This article reports on a study of 65 randomly sampled medical crowdfunding campaigns and five interviews with campaign authors. We found that authors innovated technical and professional communication (TPC) tools to narrate their illness experiences, coordinate digital audiences, and compel action. Thus, these authors practice TPC as care seeking and caregiving. Crowdfunding platforms, however, situate authors to individualize structural problems in ways that preempt collective action. We conclude with pedagogical implications of our findings.

The role of empathy in student team collaborations in technical and professional communication has been understudied. In this mixed methods study, we assess how Scrum affects both student perceptions of empathy and student use of empathetic strategies. We found that students who used Scrum considered themselves to be no more empathetic than students who did not use Scrum. However, a discourse analysis revealed that students who used Scrum deployed significantly more empathetic strategies than students who did not use Scrum.

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.

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 article offers an empirical study of literature in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and the medical humanities (MH). Article traces the topics, funding mechanisms, research methods, theoretical frameworks, evidence types, audience, discourse arrangement patterns, and action orientation that constitute the scholarship in the sample to offer a landscape of the current state of RHM and the MH. Findings can be leveraged to assess the potential for alignment between these fields for future research.

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.

This article investigates the social justice implications of localization and reports the results of an empirical study that examines poor designer localization efforts in documentation used in marketing sexuopharmaceuticals. It argues against a top-down view of design and communication and instead advocates a participatory approach that takes into account user linguacultural, political, economic, legal, and local knowledge systems in the localization process. The article also offers suggestions to guide localization theory and practice.

User-generated tutorial videos are quickly emerging as a new form of technical communication, one that relies on text, images, video, and sound alike to convey a message. In this article, we present an approach—a rubric—for assessing the instructional content of tutorial videos that considers the specific roles of modal and multimodal content in effective delivery. The rubric is based on descriptive data derived from a constant comparative study of user-rated YouTube videos.

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.

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBeth L. HewettBeth Hewett is Coeditor of the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy and a consultant with the NCTE Professional Development Consultant Network. She recently coedited Technology and English Studies: Innovative Professional Paths with James A. Inman. Her current research includes online writing instruction, instant messaging, and the rhetoric of the eulogy.Christa Ehmann PowersChrista Ehmann Powers is Vice President of Education for Smarthinking, Inc., an online learning company. She recently coauthored Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes with Beth L. Hewett. Christa's current research focuses on online teaching and learning, empirical research methods for online settings, and distance management strategies.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBeth L. HewettBeth Hewett is Coeditor of the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy and a consultant with the NCTE Professional Development Consultant Network. She recently coedited Technology and English Studies: Innovative Professional Paths with James A. Inman. Her current research includes online writing instruction, instant messaging, and the rhetoric of the eulogy.Christa Ehmann PowersChrista Ehmann Powers is Vice President of Education for Smarthinking, Inc., an online learning company. She recently coauthored Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes with Beth L. Hewett. Christa's current research focuses on online teaching and learning, empirical research methods for online settings, and distance management strategies.

A longitudinal study of four engineers shows that moving into positions of authority and responsibility allows them to claim agency within the structure of the organization. However, that structure is less stable than it first appears, and they use writing to try to establish it in a way that will allow them to achieve their goals. Agency seems to consist of the conjunction of discursively established positions in the organization and participants' taking organizational intents as their own.

This article presents the results of an empirical study comparing writing and engineering instructors' responses to students' technical writing. The study, which identifies a repertoire of 21 categories of response, indicates that the gap between engineering and writing teachers' standards for evaluating technical writing is not as wide as is generally assumed. The differences that do emerge suggest ways that the teachers can learn from each other.

Since the 1960s, attitudes toward empirical research on writing, including research on technical/professional writing, have shifted from encouragement to resistance. This essay traces these shifts in light of changes in writing research, psychology, and the rhetoric of science. In composition studies, an initial mild uneasiness about “scientism”; intensified with the rise of process models, suggesting a Romanticist defense of the mystique of creativity. More recent post‐modernist denunciations of scientific methods as immoral have other Romanticist overtones. In technical communication, a long‐standing interest in workplace writing practices allowed a smoother integration of empirical analysis with descriptive studies of writing contexts. However, as in composition, recent critiques in technical communication suggest that empirical methods should not be employed. These critiques too tightly circumscribe the values that may be considered humanist and cut off important avenues of inquiry and critique that historically have advanced both the sciences and humanities.

To gain a better sense of the metaphorical nature of the scientific research paper, the author reviewed 89 journal articles taken from the top 400 most‐cited documents in the Science Citation Index database for the period 1945–1988. Metaphorical constructions were found in a variety of forms: conceptual models, experimental designs, technical analogies, standard technical names, conventional figurative expressions, and even original figurative language normally associated with more‐literary writing. Examples are given for each mode of metaphor.