A surge in public availability of emerging GenAI-AD has brought back the promises of automated accessibility for people who cannot see or see well. This article tests those promises through a double-rendering method that asks GenAI-AD engines to describe a simple portrait of a person and then returns these generated texts into GenAI-AD engines for visualizations of what they earlier had described, revealing insights about GenAI efficacies, ethics, and biases.

Joining the growing scholarly conversation on food rhetorics and technical and professional communication (TPC), this rhetorical analysis addresses two themes that arise in a Jell-O booklet (circa 1913): 1) constructing white femininity through women’s frustration and technical failure related to cooking and 2) asserting the Black mammy stereotype as a mechanism of maintaining white supremacy. Such analysis illustrates how food-related artifacts construct ideologies as they simultaneously offer technical instruction.

This article offers infrastructural storytelling as a methodological approach attuned to the emplaced dynamics of digital infrastructure. Countering the clean progress narratives of sustainability reports in the technology sector, this approach follows digital infrastructure to two locations: San Francisco, California (Google) and Toronto, Ontario (Digital Realty). Infrastructural storytelling explicates how physical infrastructures produce uneven social, political, and economic realities by investing in some ways of life over others.

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.

This article describes students’ emotional intelligence (EI) development when participating in the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP) in two technical and professional communication (TPC) courses. The researchers used modified grounded theory to compile the emotions used for coding students’ weekly reflections, and content analyzed how the TAPP experience affected students’ EI development. Overall, the article emphasizes the importance of supporting TPC students’ EI development in low-stakes environments since EI directly impacted their actions when collaborating.

Using a multi-methodological approach, we analyze member comments in Watts Up With That (WUWT), a climate skeptical Facebook group. Quantitative topic modeling revealed that members claim hyperrationality to undermine climate science. Science-based terms were often connected to other topics, such as immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, creating rhetorical constellations that shifted rhetoric from technical spaces into political and ideological ones. These findings have implications for dealing with the challenge of misinformation’s circulation on social media.

Through an ethnographic study conducted with an Indigenous language rights organization, this article illustrates how translation and interpretation can be further considered in global technical communication research. By providing examples of how Indigenous language translators and interpreters approach their work, this article advocates for a reframing of multilingualism in technical communication through a deliberate attunement to the relationships between language, land, and positionality. The author argues that as technical communicators continue conducting research in multilingual contexts, researchers should acknowledge how translation and interpretation impact the results and methodologies of contemporary global research.

Accessing medical resources has not always been easy for marginalized communities. This article addresses a series of barriers trans African American patients experience. We examine two sites of resistance to explore (a) African Americans’ use of complementary and alternative medicine throughout history and (b) trans tactics addressing institutional oppression. We explore these experiences through an intersectional feminist lens. By providing these insights, we hope to make room for further research to be conducted to better assist marginalized communities.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Content marketing involves creating content in genres that readers find useful. These genres individually do not persuade their readers to buy a given product and may not even mention the product or service being marketed. But collectively, they are designed to lead their readers to a purchase decision, that is, they sell without selling. The authors examine how content marketers strategically deploy these ecologies of genres.

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...

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.

Metis is an underexplored rhetorical counterpart to phronesis that can be described as a flexible, innovative intelligence used in unexpected or unprecedented situations. This article explores metis in relation to techne, praxis, and phronesis, arguing that our programs should strive to cultivate students' metic intelligence through client projects and service-learning experiences. Adapting Agile project management strategies used in software development may offer one means of scaffolding this learning.

This article examines the role that reflective assessment plays in contributing to the quality of students' visual designs. Students who are required to account for their rhetorical decisions in the design of a document benefit from the practice of verbalizing those decisions. However, this study shows that students who engage in reflective assessment actually produce stronger visual designs as well. This effect should help determine the extent to which such assessments should be included in the classroom.

Drawing on a case study of an Israeli start-up company, this article maps out a theoretical and methodological framework for linking local multilingual and multimodal literacy practices to wider institutional, cultural, and global contexts. Central to this framework is attention to the linking of tools, texts, and people distributed across space-time. This process foregrounds the complex mediation of activity and the dynamic pathways shaping the ways English is being reassembled in local-global ecologies.

Text-based interviews that compared the teacher's intention for a given comment on an engineering student's paper with the student's understanding of the comment were used to examine the extent to which students understand the comments they receive and to determine the characteristics of comments that are well understood and those that are not. The teachers' comments analyzed in this study were fully understood only about half the time. Inclusion of a reason or explicit instructions helped students understand the comments.

Do programs in technical communication thrive when administered in English departments or in other configurations of administrative units? This article examines the variations in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs at four universities across the north central U.S. The first three programs have histories that led them to be housed at increasing distances from their universities' English departments. The fourth is a nascent program emerging in its university's English department.

In today's networked, technological context, the human being “consist[s] of a biological core surrounded by extended, constructed systems of boundaries and networks” (p. 7); our bodily senses are a...

This article encourages technical and professional communication programs to take on the challenge of educating students to become "community intellectuals." The notion of educating future professionals for a career needs to be reconsidered in light of both current research concerning civic rhetoric and past practices in moral humanism courses. The triumvirate of rhetoric, ethics, and moral philosophy provides an effective foundation for reconfiguring existing pedagogy in the field and offers insights for nurturing community intellectuals.

Abstract This article argues that technical communicators are uniquely poised to function as public intellectuals. To demonstrate this point, the author offers the example of her work on a major AIDS prevention program report. Situating this work within the history of technical communication, the current discussion of rhetorics of risk, and the writing classroom, the author argues that technical writers don't have simply the opportunity to engage in textual activism; in many cases they have no alternative.

Abstract This article traces the development of Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ), beginning with the first issue in the winter of 1991, through the 2003 issues. As co-editor of TCQ, charged with the manuscript review process, I shepherded more than 350 manuscripts through evaluation and about one-fourth of those through publication. In this article, I explain that process and how it changed when The Technical Writing Teacher became TCQ and what features our reviewers now believe make a successful TCQ article.

Abstract This article proposes retrospective narrative justifications combined with classical concepts of habit formation as a theory of ethics appropriate for practicing technical communicators. To explicate the theory, the article draws on Alasdair Maclntyre's ethical theory, which involves habit formation and narrative theory; on apologia and account-giving theory; and on traditional ethical stances, such as the teleological and deontological doctrines. Special attention is given to the ends-means relationship and the tension between individual and corporate identity in technical communication environments.