This article assesses the data practices of Grammarly, the prominent AI-assisted writing technology, by applying data principles that advocate for empowering Indigenous data sovereignty. The assessment is informed by the authors’ work with an Inuit tribal organization from rural Arctic Alaska that generated data and metadata about potentially sacred tribal activities. Their analysis of Grammarly's large-language modeling practices demonstrates how technical communication can hold businesses to principled data practices created by Indigenous nations and communities that understand how to create more just futures.

As infographics are implicated in racist policies like redlining, we need to decolonize the genre. But previous studies have found that infographics’ panopticism—their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues—makes them tend to support hegemonic power structures in spite of their designers’ intentions. A way out of this dilemma can be located in the first attempt to decolonize the infographic: W.E.B. Du Bois's series depicting Black life in the United States, created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This topological analysis of Du Bois's decolonial project reveals both problematic and promising avenues for our own attempts to decolonize the infographic.

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.

While data 1 has shown that COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black people, the CDC’s early data listed race as “missing/unspecified” at high rates. Incomplete demographic data obscures the virus’s full impact on marginalized communities. Without more information about who the virus is affecting and how, we cannot protect our most vulnerable. This article demonstrates disconnects between reported datasets and data visualizations in public-facing COVID health and science communication and suggests steps that technical and professional communicators can take in creating or using data visualizations accurately and ethically to describe COVID conditions and impacts.

Major trends, such as outsourcing and offshoring, and field-specific factors, such as the advent of content management systems, have fundamentally changed technical communication in recent years. These changes have been widely discussed in the literature of the field, and this article traces their impact on technical communicators in Finland, a high-cost country where downturns in the export industry and the downsizing of major employers are currently coinciding. Through the framework of activity theory, the article looks at the historical changes in the industry as sources of tension and contradictions that need to be understood in order to support professionals in the industry. With the help of interview data, the authors explore the tensions experienced by technical communication professionals in the face of such changes. This analysis leads to the formulation of a hypothesis of historical contradictions currently at play in the field of technical communication. Developmental potentials stemming from these contradictions are outlined as potential ways forward for technical communicators who notice similar tensions in their own environments.

This article engages disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) conversations at the intersections of race, rhetoric, technology, and technical communication and offers a case study of curriculum development that supports disciplinary inquiry at these complex interstices. Specifically, informed by a decolonial framework, this article discusses the status of cultural and critical race studies in technical communication scholarship; tentative definitions of race, rhetoric, and technology; the cultural usability research conducted and located accountability in the process of designing a graduate course that studies rhetorics of race and technology; and the implications of this inquiry for the discipline, field, and practices of technical communication.

This article presents a critical, new historical analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census form. The authors demonstrate that the Hispanic origin and race questions, as currently formulated, imply a “double occupancy of Hispanics” that serves a dual function: to simultaneously monitor the Hispanic population growth and inflate the white count by incorporating Hispanics into the white racial category. This double occupancy of Hispanics results in skewed data analyses that support specific political agendas and ultimately produce racial inequities.

This article examines Rachel Carson’s assimilation and revision of scientific uncertainty in her sources, annotations, and drafts for Silent Spring. It argues that Carson’s emphasis on the special topos of uncertainty was not an original invention but instead was Carson’s contribution to an ongoing scientific and political conversation about uncertainty in 1962. Carson transformed this topos into a bridge across the is–ought divide in science-related policy making, using the uncertainty topos to invite the public to participate by supplying fears and values that would warrant proposals for limiting pesticide use. Carson’s adaptation of scientific uncertainty to environmental policy making provides a historical precedent for contemporary invocations of scientific uncertainty in debates surrounding global warming, nuclear power, cancer studies, and Gulf oil drilling. The methods that the authors use to trace the development of this special topos can also serve as a pattern for excavating the histories of other pivotal topoi in the rhetoric of American science and environmental policy.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

This article draws on activity theory, politics of the artifact, and speech act theory to analyze how language practices and technology interplay in establishing the social relationships necessary for globally networked teams. Specifically, it uses activity theory to examine how linguistic infelicities and the politics of communication technologies interplay in virtual meetings, thereby demonstrating the importance of grounding professional communication instruction in social as well as technical effectiveness. That is, students must learn not only how to communicate technical concepts clearly and concisely and recognize cultural differences but also how to use language and choose media in ways that produce the social conditions necessary for effective collaboration in globally networked environments. The article analyzes two case studies—a workplace and a classroom—that illustrate how the mediating functions of language and the politics of technology intersect as mediating tools in globally networked activity systems. It then traces the implications of that intersection for professional communication theory and pedagogy.

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

Internal institutional genres can become fertile terrain for public policy debate when what Birkland called “focusing events” or ruptures extricate these genres from their contexts and subject them to public scrutiny. This study examines consequences for the local instantiation of the police use-of-force policy genre in the wake of a controversial shooting in Denver, Colorado, and traces ways in which the formation of a multi-interest task force charged with revising the police department's policy altered the policy's conventional activity system. In doing so, the public participated in remapping the local policy instantiation's relationship to the use-of-force policy genre and the routinized social action it performed.

In this article, the authors analyze early technical documents produced by the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration (NMBI), including “The Legend of Montezuma” and “Illustrated New Mexico.” The purpose of these documents are clear: to increase the number of white Americans to create a clear white majority when New Mexico became a state and thereby prevent the Mexicans from gaining power. In analyzing these documents, the authors use theoretical frameworks from studies in the history of business and technical writing (SHBTW) and critical whiteness theory to show how early textual representations of New Mexico reproduce racist constructions of native New Mexicans and represent whiteness as the norm.

Contrary to literary historians, humanist influences did not produce modern English prose style. Instead, technical or utilitarian discourse is inextricable from the development of modern English prose style. Modern English resulted from written text shaped by five factors: (a) brevity induced from accounting/administrative format; (b) aural/oral-based text, written to be heard and seen, that produced conversational style; (c) persistence of indigenous subject-verb-object syntax found in the earliest English documents; (d) a growing Renaissance book market of literate middle-class readers responding to speech-based prose; and (e) English scriptural renditions of the late Renaissance that associated colloquial speech with Protestantism. Of all writing produced before 1700, only a small amount was humanistic; the bulk was utilitarian. The Royal Society’s demand for “plain English” prevailed because the call for precise language by these early scientists reflected the indigenous nature of a plain English that had surfaced as early as 900.

This article offers a retrospective case study of a service learning project in a technical writing class. For this project, students were asked to develop a communication tool with information about consent rates in organ donation to use in an academic medical center. In contrast to the service learning literature, which notes that students often resist the professionalizing move that service learning offers, this study shows that students in this project actually overprofessionalized, constituting themselves as one more party vying for control over the communication of organ donation. This embrace of professionalism via service learning raises as many issues as the resistance to professionalism that is more commonly documented.

Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary-policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.

Engineers' use of rhetoric differs from that of scientists because of the material objects engineers work with and the material conditions under which they act. For engineers, “publication” takes the form of releasing a marketable object, not a refereed article. Thus, they have less need than scientists do to create written theoretical work and can instead build knowledge by group discussion of instrument traces that they tie directly to the object. The fact that they usually work in hierarchical, for-profit organizations also affects their rhetorical practices, as they must shape the actions of those both below and above them in the corporate hierarchy.

An MA student in professional writing and editing undertook ethnographic research on ghostwriting in the military headquarters where he has worked as a civilian writer for 18 years. He investigated the ways in which the military's review process (or “chop chain”) influences writer psychology and the final written product. His findings shed light on writer psychology and on bureaucratese as a cultural discursive product and lead him to propose changes in local writing and reviewing practices. To suggest innovations in teaching and curriculum, this article traces the MA student's academic authorship as he drew on the disciplines of ethnography, folklore, social psychology, and composition and as he used cultural theory from Foucault and textual theory from narratology.

This study shows that race/ethnicity significantly explained differences in attitudes toward human resource policies fostering diversity held by faculty at a large public university in the midwestern United States. Overall, whites' attitudes were less positive regarding diversity programs and other human resource policies relevant to women and minorities than Black's, Hispanic's, and Asian's attitudes were. We also found that individual race and ethnicity significantly explained differences in attitudes toward diversity programs to a greater extent than the demography of the organizational work unit.

This article raises questions about the social, cultural, and political assumptions embedded in the concept of authorship. The discussion occurs within the framework of social-constructionist theories and is based on a feminist critique of science and composition. This critique challenges us to remember that we and our students operate within a culture, that we and our students are located within gendered categories and along class and race lines, and that each of us has a history and a system of beliefs or worldview. Additionally, the author suggests strategies for infusing personal understandings with professional/academic writings.

To study the possible impact of feminist theory on technical communication, this article discusses six common characteristics of feminist theory: (a) celebration of difference, (b) impact on social change, (c) acknowledgment of scholars' backgrounds and values, (d) inclusion of women's experience, (e) study of gaps and silences in traditional scholarship, and (f) new female sources of knowledge. Three debates within feminist theory spring out of these common characteristics: whether to stress similarity or difference between the sexes, whether differences come from biological or social forces, and whether feminist scholars can avoid reinforcing binary opposition. The article then traces the impact of these characteristics of feminist theory and debates within feminist theory on the redefinition of technical communication in terms of the myth of scientific objectivity, the new interest in ethnographic studies of workplace communication, and the recent focus on collaborative writing.