ABSTRACTThis project investigates how the goals of microenterprise entrepreneurs affect their use of communication genres. Although slide-based business pitches are key for traditional entrepreneurs, microenterprise entrepreneurs have little interest in investment. Therefore, acquiring customers through short elevator pitches takes this central position. This article also explores the social justice dimensions of microenterprise acceleration, finding that such organizations can provide important services in combating inequality. This project uses writing, activity, and genre research as a theoretical framework, and the research site is a microenterprise accelerator in Tacoma, Washington called Spaceworks Tacoma, which supports both lower-income and Black owners of small businesses.KEYWORDS: Workplace studiesprofessional practice, social justiceethicsentrepreneurshipWriting, activity, and genre research (WAGR)microenterprises AcknowledgementsFirst, I would like to thank the entrepreneurs and the director of Spaceworks who very graciously gave me their time to talk about their organizations. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Richard Johnson-Sheehan, Jennifer Bay, Bradley Dilger, and Clay Spinuzzi who provided guidance on both the research process and the writing and revising of the manuscript. And finally, I would like to thank Rebecca Walton and this article's anonymous reviewers, who helped me to strengthen and sharpen the article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis project was not supported by any funding.Notes on contributorsMason T. PellegriniMason Pellegrini is an assistant professor in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. His main research areas are entrepreneurial communication, workplace writing, academic publishing, and qualitative research methods. In 2022, Mason received a Fulbright Open Research Grant to Chile, which he used to study entrepreneurship communication at the famous Chilean business accelerator Start-Up Chile.

ABSTRACTAs immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users' experience at the University of Connecticut's OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google's VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab's promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates "top-down" imaginaries that contrast with "bottom-up" imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.KEYWORDS: Immersive technologyinnovation labsvirtual realityimmersionuser experienceemerging technologyfuture imaginariessociotechnical imaginaries Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrent LuciaBrent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His recent scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and Enculturation.Matthew A. VetterMatthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research, which asks questions related to technology, rhetoric, and writing, has been published widely in venues such as Social Media and Society, Rhetoric Review, Studies in Higher Education, and Computers and Composition. His co-authored book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, was published by Routledge in 2021.David A. SolbergDavid A. Solberg is a teaching assistant at the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his MA degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His master's thesis was entitled The Use of Parallelism in Poetry Writing for the Acquisition of English Grammar (available from ProQuest).

ABSTRACTWe asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to they.KEYWORDS: Editingsocial justice / ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. We explained to editors that, in each sentence, the capitalized pronoun referred to the capitalized noun phrase.2. When we refer to a "comprehensive style guide," we mean a manual that provides standards for writing, editing, and publishing texts. A comprehensive style guide may be written by a publisher or discourse community but adopted widely. For example, University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style is used by other publishers and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is used in disciplines outside of psychology.Companies may create their own style guides for internal use. Such guides may or may not be as detailed or complete as comprehensive style guides and may, in fact, be based on or direct users to a comprehensive style guide for any gaps in content. For example, ACES: The Society for Editing "Style Guide and Proofreading Checklist" (Filippini, Citation2021) is for ACES communications and based on the AP Stylebook.Some editors in this study referred to style sheets. A copyeditor creates and uses a style sheet to note a running list of grammar and usage that are specific to a manuscript and which may be different from house style or a comprehensive style guide (CMOS, Section 2.55).Despite attempting to define these terms, we recognize there are overlaps among the categories and across fields. For example, the Microsoft Writing Style Guide began as an in-house style guide and is now used by other software companies. Further, there exist other contexts of the terms "style guide" and "style sheet," such as brand style guides, programming style guides, and web design style sheets.3. Of the remaining two editors, one said that they would revise the sentence to avoid using singular they, and the other said that they would use the name Pat again instead of a pronoun.4. Only three editors (4%) said they would edit the sentence.5. The two remaining editors differed in their responses. One said that they would avoid using singular they by revising the sentence; the other said that they would change the pronoun to her.6. Ten editors said that they would edit this sentence.7. As of August 16, 2022, AP Stylebook Online advice under "accent marks" reads: "Use accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them: An officer spotted him and asked a question: "Cómo estás?" How are you? Otherwise, do not use these marks in English-language stories. Note: Many AP customers' computer systems ingest via the ANPA standard and will not receive diacritical marks published by the AP."Additional informationNotes on contributorsJo MackiewiczJo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. She studies the communication of pedagogical and workplace interactions. Her book, Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in 2022.Shaya KrautShaya Kraut is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University, where she teaches first-year writing. She has also worked as an ESL teacher, a writing center tutor, and a teacher/tutor for adult basic education. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and critical literacy.Allison DurazziAllison Durazzi is a communication professional with experience in industry settings including law, the arts, and freelance editing. She is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where she researches and teaches technical editing and teaches business, technical, and speech communication courses.

This article explores how doctoral writers in interdisciplinary life sciences programs navigate genre-ing activities across multiple disciplines. In interdisciplinary environments, approaches to doing and teaching writing may benefit from a reimagining, particularly as findings suggest that writing at interdisciplinary boundaries is unsuited to apprenticeship models of pedagogy. I argue that meta-genre is a productive way of engaging with the destabilization of existing knowledge in technical communication in interdisciplinary spaces and of fostering interdisciplinary writing knowledge.

This study extends the retrospective analysis of entries for the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication (1999–2003) by Stuart Selber in 2004, focusing on the subsequent two decades (2004 to 2022), to identify the topical research areas and methodologies in technical and professional communication (TPC) via the winning entries of the award. Through descriptive content analysis of 29 dissertations and corresponding summary statistics, this study reports on TPC disciplinary emphases and growth based on the sponsoring institutions on these dissertations, featured topics and their research methods or methodologies, and projected implications for the field. Accordingly, this study reveals the state of TPC graduate research through the lens of the imminent award and what it means for doctoral researchers, their advisors, and programs.

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 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.

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.

Graduate programs in the sciences offer minimal support for writing, yet there is an increasing need for scientists to engage with the public and policy makers. To address this need, the authors describe an innovative, cross-disciplinary, National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded training program in rhetoric and writing for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate students and faculty at the University of Rhode Island. The program offers a theory-driven, flexible, scalable model that could be adopted in a variety of institutional contexts.

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practic...

This essay examines the current state of rhetoric of health and medicine as a subfield strongly dependent on interdisciplinary contributions. While some of the field's research comes from scholars trained in rhetorical history and theory, much of it consists of "rhetorical" commentary by nonrhetoricians in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and cultural criticism. The author examines questions of the relation of rhetorical research to discourse research in other fields, and considers what might count, especially in graduate student training, as rhetorical study of health and medicine.

This article presents the history, purposes, outcomes, and significance of the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication during its first five years. It analyzes the topical areas and research methods of the 34 dissertations nominated for the award from 1999 to 2003, as well as the evaluations of the judges. Methods of the nominated dissertations are interpretive (41%) and empirical (59%), but many dissertations combine methods. In the empirical category, qualitative methods (17) outnumber quantitative methods (3). The most frequent topical areas are workplace practice (8), rhetoric of the disciplines (7), and information design (6). Topics that are not widely investigated include issues of race and class and international communication.

Graduate education in technical communication should provide students with an expansive view of the field. Toward that end, we offer a three-dimensional framework that represents technical communication as a robust, diverse, complex whole. Although the framework aims towards coherence, it embraces contradiction. That is, the framework represents a totality but does not purport to be the only possible representation. Key to the framework is our belief that the gap between theory and practice can actually be productive. Almost all binaries encourage overly simplistic understandings. But we should not allow the goal of remediating the binary to close off the important tensions that can allow the field to advance. This very gap is actually one of the few sites in which new ideas and approaches can be forged.

This article discusses collaborative design in the context of developing a Toolbook hypertext intended to introduce graduate students to the fields of rhetoric and professional communication. It examines the new grammar and rhetoric of hypertext, discusses the importance of document planning within an emergent design, and argues for a functional aesthetic.