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.

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

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.

This article is a case-based theoretical exercise designed to investigate the role that ethics, culture, and artistry play in scientific illustration. In this article, the author theorizes a visual model of cultural interplay and scientific illustration in the creation of scientific knowledge and argues that scientific illustrations work as epistemological devices because they are culturally mediated constructions imbued with personal, organizational, and disciplinary trust, and shaped by the embedded cultural worldviews.

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.

“… one doesn’t simply ‘have documents,’ increasingly a person is a set of varieties of documents” (Latour & Woolgar, 1979, p. 127)Ronald E. Day’s Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Document...

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.

The book Rhetorical Touch by Shannon Walters opens with a reference to 18th-century philosopher Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac’s Treatise of the Sensations in which he argues that all other sens...

This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.

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

This article explores what sources students use for advice while writing their résumés, their reasons for choosing those sources, and their perceptions about the sources’ quality. Results from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 86 undergraduates and 20 career counselors and instructors suggest issues with educators’ credibility and students’ access. To address these issues, the author suggests that educators approach the résumé as a research project, which empowers students and legitimizes educators’ expertise.

This article presents an experimental pedagogical framework for providing technical professionals with practice on writing skills focusing on the development of their metacognitive rhetorical awareness. The article outlines the theoretical foundation that led to the development of the framework, followed by a report of a pilot study involving information technology professionals in a global setting using an online learning environment that was designed based on the framework.

In the fields of rhetoric, composition, technical communication, communication studies, writing studies, and iterations of similar related fields, disciplinary boundary-marking has provided ongoing...

This qualitative study compares how technical communicators (TCs) and subject matter experts (SMEs) characterize the role and value of the TC. Seven TCs and eight SMEs participated in an investigation of the similarities and differences between the perceptions of these two groups. Key findings are that SMEs perceive of TCs as investigators, educators, and relationship builders; TCs talk about themselves in terms of investigators, interpreters, and audience advocates; and TCs are often uncomfortable discussing their value.

The authors examined a corpus of figure captions from technical and professional communication (TPC)-journal articles to test their sense that TPC captions do not fulfill their communicative potential as well as, they sensed, journals in science often do. The authors performed a content analysis on captions from biology-journal articles and iteratively tested a coding scheme of caption content. The resulting scheme can help in analyzing caption content, developing captions, and imparting a variety of TPC-related skills to students.

Recently, research into the intersection of computer games and technical writing has been increasing, with more conference presentations and publications interrogating communication within the comp...

This study investigated virtual teams playing World of Warcraft to better understand how traditional leadership theories applied to virtual worlds and to identify the most valuable leadership traits. Raid members completed surveys that assessed their leadership capability under the competing values framework. In keeping with previous scholarship, the findings indicate that successful virtual teams value roles from task-based leadership and a factor analysis revealed that the behavioral complexity leadership theory operates differently in virtual environments.

This article examines the framing of the designer’s role in game development in textbooks published and circulated over the past decade. The authors investigate the discursive ways coding is downplayed within game design texts as a means of promoting design as a form of creative expression. This speaks to ongoing tension in the games industry of coding and technology versus art. The authors argue that, in their presentation of game design, leading textbooks attempt to frame the field as one of artistry and technical practice, presenting game design as a type of technical communication. The authors ultimately consider the potential and pitfalls of considering game design as a technical communication field and suggest that this framing presents lens for considering the recently professionalized field.

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

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

This study examines the discourse style of managers, developers, engineers, and artists working for an independent game development studio. Fourteen employees were interviewed, and then the results were coded and analyzed using an exploratory, single-case case study methodology. The authors argue that the texts, tactics, and technologies used by these professionals reveal insights into the practical, outcome-oriented dimensions of technical communication within the games industry as well as deeper cultural characteristics of this community.

The purpose of this study is to construct and validate a scale of electronic health (e-health) communication competence. Based on a comprehensive review of e-health literature, this scale was constructed using two studies to gather data and validate the scale; four dimensions emerged in the final measurement: e-health self-efficacy, knowledge, usage, and motivation. Results suggest the e-health competence scale is useful for researchers to develop online health interventions and other domains of computer-mediated communication.

Technical communication scholars have tended to treat uncertainty as a lack of certainty rather than as a diverse range of strategies for talking about risk. This review employs Goodnight’s argument spheres to comprehend treatments of uncertainty in technical communication and closely related fields. The advantages of such an approach are demonstrated via a reanalysis of a recent risk communication study. The review finishes by identifying hybrid forums as productive sites for future research.

During 2010 and 2011, debate ensued over funding for National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This article uses stasis theory to analyze reports and statements produced by NASA, politicians, and scientists. The analysis reveals that an official report addresses stasis questions and guides further action. Additionally, varying perspectives on the telescope suggest that definitions play a crucial role in technology funding debates. This analysis demonstrates that stasis theory provides a productive tool for analyzing technology policy debates.

This study of ozone-hole controversy demonstrates an approach to translation that captures material-discursive elements of environmental risk. By adapting actor–network theory's notion of translation with Goodnight's spheres of argument model, the author's results reveal how uncertainties created sites for scientists and their images to perform in ways that visualized risk in public forums. Citizens then responded to these risks through amplified uncertainties and counterimages that envisioned a hole in the skin of the body public.

This article examines how 18th-century technical communicators used spectacular science displays to critique audiences’ existing knowledge and advocate for alternative perspectives and technical practices. In addition to using disruptive rhetorical strategies such as amplification and contrary opposition, historical technical communicators heightened the wonder of their displays by disrupting audience expectations for the extended material and social scenes, including the objects, spaces, bodies, and cultural performances like gender that surrounded the demonstrations.

Reviewed by Michael MadsonMedical University of South CarolinaSince the 1990s, technical writing has oriented itself in various ways toward globalization studies and transcultural rhetorics. A grow...

Although many technical communication teachers and programs integrate some form of service-learning pedagogy, there is a dearth of technical communication research on the silent partners of these projects: the community partners. Drawing upon research data from 14 former community partners of professional writing service-learning courses, the authors suggest that understanding community partners' own self-defined stakes in service-learning projects can challenge hyperpragmatist representations of community partners and aid us in the continued creation, management, and critical evaluation of service-learning pedagogies and curricula.

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.

This article explores accessibility ontologically, proposing nonequal design as a way to include and encourage difference. Part One situates the possibility for a multiple version approach to accessibility; Part Two finds affinities in science and technology studies where several figures have explored the politics of multiple versions of ontologies; Part Three introduces three design principles—syncopation, medium specificity, and versioning—for enacting how an nonequal approach opens up generative possibilities for accessibility.

This article examines the rhetoric employed by the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to communicate the risks of nuclear power to legislators and the public. Close reading of official and unofficial documents demonstrates the importance of developing an effective risk-communication strategy in anticipation of danger rather than in response.

In a scientific dispute over the effects of atrazine on amphibians, chemical industry–funded and publically funded scientists present stunningly contrasting constructions of atrazine's environmental concentrations, persistence, and potential to harm. Considerable scientific uncertainties and variable ranges allow authors to construct preferred versions of the story of atrazine. These incommensurate rhetorical constructions, more the result of competing economic and environmental interests than of any paradigmatic misalignments, have prolonged the dispute not only over atrazine's effects but also over whether its sales should be banned.

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.

Technical communication programs preparing students to perform as symbolic analytic workers can improve a student's creative problem-solving abilities by offering study-abroad opportunities. Newer research from the field of psychology is used as a conceptual framework for discussing the author's development of curriculum for a study-abroad offering within a professional writing program. Details on the study-abroad curriculum proposal such as course assignments, readings, credit hours, and program destination and logistics are included.

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.

Coming on the heels of recent scholarship investigating scientific discourse in public contexts, Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination is a timely ...

Following reports spanning from the beginning of the OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) and OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) conflicts to the early 2010s, this rhetorical investigation analyzes the U.S. military's diagnostic practices used to identify mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in blast-affected troops. Considering the notion of "wound/injury" as a possible boundary object, this paper discusses how the conceptual framing of "invisible" injuries may produce interruptions of distrust that inhibit effective diagnosis.

I explore the role of categories as rhetorical barriers in organizations responding to crisis (Veil, 2011 Veil, S. R. (2011). Mindful learning in crisis management. Journal of Business Communication, 48(2), 116–147. doi:10.1177/0021943610382294[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). I analyze some problematic categories of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the categories’ impact on the organizations’ response to Hurricane Katrina. My analysis shows that unintended and perverse consequences (Giddens, 1984 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar], 1987 Giddens, A. (1987). Social theory and modern sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar]) reversed the power of a key legitimated category (Orlikowski, 1995 Orlikowski, W. J. (1995). Categories: Concept, content, and context. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 3, 73–78.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Giddens, 1984 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]) and exposed a set of reified categories (Giddens, 1984 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]).

In the context of forming and maintaining connections, the use of social media has become pervasive in today's society. Some use it to actively cultivate business relationships and follow or set in...