Single sourcing through a content management system (CMS) is altering technical communication practices in many organizations, including institutions of higher education. Open source software (OSS) solutions are currently among the most popular content management platforms adopted by colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. The GPL license, ease of use, customizability, and the large, global user base of mature content management systems are among the reasons these organizations choose OSS to meet their CMS needs. This article reviews the literature on the effects of single sourcing on technical communication practice. It also explores issues of OSS adoption, both generally and in international contexts. Through a case study of an OSS CMS implementation at a mid-sized public college, the article examines important contributions technical communicators can make to the rollout of an OSS-based CMS.

Applying the communication theory called punctuated equilibrium to an activity system in the federal department that oversees health-information privacy reveals that the theory fails to align well with a government activity system rooted in a stable democratic tradition. This activity system is structured to accommodate a wide variety of stakeholders and significant organizational change. This case study prompts a reexamination of punctuated equilibrium as an approach to understanding the role of documents in certain types of activity systems.

Abstract This essay uncovers rhetorical processes devoted to rehumanizing the enemy as an antidote to the virulent rhetoric of war. With an eye toward disrupting a problematic process of national identity construction based on otheringand dehumanization, this essay examines Jarhead as a case study that challenges current ideologies of soldiers and their enemies. Using Kenneth Burkes concept of consubstantiality and Linda Hutcheons discussion of reflective oscillation, essay examines Jarhead as a case of rhetoric working to rehumanize enemies, thus providing an example of how film can work against war culture.

This article illustrates the application of critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Gutierrez, 2008; Morrell, 2007) pedagogies that draw from young people’s funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to actively nurture personally, authentically, and culturally caring relationships (Howard, 2002; Noddings, 1992; Valenzuela, 1999) that reflect a concern for students’ lives. Specifically, it discusses the impact of students performing autoethnographies (Alexander, 2005; Carey-Webb, 2001) “cultural narratives that build toward critical social analysis” as a means toward increasing critical self-reflection and building compassionaterelationships between youth of color with fractured collective identities. Such approaches, as I argue, can tap into youth confusion and anger in order to engage them as critical readers, writers, and oral communicators. The findings suggest that autoethnographies increased students’ knowledge of self and, upon recognizing one another’s all-too-familiar struggles, the classroom climate became more conducive to constructing a critical common identity among youth of color. In this way, the article has implications for building classroom relationships that make for more effective pedagogies engaging dispossessed, working-class children of color with culturally relevant critical literacy teaching practices.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching “or Spanglish” among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students’ everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California’s sixth-grade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptnessat (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades of meaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded intheir everyday use of language.

Judy Garland’s correspondence with magazines and fans in the early 1950s serves as a case study of rhetorical strategies that might operate in celebrity life writing aimed at reparation and self-justification.

This case study investigates how a group of novice technical communicators used appeals to support their design decisions during group meetings. The results of this ethnographic study suggest that although these technical communicators were well acquainted with user-centered design (UCD) concepts and claimed to actively practice UCD, their appeals often did not reference data collected within user-centered research and instead referenced designer-centric appeals to support their claims. This group’s overall use of appeals to support their design decisions suggests that more empirical study into UCD theory and practice as well as students’ argumentation skills is warranted.

This article reports on a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. Drawing on interview and web data collected over 3 years, it focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of 13 ebooks self-published by online poker players. The article advances an understanding of authorship as sustained interaction among writers and readers as the work of publishing becomes absorbed into online networks as literate activity. In lieu of the capital investment of publishers that produces the materiality of the book, participants in these spaces have manufactured valued texts through collective literacy practices, coming to a loose consensus on what constitutes a book, and working together to enable proprietorship over texts, even amid environments of mass collaboration.

This article presents the results of a case study of civic discourse and explores whether and how composition classrooms can prepare students for active and informed participation in civic discourse.

Although academy-industry partnerships have been a subject of interest in professional communication for many years, they have barely been considered in terms of globally networked learning environments (GNLEs). This empirical case study of an academy—industry partnership, in which the authors participated, examines the opportunities and challenges in applying GNLE practices to the design of a corporate engineering communication workshop. Using genre-ecology modeling as the analytical framework, the study demonstrates how the pedagogical processes considered for inclusion in such a workshop may be embedded in a network of institutional genres, some of which are associated with strong regulating controls. The findings from this study have implications for those who are interested in applying GNLE practices in workplace contexts and for those interested in using a principled framework for representing the work of such partnership activities.

Abstract This essay argues for a reprivileging of the object of speech in the study of public address. To this end, public discourse concerning the tonal qualities of male and female speech, particularly in moments of affective transgression, is examined to better discern our deeply gendered, cultural norms of eloquence. The primary case study analyzes reactions to the oratory ofBarack Obama and Hillary Clinton to show how their respective vocal tones played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.

The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist.

This case study examines written peer response materials generated by small groups with varying gender compositions. Based on those observations, I offer several pedagogical implications.

As English spreads as an international language, it evolves through diverse users’ writing and speaking. However, traditional views of ESL users focus on their distance from fairly static notions of English-language competence. This research uses a grounded theory approach to describe a range of competencies that emerge in ESL users’ interactions with native-English-speaking peers and instructors.

At universities, scholars in English studies manage what Gieryn (1999) called disciplinary boundary work (the rhetorical making and policing of boundaries that construct the discipline and its institutional formations as different from other disciplines and social formations) through categorical contrasts, including: literary criticism vs. writing studies/rhetoric; scholarship vs. creative writing; quantitative vs. qualitative research; university vs. K–12 schooling; university vs. workplace; and, of course, that most basic border of disciplinarity”disciplinary knowledge vs. everyday belief and culture. The two research reports in this issue of RTE both address college-level work in the field and both highlight interesting ways in which current theoretical and methodological developments are putting pressure on disciplinary boundaries in English studies.

Drawing from a study of one student’s literate engagements with English studies and fan fiction and related fan art over her two years in an MA program, which also reached back to the earlier writing she did for English classes and other writings before the study began, this article employs sociohistoric theory to examine the profoundly dialogic interplay of vernacular and disciplinary literate activities. Following a detailed look at the student’s extensive involvement with fan fiction, the article elaborates the trajectory of linkages between fan fiction and English studies, paying particular attention to the repurposing of literate practices across these activities, the synergies and tensions that texture such interactions, and the long-term implications they have for the production of literate practice and person. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the heterogeneous assemblage of literate practices and identities that may be mediating literate action and, in particular, to the role vernacular literacies can play in developing disciplinary engagement and vice versa.

This case study focuses on images in three Science articles on the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose rediscovery was recently heralded. Because the primary piece of evidence is a frustratingly fuzzy four-second video, two groups of authors ultimately disagree on its interpretation and the same still video images that are used to argue for the sighting are used to argue against it. Given that the authors are making taxonomic arguments, images that closely resemble reality are employed. These images, like all images, are coded, and this analysis seeks to unlock these visual codes to reveal how meaning is made at the site of production, the site of the image, and the site of the audience. It also exposes how meaning making at the site of the image fueled the controversy.

In our case study, we examined the instant messaging (IM) workplace discourse of a pair of expert IM users. We found that the participants maintained discourse cohesion and thus coherence via short, rapidly sent transmissions that created uninterrupted transmission sequences. Such uninterrupted transmission sequences allowed each participant to maintain the floor. Also, the participants used topicalizations and performative verbs to maintain coherence. We also found that the participants' use of short transmissions may have ambiguated their enactment of their institutional roles and the rights afforded to them by those roles.

This study explores design presentations that were graded by engineering faculty in order to assess the distinguishing features of those that were successful. Using a thematic analysis of 17 videotaped, final presentations from a capstone chemical engineering (CHE) course, it explores the rhetorical strategies, oral styles, and organizational structures that differentiate successful and unsuccessful team presentations. The results suggest that successful presenters used rhetorical strategies, oral styles, and organizational structures that illustrated students’ ability to negotiate the real and simulated relational and identity nuances of the design presentation genre—in short, they illustrated students’ relational genre knowledge.

This article describes an interdisciplinary professional writing program and its benefits for students (in terms of knowledge, habits of mind, and developing careers). The authors present qualitative research findings about habits of mind and knowledge domains of successful students, which may prove valuable for faculty teaching in similar programs as they consider curriculum design, or for faculty pondering issues of career development for master’s degree graduates.

This article uses theories of space and findability to analyze a public information center as an example of multi-modal risk communication. The Yucca Mountain Information Center is an informational space created by the Department of Energy to inform the public about the proposed nuclear waste repository planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada. As a public space, the Center uses fact sheets, posters, and three-dimensional displays to make arguments about the storage of nuclear waste; we argue that the physical space, text, displays, and online space are all elements of risk communication. We offer a new way to read these elements of risk communication and suggest potential opportunities for public agency.

Rhetoric and composition’s increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks.

This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers coming from oral literate traditions, the War Manpower Commission developed the Training Within Industry program, emphasizing visual and experiential literacies. This analysis can inform programs that use multimodal forms of instruction by acknowledging positive and negative implications of such literacy sponsorship.

This article explores the dialectic between autonomy and mutuality within postsecondary composition programs. Grounded in a case study of writing instruction at a small, unionized, public university, the article argues that while broad workplace democracy and economic security are clearly desirable for communities of college composition teachers, their efficacy is seriously compromised absent sustained commitments to intellectual restlessness, professional deliberation, and collective action.

The year-long case study described in this article examined the transactions between a sixth grade social studies teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, and a struggling reader within her classroom, Sarah, in relation to the reading-task demands of their classroom. Findings indicated that Mrs. O’Reilly’s transactions with Sarah were influenced by a cognitive, print-centric view of reading and the identity she created for Sarah based on that view of reading. Sarah’s transactions with the reading task demands were influenced by how she identified herself as a reader and her goal to prevent her peers from seeing her as a poor reader. The findings from this study suggest that teachers and researchers need to find ways to identify and be responsive to the role of identity in the classroom.

This article is an exploration of how an alternative text reflects the multiple identities of one high school Latina, focusing in particular on her religious identity. In this ethnographic case study, the author addresses three questions: 1) In what ways does literacy activity inside the school, in the form of the science scrapbook, allow for this student to construct her religious self inside as well as outside of school? 2) How is one student’s science club scrapbook a symbolic representation of the struggle between the spiritual and material worlds that she negotiates? and 3) How does this scrapbook challenge traditional notions of identity and highlight the complexity of presenting a religious self in the public domain? In describing one student’s engagement with religion via her scrapbook, the article argues for a more complex and nuanced view of religion, literacy, and identity.

Abstract As the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control embraced new policies, technologies, and rhetorical strategies, they simultaneously moved through Lukensmeyer and Torres's "four levels of public involvement," which include the information, consultation, engagement, and collaboration levels (Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006 Lukensmeyer, C. J., & Torres, L. H. (2006). Public deliberation: A manager's guide to citizen engagement. IBM Center for the Business of Government Collaboration Series. Retrieved November 2007 from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/LukensmeyerReport.pdf [Google Scholar]). Because of the technical and scientific nature of air quality inspections, increasing public involvement, especially the involvement of those in a predominantly African American and a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, has been a challenge. This article describes the Bureau's journey through the information level, where the Bureau opens public access and participation in the investigation and reporting process; the consultation level, where Bureau staff go door-to-door in poor and minority neighborhoods collecting citizen feedback regarding perceived environmental hazards; the engagement level, where the Bureau conducts monthly environmental meetings with neighborhood residents; and the collaboration level, where citizens are taught to collect evidence of environmental violations.

Although considerable previous research has focused on Chinese students' expectations and experiences while studying in English-speaking cultures, little research to date has focused on how the instructor's cultural background affects the learning process within a managerial communication classroom Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, this exploratory case study involves two U.S. instructors teaching a managerial communication course to 106 Chinese students in Hong Kong. The findings from this study provide implications for managerial communication pedagogy and further research.

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions ethnography can make to researching academic writing, depending on the level at which it is construed, as method, methodology, or “deep theorizing.” In discussing the third level of ethnography, the author draws on recent debates around linguistic ethnography to explore how ethnography as deep theorizing can contribute to refining social practice accounts of academic writing through the specific notions of indexicality and orientation. By working through three levels of ethnography, her aim is to signal the ontological gap between text and context in academic writing research and to open up debate about how this gap can be narrowed.

Each year, more people search the Internet for health information. Through a case study conducted at a prominent health-information company, I will show that technical communicators are well-suited to contribute to the development of online health information. Like other technical communicators, online health-information developers must make rhetorical choices based on audience needs, function within specific social contexts, and work through challenges of writing, editing, and project management.

This article discusses the development of a unified social theory of genre learning based on the integration of rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and the situated learning perspective. The article proposes that these three theoretical perspectives are compatible and complementary, and it illustrates applications of a unified framework to a study of genre learning by novice engineers. The author draws examples from a longitudinal qualitative study of a group of novice engineers who developed their professional genre knowledge through both academic and workplace experiences. These examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the study of professional genre learning.

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the uses of informational texts within an ethnically diverse, second grade classroom and how the teacher carefully scaffolded students’ developing understandings about these texts. A community of practice theoretical framework was employed to better understand the ways in which informational texts were embedded within the larger classroom community (Lave&Wenger, 1991).

Edith Wharton's lack of recognition as a short story writer depends on several factors, including conflicting theories about short story form and technique, her relationship to literary and cultural history, and her use in literature classrooms. Her problematic relationship to the short story form provides an important case study in critical reception and canon formation.

This article reports a case study of three multinational companies that work together in a consortium, focusing on intercompany and intracompany variation in writing products and processes. The authors discuss variation in two genres: meeting minutes and internal memos. Adopting a social constructionist, communities of practice (CofP) approach, they argue that the companies form overarching constellations of CofP. Although the participants broadly work with the same genres of written documents, the form of these documents varies according to the local context, audience, and purpose. The authors discuss the implications of their findings, with particular reference to the difficulty writers face when they make the transition from writing for one community of practice to writing for another.

Recently, scholars of new media have been exploring the relationships between genre theory and new media. While these scholars have provided a great deal of insight into the nature of e-genres and how they function in professional contexts, few address the relationship between genre and new-media theories from a designer's perspective. This article presents the results of an ethnographic-style case study exploring the practice of a professional new-media designer. These results (a) confirm the role of dynamic rhetorical situations and hybridity during the new-media design process; (b) suggest that current genre and new-media theories underestimate the complexity of the relationships between mode, medium, genre, and rhetorical exigencies; and (c) indicate that a previously unrecognized form of hybridity exists in contemporary e-genres.

Nineteenth-century American leaders in education came to advocate a redesign of the schoolroom that resulted in its being seen as more the province of female teachers than of male teachers. This discourse of reform serves as a case study of how space itself may be rhetorically “gendered.”

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in Appalachia inform a teaching philosophy that differs significantly from her colleagues. Her story invites us to reconsider how “the culture of power” functions as a formidable gatekeeper.

This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student work, “Accessing Disability” argues that critical thinking can be taught more effectively through multi-modal methods and a de-emphasis on the linear progress narrative.

“Where is God now?” is a question from the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States.

The “steel bible” emerged in 1919 and went through 11 editions in 80 years. In its evolution we can see the shift from individual to group authorship, an increasing use of visual elements, and a physical change from a small, hand-held volume to a weighty desktop reference. In a textual analysis, we can see that it was essentially static, changing only by additions and deletions, as the industry evolved. The eventual closing of hundreds of plants and the migration of the industry to other countries can be seen in the change of publisher, the sudden absence of photography, and the international references. Originally, the steel bible came from the factory floor and the words of the plant managers, but by the 1990s, it was a highly-abstracted representation of knowledge. In the steel bible, we can see the history of the industry and the maturing of technical communication in the 20th century.

Content analysis is a powerful empirical method for analyzing text, a method that technical communicators can use on the job and in their research. Content analysis can expose hidden connections among concepts, reveal relationships among ideas that initially seem unconnected, and inform the decision-making processes associated with many technical communication practices. In this article, we explain the basics of content analysis methodology and dispel common misconceptions, report on a content analysis case study, reveal the most important objectives associated with conducting high quality content analyses, and summarize the implications of content analysis as a tool for technical communicators and researchers.

A comparative evaluation of two user guides—the document traditionally used by a company and a model document designed on the basis of research results and recommendations—was carried out using a number of complementary approaches focusing on the user. The quality and suitability of these documents for the target audience were assessed in terms of content, structure, presence of certain organizational devices (such as headings) and pictures included. The results revealed that the model document was more attractive, more efficient, and better adapted to users' needs, thanks to its modular organization (being structured according to “functions”), a large number of pictures, the presence of headings, and rationalization of the vocabulary used.

This case study closely examines how John (a former student of mine, age eight, second grade)composed during an informal writing group at school. Using qualitative research methods, I found that John selectively took up conventions, characters, story grammars, themes, and motifs from video games, television, Web pages, and comics.