I propose Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as an approach for understanding the discursive and material implications of technical documents in distant sites. I provide a historical vignette of MCDA and exemplify how technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can critically engage with distant sites through MCDA by analyzing materials about GhanaPostGPS, a geolocation technology. I conclude by discussing limitations of MCDA – access to archives – and propose the creation of crowdsourced technical documentation archives.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.KEYWORDS: Computer-based learningcritical theorypedagogical theoryrhetoric of technologysocial theoryusability studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebekah Shultz ColbyRebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.

This article asserts that auditory cues can be categorized by rhetorical function into the categories of visual rhetoric, defined by Amare and Manning under Peirce’s Ten Classes of Sign, understanding visual rhetoric to include both images and text. This article expands this definition to aural-visual rhetoric, including auditory elements as visual rhetoric to analyze multimodal Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), demonstrating this method using the opening tutorial scene from Portal 2.

This article argues that through embodied presentations and the multimodal, international and intercultural affordances of YouTube, the rhetoric of Black hair care YouTubers is tactical TPC toward social justices. We note the interactive comments section as a place for technical communicators to identify and redress issues in normative instructional discourse. This scholarship extends TPC beyond “how to do it” and “how I do it” toward “how we must view it in order to do it.’

ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

In this article, I examine and contextualize a selection of award-winning data visualizations created by W. E. B. Du Bois and his team for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, France. I show that Du Bois’s success with these data visualizations is partially attributable to the ways in which he merged artistic creativity with statistical empiricism to overcome the practical and ideological constraints of his rhetorical situation, namely a need to be seen amongst the fair’s larger spectacle and a refutation of the “scientific” racism that pervaded academia at the time. The research presented confirms Du Bois as an important but previously unrecognized progenitor of data visualization and therefore deserving of much more recognition in the fields of technical and professional communication (TPC) and data visualization than he currently receives. Ultimately, I argue that his achievement recommends useful lessons for contemporary scholars, practitioners, and pedagogues of TPC and data design.

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.

This content analysis examined how the authors of 114 peer-reviewed journal articles explained their empirical approaches to visual rhetoric scholarship. The authors content analysis sought to answer the question: how do scholars engage with the material dimensions of visual culture, specifically in terms of artifact selection and reporting data collection procedures? The answers to this question, the authors argue, are needed urgently as visual rhetoric research continues to expand because inconsistent reporting will hinder replicability and the reader’s access to the author’s argument. The authors use the findings of their content analysis to surface the implicit norms of empirical visual rhetoric research and to develop recommendations for reporting visual data collection procedures.

This content analysis examined how the authors of 114 peer-reviewed journal articles explained their empirical approaches to visual rhetoric scholarship. Our content analysis sought to answer the question: how do scholars engage with the material dimensions of visual culture, specifically in terms of artifact selection and reporting data collection procedures? The answers to this question, we argue, are needed urgently as visual rhetoric research continues to expand because inconsistent reporting will hinder replicability and the reader’s access to the author’s argument. We use the findings of our content analysis to surface the implicit norms of empirical visual rhetoric research and to develop recommendations for reporting visual data collection procedures.

The dispute for authority between the seemingly disparate disciplinary camps of theory and practice is a longstanding and well-documented tension within the field of technical communication (Miller...

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.

"Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric & Scientific Discourse, by Jonathan Buehl." Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 95–96

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.

Abstract The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media. Keywords: crowd sourcingpedagogyreachsocial media ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article. Notes Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, Citation2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, Citation2013, para 1). In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing. We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElise Verzosa Hurley Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos. Amy C. Kimme Hea Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.

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.

This article builds on scholarship in technical communication, medical rhetoric, and visual communication and represents a portion of a grounded study of one medical workplace setting's visualization practices. Specifically, the author explores how medical images—as technologically and rhetorically rendered artifacts—make “present” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969 Perelman , C. , & Olbrechts-Tyteca , L. ( 1969 ). The new rhetoric . Notre Dame , IN : University of Notre Dame Press . [Google Scholar]) the material characteristics of disease and thereby perceptually and argumentatively afford the construction of knowledge about future cancer-care action.

This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008 Bacey , J. , & Barry , T. ( 2008 ). A comparison study of the proper use of Hester-Dendy® samplers to achieve maximum diversity and population size of benthic macroinvertebrates Sacramento Valley, California (Report No. EH08-2) . Sarcramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]; Levine et al., 2005 Levine , J. , Kim , D. , Goh , K. S. , Ganapathy , C. , Hsu , J. , Feng , H. , & Lee , P. ( 2005 ). Surface and ground water monitoring of pesticides used in the Red Imported Fire Ant Control Program (Report EH05-02) . Sacramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.

Consent tools for health research generally are designed without contextual or linguistic factors in mind. This is especially true of university-based research. This case history details our design team's efforts to transform one generic consent form into a set of multimodal tools that will increase patients’ understanding of and participation in a medical study.

This special issue features articles that can help composition instructors think about ways to assess student products that are delivered in a variety of media. Although the topic of assessment is a common one, challenges arise as we apply—and adapt—our traditional assessment strategies to the features and components of compositions produced using new media. It is our hope that by engaging with the experiences of the authors of the articles in this special issue, readers of this issue will begin a conversation—among themselves, with their students—that leads them to articulate, reflect upon, and continually refine the criteria that are essential to both formative and summative assessment.

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.

This article describes the development of visual rhetoric in a historically significant museum exhibit. The study documents rhetorical change in the museum's displays, specifically in visual series depicting the horse's evolutionary development. The study also exposes the purpose of series patterning in the renovated display and the multiple views on scientific visualization this display implies. Such an analysis suggests the broad range of strategies in visual rhetoric available to science communicators working in the area of science popularization.

In his newest book, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, Gunther Kress brings visual communication into the 21st century by applying social semiotic theory (a th...

This study focuses on the intersection of visual rhetoric with rhetoric of science by examining the rhetorical context in which natural science illustrators operate as they represent paleontology. Field methods were employed to study the rhetorical context in which paleontology becomes represented through art; this article reports the findings from the field study and contextualizes the study in rhetorical theories of invention and a discussion of social versus scientific facts. The research highlights some differences between what experts know and what public audiences perceive, offering insight into why those differences exist.

Abstract This article explores the challenges and opportunities that the rising numbers of students with disabilities and the changing definition of disability pose to technical communication teachers and researchers. Specifically, in a teacher-researcher study that combines methods from disability studies, I report on the effectiveness of multimodal and universal design approaches to more comprehensively address disability and accessibility in the classroom and to revise traditional impairment-specific approaches to disability in technical communication. Notes 1. CitationCharlton (1998), in Nothing About Us Without Us, recalls hearing this slogan in South Africa in 1993 from two separate leaders of Disabled People of South Africa, Michael Masutha and William Rowland, and he writes, “The slogan's power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (p. 3). 2. Other principles include guidelines for equitable use, varieties of perceptible information, and appropriate size and space for approach and use. See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html for quoted guidelines. 3. CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It is a challenge-response test that usually visually distorts and warps letters, assuming that a human can decode the letters but a computer cannot. 4. For details on the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility, see CitationThatcher et al. (2006), pp. 26–28. Chapter 1, “Understanding Web Accessibility,” is useful for students to read and discuss during this segment of the class. 5. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by CitationThatcher et al. (2006) is also a useful resource for students to consult, particularly Chapter 1.

During the aftermath of recent disasters (both natural and human made), people have communicated by cobbling together available social software resources—relying on the capabilities of Internet tools such as blogs, news sites, and Flickr. Examining the use of social software taking place after the London bombings of July 7, 2005, I propose a method by which we can study users' literate appropriations to shape the development of more accommodating communication systems.

This article describes the authors' work as formative evaluators of a mixed-reality science museum installation, Journey with Sea Creatures. Looking beyond the focal point of the screen to the spatial and temporal surroundings of the exhibit, the authors employed a technique they call retrospective narrative mapping in conjunction with sustained on-site observations, follow-up interviews with museum visitors, and the development of personas to better understand the user experience in multimodal informal learning environments. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional identities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two midwifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional consumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwifery's recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework.

This article reports the results of a survey of professional writers about the nature and importance of visual communication in their work. The results confirm the suggestions in the field's literature that visual communication is important to workplace practice and that the role of the professional writer has expanded beyond the domain of the verbal. Visual communication responsibilities are complex and varied, but the practitioners surveyed typically engage in substantial amounts of design-related work and value visual communication abilities. The data suggest that visual communication should be a curricular priority in professional writing programs.

Abstract This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Abstract This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Florence Nightingale is usually pictured as an angelic nurse tending to British soldiers in military hospitals during the Crimean War. Although Nightingale was indeed a tender of soldiers, she was also an administrator, advocate for the common soldier, and proponent of the use of statistics and information design. This article examines Nightingale's rose diagrams, which she designed following her service as the director of nurses at a field hospital in the Crimean War. When the war ended, Nightingale was asked by the queen to write a report on the poor sanitary conditions and make recommendations for reform. When, after six months, the government did not act on the reforms, Nightingale decided to write an annex to the report, in which she would include her invention, the rose diagrams. Nightingale's ultimate success in persuading the government to institute reforms is an illustration of the power of visual rhetoric, as well as an example of Nightingale's own passionate resolve to right what she saw as a grievous wrong.

Composing hypertext documents can be an enriching path into the world of technical communication. In learning to produce hypertext, students are introduced to an important form of written composition that encompasses not only text generation, but also visual communication and information architecture. In this article, I provide a rationale for teaching hypertext composition and then some specific curricular suggestions in two parts, one for teaching beginners, and one for teaching more advanced students.

Ernst Haeckel was a fascinating German scientist, philosopher, and advocate of social Darwinism who sought to reinvent science as the basis of all knowledge and best guide for human activities. His monistic and vitalistic philosophy of science influenced later German holistic science and Nazi pseudo-science. Recent research reveals several of his most famous illustrations, of embryos of various animals and that are still published today, to be incorrect and probably knowingly so. The complex rhetorical connection between theory and visual support is revealed, as creationist critics contend that the falsity of the visuals implies the refutation of evolution. We see that our decisions made in crafting illustrations carry serious rhetorical and ethical implications for various audiences.

Abstract The focus of workplace communication research on visual rhetoric has tended to be the efficient and unproblematically "effective" functioning of visual texts. By suggesting ways in which the visual representations of science are construed by expert readers, this article responds to a call within our discipline for more critically focused contributions to the study of visual literacy. A former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Botany was asked to explain his interpretation of visuals appearing over an 80-year period in that journal; his responses illustrate how visual explanations testify to their creators' authority and how, once established, such authority actuates the rational arguments of science. Rhetorical appeals within and arrangement of visual texts are considered, as is the persuasive power of legends and captions.

When working with graphics and illustrations, technical communicators face ethical questions at almost every step. The visual rhetorics available offer help with evaluating visual components but little guidance on ethical issues. This article presents examples of ethical conflicts, describes some of the prominent visual rhetorics, and discusses ethical issues that need to be addressed. Some steps for improving ethical awareness related to graphics and illustrations are suggested.

This article extends the discussion of visual hetoric to the writing spaces and iconic representations of computer interfaces. An examination of the interfaces of a word-processing and a page layout program for desktop publishing reveals the visual nature of the interface. This visual writing space, different from the blank piece of paper, can encourage and foster a writer's consideration of options for integrating visual and verbal elements into a text.

Supra-textual design encompasses the global visual language of a document and operates in three modes: textual, spatial, and graphic. The rhetoric of supra-textual design includes structural functions that provide global organization and cohesion and stylistic functions that affect credibility, tone, emphasis, interest, and usability. Supra-textual rhetoric extends to other documents through conventional codes and through sets and series. Because writers may not control the end product of supra-textual design, intention may also be a rhetorical factor.

One of the reasons students in technical and professional writing classes are often unable to make judgments about the ethical worth of a piece of writing is that they lack an understanding of how connotative meanings are constructed. Socially oriented semiotic theories offer models of how language works symbolically in this way. A productive means of introducing these is to have students evaluate advertisements as forms of technical and professional writing. This study uses central ideas from Roland Barthes's essays on connotative semiotics as a rationale for directing writers to develop the critical reflex to analyze and then make judgments about the values implied by connotative systems.