Misinformation has generated much discussion in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant "Infodemic," as the World Health Organization (WHO) dubbed the challenge of disordered information. Rhetorical genre studies can offer important insights about how misinformation functions within informational ecologies by revealing how typification and recurrence provide opportunities for misinformation to take hold. This article develops a genre-based framework to study scientific and technical misinformation as illicit genres through concepts of genre function and abusability.

ABSTRACTThis project investigates how the goals of microenterprise entrepreneurs affect their use of communication genres. Although slide-based business pitches are key for traditional entrepreneurs, microenterprise entrepreneurs have little interest in investment. Therefore, acquiring customers through short elevator pitches takes this central position. This article also explores the social justice dimensions of microenterprise acceleration, finding that such organizations can provide important services in combating inequality. This project uses writing, activity, and genre research as a theoretical framework, and the research site is a microenterprise accelerator in Tacoma, Washington called Spaceworks Tacoma, which supports both lower-income and Black owners of small businesses.KEYWORDS: Workplace studiesprofessional practice, social justiceethicsentrepreneurshipWriting, activity, and genre research (WAGR)microenterprises AcknowledgementsFirst, I would like to thank the entrepreneurs and the director of Spaceworks who very graciously gave me their time to talk about their organizations. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Richard Johnson-Sheehan, Jennifer Bay, Bradley Dilger, and Clay Spinuzzi who provided guidance on both the research process and the writing and revising of the manuscript. And finally, I would like to thank Rebecca Walton and this article's anonymous reviewers, who helped me to strengthen and sharpen the article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis project was not supported by any funding.Notes on contributorsMason T. PellegriniMason Pellegrini is an assistant professor in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. His main research areas are entrepreneurial communication, workplace writing, academic publishing, and qualitative research methods. In 2022, Mason received a Fulbright Open Research Grant to Chile, which he used to study entrepreneurship communication at the famous Chilean business accelerator Start-Up Chile.

This article unpacks the ideologies of "professionalism" by examining how international and multilingual identities are negotiated through the enactment of workplace genres. Relying on autoethnographic narrative vignettes that highlight the affective labor inherent in such identity negotiation, this article moves beyond traditional workplace contexts to explore familial sites of intergenerational knowledge construction. The author argues that "professionalism" for multilingual communicators is bound by native-speaker paradigms and colonial language ideologies that complicate how expertise is voiced.

This article explores how doctoral writers in interdisciplinary life sciences programs navigate genre-ing activities across multiple disciplines. In interdisciplinary environments, approaches to doing and teaching writing may benefit from a reimagining, particularly as findings suggest that writing at interdisciplinary boundaries is unsuited to apprenticeship models of pedagogy. I argue that meta-genre is a productive way of engaging with the destabilization of existing knowledge in technical communication in interdisciplinary spaces and of fostering interdisciplinary writing knowledge.

Studies of emergent online science communication genres continuously seek to understand novel forms of popularizations aimed at facilitating expert-with-public engagement. To understand how scientists can successfully engage with audiences in dynamic online environments, we examine Reddit’s science subreddit, attending to the acclaimed Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series, and subsequent Science Discussion Series (SDS). A move analysis on a corpus of AMA and SDS original posts reveal moves used when engaging audiences through these installments.

In this article, I argue that the accelerated adoption of political technology during the COVID-19 pandemic evinces exigency for a rhetorically grounded framework to teach, research, and practice political technical communication (PxTC) as a sub-discipline. As a starting point, I use a rhetorical genre studies approach to identify political social actions that separate political communication technologies into four distinct genres: election, electioneering, constituent services, and punditry.

This article highlights technical and professional communication (TPC) as a literacy practice used to plan and sustain Black family reunions. Specifically, I examine the work of three families who create and engage with technical and business writing genres to complete internal and external reunion organizing work. I argue that the field of TPC needs more focused inquiry into research that centers Black families as TPC practitioners.

This article argues that science fiction is a powerful tool for teaching ethics in the technical communication classroom. As a literary genre, science fiction is uniquely situated to critique the social and political consequences of technological progress and to guide future behaviors. Using a speculative fiction-themed technical communication seminar as a case study, this essay demonstrates how science fiction theory, narratives, and projects can encourage students to think more holistically about their future roles as scientists and communicators. Such an approach can reinvigorate traditional workplace genres, support responsible decision-making, and promote multiculturalism, environmentalism, and social justice.

This article analyzes user work during open game development and presents an alternative model for participatory design. During open development, developers publicly distribute incomplete games, discuss their design goals, and facilitate user feedback. This article examines user work on an open development forum using conventional content and discourse uptake analyses. It finds that users customize their participation, engage with multiple objects of design, and affect design through collective action.

Part of learning a discipline’s genres is learning how one’s work must be presented. Students confronting this economy of genre sometimes chafe at its restrictions, and their apprehension reveals unsuspected stakes for technical communication. In interviews, students discuss how their final presentations fail to capture the sophistication and the nuances of their designs, suggesting that learning genres is not just about participation but also about letting go of competing ways of conceiving practice.

Environmental discourses remain an important area of concern for technical communicators and rhetoricians who seek to evaluate the social actions of their genres (Dayton, 2002; Miller, 1984); addre...

A Playable Case Study (PCS) is a hybrid learning experience where students (1) participate in a fictional narrative that unfolds through an immersive, simulated environment and (2) engage in classroom activities and lessons that provide educational scaffolding and promote metacognition through in-game and out-of-game experiences. We present the Microcore PCS to illustrate the potential of this new type of experiential simulation that incorporates aspects of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to increase immersion and teach workplace literacies in the technical communication classroom. We explore results from a pilot test of Microcore with an undergraduate technical communication course, identifying design strategies that worked well and others that led to improvements that are currently being incorporated. We also provide questions to prompt future research of playable case studies and discuss our findings in a broader context of technical communication pedagogy.

Using a cultural-historical genre analysis of the Gantt chart, the author describes how, when a project’s progress and scope are being considered, this popular project management visualization evokes managerial values of certainty and simplicity. These values, instantiated in early 20th-century scientific management philosophy, are made visually manifest in Henry L. Gantt’s popular chart. These charts require technical and professional communicators to gauge the rhetorical implications of using them when providing their expertise in communicating project management.

Content marketing involves creating content in genres that readers find useful. These genres individually do not persuade their readers to buy a given product and may not even mention the product or service being marketed. But collectively, they are designed to lead their readers to a purchase decision, that is, they sell without selling. The authors examine how content marketers strategically deploy these ecologies of genres.

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners.

This article traces the reception of a “science comic book” by various audiences including readers and reviewers after publication as well as grant application review committees vetting the proposed project in its conceptual stage. Specifically, the work is a biology textbook containing comics-style visual explanations couched in the form of an imaginative story interwoven with and supplementing traditional text-based explanations of the same ideas. The analysis uses Genette’s concept of “paratexts” (i.e., a class of speech genres comprising those supplementary texts that contextualize and inform readers’ interpretations of the primary text that they accompany) to examine the rhetoric of the visual in the discourse of science education. This analysis observes that the stigmatization of comics as a medium played some role in how readers, critics, and reviewers responded to the text. The implications of this stigma for cultural conceptions of science and their relationships to other knowledge domains, including the arts and humanities, raise a concern for the mediation of public impressions of science as an institution.

Crowdfunding is a novel mechanism for garnering monetary support from the online public, and increasingly it is being used to fund science. This article reports a small-scale study examining science-focused crowdfunding proposals from Kickstarter.com. By exploring the rhetoric of these proposals with respect to traditional grant funding proposals in the sciences, this study aims to understand how the language of science may be imported into this popular genre.

A decade ago, I was struck by the realization that almost all of the scholarship in our field focuses on the technical communication that happens within organizations, or that is produced by organizations to engage with their members, constituents, or customers (Kimball, 2006).In our scholarship, pedagogy, and practice, we regularly assume that the basic unit for consideration, the scope, is some sort of formal organization: a corporation, a government agency, or an institution.This organizational assumption has come under increasing scrutiny by others, as well.For example, Clay Spinuzzi's influential work has gradually expanded the frame beyond the organization to more flexible and temporary alliances.In Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Spinuzzi, 2003) and its more applied follow-on volume, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations (Spinuzzi, 2013), Spinuzzi focused primarily on communication networks and conventions within organizations.But, more recently, in All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks (Spinuzzi, 2015), Spinuzzi broadens his focus beyond the organization, ironically by looking at something smaller: the projectbased team.In other words, Spinuzzi's work seems to have begun with assuming the organization as the proper unit of study but has shifted to consider more contingent and nimble arrangements that cross-organizational boundaries.Of course, the organization is still an important unit of scope.Yet the organizational assumption obscures a larger view of the technical communication performed by millions of people each day on their own, working outside of, between, and even counter to organizations.This kind of technical communication existed long before the organizational assumption, but it has grown tremendously with the opportunities afforded by the Internet for people to share technical information for their own purposes, rather than on behalf of institutions.In effect, everyone who enjoys access to the Internet is now a potential technical communicator, sharing what they know about technology with the entire world.With services like YouTube, Instructables, and web forums, anyone with only a small investment in money or technology can share with users across the world the kind of information that has traditionally been the product of professional technical writers employed by corporations or government agencies.(For a more detailed discussion of this trend, please see Kimball, 2016.)These new technical communicators find a ready audience in the many people interested in knowing "how to do" something, but not "how to become" something.Examples abound, but here's a personal one.The bearings of our washing machine burned out.As it loudly tried to shake itself apart, my wife and I cast about for what to do.In previous decades, our options would have been slim.We could take the machine apart and try to diagnose and repair the problem ourselves.Naturally, our ignorance made us reluctant to take that route.We could hire a repairperson, but likely at great expense.We could simply buy a new washer, at even greater expense.Finally, we could seek formal training and become appliance repairpersons.However, such training is difficult to come by, even more costly, and slow.We would likely run out of clean clothes before we learned enough to fix the machine.And, ironically, we would likely have to learn a lot of information about fixing other kinds of machines, as well as the professional values and standards that would allow us to participate

The genre of technical description is seeing a resurgence, particularly in online locations, where new, hybrid versions have emerged. The technical explanation, one such hybrid, proliferates on the social message board site Reddit and the message board “Explain Like I’m Five,” in which answers to complex questions are crowdsourced. This study examines 233 such questions and their answers, identifying the effort needed to generate technical explanations as distributed and coordinative technical communication work.

This article examines the inter-relational role of genre and narrative in a social justice organization. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this test presents a process-centered approach using genre ecology modeling and narrative maps. This approach can help scholars understand how genre and narrative dialectically promote collaboration and coordination while simultaneously promoting the process of consubstantiality and rhetorical identification in networked organizations.

This article uses genre-field analysis (GFA) to examine Minecraft griefing guides: user-generated documentation that operationalizes destructive approaches to gameplay. Griefing guides promote subversive praxis while forwarding a utilitarian ethical system that alues hedonistic schadenfreude, running counter to morals of cooperation championed by most Minecraft players. Published in online forums where debates over conflicting praxis continue, these guides explicitly address, rather than mask, the negotiation of ideological values and ethical systems within a community.

Using a move-strategy genre analysis of 180 video game user reviews posted to six websites, this article describes typical characteristics of the genre as well as significant variations in genre construction. By creating new audiences and purposes for the genre, emerging genre variants have opened critical debates within the user community about genre change. Ultimately, the author argues that tracing genre variations could have implications for how technical communication scholars and practitioners support the needs and goals of user-generated genres.

Field narratives that (re)classify technical genres as liberating for women risk supporting the notion that feminism is a completed project in technical communication scholarship. This article suggests that technical communicators reexamine the impact of past approaches to critical engagement at the intersections of gender studies and technical communication; cookbooks provide a material example. The authors illustrate how a feminist approach to cookbooks as technical/cultural artifacts can productively revise field narratives in technical communication.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

This article pilots a study in statistical genre analysis, a mixed-method approach for (a) identifying conventional responses as a statistical distribution within a big data set and (b) assessing which deviations from the conventional might be more effective for changes in audience, purpose, or context. The study assesses pharmaceutical sponsor presentations at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee meetings. Preliminary findings indicate the need for changes to FDA conflict-of-interest policies.

Nonemployer firms—firms with no employees—present themselves as larger, more stable firms to take on clients’ projects. They then achieve these projects by recruiting subcontractors, guiding subcontractors’ interactions with clients, and coordinating subcontractors to protect their team performance for the client. Using fourth-generation activity theory, I examine how these firms stage-manage their ad hoc collaborations. I conclude by describing the implications for further developing fourth-generation activity theory to study such instances of knowledge work.

Although self-assessment is an important genre in both the academy and the workplace, it is often static. The resulting fixed identities are problematic in a creative economy that requires fluidity. Drawing on the work of Carruthers and Goffman, among others, we argue that memory and meditation, encompassing inventory and invention and coupled with rhetorical performance, constitute dynamic self-assessment.

This article reports the findings from analysis of end-of-life court cases and case files from one state public guardianship administrator as well as interviews with guardians or surrogates to identify how language and principles of the courts are operationalized in end-of-life decisions for those who are unable to make decisions for themselves. We found that physicians and guardians worked well within the requirements of the genre to ensure the best interests for those whom they represent.

With an ecological approach to the genres that circulate within communities of practice, this article traces the overlap between technical communication and online gaming communities in terms of their rhetorical uses of technical communication genres. Through shared practices, technologies, and epistemologies, online gaming environments call upon gamers to become technical communicators and provide opportunities for technical communicators to apply their expertise within the gaming industry.

This article uses research in cultural–historic activity theory, exploring patients' use of technical health care texts to produce knowledge and design their choices related to their bodies and health. Drawing on a case study of Meagan, who dealt with colitis and complications due to pregnancy, the author argues that we should consider reception and use as multisemiotic acts of repurposing, inscription, and reproduction alongside the research of the production of texts by professionals.

This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008 Bacey , J. , & Barry , T. ( 2008 ). A comparison study of the proper use of Hester-Dendy® samplers to achieve maximum diversity and population size of benthic macroinvertebrates Sacramento Valley, California (Report No. EH08-2) . Sarcramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]; Levine et al., 2005 Levine , J. , Kim , D. , Goh , K. S. , Ganapathy , C. , Hsu , J. , Feng , H. , & Lee , P. ( 2005 ). Surface and ground water monitoring of pesticides used in the Red Imported Fire Ant Control Program (Report EH05-02) . Sacramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010 Kuhn , V. , Johnson , D. J. , & Lopez , D. ( 2010 ). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy . Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 14 ( 2 ). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html [Google Scholar]) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

Composition and rhetoric's attention to writing as cultural performance is expanded to analyze writing as organizational performance. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse enables the diagnosis of a technical writer's annual performance appraisal as grounded in 20th-century Taylorized management principles. Tenets from posthumanism—including a discarding of the liberal humanist subject in knowledge production and a leveraging of distributed cognition for enhanced performance of humans acting in concert with intelligent machines—enable a theoretical framework for repurposing this genre.

Clay Spinuzzi. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 230 pp. With this book Spinuzzi has done the field a great service: He has “absorbed more literature from activity theory, actor-netw...

In this article we compare two different perspectives on the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant proposal and funding process: that depicted by the genre-dominant NSF Web site and that articulated by several successful NSF-funded researchers. Using genre theory and play theory to map the respective processes, we found that a systems-based refocusing of audience analysis—namely, genre field analysis—allows researchers a more accurate understanding of their roles as agents within the system.

Twelve currently popular technical communication textbooks are analyzed for their treatment and discussions of the types of writing that engineers produce. The analysis reveals a persistent bias toward humanities-based styles and genres and a failure to address the forms of argument and evidence that our science and engineering students most need to master to succeed as rhetoricians in their fields. The essay ends with recommendations and calls upon instructors to reenvision the service course in technical communication.

“The study of activity ceases to be the psychology of an individual, but instead focuses on the interaction between an individual, systems of artifacts, and other individuals in historically developing institutional settings” (Miettinen, 1997). As teaching technical writing online becomes more widespread, teachers and scholars are identifying ways to increase teaching/learning efficacy. One way of accomplishing this goal is by continually reflecting on different types of student ethos being constructed in an online course. The changes that occur in the ethos development process can be contextualized through activity theory, which emphasizes the dynamic, evolving nature of social environments. Activity theory's focus on cultural history and tools makes it ideal for exploring active communication among multiple participants in an online technical communication environment. The triangle of human activity adapted and developed by Engeström (1987) Engeström, Y. 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental research., Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy. [Google Scholar] provides a framework for exploring ethos as an object within an online course's activity system.

This article discusses the rise of conservation writing as a new field of technical communication, and it offers pedagogical strategies for teaching conservation writing and building curricula. Conservation writing is an umbrella term for a range of writing about ecology, biology, the outdoors, and environmental policies and ethics. It places the natural world at the center of readers' attention, often viewing sustainability as a core value. A course or curriculum in this kind of writing would likely need to help students master a variety of genres, while providing a working knowledge in environmental law, ethics, and politics.

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.

In 1974, the traffic-accident data archive maintained by the Department of Transportation for the state of Iowa was transferred from a primarily paper-based system to a mainframe computer. Data reg...

This article presents a framework for analyzing innovative information technology adoption by organizational work groups. Concepts from three distinct theories (adoption and diffusion theory, cultural-historical activity theory, and the social construction of technology) are modified and integrated to form a hybrid, layered framework, which is then applied to a specific case to demonstrate the advantages for guiding research and analysis. The illustrative case presents the experience of a small work group in a high-technology company that implemented single-source content management.

Charettes offer a productive way of combining theory and practice to address some of the difficult matters of getting students to see and perform technical communication as students, professionals, servers, and citizens. This collaborative activity helps students prepare for an increasingly modular professional world by revealing the contingent rhetoricity of professional autonomy. Charettes can help technical writing programs and students integrate service and civic learning into the curriculum by using indigenous professional genres that actively demand stakeholder participation. The intensity and pragmatic force of charettes can assist students in building their ethos while working with fellow stakeholders. The wide range of possible documents involved in the process associated with charettes can help technical communication students and teachers explore the connections between rhetorical exigencies and genre and put their skills to good use in a culture where many are looking for new ways to build critical citizenship.

Much genre research focuses on genre as typified, recurring discursive actions used by members of discourse communities. This article discusses the role of genre in a project that includes participants from different discourse communities. The participants created a single text to assist multiple audiences to ensure that buildings and facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. The author proposes a functional framework for considering the role of genre knowledge on the cross-disciplinary project.

Instructors in multi-major professional communication courses are asked to teach students a variety of workplace genres. However, teaching genres apart from their contexts may not result in transfer of knowledge from school to workplace settings. We propose teaching students to research genre use via activity theory as a way of encouraging transfer. We outline theory and research relevant to teaching genre and provide results from a study using activity theory to teach genre in two different professional communication courses.

Although the rhetoric of relatively stable scientific disciplines has been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to discourse formation in young disciplines. The author extends recent theories of genre and disciplinary discourse in a close rhetorical analysis of early papers in ethnological science. Practitioners apply extant rhetorical resources to new disciplinary problems as they learn to identify themselves as participants in a collective project. The young discipline "learns" its discourse from its practitioners.

This article argues that fact sheets produced by environmental activists in response to proposed nuclear waste repositories constitute a new genre of scientific rhetoric. By analyzing the rhetorical features of these texts, including the simultaneous reliance on and distrust of scientific evidence, this article demonstrates how effective environmental activists' texts can be, in spite of the constraints and pressures of their rhetorical situation.

Theoretical foundations in website design courses can facilitate students learning the genres of Internet communication. Genre theory and activity theory provide opportunities for emphasizing the social context of websites in ways that emphasize for students the identity-laden nature of sites that can often appear to be anonymous and addressed to multiple audiences. After proposing ways that these theories can be integrated into website design courses, the article focuses on two students' website portfolios and ways they utilize theories discussed in class to produce websites in two different fields.

This article explores the effect of classroom-workplace collaborations on student learning. Drawing on two case studies, I explore how classroom-workplace collaborations help us to teach professional genres. I examine how they replicate workplace activity and convey features of workplace genres and how they serve as transitional experiences for students. I also examine students' reactions to the feedback they received during the projects.

This article describes a discipline‐specific communication course for engineering students offered by a Canadian university. The pedagogy of this course is based on North American theories of genre and theories of situated learning. In keeping with these theories, the course provides a context in which students acquire rhetorical skills and strategies necessary to integrate into a discipline‐specific discourse community. The authors argue that such a pedagogical approach can be used to design communication courses tailored to the needs of any discipline if the following three key conditions are met: assignments are connected to subject matter courses, a dialogic environment is provided, and the nature of assignments allows students to build on their learning experiences in the course.