“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...

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...

According to Lisa Meloncon (2014), “…TPC [technical professional communication] practitioners and academics have few resources to understand issues related to disability studies and accessibility, ...

Although trade and politics have made the world a smaller place, politics and businesses remain local in most parts of the world (Starke-Meyerring, 2005). Therefore, industries and practices are be...

"Rhetoric and Communication Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault." Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(4), pp. 426–427

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.

This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register – specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns – was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency–structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors’ correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency–structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.

Participating in user-centered design provides potential users of interactive risk visualization tools agency in influencing tool development. This article identifies and characterizes pathways for agency that users may experience as they participate in design of interactive tools for visualizing environmental risks. We present an empirically based conceptual framework for better understanding user agency during visualization tool development based on findings from interviews with professional visualization tool developers and discuss practical implications and future research recommendations.

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...

This article examines the fingerprint biometric technology adopted by Ghana to enhance its electoral integrity and argues that although this technology is touted to be value-neutral, objective, and accurate, it is inherently discriminatory. Reports show that the biometric rejected those individuals who are engaged in “slash-and-burn agriculture.” Therefore, the mass subjection of elections to the logic of the biometric technology in resource-mismanaged contexts is welcoming, but its use raises social justice and localization concerns.

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (times change and we change with them). Not only is the techne of today’s rhetoric and professional communication changing but we rhetors and professiona...

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 how empty state pages (ESPs) constrain user-generated communication through the ethical lens of Bourdieu’s habitus. The authors define ESPs as interactive instructional templates that prompt users to input information to participate in an online network. Through a case study analyzing ~450,000 online comments from The New York Times, the authors find a direct connection between ESP elements, such as the character limit for comments, and online writers’ cultivated habitus.

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.

The edited collection Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies will be interesting for scholars, educators, and for practicing communicators in the field of scientific communic...

In The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, Nicole Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson explore the implications of writing center directors’ hybrid day-to-day labor and ...

"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.

To help prepare students for the rigors of an online master’s degree in technical and professional communication, I created a course-embedded online student orientation (OSO) structured by the community of inquiry theory of online learning. The study researched the effect of the OSO on student satisfaction, student perceptions of online learning, and students’ program retention. The OSO was effective in helping students to reflect on their learning and demonstrated students’ interest in peer collaboration.

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric – primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions – to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change.

This article offers a revision to an existing social science methodology, Q methodology, through “Q-Rhetoric.” After detailing Q methodology’s theoretical underpinnings and practical method, and persistent critiques of the methodology, the article employs perspectives from rhetorical theory and Amerindian anthropology to suggest a methodological correction. It concludes by detailing the use of Q-Rhetoric to intervene in a Wisconsin stream management controversy, proposing Q-Rhetoric as a pragmatic and theoretically sound methodology for working across disciplinary divides.

In this article the authors envision a more durable and portable model of scholarship on public engagement with science through partnerships between rhetoricians of science and quantitative social scientists. The authors consider a number of barriers and limitations that make such partnerships difficult, with an eye toward discovering ways that researchers may overcome them. The authors conclude by articulating guidelines for reciprocal transdisciplinary work as well as specific recommended practices for such collaborations.

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...

As the journal begins its 38th year, I am honored to take the helm as editor of a publication that not only conveys cutting-edge research but also serves as a vehicle for helping us to reimagine th...

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.

Blood Sugar considers how metabolic syndrome is assembled and packaged to represent a medical category with cultural and racial consequences. In this text we find an unraveling of the chords woven ...

The authors provide an overview of what capstone courses do by presenting information from across the field based on materials received from and interviews with technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty. The authors then point to opportunities to improve the course. Finally, the authors argue for sustainable program development as the theoretical framework to perform programmatic work.