Cooperatives are distinct from conventional businesses and the technical documents they produce challenge assumptions about documentation practices. To better understand these differences, technical communicators may need a set of tools well-suited to mission-driven, for-profit businesses. In this process-focused article, I draw on action research methodology to take first steps toward articulating the similarities and differences in research between a conventional organization and a cooperative. I demonstrate this framework by using two recent case studies.

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.

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.

This article situates reproductive applications as an emerging “do-it-yourself” health technology in need of feminist technical communication action. The authors focus on Glow, a fertility and period tracking application, and argue that though this application promises user’s self-empowerment over their reproductive health, individual agency is often reduced. The authors consider how technical communication scholars can intervene in fertility and period tracking applications through a redesign of how consent is obtained when collecting user’s personal health information.

Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication offers a distinct approach to the recent posthuman turn in technical communication research by extending theories to practice and exploring posthuman app...

We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of “scientific controversy.” Our praxiographic analysis reveals that “scientific controversy” is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists’ demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.

This article reviews literature on emotions within communication settings and proposes that emotions serve as motivations to accomplish social action; these motivations also serve as opportunities to negotiate agency within unfamiliar workplace settings. To exemplify the way this process develops, the author presents a case study of a technical communication intern as she works full-time for a German sales and distribution company. Through reflective self-narratives, the intern describes specific emotions she experiences as she adjusts to this German workplace. These emotions connect directly to decisions the student makes that help her negotiate agency from a “powerless” position, resulting in effective workplace relationships and a competent persona.

This article examines the emergence of technical communication as an academic field in China from the perspectives of pedagogy, program building, market needs, professionalization, and local sociopolitical contexts. Highlighting the close disciplinary connections between translation and technical communication, it identifies visionary faculty with overseas experiences as national leaders in curriculum innovation. It also explores the close industry–academia connections facilitated by semi-open WeChat groups and existing approaches to building international partnerships with technical communicators in China.

"Women physicians and professional ethos in nineteenth-century America." Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(3), pp. 290–291

Given the barriers for transgender people to access affordable gender-transition care, online environments have witnessed a rise in user-generated instruction sets providing direction on the self-administration of hormone therapy. These ethical forms of tactical technical communication demonstrate the need to consider a new materialist approach to queer theory, which refuses to align queer agency with stable identities. Drawing directly from these user-generated instructions, this article articulates a theoretical framework for queer, tactical technical communication.

The current U.S. political climate has catalyzed intense public conversations about our relationship with facts and the truth. Declarations we have entered a Post-Truth Era vie with demands for ren...

Case studies have been a central methodology employed by scholars working in the rhetoric of science and technical communication. However, concerns have been raised about how cases are constructed and collected, and what they convey. The authors reflect on how rhetoricians of science and technical communication researchers can – and do – construct a variety of case-based mixed-methods studies in ways that may make our research more portable and durable without undercutting the important and central role of case-based analysis.

Relying on the case of a mixed-methods study centered on patients’ strategies for establishing their credibility in clinical conversations, this essay argues that the more intentional and effective the participant recruitment and the more specific the inquiry, the more likely technical communication and rhetoric of science researchers are to encounter potentially powerful partners through which they might get and analyze compelling data and, thus, gain engaged audiences outside of their disciplines.

In a networked society, humans are connected through mobile devices to always-on networks, and these technologies merge with us in new ways. In this environment, studying human-networked interactions involves an expanded type of usability. In this article, we argue that a key component of usability is how humans connect and disconnect from these networks. For this reason, the authors advocate studying how users connect and disconnect between online and offline contexts in their everyday life. Such an effort involves questioning our assumptions about the role of connection in usability and introduces methodological issues in studying these processes. These shifts require our research to be more multidisciplinary and more methodologically demanding, with major implications for the portability and durability of technical communication research.

Technical communication scholarship is in the midst of a social justice movement with scholars interrogating considerations of race in technical professional communication (TCP) (Haas, 2012), revea...

This case study is based on a research through design project (RTD) that focuses on a technical communication video of the live-action format. It investigates the usability and design-implications of a live-action how-to video, by means of analyzing user-centered data such as YouTube analytics data, usability, and comprehension assessments. In the study, four key live-action video affordances are identified: verifiability, comparability, recordability, and visibility. The identification of these affordances when related to the users’ assessments resulted in several design implementations that would warrant sought-for communication efficacies. Findings show that some assumed efficacies appear to be mitigated by the complexity and the density of the video information. One implication of this is that the implementation of conventional video editing techniques and the addition of on-screen text that serve to make content briefer and more concise into instructional live-action videos requires the technical communicator’s careful consideration.

Women continue to face difficulties in the technical and professional communication (TPC) workplace for a myriad of reasons. However, they are not powerless, and interviews with 39 female practitioners of TPC reveal that they use interactional power to maneuver within and around the system of the traditional workplace to solve problems of devaluation, exclusion, harassment, and siloing. A key aspect of being able to navigate power through interaction is becoming aware of the context in which power struggles take place and then using that knowledge to design new participation. Women who claim agency in the workplace understand that power is not possessed, but that they can access resources to participate in power shifts and dynamics.

This article reports findings from a month-long research project in Vietnam working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). The authors found that VAVA did not always abide Western prescriptions for “good” technical and scientific communication yet were extremely effective technical communicators among victims and families. This article reports findings that call for an expanded definition of what it means to practice good technical communication, especially in understudied cultural contexts.

This article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users’ contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication’s value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.

The introductory technical communication class serves many purposes, but perhaps an understudied purpose is the class’s role in university retention and persistence. In this study, students used Twitter to complete biweekly assignments as a way to develop a sense of belonging, which is an important component to retention and persistence. Authors explore how this Twitter intervention affected students’ sense of belonging, their creation of an online community, and their continued pursuit of a technical communication education.

In his 2013 article “Slow Ideas,” Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Atul Gawande discusses two forms of disciplinary change. He describes two surgical innovations from the mid-19th century, and traces why one (anesthesia) was easily and rapidly adopted, whereas the other (antiseptic) was accepted only slowly, over the course of decades. This happened because the more significant innovation (antiseptic) required a fundamental redefinition of the profession of surgery, including a significant rethinking of the field’s methods and values. Instead of “warriors against disease,” surgeons needed to become scrupulously sterile practitioners of cleanliness—and many, advanced in their careers, resisted such a change. This article contents that usability and user experience represent a similarly slow change in the field of techncial communication, and that we are still in the midst of transformations within our discipline which may require similar redefinition of scholarly work within this field.

Program location has been a key conversation piece in discussions concerning the technical communication profession. Less attention has been devoted toward location of individual faculty, particularly those who may be the lone communicator in departments outside of English or humanities. Although these arrangements may not be without challenges, they also may yield unique opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations and professional identity shaping in ways that more traditional academic technical communication positions do not.

There is no shortage of calls for innovation in higher education. In response to some catastrophic outside influence, whether it be budget cuts, an impending enrollment collapse, or the rapid expan...

Drawing from literature on communication as a physical, material experience, this article expands Cargile Cook’s “layered literacies” (2002) pedagogical framework to include a seventh literacy—embodied literacy. The article uses a classroom case study in which students coproduced a cookbook with low-income, elderly, disabled users, to demonstrate how students can become more responsible and effective technical communicators by recognizing users’ divergent embodied experiences. The article includes suggestions for concrete classroom practices that encourage such embodied literacy.

This article argues for an “off the grid” approach to thinking about technology and technical communication. First, the author presents a metatheory that connects numerous descriptive theories of technology into a unified approach to philosophizing about technology. Then, the author uses this unified approach to argue that the metaphor of off the grid living provides technical communicators with a way of rethinking our approach to pedagogy, user-centeredness, and the future of our field.

This article examines prescription drug labels (PDLs) via an actor-network theory analysis to demonstrate current challenges with technical communication (TC) scholars’ appropriation of actor-network theory. The authors demonstrate that the complexity of the PDL network requires a more nuanced deployment of actor-network theory notions of durability and synchronicity. Specifically, the authors suggest that diachronic approaches to networks enable a more comprehensive understanding in ways that synchronic approaches cannot.

The dispute for authority between the seemingly disparate disciplinary camps of theory and practice is a longstanding and well-documented tension within the field of technical communication (Miller...

Understanding technological literacy for technical communicators is crucial for effective pedagogy in technical and professional communication. Challenges of teaching technical communication students the functions and concepts of workplace software include the number of rapidly changing applications, a desire to focus on education over training, limited faculty expertise in software, limited resources for teaching software, and a desire to focus on technical communication principles. To address these challenges, the authors explore how to use a four-level framework of technological literacy along with existing resources to design a course to help students use, understand, and evaluate technical communication technology.

The authors argue that skills in quantitative literacy (QL) and quantitative reasoning (QR) augment students’ communicative effectiveness. This article offers a pedagogical framework and model for how QR can be productively interwoven with the rhetorical know-how of technical writing pedagogy. The authors describe their course redesign, present preliminary assessment data, and conclude by highlighting some implications not only for student learning, but also for the QL movement itself.

This article presents a case study using ethnographic and visual methods to investigate the framing activity of engineering students. Findings suggest students use the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis to produce the vivid images needed to frame engineering constraints. Data reveal students multimodally inducing collaboration between group members to construct images as ways to configure engineering constraints. The author argues for the usefulness of hypotyposis for understanding the framing of engineers, technical communicators, and other designers.

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.

International interest in technical communication education is growing as more individuals gain online access worldwide. This factor means technical communication educators might find themselves developing online classes for students located in other nations. Doing so requires an understanding of aspects affecting international interactions in such educational contexts. This article examines central factors—or friction points—that technical communication instructors must understand and address to offer effective online educational experiences to globally distributed students.

The author reports on social media research in technical and professional communication (TPC) training through a national survey of 30 professional and technical communication programs asking about their use of social media in technical communication. This research forms the basis of recommendations for training online TPC faculty to teach with social media. The author offer recommendations throughout for those who train online TPC faculty as well as for the teachers themselves.

This article addresses emerging calls for online education and cross-cultural technical communication training, specifically by outlining and reporting on the development and sustainability of two online programs: the graduate online technical and professional writing certificate and the emerging undergraduate bilingual professional writing certificate at the University of Texas at El Paso. Data presented suggest cultural and linguistic diversity should be embedded and streamlined across all aspects of online technical communication programs.

This article reports on an effort by the authors to use usability testing as a component of online teacher training for their multimajor technical communication course. The article further explains the ways in which program administrators at other institutions can create their own usability testing protocols for formative online teacher training in course design and in principles of user-centered design.

Online writing courses have developed in importance to meet student learning and institutional expectations; over time, a controversy about training online instructors and building sustainable programs has emerged. This article relates training demands within the University of Arizona’s Writing Program and development of an online professional & technical writing certificate. The article proposes training instructors with master courses and building a sustained program through a participatory design to create a professional and integrated environment.

As complex and adaptive environments, workplaces have long been a subject of study in the field of technical communication and an area of concern in Clay Spinuzzi’s scholarship. In All Edge, howeve...

To make technical communication scholarship more reflective of the complexity of work done by such communicators, a new concept that marries recent parallel turns to ethics and invention is needed. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a stranger to the field, offers such a concept: responsibility. It covers more explanatory ground than the most cited of ethical concepts, deliberation, and most importantly, centers ethics and invention squarely within the technical communicator’s relationship to language.

Component content management (CCM) enables organizations to create, manage, and deliver content as small components rather than entire documents. As CCM methodologies, processes, and technologies are increasingly adopted, CCM is reshaping technical communication (TC), the roles of technical communicators, and the skills they need for career success. This article reviews scholarly and trade publications that describe changes in roles and needed skills in CCM environments and identifies implications of these changes for TC education.

Tenure-line faculty—teaching onsite or online—are typically perceived as resident scholars and instructors who live local to their institutions. A geographically diversified tenure-line faculty, however, could also serve the education of students by bringing a wider array of influences and opportunities to the online classroom. Programs in technical communication must examine how to incorporate extralocated faculty and how to prepare willing and eligible faculty for extralocated teaching, research, and service.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.

"Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric & Scientific Discourse, by Jonathan Buehl." Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 95–96

This article examines the practices of writers in online discussion board conversations as they interpret technical documents related to a psychiatric diagnosis. Drawing from interviews with 15 participants, the author argues that writers in this context interpret and manipulate medical knowledge in unique ways that benefit the community. The author concludes that studies in technical communication should take into account all groups affected by specialized knowledge, including those with little expertise or social power.

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

Tactical technical communication research suggests its application to social justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

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.

The controversy surrounding the ending of Mass Effect 3 serves as a case study of a company’s rejection of cocreation with customers. The game designers and players battled for control of the aesthetic space of the game. The company failed to resolve their conflict effectively, allowing players to use social media to transform tactical action into strategic action. This case study has implications for technical communicators who increasingly are collaborating with users in cocreative relationships.