Community health practitioners face a common challenge of communicating the value of their work because it is intentionally designed to prevent health issues from happening. This case study examines how impact storytelling—a four-question framework developed by a community health manager at a nonprofit health system—mediates between technical expertise and executive's understanding. Through interviews with four Community Health practitioners, this research explains how the framework addresses specific technical communication challenges. This research brings together theory with practice by offering both a transferable framework for nonprofit organizations as well as theoretical insights into how workplace communication tools emerge from workplace practices.

Agile methodologies often do not explicitly include the process of creating user documentation, consistent with the idea that documentation should be minimal to create efficient processes. While Agile provides several advantages for technical communicators, these processes also raise challenges that technical communicators creating user documentation need to address, including collaborating with development teams and evaluating the usability of user documentation. Building on existing research, this qualitative study aimed to understand both the advantages and challenges of Agile and illuminate how technical communicators and their colleagues address the challenges. We interviewed 14 practicing technical communicators and their colleagues over 3 months in the fall of 2022. Participants worked in six software development organizations across the United States, with one working in Europe. We analyzed results qualitatively to discern findings focused on three topics—general advantages and challenges of creating user documentation in Agile contexts, the dynamics of technical communicators interacting with Agile development teams, and the effects of Agile on assessing the usability of user documentation. We offer suggestions for practitioners and educators as they consider how Agile affects the creation of user documentation, leveraging the benefits of Agile, and addressing challenges in innovative ways as demonstrated by participants in this study. Future research will provide even richer perspectives.

This study investigates how chronic pain is represented in widely used pain assessment scales. Through a thematic analysis, four overarching themes are identified: pain is framed as a linear continuum, depicted as a progressive bodily obstacle, normalized to a baseline of zero, and characterized as a predictable condition. The design of these scales oversimplifies the complexities of chronic pain into a linear narrative that can potentially marginalize patient experiences and lead to treatment delays. This research advocates for a shift toward patient experience design (PXD) to develop more nuanced, human-centered assessment tools that better capture the fluidity of chronicity.

Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) scholars and practitioners (TPCers) see a need to intervene in a range of complex problems. Yet scholars such as Leah Ceccarelli and Lauren Cagle have noted a gap between scholarly research findings and policy changes. To address this gap, I theorize a strategic grounding framework, consisting of multiple, linked tactics that over time enable TPCers to make a case to gain a seat at the table to shape policy. I theorize this framework through a case study of Stephen J. Pyne, founder of the subfield of Fire History, who influenced national and global fire management policy. I examine Pyne's professional papers, housed in the Stephen J. Pyne Papers Collection at the Arizona State University Archives. The framework offers TPCers a series of tactics that position TPCers as change makers as they place their expertise to shape policy that addresses complex problems.

Previous literature has shown that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) software, including large language model (LLM) chatbots, might contribute to qualitative research studies. However, there is still a need to examine the relationships between researchers, GAI technologies, data, and findings. To address this need, our team conducted a thematic analysis of our reflexive journals from an LLM chatbot-assisted research project. We identified four roles that researchers adopted: managers closely monitored the LLM's work, teachers instructed the LLM on theories and methods, colleagues openly discussed the data with the LLM, and advocates worked with the LLM to improve user experiences. Planning for and playing with multiple roles also helped to enrich the research process. This study underscores the potential for using conversational roles as a framework to support reflexivity when working with GAI technologies on qualitative research.

Chemist Ethaline Cortelyou, a significant figure in the emerging profession of technical communication in the 1950s, became a national mentor to women in the sciences, first leading them into the practice of technical editing and then away from it. This article presents a case study of her awakening to the true nature and cost of the patriarchal workplace and her own complicity in actively supporting sexist assumptions and the status quo. During the Sputnik crisis, Cortelyou recognized and overcame her internalized sexism, revised her advice to young women in the sciences, and became a public advocate of workplace reform.

The rise of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) threatens to upend traditional teaching and learning practices. Writing, speaking, and communication instruction will all need to evolve. This article presents a case study of one institution's efforts to design and implement a communication curriculum responsive to the unique demands of the EMI environment. The curriculum proposed enacts an interdisciplinary, multimodal approach to the teaching of communication. We discuss the specifics of the curriculum, the process of its creation, the principles underlying it, and how these principles play out in practice. In doing so, we hope to provide a model both for global communication instruction and future curricular design efforts.

Creating new emojis is predicated on a system of technical writing that lobbies for new emojis to the Unicode Consortium. Emojination, an activist collective working for cultural inclusivity, helps everyday people write proposals for inclusive and culturally sensitive emojis. Through a case study of Emojination, this article describes ways that Tactical Technical Communication can work toward cultural inclusivity within regulatory frameworks.

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

When most people think about the water coming from their kitchen faucets, they seldom consider where the water originates and how transporting it to their homes has environmental impacts. Utilities that supply water know the complexity of their systems, but from their position as a “utility,” they view their job as supplying safe water to their customers, not necessarily stewarding the environment. Consequently, when building large projects like dams, canals, and tunnels, utilities regard environmental disruption as a necessary byproduct of serving growing cities with water. Representations of these projects often replicate the “man conquering nature” frame, praising these engineering marvels for their defiance of nature. Denver Water, the utility that serves almost 1.5 million people on the arid eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, has produced films describing its complex system since the early 20th century, and these films reveal an evolution of values from dominating nature to actively stewarding the environment. This paper reports on a grounded theory analysis of films produced by Denver Water between 1933 and 2018 examining how the films frame human relationships to the natural environment. The results reveal that the films increasingly express stewardship ideals over those of domination, with recent public communication actively advocating for environmental causes. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can learn important lessons from Denver Water about ethical organizational action for environmental stewardship.

There are two boundary concepts utilized in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship: boundary work and, to a lesser degree, boundary objects. Boundary work functions to demarcate, incorporate, and expel particular ideas, groups, and practices from a field or profession. Boundary objects enhance the capacity of ideas, practices, and theories to translate across different groups. Together, these concepts are useful to TPC scholars interested in moments of controversy. In this essay, I explore the dialectical relationship between these two concepts and apply the resulting synthesis to a contemporary case study, the use of fecal microbiota transplants. I argue that the human microbiome functions as a boundary object and opens space within medicine’s own boundary work for the inclusion of fecal microbiota transplants. Together, the dialectical concepts of boundary work and boundary object create a new kind of analytic that allows TPC scholars to map boundary transformations, recognize moments for intervention, and create strategies for collaboration.

Deploying a grounded theory approach, this case study examines 9 years of a nonrenewable energy company’s responses to a voluntary environmental disclosure questionnaire to discover how industrial discourse about climate change is used by industry writers. Through using the rhetorical strategies of emotions, affect, and mythic narrative within theory, balancing norm, and dominion frames, the company communicates climate change does not impact their secure economic future due to their proactive approach toward regulatory compliance with technological innovation and attentive internal and external policy oversight.

This study details a method for mHealth app development and user experience design (UX) evaluation, which generates a comprehensive list of stakeholder-users, acknowledges UX barriers, advocates multiple methods, and argues that developers should address the UX needs of each stakeholder-user in a complex health-care system. A case study of a research project on an mHealth app for women who are considering prevention of or treatment for osteoporosis assists to elaborate and define the method. To find any measure of success, a fully functional app for older users should be integrated into the entire health-care system.

This article presents a case study of the Smarter Crowdsourcing project the International Development Bank and Governance Lab cohosted to cope with the emerging Zika outbreaks in Latin America countries. Using the lenses of intercultural communication methodologies, user-centered design, and global cultural flow, I examine the exclusion of at-risk populations as marginalized end users of the project. I also examine the impacts of this oversight on the effectiveness of the technocratic solutions. I then conclude by discussing the implications this case has for international health intervention, global technical communication, and community-based research.

This article examines how normative assumptions about disability, family, and care perpetuate barriers to social services in cross-cultural contexts. It reports on an 8-month case study of how a county-sponsored, person-centered disability grant targeted but failed to meet the needs of Somali applicants. I identify four impasses that alienated applicants and demonstrated the grant's process relied on culture norms, including medical definitions of disability, institutional expertise, and normalization of self-sufficiency. I develop three recommendations for future technical communication and policy interventions. This study offers insights into how person-centered initiatives can engage the contexts and expertise of diverse users within institutional structures.

This article reports on a qualitative study of strategies and competencies used by technical communication and translation students to address challenges inherent in global virtual team collaboration. The study involved students from three universities collaborating in virtual teams to write and translate instructional documents. Qualitative content analysis of students’ reflective blogs and team transcripts was used to examine their experiences while collaborating. Students faced challenges related to communication, leadership, and technology, and developed various strategies to address those challenges. Although the students did not face cultural challenges, they reported increased awareness of cultural issues. Students also reported that the project helped them better understand the workplace and define career goals.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case study challenges technical writing students to consider complex cultural circuits, or networks, that comprise a specific controversy. The students analyze the rhetorical situation, create new content that contributes to the ongoing discussion, and learn about audience through usability testing their multimodal projects.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

Technical communication research has critically engaged with organizational trends toward flattened organizations like networks, horizontal arrangements, and adhocracies, assemblages that hybridize top-down management in favor of autonomous groups. There has been no engagement with a related but distinct trend: worker cooperatives. Co-ops promise similar advantages but are distinct as they claim to deliver what flat organizations promise: access to governance, empowerment, and autonomy. In this article, I survey literature on flattened organizations, apply technical communication theory to account for cooperative communication, and conclude with an analysis from a qualitative study at a cooperative site.

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.

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.

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 describes protocological rhetoric as a conceptual tool for exploring and changing institutions. Protocological rhetoric is an extension of two lines of thought: Porter, Sullivan, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles's institutional critique and Science & Technology Studies's (STS) concept of information infrastructure. As a result, protocological rhetoric imagines institutions as networked information infrastructures. This article describes the method and provides an example through historical case study. I suggest that the approach provides methods for actively transforming institutions.

Visual sign systems have become an essential means of communication in places where large numbers of people of different nationalities gather, such as at international airports and the Olympic Games. That they can effectively increase accessibility among users not necessarily sharing a common language speaks to their potential usefulness in other situations. A homeless shelter in a western North Carolina community received funding to build a new facility. With the clientele's widely diverse communication abilities, including those who are illiterate or have limited reading skills, those who are non-native speakers knowing little to no English, and those who are coming from different cultural contexts, a visual sign system was designed to facilitate navigation for all visitors. Using Peirce's theory of signs, Neurath's ISOTYPE, and the least action principle borrowed from physics as a framework, this case study shows how the signs were designed and usability tested to ensure increased accessibility.

Professional identity is oft explored in the field, but such identities usually reside institutionally and may exclude women who engage in professional communication from the workplace of the home. One instantiation of this extra-institutional professionalism is mom blogs, the authors of which create content, find sponsors, and address issues important to mothers. Yet the women lack legitimacy as professionals because of the title “mommy blogger” and because of the notion that blogging is a hobby. My qualitative study explores how mom bloggers claim a professional space in communication. I interviewed 22 mom bloggers, using Faber's (2002, [18]) theory of professionalism and Durack's (1997, [17]) ideas of redefining terms, such as “workplace,” to include women. My findings show that mom bloggers engage in the characteristics of professional communicators, model egalitarian professionalism, employ an ethic of care that combats elitism, and challenge the field to include their work, from the home and through new media, as professional.

Between 1884 and 1926, such publishers of technological information as Henley Publishing, Audel Publishing, John Wiley, Van Nostrand, McGraw-Hill, and Practical Publications put out dozens and dozens of technical catechisms on a wide variety of technical subjects. Then, around 1926, these publishers ceased releasing texts called catechisms. What made the genre so popular? Did it disappear? The answers to these questions provide a case study of genre adaptation, genre change, and genre persistence within technical communication.

This article makes the argument that material evidence for many of the most valuable contributions that contemporary technical communicators make to their organizations is often found not in the traditional documentation that they produce but, rather, in the more fragmentary and provisional documents they create as daily participants in their work teams. To make this argument, the article presents data from a case study of a technical communicator at a software firm, showing how a reminder note he carried to a meeting helped him achieve an important design change. The article unpacks the concept of immutable mobiles from actor network theory to derive a framework that helps us interpret the multiple functions of this note in helping the technical communicator warrant and win a design argument with software developers.

Community-based projects immerse technical writing students in intercultural communication, addressing local needs and shaping documents in human terms. Students at a South Texas university work to establish communication with clients in a city-county health department to create effective documents and disseminate family health legislation. To prepare students for interactions in multicultural settings, the teacher provides an instructional framework that highlights the concepts and values of intercultural communication and the principles for effective problem-solving. Students engaged in the Baby Moses ( el niño Moisés) project encounter misunderstandings, rhetorical challenges within the process of document creation, and cultural tensions that thwart their goal to disseminate information to the community. Students and the teacher learn that the classroom, like the city-county health department, is a fertile site for cultural disequilibrium, tensions, and potential cultural awareness. To insure a viable Technical and Professional Writing Program in a culturally diverse university and surrounding community, the teacher identifies opportunities that help students develop and enhance their identities as culturally-sensitive communicators and effective problem solvers.

A study of the oral communication experiences and training of obstetric sonographers can provide insight into the complex expectations these medical professionals face as they complete their technical tasks and communicate with patients. Unlike other diagnostic medical professionals, obstetric sonographers are expected to provide detailed information to patients during the exam, a practice not typically found in the work of other types of medical diagnostic professionals. This study presents the results of interviews with 23 obstetric sonographers who described their communication experiences and their views on sonographer training in communication. Results suggest that sonographers experience complex communication challenges in the workplace that are not typically addressed in their education, nor are they officially recognized in the official discourse of their profession.

Single sourcing through a content management system (CMS) is altering technical communication practices in many organizations, including institutions of higher education. Open source software (OSS) solutions are currently among the most popular content management platforms adopted by colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. The GPL license, ease of use, customizability, and the large, global user base of mature content management systems are among the reasons these organizations choose OSS to meet their CMS needs. This article reviews the literature on the effects of single sourcing on technical communication practice. It also explores issues of OSS adoption, both generally and in international contexts. Through a case study of an OSS CMS implementation at a mid-sized public college, the article examines important contributions technical communicators can make to the rollout of an OSS-based CMS.

This case study focuses on images in three Science articles on the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose rediscovery was recently heralded. Because the primary piece of evidence is a frustratingly fuzzy four-second video, two groups of authors ultimately disagree on its interpretation and the same still video images that are used to argue for the sighting are used to argue against it. Given that the authors are making taxonomic arguments, images that closely resemble reality are employed. These images, like all images, are coded, and this analysis seeks to unlock these visual codes to reveal how meaning is made at the site of production, the site of the image, and the site of the audience. It also exposes how meaning making at the site of the image fueled the controversy.

In our case study, we examined the instant messaging (IM) workplace discourse of a pair of expert IM users. We found that the participants maintained discourse cohesion and thus coherence via short, rapidly sent transmissions that created uninterrupted transmission sequences. Such uninterrupted transmission sequences allowed each participant to maintain the floor. Also, the participants used topicalizations and performative verbs to maintain coherence. We also found that the participants' use of short transmissions may have ambiguated their enactment of their institutional roles and the rights afforded to them by those roles.

This article uses theories of space and findability to analyze a public information center as an example of multi-modal risk communication. The Yucca Mountain Information Center is an informational space created by the Department of Energy to inform the public about the proposed nuclear waste repository planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada. As a public space, the Center uses fact sheets, posters, and three-dimensional displays to make arguments about the storage of nuclear waste; we argue that the physical space, text, displays, and online space are all elements of risk communication. We offer a new way to read these elements of risk communication and suggest potential opportunities for public agency.

The “steel bible” emerged in 1919 and went through 11 editions in 80 years. In its evolution we can see the shift from individual to group authorship, an increasing use of visual elements, and a physical change from a small, hand-held volume to a weighty desktop reference. In a textual analysis, we can see that it was essentially static, changing only by additions and deletions, as the industry evolved. The eventual closing of hundreds of plants and the migration of the industry to other countries can be seen in the change of publisher, the sudden absence of photography, and the international references. Originally, the steel bible came from the factory floor and the words of the plant managers, but by the 1990s, it was a highly-abstracted representation of knowledge. In the steel bible, we can see the history of the industry and the maturing of technical communication in the 20th century.

Content analysis is a powerful empirical method for analyzing text, a method that technical communicators can use on the job and in their research. Content analysis can expose hidden connections among concepts, reveal relationships among ideas that initially seem unconnected, and inform the decision-making processes associated with many technical communication practices. In this article, we explain the basics of content analysis methodology and dispel common misconceptions, report on a content analysis case study, reveal the most important objectives associated with conducting high quality content analyses, and summarize the implications of content analysis as a tool for technical communicators and researchers.

A comparative evaluation of two user guides—the document traditionally used by a company and a model document designed on the basis of research results and recommendations—was carried out using a number of complementary approaches focusing on the user. The quality and suitability of these documents for the target audience were assessed in terms of content, structure, presence of certain organizational devices (such as headings) and pictures included. The results revealed that the model document was more attractive, more efficient, and better adapted to users' needs, thanks to its modular organization (being structured according to “functions”), a large number of pictures, the presence of headings, and rationalization of the vocabulary used.

This historical case study of a non-rule policy document (NPD) adopted by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management describes an emerging genre in environmental discourse. The NPD standardizes environmental public policy for land disposal of foundry sand, a solid waste. The collaborative writing process took six months with industry input, and the NPD was presented to two environmental boards. Two contrasts, in process and format, distinguish NPDs from rules. The NPD is an entirely new kind of writing which includes guidance for implementing statutes. The writing process in the case involves government writers and industry representatives, although it does not include other public input such as public hearings. Instead, the staff of the pollution control agency simply presents the NPD to the appropriate environmental policy boards and arranges for its publication. This article adds to the body of knowledge about technical writing in government, specifically environmental policy and non-academic genres.

Finding itself at the center of highly publicized legal and political deliberations over fairness in testing, personnel credibility, and legal liability, the training department at a North American transit authority adopted a genre system that enabled the production of objective evidence of job competence, which was then used to make objective decisions about who passed and failed various training programs. The ongoing genre-structured activity of the department involved not only the regularization of organizational texts but also the regularization of social interaction mediated by those texts, which, while producing the types of interpretively stable documents required for successful public deliberation, led to a shift in authority and social relations within the department that instigated considerable resentment and loss of morale among many veteran instructors.

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

This article draws on the principles of linguistic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to analyze and explain discursive diversity in organizational Web pages. Organizational Web sites must typically appeal to multiple audiences, a condition that often results in different discourses being juxtaposed within the same interface. To analyze and explain the effects of such juxtapositions, this article adapts to the Web the principles that Bakhtin developed to conceptualize discursive diversity in the novel, in particular his concept of dialogism. To illustrate their efficacy, the article applies these principles to analyze a pair of government Web sites about forests, the forest industry, and the environment. Whereas the homepages of the two sites project divergent approaches to the discourses of their diverse audiences, a dialogic analysis of the new site's deeper levels reveals how the government's discursive strategy appears to favor one audience at the expense of others. Drawing on this case study, this article discusses how an approach informed by Bakhtin's principles can illuminate our analysis of organizational Web discourse.

Although rhetoricians have studied the discourse practices of engineers, little is known about the production workers who must assemble engineering knowledge into functional products. This case study examines what happens when a production worker tried to improve manufacturing documentation, and how her success depended upon both her craft knowledge and the rhetorical skills she attributes to a Writing Across the Curriculum program she experienced in college. … although the goal of engineering may be to produce useful objects, engineers do not construct such objects themselves. Rather, they aim to generate knowledge that will allow such objects to be built [1, p. 5].

As proposed in the classic work by Hervey Cleckley, M.D.— The Mask of Sanity—a psychopath typically meets sixteen diagnostic criteria. Every one of them applies to Richard Hickock as he is revealed by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel about the murder of Kansas farmer Herbert W. Clutter and his family forty years ago. It transcends the boundaries of traditional journalism by closely examining the entire constellation of antisocial personality traits that Hickock exhibits. Drawn in large part from jailhouse interviews, Capote's portrait of Hickock breathes life into the psychiatric literature, thus rendering intelligible the mental evaluation provided by the physician who examined the accused in preparation for his upcoming trial. In so doing, Capote's best-selling masterpiece serves as a case study of a psychopath, one that conforms to established medical authority while maintaining its popular appeal.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the use of the Black communication style by African Americans in an organized environment. The research method which was used involved a multimethod approach of data collection in the field using direct observation, and obtrusive observations, as well as semi-structured interviews. This investigation has shown that although the Black employees in this organization felt, in general, as if they were changing their communication style to fit the organizational norms, they continued to rely on the cultural norms underlying the Black communication style. U.S. demographics are foretelling a future that will require innovative organizational communication strategies. According to Fine, two facts about the U.S. corporate environment which are uncovered by demographic trends are that the workforce will be comprised of a “greater diversity of gender, race, age, culture, and language” and that the demand for qualified workers will exceed the supply thereby “creating intense competition among organizations for workers” [1]. These changing demographics are not going unnoticed by the U.S. corporate leaders. Specifically, the issues of most concern to organizational executives, according to Workforce 2000, center around linguistic and cultural differences. Most organizations have no innovative strategies for meeting the demands of a diverse workforce. Traditional programs, such as day-care provisions, flexible work times, and hiring and recruiting more people of color are being implemented by corporate America in an effort to meet the demand for diversity. However, organizations are often lacking in creative programs which will provide for this emerging diverse workforce an environment that will accept and nurture their diversity. Certainly these corporate executives are receiving little in the way of guidance from organizational researchers.

Participants in a qualitative case study of nonacademic R&D authors were uncomfortable with the idea of persuasion in their writing. The participants thought their reports were more informative than persuasive. Three definitions for “persuasion” emerged: discourse intended to push a reader toward an action; discourse written in a clear, compelling style; and shady, manipulative discourse. When asked whether they owed a greater debt to their audience or to their subject matter, most participants chose subject matter. However, some participants argued that my question posed a false dichotomy, in that serving subject matter was the best way to serve audience.

Two groups of university students, approximately half with work experience, read one of two versions of the same case study narrative—a traditional, printed version or a computer version. Afterwards, both groups selected from a list of paragraphs to compose a memorandum needed to resolve the conflict in the case, and, two days later, completed a questionnaire to determine retention of the narrative. The researchers hypothesized that the subjects using the computer version would perform better and rate their version as more realistic because of this version's visuals and decision paths. The subjects using the computer version did perform somewhat better at selecting the correct final memo paragraph, but overall, the results did not show either method to be superior. The subject's previous off-campus work experience, however, did produce an impact on both the results and acceptability of the case method.

This article is a case study of a small controversy involving a 1983 government research report on gender biases in naval officer fitness reports. The research at issue indicated that male commanding officers customarily wrote differently in naval fitness reports about women than in fitness reports they wrote about men, and the researchers concluded that the commanding officers needed to change their writing habits. But the objectivity of the researchers was soon challenged. In this survey of the controversy, the writing of several groups—male commanding officers, female naval officers, male newspaper editors, and female personnel researchers—is both illustrated and critiqued. The main focus here is rhetorical credibility in professional communications when gender is the issue at hand.