This study explores technical and professional communication (TPC) students’ design of multimodal career portfolios, focusing on their strategies amid technological advancements and shifting workplace dynamics. The study analyzed 155 artifacts from 31 students, including resumes, video resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and rhetorical and modal analyses, using MAXQDA for discourse analysis. The results highlight the importance of research synthesis, intertextuality, audience awareness, personal branding, and adaptability in portfolio development. TPC students effectively create portfolios that meet company expectations across boundaries. A multimodal approach in TPC curricula is recommended, along with further research on emerging technologies’ impact on portfolios.

Over a period of 10 years, we have developed a sustainable process of online portfolio assessment that demonstrates both reliability and validity, using both qualitative and quantitative measures. The sustainable cycle is that, each semester, we assess a random sampling of the students' work that they have posted, as per our instructions, in an online portfolio. During the reading, the faculty score the documents for 11 variables, including writing, content, audience awareness, and document design. We achieved validity by a modified online Delphi that led to a redefinition of the construct of technical communication itself; we achieved reliability by adjudication resulting in adjacent scores. The results of our assessment meet the requirements of ABET and result in a continual cycle of improvement for our technical communication curriculum. Results from three semesters show an improving correlation between the course grade and the overall, holistic portfolio score.

The antecedents of literary autobiography as we know it today emerged during the 17th century against a backdrop of the rise of empirical science and inductive method. An arguably older form of autobiography—the portfolio—has, unlike the literary biography, languished on the periphery of academia during our time. While it should not be controversial to say that possession of an heuristic bent is one mark of a successful education (since learning how to think, that is learning how to be open, alert, engaged, is the fundamental mission of the student), the portfolio has been ignored in part because of its modern connotation as a ‘marketing’ tool but perhaps more significantly because as a heuristic methodology it is a threat to the centrality of the pedagogue. I argue that the portfolio deserves at very least a re-evaluation throughout academic (to say nothing of quotidian) life as an indispensable tool of the spirit of pedagogy. Like the autobiography, it is validated by the belief that gathering data or details about individual lives has to precede drawing general conclusions or seeing any overarching patterns.

Daniel Defoe, one of the pioneers of the English novel, primarily earned his living as a journalist, pamphleteer, proposal writer, and freelance business consultant. A born entrepreneur, Defoe's many projects included promoting and marketing the first practical diving bell, designing commercial fisheries and improving London's sewer system, producing a series of popular self-help manuals, and founding and editing the first English technical writing journal, The Projector. These were the products of Defoe's indefatigable pen, and the utilitarian simplicity of his business and technical writing has strongly influenced English prose ever since. This article will examine two major pieces of Defoe's professional writing: An Essay of Projects, (1698) a portfolio of his best proposals, and the landmark The Complete English Tradesman (1725), the first English business writing manual. These and similar texts would form the loam of Defoe's great novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1721), and A Journal of a Plague Year (1722). While Defoe's professional writing shaped his creative writing, his gifts as a novelist—his plain, demotic style, his knack for concise narrative and analytical summary, his ability to create convincing personas through textual documentation—shaped his business writing. Both forms of writing made him the premier spokesperson of a new social and economic order.

This paper discusses a method to improve the oral communication competencies of technological students that has been utilized successfully at the University of Missouri-Rolla, the main scientific/engineering school of the University of Missouri system. Methods of individual instruction are explored, including personal assessment of strengths and weaknesses, individualization of course goals, time management, and the reduction of communication anxiety. Methods of group instruction are also detailed, including different types of oral presentations the technologist might be expected to make, building a professional attitude, the professional portfolio, and out-of-class speaking experience. Two premises form the basis for these methods. First, that a strong individual approach will significantly increase competencies in oral communication while reducing anxiety. And second, that emphasizing a professional attitude will encourage the student to work to his capacity in improving his competencies, and will prepare him to be a more effective professional.