on writing careers and pedagogy, less attention has been paid to how LLMs can aid writing research. Building from previous research, this study explores the utility of AI text generators to facilitate the qualitative coding research of linguistic data. This study benchmarks five LLM prompting strategies to determine the viability of using LLMs as qualitative coding, not writing, assistants, demonstrating that LLMs can be an effective tool for classifying complex rhetorical expressions and can help business and technical communication researchers quickly produce and test their research designs, enabling them to return insights more quickly and with less initial overhead.

This article presents a case study of an online class in technical and professional communication pedagogy (the teaching of technical and professional writing) that uses digital video technology for discussions. Because students in the class share their experiences using the video technology, the study uses a collaborative autoethnography framework to learn if the digital technology, Flipgrid, would enhance students’ experiences with discussions in an online class compared to their experiences with discussions on traditional discussion boards. Providing such exposure to a new technology tool can help students gain the confidence that is necessary for learning new technologies in the workplace. When the technology did not provide the hoped-for results after a few weeks, the class stopped using it, returning to the traditional discussion board in the learning management system, which can be more effective when teachers participate and organize students into small groups. Reflecting on what happened, students in the class collaborated on this article to share their experiences.

This study uses examples from a case of everyday technical and professional communication (TPC) at a small multinational company on the Mexico–U.S. border to illustrate how coordinating analytical frameworks commonly used in TPC analyses—activity theory (AT) and actor-network theory (ANT)—can help TPC scholars and practitioners negotiate interpreting others’ asynchronous communication fairly and justly, even in complex, intercultural contexts. The examples illustrate why developing normative ethics for the 21st century requires attention to the ways that goal-oriented activity and the flat, networked interaction of the human, nonhuman, and black-boxed forces intersect in everyday TPC practitioners’ lives and work.

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.

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

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.

Social tagging ranges among the ``killer applications'' of Web 2.0. An ever-growing international community uses Web sites such as the photo database Flickr and the bookmarking service Delicious. In addition, a number of other portals use tagging to compile user-specific metadata on information on any subject—whether it be travel destinations, personal contacts, films, or museum exhibits. Retrieving and storing information via tagging seems to meet users' needs for a number of purposes and in many contexts. Starting with a synopsis of the current literature on social tagging and then focusing on the results of two surveys—qualitative interviews and an online questionnaire—this article explores the potential and limitations of tagging as a tool for organizing shared and personal knowledge.

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.

This article provides a cultural-historical analysis of dictation as a composing method in Western history. Drawing on Ong’s concept of secondary orality, the analysis shows how dictation’s shifting role as a form of literacy has been influenced by the dual mediation of technological tools and existing cultural practices. At the dawn of modernism, a series of technological, economic, and philosophical factors converged to promote silent forms of individual authorship over collaborative modes of dictation favored in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Similar changes are taking place today and may help reverse the dominance of silent authorship. If voice-recognition technologies continue to improve in the future, they may help professional communicators bridge the spoken and textual realms and effect changes in our attitudes toward authorship and orality.

Often, new technologies are seen as artifacts whose use is obvious. This study, which builds on Weick's notion that all technologies are equivocal, challenges that assumption. Using a case approach, this research examines how various groups at Far West, a professional school, interpret the implementation of a two-way video and audio videoteleducation (VTE) distance learning system and analyzes why different groups interpreted the technology in fundamentally different ways. From this case data, a model is created that examines the effects that dominant organizational groups’ interpretation and thus conceptualization of VTE have on its system design, support, training, and rewards; measures of effectiveness; and rule generation.