This article aims to help doctoral students in technical communication prepare themselves for the academic job market and for the subsequent process of earning tenure and promotion in increasingly demanding environments. The authors propose that students do four things: (a) learn to spot and articulate research problems; (b) find their vocation—the work to which they feel a personal calling—within technical communication; (c) identify the research methods that best suit their personalities; and (d) articulate a research identity and agenda that they can explain at three different levels of abstraction: describing individual projects, naming the coherent themes that connect these projects, and defining themselves concisely as scholars. All these orienting practices involve students in stepping back, looking for larger patterns in their work and in their professional interests, and finding specific language to represent them.

This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center at Michigan State University and offers a stance on graduate student mentorship. It describes WIDE’s mentorship model as feminist and inclusive and as a means to invite researchers with different backgrounds to engage in knowledge-making activities and collaborate on projects. Additionally, the article explains how WIDE enables growth for its researchers, teachers, and leaders. To illustrate these ideas, the authors provide multiple perspectives across faculty mentors, former graduate students, and current graduate students in order to discuss how WIDE researchers practice mentorship and how this mentorship prepares students for future work as scholars and researchers. Finally, the article suggests ways other research centers can adapt WIDE’s approach to their own institutional context.

Gaining access to interdisciplinary research sites poses unique research challenges to technical and professional communication scholars and practitioners. Drawing on applied experiences in externally funded interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship about interdisciplinary research, this article describes a training protocol for preparing graduate students to understand the dynamic nature of access in interdisciplinary work as well as to develop a capacity for making a case about the value of their expertise in interdisciplinary research contexts. The authors situate the training protocol in the context of three distinct phases of case-making (individual, relational, and speculative) and note how the conditions for negotiating access vary within and across these phases. The authors conclude by describing implications to graduate students and faculty for theorizing access in this way and developing training to support graduate students’ negotiation of access in interdisciplinary work.

In an effort to expand the range of ways graduate programs prepare students to be scholars and practitioners in technical and professional communication, this article argues for a fresh direct reengagement with stories, storytelling, and narrative as valuable ways of studying and effectively producing the varied texts of the workplace. The previous call for acknowledging the value of narrative traces back almost 30 years, and story is still being used in a variety of compelling ways, even as an overt regard for narrative has not been sustained. What may be lacking is a systematic way to transform assumptions about stories as informal anecdotes into stories as data for rigorous analysis. David Boje’s antenarrative theory and method offers technical and professional communication graduate students, scholars, and practitioners just such a compelling and timely position from which to consider workplace processes and products.

To address graduate writing pedagogy in technical communication, this article reports on a study of 14 award-winning dissertations in the field. By treating dissertations as cultural artifacts constitutive of the educational contexts in which they are authored, this study reads dissertation methodology sections as research narratives to understand how we prepare new scholars and to examine the changing nature of what we value in the field.

This article provides a short history of the continuing issues that modern technical communication and technical communication faculty face. It discusses the first texts and many of the early pedag...

As technology continues to become more ubiquitous and touches almost every aspect of the composing process, students and teachers are faced with new means to make writing a multimodal experience. This article embraces the emerging sector of wearable technology, presenting wearable writing strategies that would reimagine composition pedagogy. Specifically, the article introduces Google Glass and explores its affordances in reframing student peer-review activities. To do so, the author presents a brief overview of wearables and writing technology, a case study of how the author deployed Google Glass in a first-year writing course, and a set of tips for using wearable technology in general and technical writing courses.

Engineers communicate multimodally using written and visual communication, but there is not much theorizing on why they do so and how. This essay, therefore, examines why engineers communicate multimodally, what, in the context of representing engineering realities, are the strengths and weaknesses of written and visual communication, and how, based on an understanding of these strengths and weaknesses, one can consider using the strengths of each form of communication to address weaknesses in the other. Doing so can possibly enable one to demonstrate for engineering majors how they can, with greater effectiveness, communicate multimodally for representing well engineering realities.

Image-based research conducted on and by research participants holds promise to extend participatory studies in technical communication by delivering research techniques that have been used for Policy Research in Public Health and other areas of participatory research (e.g., community-based participatory research). Even though they can expand policy (or even user design work), the use of participants’ images is not without challenges. The article discusses those challenges and suggests practices that stabilize the research logistically, relationally, and thematically; it also presents the approach as attractive for use in arenas that reward scrutiny even though they have traditionally been difficult to study.

In this special journal issue, we explore the turn toward human-centered design (HCD) in research and higher education. We begin with a discussion of how HCD emerged in scholarly work at the edges of our field in places such as design, psychology, art, and engineering. Following this, we consider how an HCD perspective is manifesting itself in academic programs in different institutional contexts. We then discuss how this trend is further illustrated by the transformation of our department at the University of Washington, which shifted from being the Department of Technical Communication to becoming the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. Finally, we discuss the work of a group of researchers who contributed articles to this special issue. Each of these articles offers a perspective from someone within our field about how an HCD perspective has influenced their thinking and research.

Human-centered design expands the context and reach of the work of technical communicators and provides an opportunity to investigate and advocate for the needs of vulnerable populations. This article summarizes and contributes to the conversation about social justice occurring in both technical communication and design. Using a variety of qualitative methods as a type of design ethnography, this article shares findings from a study that investigated the experiences of homeless bus riders. The study findings provide an opportunity to examine the design of information and communication technologies and changes to policies that impact vulnerable populations. The article discusses the implications of an advocacy perspective for technical communicators practicing human-centered design and their role and opportunity to bring about socially responsible design.

Human-centered design is a burgeoning field of study that has the potential to work toward actively creating more just and equitable technology design while critically interrogating the design process. To do this, human-centered design needs to consider making social justice aims a primary objective and end-goal in design. One way of integrating social justice aims into design is to employ the use of narrative inquiry. This article explores an alternative method for developing design scenarios using narrative inquiry and the feminist concepts of silence and voice as a way to promote considerations of social justice and inclusion in design. Using narrative inquiry to rethink certain aspects of the design process can help designers address issues of agency. The methodological focus of this article responds to Suchman’s call for “alternative visions” of how technology production and design can be undertaken.

Technical and professional communication (TPC), like human-centered design, has long been human centric. But TPC struggles with the complexities of determining which humans are at the center of our work. This article proposes that an explicit consideration of human dignity and human rights can help us to navigate these complexities by reflecting upon whether our work harmonizes with the notion that every person has intrinsic worth. To illustrate, I present findings from exploratory research with nonelite Rwandan youth in which participants conveyed the roles and effects of technology-mediated communication and information and communication technology in their lives. I assert that as TPC begins engaging more explicitly with human dignity and human rights, we should adopt a perspective inspired by human-centered design scholar Richard Buchanan: embracing human dignity and human rights as the first principle of communication and the foundational value of the TPC field.

Human-centered design philosophy proposes that end users be at the center of technical system designs. Building on a seminal study by Gould and Lewis, we present findings from two surveys that explored the practice of building interactive systems from the perspective of information and communication technology (ICT) professionals. We generated ICT job descriptions based on a lexicon derived from practitioners’ own words. We found that while “human-centeredness” has risen among ICT professionals, our respondents varied significantly in how they considered the original three Gould and Lewis principles with respect to their job titles and roles. We thus argue that tools that support clear communication among roles are critical; in this project, we analyzed personas as a common ICT communication tool. While personas were generally perceived positively, persona creators need to consider factors that contribute to buy-in from design teams, including quality research and effective presentation.

In this article, I argue that remote technical communicators increasingly encounter problems with making their work visible to others. This article offers a methodology to help remote workers and technical communication researchers locate how problems of visibility emerge from complex and local relations among people, places, and things.

This article argues for the need for a social justice approach to technical communication research and pedagogy. Given previous calls by scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) for an attention to diversity, inclusion, and equality, the author examines the place and purpose of social justice in TPC and provides useful approaches for promoting a more genuine and critical interrogation of how work in TPC impacts the human experience.

The authors argue that technical and professional communication is currently facing an issue of incommensurability due to the diversity of the field. They call for unifying the field around its research questions to provide a common foundation for the future.

This article considers how issues of power and legitimacy in technical communication are connected to clearly defining what a technical communicator does. An articulation of what technical communicators do can grant the field power in presenting a united front to employers with respect to the value technical communicators bring to the workplace. So as to leverage the power and legitimacy associated with articulating what technical communicators do, this article reviews and revises the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH)’s definition of technical communicator. To effectively revise the OOH’s definition, this article reviews academic and practitioner scholarship in technical communication and the administration of technical and professional writing programs. It demonstrates that concerns about practical skills, conceptual skills, and flexibility are related to legitimacy and power. These concerns can be used as criteria to evaluate and revise the OOH’s definition of technical communicator. In closing, the article discusses the benefits associated with the revised definition and how these benefits are related to issues of power and legitimacy in the field.

In this article, we use extant International Business Machines' internal communications to demonstrate how Boje’s notion of “antenarrative” can serve as a methodology for feminist historiography and as a way of uncovering forgotten and unchallenged systems of power and legitimacy in technical and professional communication. The antenarrative fragments of any official, sanctioned story give us insight into the ways in which power has been distributed throughout an organization and where agency can be claimed in real time. We also see that a methodology that considers the untold and unofficial stories of women in the workplace works to explain current distributions of power. This can be done by investigating the antenarratives that threaten to disrupt the prepackaged grand narrative of organizations; we show this specifically through a case study of International Business Machines' archival memos in contrast with the company’s website and public relations documents.

This article examines illustrations in two medical texts written in China’s Northern Song dynasty. Compared with medical books produced in previous dynasties, these two texts incorporated more illustrations with enhanced beauty and usability. These visual features, I argue, carried rhetorical attributes that helped these texts negotiate their way into printing, circulation, and becoming canonical in their own genres. At the same time, they also facilitated efficient and accurate reading through reduced visual clutter and enhanced accuracy, and thus appealed to both the elite and the public readership. The article reviews these visual strategies and their implication for technical communication today.

We report the results of a pilot study that offers the field of technical and professional communication its first look at material working conditions of contingent faculty, such as course loads, compensation, and professional support. Findings include that contingent faculty are more enduring with stable full-time, multi-year contracts; they carry a substantial teaching loads; and the majority are satisfied and happy in their present position, but half would prefer to be working on the tenure track.

Drawing from the author’s experience teaching online technical communication courses with an embedded service-learning component, this essay opens the discussion to the potential problems involved in designing online service-learning courses and provides practical approaches to integrating service learning into online coursework. The essay addresses specifically those classrooms where students may be required to develop or find their own service opportunities, whether those opportunities are within their community, on the college or university campus, or in another community. The essay argues by implementing service learning into online classrooms and requiring students to locate their own agencies, students not only build a greater sense of civic engagement because they are working with agencies whose missions they support, but also they develop a greater sense of responsibility for their own education and the coursework they undertake.

This article describes how a special kind of academe–industry collaboration—based on a joint appointment agreement between a university and an industry site—was set up, promoted, and experienced by a professor of technical communication and his student interns. To illustrate the nature and value of this kind of collaboration, the article discusses several of the professor’s research projects, and the teaching scenario connected with this collaboration, as well as the experience of the student interns. The keys to success for such an exchange are to (a) create a clearly structured agreement that is easy for both parties to implement within their respective institutions, (b) promote the agreement to administrators and employees at both institutions, and (c) launch into the exchange with enthusiasm for learning, networking, and finding research projects.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

Scholars of rhetoric and writing have long recognized the mediated nature of rhetorical action. From Plato’s early indictments of writing as enemy of memoria to Burke’s recognition of instrumental causes to recent analyses of digital mediation, the study of meaning-making refuses one-to-one, transparent theories of communication, instead recognizing that there is more to rhetorical action than humans. This article follows the trail of Haas, Swarts, and others arguing that analyses of mediation uncover much about human motives, digital communities, and rhetorical action. I argue that technologies often function as rhetorical genres, providing what Miller characterizes as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” that occur in uniquely digital spaces. Working from sites of participatory archival creation and curation, I argue that invisible rhetorical genres operating at macroscopic levels of scale are central to shaping individual and communal activity in sites of distributed social production. To support this claim, I investigate two applications—a content management system called Gazelle and a bittorrent tracker called Ocelot—to demonstrate how largely invisible server-side software shapes rhetorical action, circumscribes individual agency, and cultivates community identity in sites of participatory archival curation. By articulating content management systems and other macroscopic software as rhetorical genres, I hope to extend nascent investigations into the medial capacities of digital tools that shape our collective digital experience.

Aristotle’s science writing serves as an instance of a classical science writer at work. Applying his theory of writing found in his Rhetoric, Poetics, Posterior Analytics, and Categories treatises to his History of Animals illustrates his work as a writer of life science. As rhetorical tools, his theory of tropes and figures and his theory of the model as developed in his theory of definitions and the enthymeme work as epistemic strategies. The essay concludes that further study should examine other rhetorical dimensions of his science writing.

This article introduces Speculative Usability. Whereas traditional models of usability rely on the salient features of an object–user relationship focused around the uses for which the object was designed, the goal of Speculative Usability is to notice an object as it interacts with other objects (in addition to but including human users) and to be vulnerable to an object’s unintended effects. The payoff of this speculative approach is an increased inventional capacity for usability testing.

Because of the globalized use of the Internet, companies of most countries rely heavily on websites for the sale of their products and services internationally. However, a company’s website, no matter how nicely designed in terms of graphics used and information provided, may still fail to achieve the expected result if it fails to consider the relevant business cultural values and conventions of the target country. This article, in light of American business values and Chinese business values and through case analyses, identifies the possible problems on those websites aiming at international business. Using specific company websites of both the United States and China and through comparison and contrast, the author analyzes problems in aspects of content, graphics, and layout in attempt to improve designers’ cultural awareness in these aspects and improve their skills for the localization of their international business websites.

The controversy about vaccines and autism presents an opportunity to explore how science is constructed in public debates about health and medicine. Rhetors who argue against a connection between vaccines and autism insist that their opponents are irrational, while rhetors arguing for a link insist that their fears are rational indeed. This analysis poses an alternative way of understanding the vaccines-autism controversy, suggesting that it is partly fueled by differing perceptions of the boundary between science and non-science. Using the concept of boundary work as a lens, this article uses generative rhetorical criticism to examine artifacts within the controversy and explores rhetorical constructions of scientific evidence, the forum of scientific discourse, scientific expertise, and the scientific capability. The findings suggest that rhetors’ awareness of disciplinary boundaries is just as important in the construction and reception of their arguments as their knowledge of scientific facts and principles.

A field’s identity and sustainability depend on its research as well as on programs, practice, and infrastructure. Research and practice have a reciprocal relationship, with practice identifying research questions and researchers answering those questions to improve practice. Technical communication research also has an exploratory purpose, using the knowledge and methods of the field to explain how texts work in a variety of contexts. A gap between research and practice developed in the 1990s. Defining explicitly how the parts of our research and our practice connect to form a whole will give the field a stronger identity

In my half century as a technical communicator, I have seen many changes. The profession has evolved from one that supported the work of engineers and programers to one that stands on its own, providing important tools and capabilities to audiences. I too have evolved within the profession—from someone who had little idea what technical communication was, to a practitioner, to an educator. The changing nature of the profession and my participation in it has made for an exciting time—our profession is anything but dull.

Teaching technical writing without formal training can be daunting. However, there are many resources available that can provide background and materials for teaching. My approach involved reading textbooks and articles not only on approaches to technical writing but also on what students can expect once they complete their education and are hired. Journals both in the field and in similar fields, working as a technical editor or writer, and attending conferences and talking with both other academics and those in the field offer help. This article, therefore, describes my approach from the day I was hired to teach two technical writing courses to my retirement 37 years later.

This article analyzes a proposal submitted to a funding unit in Michigan Technological University by a PhD Forestry student. A rhetorical-cultural approach of the text provides evidence to argue that scientific writing is rooted in a cultural practice that valorizes certain kinds of thought, practices, rituals, and symbols; that a scientist’s work is grounded and shaped by an ideological paradigm; hence, scientific texts have material existence. We find out that science writing is kairotic, selective, and persuasive. The results of the analysis provide enough insights for technical communicators to think about the role that institutions and disciplines play in knowledge production. Thus, technical communicators will not only think about rhetorical moves when they are composing, they will also think about the articulations between contexts and ideological practices and how they shape the identity of writers and communicators.

Quad charts are a genre frequently used in scientific and technical environments, yet little prior work has evaluated their potential for reinforcing technical communication fundamentals. This article provides background information about quad charts and notes the benefits of implementing quad charts in the classroom. In particular, introducing engineering students to this genre appeals to their tendency to outline information and incorporate visuals in the planning stages of the composing process. The authors share their approach for integrating quad charts within a collaborative project in a fluid dynamics course and note the ways in which the genre facilitated effective project planning and communication within student teams.

Ethics and technical communication have a long history. Much of the discussion has ignored, though, the evil in language—overnaming. We see clearest this evil in what some have called “administrative evil.” Technical communicators, like all good rhetoricians, need to understand how to respond to it. Overnaming as part of “administrative evil” is that evil which grounds all other evils. It is a certain understanding of language and what naming can do. When we overname, we try to control words to mean one thing eternally. Rhetoric is a move of renaming those words that have been overnamed. Such invention is needed as part of any rhetorical education for technical communicators.

Culture as a research site and tool has been well established in the field of intercultural business and technical communication. In recent years, the perspective of culture as an ongoing process responding to contextual forces has been widely embraced in the field. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of culture helps communicators make contextual evaluations in intercultural business communication practices. While researchers strive to examine the dynamic nature of culture and contextual factors’ influence on culture and communication, little efforts has been made to examine the process of a cultural element’s generation, development, and transmission. To understand the notion of culture as a dynamic process for effective intercultural business and technical practices, it is necessary to conceptualize or describe how a cultural element or unit originates and develops along an evolutionary path. In this study, we focus on how the online meme serves as an empirically useful unit of culture, explore an online meme’s evolution process when it successfully transfers from an online marketplace to cultural space, and identify the qualities that constitute the success of the online meme.

This article studies how international business could suffer because of using the wrong translation criteria as guidelines in international business translation. The author starts with the discussion of translation criteria of different contemporary schools such as aesthetic equivalence, dynamic equivalence, adaptation school, and alienation school. Then, in light of the characteristics of each school’s criteria, the writer points out that there is not such an issue as to which criteria are more correct or superior to other ones. Each set of criteria has its own application area. Mechanically sticking to a single set of criteria will only yield undesired effects. To justify this point of view, the author uses specific examples of international business translation to show how international business stumbled because of translator’s undifferentiated adherence to the use of the same translation criteria or alienation approach throughout the translation process.