Technical and professional communication (TPC) is largely marked by attentiveness to audience. Blakeslee (2009) underscores this facet of the field’s character, urging scholars to explore how the g...

Ethics and Practice in Science Communication (2018) is a collection of works drawn from various conferences, symposia, and journals that explores the ethics of technical communication and the commu...

This paper studies the language of job descriptions in rhetoric and technical and professional communication to explore how this language might be exclusionary of international scholars. Through critical discourse analysis, we reviewed current U.S. labor and immigration laws and contrasted those laws with the language of hiring documents. We found that hiring documents do not always align with U.S. labor and immigration laws and consequently hinder the hiring prospects of international scholars.

This article examines how nineteenth-century participants in technical and professional communication (TPC) used rhetorical techniques of ridicule to critique audiences’ assumptions and advocate for expanded educational opportunities. Encouraging laughter ostensibly about college mathematics, Vassar students drew on their knowledge of rhetoric and higher education to disrupt audience expectations regarding the gendered identities of mathematician and college student. Using a case study, this article broadly urges the development of the role of humor as a technique in TPC.

ABSTRACT This article examines pedagogical results from an IRB-approved study that used the Omeka platform in two sections of technical writing classes. The research question explored how a digital humanities (DH) project can be an opportunity for students to learn concepts and take ownership of publicly facing content. The method used is qualitative, and findings indicated that students embraced an open-source and collaborative project. Results also demonstrated how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors might find DH tools well suited to TPC competencies.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the process of coding and analyzing data from 376 Programmatic Student Learning Outcomes (PSLOs) from 47 technical and professional communication (TPC) undergraduate degree programs. The resultant findings suggest that TPC program administrators adopt common PSLOs, eliminate embedded PSLOs, and consider the assets of PSLOs beyond assessment. Such practices will ensure that PSLOs support students as a primary audience and cohere with broader disciplinary understandings of education at the undergraduate level in TPC.

ABSTRACT Recruitment advertisements published in technical and professional communication (TPC) conference programs and proceedings offer a snapshot of the messages that these programs use to market themselves and distinguish their value in the marketplace of graduate programs. Using an exploratory mixed methods approach informed by Bakhtin's theory of addressivity, we developed a two-phase study to assess recruitment advertisements from three perspectives: from the advertisement content itself, from the students being recruited, and from the TPC program coordinators or directors. Recommendations for improving TPC advertising and promotion are given.

ABSTRACT More research is needed about how women in engineering develop and are recognized for communication skills within classrooms and workplaces. Using semi-structured interviews with female engineering students, this study examines how these women negotiate conflicting narratives about the importance of communication within their coursework and internships. By learning more about undergraduate women’s experiences of (under)valued labor based on narratives about what counts as “engineering” skills, instructors can better create inclusive classrooms that welcome multi-faceted competencies.

ABSTRACT This article uses an apparent feminist approach to engage a two-part research question: First, does gender affect the frequency with which people become subjects of medical digital imaging? Second, how do the subjects of medical digital imaging become persuaded to accept this role? Engaging with medical imaging and the technical communication surrounding it as an assemblage of technical rhetorics (Frost & Eble) and thus a technology, this project shows that women are more commonly scanned as a result of social biases. Further, this article argues that the ubiquity of scanning of women’s bodies has implications for political agency and privacy and for technical communicators’ understandings of efficiency. This study is preliminary but presents compelling evidence that further research on the technical communication surrounding gender and medical imaging is necessary.

ABSTRACT This Methodologies and Approaches piece examines the question: How do TC students perceive the value of improvisational training? Students from three workshops were surveyed about their reactions to the improv games in which they participated. Major findings are that students at this STEM university overwhelming considered improv training to be valuable. They associate improv training helpful in quick-thinking, collaboration, creativity, and confidence. They further consider improv skills transferable to effective performance in various settings.

In Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA, Evia introduces readers to an open source information standard that can be used to write structured content; coordinate collaborative workflow...

ABSTRACT “Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

Using a dissertation research project at a transnational site, this pedagogical process piece explores the experience from both the student and mentor perspectives. We discuss challenges gaining access to the research site and navigating frequently-acknowledged-but-rarely-described affective, relational dynamics that disrupt qualitative research in everyday technical and professional communication. To assist students’ and their mentors’ engagement with these dynamics, we suggest heuristics derived from critical reflection on our own tactical responses to these research and pedagogical challenges.

This article responds to recent calls for social justice-oriented work in Technical and professional communication, detailing moments from a participatory photovoice project with community organizers working toward a more just regional economy. By juxtaposing participatory action research methods and the rhetorical concept of metis, or embodied, rhetorical cunning, this article highlights how reversals of power might transform research projects for all parties involved; and how disenfranchised groups might challenge extractive practices draining their communities.

Technical communicators can manage the content users share in online communities, but this is only feasible if the users act like a community with a shared understanding of what the software does. When they do not, users discuss technologies as unsettled objects and rely on technical communication to socially construct them. This research describes such uses of technical communication and argues how professional technical communicators can help.

The multiple conceptualizations of design thinking make it difficult to implement and teach in TPC, especially given classroom constraints. We propose a framework (mind-set and process) that balances knowing with the thinking/doing of design thinking. This framework is effectively implemented through game design. We demonstrate that game design increases students’ ability to iterate and solve macro- and micro-level problems along with their ability to approach unfamiliar or ill-structured tasks while facing such wicked problems.

Providing contextualized, effective writing instruction for engineering students is an important and challenging objective. This article presents a needs analysis conducted in a large engineering college and introduces the faculty development program that was created based on that analysis. The authors advocate for sustained interdisciplinary collaboration to promote contextualized adoption and adaptation of best practices and testing of scalable strategies.

This article builds upon the exigence highlighted in recent scholarship on preparing technical and professional communication (TPC) graduate students for collaborative research and professionalization. Using collaborative autoethnography as a self-study methodology, the authors offer authentic graduate research and mentorship experiences in a collaborative research incubator, the Wearables Research Collaboratory, at a midwestern research university.

In an in-depth study of communication in the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) field, Angeli broadens the scope of health and medical professional communication through an analysis of the high stake...

Informed by the social justice turn, this article highlights the often-overlooked voices and experiences of women working in technical and professional communication in the Global South, specifically in India. Using an apparent feminist frame, this article highlights the networked identities and forces of power at play that can marginalize Indian practitioners in globalized workplaces. Further, it seeks to understand the ways Indian women exercise and establish professional legitimacy by utilizing apparently feminist tactics.

Sequential rhetoric can serve as a framework to instruct UX practice (through user story maps) to new learners because it is both approachable and affordable. Sequential rhetoric consists of five main facets that incorporate planning elements (core visual writing and envisaging) and composing elements (interanimation, juxtaquencing, and gestalt closure), which this essay both defines and relates to convergent scholarship. We argue that sequential rhetoric transfers beyond the technical classroom and into the profession itself.

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. The guest editors briefly overview intersections between comics and technical communication, then introduce the special issue’s contents and contributions to ongoing conversations in the field.

This article explores activism in a 1990s comic produced by a South African women’s activist group. The comic, written in Zulu, attempts to mobilize women through the use of narrative and personal connection (focusing on domestic violence) and teaches about politics and oppression through pictures and stories. Understanding how this comic was designed for a specific audience provides context for producing creative documentation in localized contexts and highlights the complexities of writing within colonial systems.

Comics-based how-to instructions have historically figured into a gender-aware category of technical communication. Studying such comics-based literature for gendering is a promising endeavor that has not garnered much scholarly attention to date. This analysis attempts to do so within the critical framework of comics studies. Through close examination of examples of gendered instructional comics past and present, this article argues that the comics medium is well suited to inform and persuade readerships through gendered means.

Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic adaptation of Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions. Using discourse analysis, it argues that Sikoryak’s adaptation, while an impressive piece of art, is not an example of accessible user agreement as media reports claim. The article concludes with practical implications on producing comics-style technical communication.

Journalists, politicians, and law enforcement professionals have linked anarchist cookbooks to various crimes including bank robberies, hijackings, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings. By braiding comics scholarship with tactical technical communication (TTC), this article asks how anarchist cookbooks deploy comics techniques, formal features, and affordances to convey subversive tactics to audiences. We identify visual-verbal tactics that recur throughout anarchist cookbooks, identify comics elements associated with these tactics, and suggest implications for research and practice.

This graphic meditation on issues of cultural relevance and accessibility in comic-based health communication texts presents the web of rhetorical considerations inherent in creating culturally accessible health communication texts. Applying recent technical communication theories related to social justice this article will examine contemporary instances of comics being used as health communication tools for culturally diverse patient populations. The authors offer original drawings and text for the article.

In a move that is becoming more common within digital humanities and comics scholarship, Jason Helms sets out to illustrate his argument through formal means, and thus has produced a work that is b...

Technical communication research has relied heavily on participatory, user-focused strategies as well as “participative”, posthuman frameworks. Both research methodologies have various strengths, yet also have been critiqued for underplaying the role of human and non-human agency (respectively) in rhetorical situations. Through an analysis of an urban planning comic book, I suggest that turning to the Greek concept of methexis – or “participation” – may help technical communication researchers bridge posthuman and user-centered investigative approaches.

The Good, the Bad, and the Data is the latest volume in a series of graphic guides aimed at students learning ethnographic methods. It tackles an important resource need, because coding qualitative...

Bruno Latour advocates for portrayals of science in the making but does not explain how the public can access these portrayals. This article addresses that gap by analyzing how 199 press releases from NASA’s Curiosity mission depict science. Results indicate that the releases often cover Curiosity’s tools and activities, occasionally feature scientists at work, and rarely mention controversies. Ultimately, these press releases provide the public an engaging but partial perspective on science in the making.

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.

The practice of helping users accomplish tasks with various technologies has long been a central concern for technical communicators. For Jason Swarts, this activity sits at the core of technical c...

Building upon critical and intercultural work in the field, Haas and Eble’s edited collection, Key Theoretical Frameworks: Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century offers a soci...

This study explores how agency is distributed in an interaction among a child, a speech-language pathologist, and an electronic communication device. Using video-recorded data of the interaction, I consider how micro features of the participants’ communication such as gaze and gesture as well as material objects such as the device collectively shape possibilities for agency. This interdependent, posthuman approach shifts our understanding and practice of agency from gaining independence to improving collect action.

Based on a workplace ethnography of an organization referred to as the “Metro Data Cooperative,” this article unpacks the multiple approaches to “storytelling with data” held by research subjects. The research suggests that “storytelling” is more than a discursive form that writers break into. Instead, because there are always multiple statistically supportable stories available, researchers and practitioners should understand storytelling as a malleable activity taking place with regard to multiple organizational and technical influences.

This article offers a methodology for conducting large-scale audience analysis called “big data audience analysis” (BDAA). BDAA uses distant reading and thin description to examine a large corpus of text data from online audiences. In this article, that corpus is approximately 450,000 online reader comments. We analyze this corpus through sentiment analysis, statistical analysis, and geolocation to identify trends and patterns in large datasets. BDAA can better prepare TPC researchers for large-scale audience studies.

In Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues, Jared Colton and Steve Holmes wrestle with a core question facing digital rhetoricians: how might any example of digital communication technology or practi...

With the goal of increasing interdisciplinary dialogue, the authors engage Dr. O’Connell’s response to “Terminal node problems: ANT 2.0 and prescription drug labels.” Specifically, the authors aim to address the questions and concerns raised by Dr. O’Connell as well as offer suggestions for future research that builds on the insights that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialectic.

I appreciate that this paper was applauded for its thoughtful approach to assessing “prescription drug labels (PDLs)” using rhetorical principles. However, I believe the authors’ invention of the composite artifact “PDL” and their subsequent assessment based on this flawed concept is problematic and may weaken the validity of their conclusions.

This study examines the visual representation of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to1925. Compilers of the Atlases used a variety of visual strategies to facilitate rhetorical inclusion and exclusion, and by creating particular visual emphasis, constructed Chinese immigrants as being alienated, racialized, and low in the ethnic hierarchy. The visual constructs of the Chinese population reflected and reshaped the state’s policy of immigration restriction in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“When I say the word environmental, what is the first thing that comes to mind?” (Ross, p. 1). So begins Ross’ edited collection, Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric, which examines how language an...

As globalization exerts a higher demand on the technical communication profession, technical communication scholars and practitioners have paid significant attention to translation/localization (St...

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

Recently, educators have created crowdsourced syllabi using social media. Activist syllabi are digitally circulated public collections of knowledge and knowledge-making about events and social movements. As technical communicators, we can function as curators of public intellectualism by providing accessibility and usability guidance for these activist syllabi in collaboration with activist syllabi creators. In turn, technical communicators can work with syllabi creators as a coalitional social justice strategy to enhance the circulation of these activist syllabi.

This article reports the results of a survey of technical and professional communication (TPC) undergraduate and graduate students regarding their perceptions of diversity in TPC academic programs. The responses of the total group of respondents and a subset of respondents identifying as a person of color (POC) are compared. Results show that both the overall group and the group of students identifying as persons of color see their TPC programs as both diverse and supportive of diversity. Respondents identifying as a person of color also reported that they were not worried about fitting in when enrolling in their TPC programs. However, the survey also shows that TPC students who identify as persons of color note a lack of students and faculty of color in TPC academic programs and departments. Possible reasons for respondents’ perceptions of having diverse and supportive departments while also observing the lack of POC within the department are discussed.

This article advocates for a contrasting Value Sensitive Design (VSD) framework based on principles of environmental justice, which encourages environmental-sensing wearable developers to make their values apparent to users in their designs in order to transform users into researchers rather than passive data collectors; make technological systems more transparent rather than opaque; and connect users to larger networks of individuals, who share common justice-oriented goals.

[T]he (re)turn to quantitative research in recent years has brought with it the renewed hope that such research will be shared – and shared widely in a way that helps us answer more global question...