This corpus-based study investigates the grammatical stance constructions in CEO statements within the annual reports of U.S. and Vietnamese banks from 2020 to 2022. The findings indicate that modality is the dominant stance type followed by attitudinal and epistemic stance markers. Both groups of bank leaders favor desire/intention/decision verbs with infinitive complement clauses, certainty/likelihood verbs controlling complement clauses, and volition/prediction modality. But variations exist in the specific stance devices employed to shape corporate image and engage with stakeholders. These findings provide insights into cross-cultural corporate discourse in the banking sector and have valuable implications for business writing and professional communication.

This article offers multiple strategies for instructors who are implementing intercultural communication (IC) projects in their classrooms for the first time. The strategies—referred to as UNITE—are based on five main stages that collaborative projects can follow: understanding and learning about IC collaborations, navigating the project prior to the classroom collaboration, introducing the project to students, tending the project throughout its duration, and ending the project. Using their years of experience in participating in the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP), the authors provide examples and explanations of moves and activities that have worked in facilitating successful IC collaboration projects for students in their technical and professional communication courses.

International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

Request emails are vital in workplace communication. This study uses a three-round Delphi method to investigate the types, frequencies, and perceived burdens of request emails in Korean organizations. Fifty workers from large corporations identified and evaluated 32 common email scenarios, revealing that the most frequent requests are sent to superiors asking for approval, feedback, and document reviews whereas the most burdensome requests are sent to colleagues asking them to perform tasks. Highlighting the hierarchical dynamics of Korean workplaces and the importance of culturally appropriate communication strategies, the findings from this study can inform global training programs and curricula on workplace communication.

This study examines how metadiscourse resources are used to achieve persuasiveness in Apple's earnings conference calls from 2013 through 2022. Adopting a corpus-assisted discourse study approach, the study reveals that self-mentions, transitions, and boosters are the three most frequently used metadiscourse resources by Apple executives. The authors detail how different types of metadiscourse contribute to the construction of three interactive roles that enhance persuasiveness. The study contributes to current studies of persuasion as a form of strategic communication. Business practitioners may benefit from learning the language practices of leading companies in order to optimize their own corporate communication strategies.

This article explores four different topics of conversation in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship that overlap and connect with contemporary issues in generative artificial intelligence (AI): process and iteration, theory and power, actors and activity, and the social justice turn. The authors offer four nonexhaustive reviews of these conversations, offering insight into key issues and texts that have animated discourse in the field and can directly or indirectly address the complex relationship between TPC work and generative AI.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are already being implemented for a variety of writing tasks in workplaces, where individual (human) authorship is valued less than the efficient production of text. But policies regarding AI use in higher education continue to prioritize academic integrity, focusing on narrowly defined notions of authorship that do not reflect the realities of workplace writing. Through an analysis of 100 university policies on AI, this article shows how AI tools create a tension for faculty in technical and professional communication who must operate within institutional or departmental policies for AI use but must also prepare writers for workplace authorship.

This article examines issues of authenticity involved in using generative AI to compose technical and professional communication (TPC) documents. Authenticity is defined through an Aristotelian understanding of ethos, which includes goodwill ( eunoia), practical wisdom ( phronesis), virtuousness ( arete), and Fromm's concepts of true self and pseudo self. The authors conducted an initial analysis of AI affordances that align with TPC concerns—genre, plain language, and grammatical/mechanical correctness. The preliminary results show that these affordances may be limited by issues of inauthenticity. The authors suggest that in order to address AI's limitations, writers should adopt a rhetoric of authenticity via real-world engagement, human centeredness, and personal style.

This article focuses on the unique ways that technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can study artificial intelligence (AI) models that challenge the idea that humans and machines are separate yet equal entities. The authors present a brief definition of AI, a recap of HCI research paradigms, and a description of how AI models challenge traditional HCI research and how TPC researchers might respond to these challenges in their studies. Rather than presenting clear-cut methods for studying AI, the article highlights questions that researchers need to consider as they develop approaches for studying AI.

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.

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.

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.

Artificial intelligence tools are being increasingly used to do content analysis in technical and professional communication (TPC). The authors consider some of the affordances and constraints of these tools and suggest that construct validity is an underdiscussed form of validity within TPC research that will become more important as artificial intelligence research tools become increasingly prevalent. But construct validity is an important idea for graduate programming on research methods regardless of the type of method, technique, or tool used—whether qualitative or computational. Thus, training in construct validity is important for strengthening graduate research preparation in TPC.

Business communication students should be taught how to innovate because the ability to do so is an important skill for business success. Despite knowing that business communication students need to learn how to innovate, instructors are not always equipped with the proper tools to teach students how to innovate based on sound principles. This article provides one such tool by translating the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) principles into specific practices designed to help students innovate. By understanding these practices, instructors will be well-equipped to foster student innovation in their own classrooms based on SoTL principles.

Employers are increasingly turning to innovative artificial intelligence recruiting technologies to evaluate candidates’ online presence and make hiring decisions. Such social media screening, or social profiling, is an emerging approach to assessing candidates’ social influence, personalities, and workplace behaviors through their publicly shared data on social networking sites. This article introduces the processes, benefits, and risks of social profiling in employment decision making. The authors provide important guidance for job applicants, technical and professional communication instructors, and hiring professionals on how to strategically respond to the opportunities and challenges of automated social profiling technologies.

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 article highlights the role of place in understanding problems, specifically within community-engaged projects in upper-level technical and professional communication courses. Drawing on a year-long participant-generated imagery study with students, instructors, and community partners, the authors argue that photographic research is effective in helping participants and researchers tune to place. Taking photos offers opportunities for documentation, individual interpretation, and collaborative reflection, resulting in a deeper, more nuanced sense of place. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how a greater awareness of place, cultivated through reflecting on visual evidence, enhances engagement projects and helps technical communicators address complex problems.

Technical communication practice can change rapidly over time and across organizations. As a result, lifelong learning is an important mind-set, yet few studies explore how technical communicators learn on the job. This study builds on research about technical communication training by reporting on learning practices in one documentation team working at a large, multinational corporate information technology firm. Based on interviews and artifact analysis, the authors report on topics, technologies, and learning purposes that the team discussed, finding that peer-led, collaborative learning enables documentation teams to create and sustain group dynamics, an underexplored facet of on-the-job learning.

Classroom practices and approaches often rely on anecdotal evidence for implementation and effectiveness. Conducting small-scale, quasi-experimental studies can provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of a classroom practice. In technical and professional communication, quasi-experiments tend to be underused compared to other research methods. This article introduces quasi-experimental research as a tool for instructors to use in their teaching approaches and practices by addressing two common fears that prevent them from conducting such research: the fear of doing it wrong and the fear of wasting time. The authors use case studies to explain key concepts, including the difference between quasi and true experiments, selection bias, and confounding factors, and discuss principles of quasi-experiments related to ethical considerations, data collection, and statistical analysis.

This article connects work on emotion, rhetoric, and entrepreneurial experience as it reports findings from a questionnaire issued to 80 entrepreneurs who belong to the global entrepreneur community Startup Grind. The findings from this study offer researchers a more robust representation of the rhetorical theories that guide entrepreneurs’ professional communication practices. In particular, the authors report on the distribution and dependency between two variables: operative rhetorical theory (indicated by one of four choices) and entrepreneurial experience (indicated by number of ventures and total years of experience).

Initiating and continuing rhetorical invention is an important practice for teams seeking to innovate. Workplace professionals demonstrate one potential model of rhetorical innovation by instantiating four rhetorical moves that make up a broader practice of difference-driven inquiry (DDI). But it remains unknown how DDI, as a model of innovative rhetoric, can be taught in the technical and professional communication classroom. Over the course of two studies, the author investigated a pedagogy attempting to teach practices for innovation rhetoric. The results show that the pedagogy can be effective but that more scaffolding is needed.

This article historicizes the impact of the Common Rule, which mandates the existence of Institutional Review Boards, on technical and professional communication (TPC) research with a focus on the principle of justice. Justice is discussed as a complex principle that must be internally and coherently balanced along several axes in the design, implementation, and promulgation of research in technical communication. The author proposes that with shared language, which in this article begins with one principle—justice—TPC researchers can more plainly articulate their positions in the development and dissemination of scholarship, thereby adding coherence to ethical work in the 21st century.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) has recently turned to social justice to interrogate seemingly neutral documents’ impacts on marginalized populations, including disabled individuals. In workplace contexts, such efforts are often impeded by rights-based discourse that maintains ableist institutional spaces and impedes efforts toward broader institutional change. Recognizing that TPC practitioners likely will encounter rights-based discourse, this article offers an ethical decision-making framework that couples the field's previous disability studies work with disability justice. We offer guidelines and a critical vocabulary for bridging legal rights and social justice concerns to inspire ethical articulations of disability access needed for transformative change.

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.

Business communication textbooks offer impression management (IM) strategies to help students learn how to soften bad news. But corporations sometimes use these strategies in ethically questionable ways. This article analyzes IM strategies in a landmark case of ethically dubious corporate financial reporting. Findings suggest that the company, Ivax, manipulated three standard IM strategies by overamplifying its power to fix a financial crisis, substantially downplaying bad news, and concealing damaging information. Ivax also used a fourth, less familiar strategy: It buried contradictory information in legal disclaimers. Instructors need to help students become ethical writers who avoid questionable IM strategies like these.

This article advocates for web scraping as an effective method to augment and enhance technical and professional communication (TPC) research practices. Web scraping is used to create consistently structured and well-sampled data sets about domains, communities, demographics, and topics of interest to TPC scholars. After providing an extended description of web scraping, the authors identify technical considerations of the method and provide practitioner narratives. They then describe an overview of project-oriented web scraping. Finally, they discuss implications for the concept as a sustainable approach to developing web scraping methods for TPC research.

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.

The social justice turn in technical and professional communication (TPC) has inspired a substantial body of progressive scholarship and discussion. But it is not clear how these scholarly efforts have shaped (or are shaping) programmatic and curricular efforts. This article reports the findings of a survey of TPC instructors and an analysis of 231 TPC programs to examine their curricular efforts toward social justice. Drawing from the mixed findings, the authors argue that vigorous curricular efforts in social justice enable TPC to fully and practically demonstrate the core mandate of our discipline.

Since 1985, the field of professional communication has grown in size and reputation while maintaining a space within its primary disciplinary home of the English department. This article relies on historical evidence to examine how a field that was once evenly divided between business communication and technical communication is now technical communication-centric, almost to the exclusion of business communication. The authors pose questions about the field of professional communication and how faculty who consider business communication to be their primary discipline (regardless of their disciplinary home) might play a role in future discussions related to disciplinarity and domains of knowledge.

Academic work increasingly involves creating digital tools with interdisciplinary teams distributed across institutions and roles. The negative impacts of distributed work are described at length in technical communication scholarship, but such impacts have not yet been realized in collaborative practices. By integrating attention to their core ethical principles, best practices, and work patterns, the authors are developing an ethical, sustainable approach to team building that they call constructive distributed work. This article describes their integrated approach, documents the best practices that guide their research team, and models the three-dimensional thinking that helps them develop sustainable digital tools and ensure the consistent professional development of all team members.

Empathy competence is considered a key aspect of excellent performance in communication professions. But we lack an overview of the specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills required to develop such competence in professional communication. Through interviews with 35 seasoned communication professionals, this article explores the role and nature of empathy competence in professional interactions. The analysis resulted in a framework that details the skills, knowledge, and attitudinal aspects of empathy; distinguishes five actions through which empathy manifests itself; and sketches relationships of empathy with several auxiliary factors. The framework can be used for professional development, recruitment, and the design of communication education programs.

In the information age, discourse plays an increasingly important role in promoting innovative products. But how language works in the innovation process remains underexplored. This study explores the discursive communication strategies used to introduce innovation by analyzing the content, cohesion, and coherence of product launch presentations by Steve Jobs. It reveals that such discursive communication strategies improve the audience’s understanding, recognition, and acceptance of innovative products. This study contributes to both business communication studies in general and research on innovation communication in product launches in particular.

Scholars within the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) have called for situating the field in wider social, cultural, political, and global contexts. Despite a growing body of scholarship in this area, less attention has been focused on ways these issues are bound up in 21st-century global innovation and start-up ecosystems. This article addresses these issues by examining case studies of three high-tech initiatives in an emerging start-up ecosystem within the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In making this move, the research offers a theoretical and methodological framework for examining global innovation systems as they are constructed, enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed. Arguing for attention to the links between space and the politics of mobility, the author specifically examines the interplay of literacies, identities, technologies, mobilities, geographies, and practices.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.

This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

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.

With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and examinations of positionality, privilege, and power, the authors suggest three research methods that help capture the intricacies of blurred personal and professional lives: time-use diaries, embodied sensemaking, and participatory data collection and coding. These methods seek to illuminate the invisible work of women, as well as the diversity and range of experiences of home-based workplace communicators.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter has served as a leading public platform for sharing, receiving, and engaging with virus-related content. To protect users from misinformation, Twitter has enforced stricter content-vetting policies. This article positions Twitter as a politically motivated entity and briefly traces Twitter’s use and applications of the term “harmful content.” The author investigates how the platform’s broadening of its definition of harmful content illustrates Twitter’s strategy for combating misinformation by acting on kairotic moments in a way that is shaped by the diverse authoritative voices already guiding larger public COVID-19 discussions. The article concludes by examining the roles these observations can play in technical and professional communication classrooms.

Understanding the law and its impact on the practice of technical communication has been an important scholarly thread in technical and professional communication (TPC) for more than two decades. Technical communicators recognize the impact of their work on stakeholders as well as the potential liability issues associated with composing technical communication documents. While this scholarship is widespread, relatively few pedagogical resources are available to prepare students for success in a litigious world or to guide instructors in teaching legal writing. This article offers a case study of a legal writing course that prepares TPC students to develop legal literacy and succeed in the workplace.

This study investigates the role of stasis, an ancient rhetorical tool with both heuristic and analytic capabilities, in entrepreneurial rhetoric, specifically in pitching and question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from a multiyear sample of Shark Tank pitches, the author found that funders expect entrepreneurs to account for stases of being, quality, quantity, and place. The findings suggest a series of associated questions within each stasis. When these questions are answered unsuccessfully, standstills occur within the funding argument; when they are successfully addressed, the stasis passes, and ventures are more likely to receive funding. The author discusses the implications of this study for entrepreneurship and professional communication.

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content and answerability.

As discussed throughout this special issue, interest in design thinking as a process, a set of mind-sets and practices, and also a potential addition to writing studies and technical and professional communication (TPC) program curricula has increased recently, opening discussions about the rhetorical nature of design-thinking practices. Does design thinking align with the already rhetoric scholarship on design in TPC? In this working bibliography, we pull together literative from across disciplines, popular media, and higher education media to examine design thinking from a variety of angles and to offer a starting point for peers interested in learning more.