Usability has been widely implemented in technical communication curricula and workplace practices, but little attention has focused specifically on how usability and its pedagogy are addressed in our literature. This study reviews selected technical communication textbooks, pedagogical and landmark texts, and online course syllabi and descriptions and argues that meager attention is given to usability, thus suggesting the need for more in-depth and productive discussions on usability practices, strategies, and challenges.

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.

The authors provide a robust framework for using rhetorical foundations to teach multimodality in technical communication, describing a pedagogical approach wherein students consider the rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory—when developing texts beyond print. Students learn to assess their own work, reflecting on how each canon contributed to the rhetorical effectiveness of their multimodal projects. The authors argue for using the canons as a rhetorical foundation for helping students understand technical communication in the digital age.

Interviews with 14 technical communicators reveal that skills in rhetorical invention help them creatively address communication problems. They define creativity in relation to four interrelated exigencies of invention: thinking like a user, reinvigorating dry content, inventing visual ideas, and alternating between heuristic and algorithmic processes. They recognize intrinsic factors such as curiosity and sympathy as motivations for their creativity, while being conscious of the external factors (people, money, and time) that may restrain creativity.

Reading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay "Semantic and Poetic Meaning," this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a "mathematical" ideology of language is an attempt to render language "neutral" and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.

Women technical communicators helped to organize many of the first professional associations for technical communicators in the 1940s and 1950s. For some of these women, organizing was an occupational closure strategy of revolutionary usurpation: They may have hoped to position themselves favorably to shape a future profession that was not predicated on hidden forms of their inclusion. Exclusionary and demarcationary forces, however, seem to have ultimately undermined their efforts, alienating some of them and inducing others to adopt a strategy of inclusionary usurpation. In addition to using gender-sensitive revisions of occupational closure theory to explain the phenomenon of the woman organizer, the author chronicles the emergence of 8 professional associations for technical communicators and identifies the women technical communicators who helped to organize them.

The authors performed an interdisciplinary literature review of research on communication and climate change. The authors reviewed STEM, social science, and risk analysis journals to synthesize recent publications on climate change communication which could support research in technical communication. Several applications are proposed for technical communication research, including using this review to contextualize local qualitative work, to spur interdisciplinary projects and address gaps in multidisciplinary literature, and reconsider a role for advocacy in 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.

At the time of publication B. McNely was at The University of Kentucky, C. Spinuzzi was at The University of Texas at Austin, and C. Teston was at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Solving Problems in Technical Communication follows up Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber's influential 2004 collection of previously published work, Central Works in Technical Communication....

This article provides background on social network analysis, an innovative research paradigm that focuses on the importance of social networks. The article begins by giving background on the development of social network analysis and different methods used by social network analysis researchers. The article then examines how these methods can be used in the field of technical communication by focusing on how technical communicators form social networks and connect diverse audiences.

Previous research in technical communication indicates service-learning pedagogies can help prepare students for the workplace. The field, however, has only recently and tentatively extended these pedagogies into online environments and has not yet demonstrated how and whether such service-eLearning could as effectively bridge the gap between the classroom and workplace. In this article, the author discusses one such extension and offers a framework and model.

This article reports on results of a nationwide survey of alumni in professional and technical communication. It presents a series of snapshots from the results, including the types of texts written and valued, where those types are written, with and for whom, and with what technologies. A range of implications are explored.

The decision to follow the demonstrative this with a noun phrase is important to students’ writing development. Previous research has emphasized when students should not attend this rather than studying why students make the choice. Using a corpus-linguistic approach, we investigated 1,999 instances of (un)attended this in student technical and academic writing. High shares of unattended this were found in both text types as well as in original and revised drafts.

Abstract The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media. Keywords: crowd sourcingpedagogyreachsocial media ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article. Notes Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, Citation2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, Citation2013, para 1). In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing. We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElise Verzosa Hurley Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos. Amy C. Kimme Hea Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.

This special issue addresses social media and their effects on the field of technical communication. Through various methodologies and distinct sites of inquiry—from research into ways knowledge workers use specific social media sites, to collaborations by scholars across the globe using social media and other technologies, to classroom practices that investigate social media—contributors consider the imbricated nature of social media in public life and its significance to our work as researchers and teachers.

This article examines changing social media practices, arguing that technical communicators and teachers understand their roles as mediators of information and communication technologies. Drawing on a case study growing out of a colloquium on technology diffusion and communication between the Global North and South, the author proposes that technical communicators be attentive to the participatory nature of social media while not assuming that social media replace the dynamics of face-to-face human interaction.

Abstract This article explores the boundaries of technical communication as knowledge work in the emerging era of social media. Analyzing the results of an annual survey offered each year from 2008 until 2011, the study reports on how knowledge workers use publicly available online services to support their work. The study proposes a distinction between sites and services when studying social media in knowledge work and concludes with an exploration of implications for technical communication pedagogy. Keywords: genreknowledge workonline servicessocial media Notes Note. Data from Divine, Ferro, and Zachry (Citation2011). Note. Empty cells represent questions not asked in the indicated year. Note. Bold values represent the highest percentage of participants reporting a single site in a given year. Note. Bold represents sites that were reported by 15% or more of all participants in 2011. Note. Data from Ferro and Zachry (p. 949). Additional informationNotes on contributorsToni Ferro Toni Ferro is a PhD candidate in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She received her MS in human-centered design engineering at the University of Washington and her BS in general engineering at the University of Redlands. Mark Zachry Mark Zachry is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research areas include the communicative practices of organizations and the design of systems to support collaboration.

The expanding use of social media such as Twitter has raised the stakes for teaching our students about individual and organizational ethoi. This article considers the role of organizations' Twitter feeds during emergency situations, particularly Hurricane Irene in 2011, to argue for a pedagogical model for helping students collaboratively code tweets to assess their rhetorical effects and to improve their own awareness and use of microblogging as a communication tool.

This article explores the ramifications of deploying free and open source software (F/OSS) for technical communication program development. Against the backdrop of the recession, the article draws on empirical research to examine how different stakeholders understand the F in F/OSS, its relationship with proprietary software, and the institutional contexts surrounding these technologies. It contributes four recommendations for working with F/OSS that might help programs shore up in tough times and thrive postdownturn.

Abstract We justify and describe our development of the Service Learning Opportunities in Technical Communication (SLOT-C) Database. The database broadens the range of organizations that instructors and students have for client-based communication projects. We argue in support of incorporating service learning into classes and facilitating partnerships among university instructors, their students, and nonprofits. We report strategies we learned for working with student interns and IT experts and strategies we developed as we worked with usability-test participants. Keywords: client-based communication projectsiterative designservice learning opportunitiestechnical communicationuser-centered design ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We sincerely thank the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication for awarding us a research grant in 2009 to build this database. We greatly appreciate Sam Singer, whose expertise in databases and Web development made the concept become a reality. We would also like to thank Stewart Whittemore, who contributed ideas in the early planning stage. Notes Waterfall design involves creating a design to which you are firmly committed early in development and letting all design decisions flow from the initial plan. Iterative design is more flexible, allowing the plan to change as needed in response to feedback. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSusan A. Youngblood Susan A. Youngblood teaches technical and professional communication at Auburn University, and many of her classes feature service learning. Her research addresses vulnerability, accessibility, and competing needs in communication, particularly in online environments. Jo Mackiewicz Jo Mackiewicz teaches editing at Auburn University. Her research applies linguistics to technical communication and focuses on politeness and credibility in evaluative texts such as tutoring interactions, editing sessions, and online reviews.

This study investigates the usability of print and online video instructions for computer tasks. Usability tests, comprehension tests, and questionnaires were collected from participants, and 4 areas of usability were analyzed: effectiveness, retention, satisfaction, and preference. Findings show marginal differences between the 2 mediums, except in terms of user satisfaction and instruction length. This research helps technical communicators better understand the affordances, or potentials and limitations, of print and video instructions.

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 examines the role that reflective assessment plays in contributing to the quality of students' visual designs. Students who are required to account for their rhetorical decisions in the design of a document benefit from the practice of verbalizing those decisions. However, this study shows that students who engage in reflective assessment actually produce stronger visual designs as well. This effect should help determine the extent to which such assessments should be included in the classroom.

Drawing on a case study of an Israeli start-up company, this article maps out a theoretical and methodological framework for linking local multilingual and multimodal literacy practices to wider institutional, cultural, and global contexts. Central to this framework is attention to the linking of tools, texts, and people distributed across space-time. This process foregrounds the complex mediation of activity and the dynamic pathways shaping the ways English is being reassembled in local-global ecologies.

This article discusses the largest and most complex international learning-by-doing project to date—a project involving translation from Danish and Dutch into English and editing into American English alongside a project involving writing, usability testing, and translation from English into Dutch and into French. The complexity of the undertaking proved to be a central element in the students' learning, as the collaboration closely resembles the complexity of international documentation workplaces of language service providers.

This article considers how users employ extraorganizational technical communication to reshape technologies, both materially and symbolically, even after these technologies enter into common use. Specifically, I analyze how women bicyclists of the 1890s authored instructional materials to complicate gendered and classed assumptions about users implicit in manufacturer-produced texts. I argue that technical communicators, in their teaching and research, should consider the role that extraorganizational technical communication plays in generating vital and lasting cultural changes.

In this study, I compared initial drafts of job application cover letters by nontraditional students in an introductory professional writing course with those by traditional students to determine if prior workplace experience improves rhetorical adaptability in students' writing. Although one might expect nontraditional students to display more rhetorical adaptability, this study reveals no difference. These results suggest that minor changes in pedagogy may help nontraditional students use their workplace experience to improve workplace-oriented writing in the classroom.

This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective—all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.

The field of technical communication has made notable progress in researching and teaching intercultural issues. Not enough discussion, however, is available on assessing students’ intercultural competence. This article attempts to start this discussion and invite further research. It suggests a working definition to conceptualize intercultural competence and draws upon diverse disciplines to review different assessment methods, including their strengths, drawbacks, and potential applications in technical communication classes.

Wikis enable large, diverse groups of writers to effectively collaborate online. Although Wikipedia is the best-known wiki, businesses are increasingly using wikis to build documents and resources for internal use. Although many teachers of technical communication are interested in integrating wikis into their syllabi, assessment is difficult. Assessments based on traditional assignments fail because they do not focus on the social nature of wikis. This article introduces an “archaeological” assessment framework focused on this discourse.

Abstract Since the 1950s, technical communicators have been trying to predict future developments in technology, economics, pedagogy, and workplace roles. Prognosticators have included founders of the profession, academics, business leaders, and practitioners. This article examines their predictions to determine what they reveal about technical communication as a discipline. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Xiaoyan Huang, Jie Chen, Prasad Patankar, and the interlibrary loan staff at Missouri S&T. These people assisted by requesting, downloading, and photocopying articles and (in a few cases) correcting citations. The authors would also like to thank the journal's editors and copy editors for their contributions. Notes Full citations for in-text source references are either within the text as part of the annotated bibliographies (divided by publication years: 1952–1990, 1991–2000, or 2001–2010) or within the end-of-text list titled "Additional References." Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid Wright David Wright has a PhD in Technical Communication from Oklahoma State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Technical Communication in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Edward A. Malone Edward A. Malone is Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Director of Online Graduate Programs in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Gowri G. Saraf Gowri G. Saraf has a BE in Instrumentation Technology from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Tessa B. Long Tessa B. Long has a BA in Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Irangi K. Egodapitiya Irangi K. Egodapitiya has a BA with majors in English, sociology, and management from the University of Peradeniya, near Kandy, Sri Lanka, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Elizabeth M. Roberson Elizabeth M. Roberson has an AS in Business Administration, a BS in English, and a BS in Writing from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T.

Cognitive scientist Andy Clark (2008 Clark , A. ( 2008 ). Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension . New York : Oxford University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) has argued, “the study of mind might … need to embrace a variety of different explanatory paradigms whose point of convergence lies in the production of intelligent behavior” (p. 95). This article offers technical communication research as such a paradigm and describes technical communication research past and present to argue that our disciplinary knowledge of tools, work environments, and performance assessment is a necessary complement to a more robust science of the mind.

This article reports my classroom-based qualitative research, conducted at a midwestern university, on the role of World Englishes in the ethos transformation of U.S. native English-speaking students. The 30 participants completed assignments that enhanced their understanding of how the English language affects discursive tasks in international audience adaptation. Efforts at internationalizing technical communication can benefit immensely from the inclusion of the World Englishes paradigm in training programs to account for students' language attitudes.

Abstract This article discusses the need for technical communicators to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between law and their work. The author reviews the discipline's literature regarding the relationship between law and technical communication and argues that technical communicators must learn to see themselves as coproducers of the law. To that end, the author offers pedagogical strategies for helping technical communication students develop skills for recognizing the legal implications of their work.

This special issue features articles that address legal issues as they relate to technical communication research, pedagogy, and practice. The articles will assist instructors who wish to engage classes in activities that allow students to understand, analyze, and respond to legal dilemmas related to workplace activities. The articles will also highlight contemporary subjects for research inquiry in technical communication, including the relationship between technical communication and civic engagement, which often depends on the study of legal processes. It is our hope that this special issue will generate interest in the intersection of technical communication and the law and that it will provide readers of TCQ with a valuable and unique foundation for teaching and research in this area.

Abstract This article explores the challenges and opportunities that the rising numbers of students with disabilities and the changing definition of disability pose to technical communication teachers and researchers. Specifically, in a teacher-researcher study that combines methods from disability studies, I report on the effectiveness of multimodal and universal design approaches to more comprehensively address disability and accessibility in the classroom and to revise traditional impairment-specific approaches to disability in technical communication. Notes 1. CitationCharlton (1998), in Nothing About Us Without Us, recalls hearing this slogan in South Africa in 1993 from two separate leaders of Disabled People of South Africa, Michael Masutha and William Rowland, and he writes, “The slogan's power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (p. 3). 2. Other principles include guidelines for equitable use, varieties of perceptible information, and appropriate size and space for approach and use. See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html for quoted guidelines. 3. CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It is a challenge-response test that usually visually distorts and warps letters, assuming that a human can decode the letters but a computer cannot. 4. For details on the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility, see CitationThatcher et al. (2006), pp. 26–28. Chapter 1, “Understanding Web Accessibility,” is useful for students to read and discuss during this segment of the class. 5. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by CitationThatcher et al. (2006) is also a useful resource for students to consult, particularly Chapter 1.

Abstract In this article, I argue that to understand technical communication instruction in non-Western countries, one has to pay close attention to the impacts of local cultural, educational, political, and economic contexts on technical communication practices. I identify two localized programs that share features of technical communication in China and review their programmatic positioning at national and local levels. I also suggest ways for U.S. technical communicators to start cross-cultural collaboration with local programs.

Programs in technical and professional communication are continually challenged by issues of location and dislocation. Historic changes and interdisciplinary initiatives are in progress at colleges and universities worldwide. The five articles of this special issue will offer a portrait of the multiple ways that technical communication programs are positioning themselves to do innovative teaching and research.

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly brings posthuman perspectives to bear on the kinds of metarhetorical, organizational, and intertextual problems that are central to technical...

Technical communication pedagogy often uses two distinct processes to help students construct user-centered documents: audience analysis and invention. However, posthuman contexts, such as virtual reality, challenge traditional methods for audience analysis and invention. In virtual environments, knowledge is constructed by and through embodied interactions with people, technologies, spaces, and ideas—and the dual processes of analysis and invention are conflated. In this article, I present data from a semester-long comparative study between two technical communication courses. Students in both courses created instructions for filming in a virtual environment, but students from only one of these courses experienced the space/place of virtual reality. The data emphasize the importance of embodied experiences in technical communication pedagogy and practice.

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 attempts to summarize the history of ATTW. It focuses on issues that led to the need for an organization devoted to technical writing, and the individuals who were leaders in ATTW, as well as in NCTE and CCCC, whose efforts provided the foundation for the presence of technical writing as a legitimate teaching and research discipline. We draw on existing historical pieces and the contributions provided by many of the first ATTW members to capture the history of ATTW. We describe the major changes in ATTW from 1973–2007 and conclude with our reflections, as well as important questions we believe to be critical to the future of ATTW

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.

In this interesting argument for the reintroduction of metaphor as a rhetorical strategy for technical communicators, Timothy Giles emphasizes the importance of the metaphor to convey complex conce...