In Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace (2019), Elizabeth L. Angeli explores the unpredictable workplaces which are the locations of emergency medical services provided by first responders, the EMS personnel who receive 911 calls but may have little idea about what to expect once they arrive at the site of the emergency. While rhetoric of health medicine (RHM) is not a new area of rhetoric, Angeli found little research about EMS professional rhetoric, leaving a void in understanding the modes of communication in these ever-changing, life-altering workplaces. Her text began as part of her dissertation project but morphed into a rhetorical analysis/EMS rhetorical training pedagogy for Technical Professional Communication (TPC) and RHM as well as EMS trainers and trainees.

In fall 2019, the Two-Year College English Association distributed a survey to two-year college English faculty across the United States through professional listservs, regional distribution lists, and social media platforms. This report summarizes the key data derived from 1,062 responses to close-ended questions about workload related to teaching, service, leadership, and professional development. The report discusses the demographic profile, employment status, and contractual obligations in course assignments of the two-year college English faculty who responded. It also summarizes Information about respondents’ overload teaching, their autonomy within their teaching responsibilities, and the kinds of service and professional development activities in which they engaged.

Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color () underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers, this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces, including educational institutions? Using critical race (; ; ; ; ; ; ) approaches to literacy sponsorship (), and observations and interviews with university custodians, this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy, because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE instructors a willing audience for critiquing the structural oppression inherent in literacy and for valuing dialectical, linguistic, and genre diversity. This snapshot focuses on a faculty writing retreat that emerged out of a WAC/ CE partnership and demonstrates how such partnerships can open the door for critical WAC pedagogy.

We understand "community literacy" as the domain for literacy work that exists outside of mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, lifelong learning, workplace literacy, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal and technological representations as well.We publish work that contributes to the field's emerging methodologies and research agendas.

This article describes and reflects on a collaborative, in-class activity that asks students in a business writing course to analyze the intersection of language, values, and social justice through a rhetorical analysis of corporate mission statements. The activity looks at how mission statements, as a genre, work to construct an ethos of civic engagement targeting a specific audience. Students reflect on values embedded in mission statements and compare these values with corporate action. Students then work in groups to create their own mission statements that direct their research and teamwork for their other, collaborative course projects. I offer this activity focused on mission statements as a concrete way to discuss social justice, values, and civic engagement in a business writing course; specifically, students explore how language impacts social justice and structural (in)equality.

ABSTRACT This article examines pedagogical results from an IRB-approved study that used the Omeka platform in two sections of technical writing classes. The research question explored how a digital humanities (DH) project can be an opportunity for students to learn concepts and take ownership of publicly facing content. The method used is qualitative, and findings indicated that students embraced an open-source and collaborative project. Results also demonstrated how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors might find DH tools well suited to TPC competencies.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the process of coding and analyzing data from 376 Programmatic Student Learning Outcomes (PSLOs) from 47 technical and professional communication (TPC) undergraduate degree programs. The resultant findings suggest that TPC program administrators adopt common PSLOs, eliminate embedded PSLOs, and consider the assets of PSLOs beyond assessment. Such practices will ensure that PSLOs support students as a primary audience and cohere with broader disciplinary understandings of education at the undergraduate level in TPC.

ABSTRACT Recruitment advertisements published in technical and professional communication (TPC) conference programs and proceedings offer a snapshot of the messages that these programs use to market themselves and distinguish their value in the marketplace of graduate programs. Using an exploratory mixed methods approach informed by Bakhtin's theory of addressivity, we developed a two-phase study to assess recruitment advertisements from three perspectives: from the advertisement content itself, from the students being recruited, and from the TPC program coordinators or directors. Recommendations for improving TPC advertising and promotion are given.

This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause a crisis in the first place. Drawing from literature on crisis communication and the experiences users described in the Zoom CEO’s blog post, the author concludes that while Zoom did indeed have technical issues that contributed to its privacy crisis, users also experienced its technology in unexpected ways, and the company underestimated the privacy expectations of its new users. Zoom’s privacy crisis ultimately provides a useful discussion of why it is increasingly important for companies to incorporate privacy by design and to be frank about their privacy practices with a public who has a growing interest in, and dissatisfaction with, corporate privacy practices.

With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and examinations of positionality, privilege, and power, the authors suggest three research methods that help capture the intricacies of blurred personal and professional lives: time-use diaries, embodied sensemaking, and participatory data collection and coding. These methods seek to illuminate the invisible work of women, as well as the diversity and range of experiences of home-based workplace communicators.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter has served as a leading public platform for sharing, receiving, and engaging with virus-related content. To protect users from misinformation, Twitter has enforced stricter content-vetting policies. This article positions Twitter as a politically motivated entity and briefly traces Twitter’s use and applications of the term “harmful content.” The author investigates how the platform’s broadening of its definition of harmful content illustrates Twitter’s strategy for combating misinformation by acting on kairotic moments in a way that is shaped by the diverse authoritative voices already guiding larger public COVID-19 discussions. The article concludes by examining the roles these observations can play in technical and professional communication classrooms.

This article argues that religious and secularist identities complement and intersect in political ways with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality and that they inform writing center practice because belief exists along a spectrum that involves all writing center inhabitants and affects all writing-centered conversations. We suggest that this spectrum of faith is evocative of the spectrums that theorists of race, gender, and sexuality in particular have discussed, yet often faith has been overlooked in discussions of identity in writing center work (Denny, 2010). We propose that theories of race, gender, sexuality and other identities that have served as springboards for professional development in writing centers can help to facilitate the development of a greater literacy of faith and secularism as complicated and nuanced identities. Specifically, we believe theories involving intersectional social justice work and hybridity can help to facilitate self-reflective and productive interfaith dialogue or dialogue about faith and secularism. Thus, such theories can help writing center professionals dismantle stereotypes about believers and secularists and problematic notions of what faith, or a conversation about faith, is or should be.

This article focuses on how formative feedback can be used to help engineering students write precise and coherent management summaries that appeal to a mixed audience. Management summaries are especially challenging to master as students must strive for a balance between adhering to scientific standards and being intelligible for a wider non-expert readership. Students of Energy and Environmental Technology at the school of engineering (FHNW) in Switzerland write a total of six technical reports about their project work (mostly in German). By analysing two management summaries, the focus is laid on the lecturers’ approach of relying on formative feedback which supports and accompanies the students’ iterative writing processes. It is shown how in early semesters lecturers provide hands-on guidance, such as suggesting discourse markers or pinpointing vague references to sharpen students’ awareness of the need to write as concisely as possible for mixed audiences.

Collaborating between Writing and STEM: Teaching Disciplinary Genres, Researching Disciplinary Interventions, and Engaging Science Audiences This poster describes a multi-pronged effort to build a writing curriculum in Physics and other STEM fields at the George Washington University, USA. These efforts include curricular collaboration, a research study conducted by the Physicists and Writing Scholars, and external funding initiatives. This project first began as a curricular collaboration through our Writing in the Disciplines (WID) curriculum, initiated by observations among Physics faculty that undergraduate students lack Physics specific writing skills. Writing faculty responded to this observation by introducing Physics faculty to the idea that writing can and must be taught, that the genres of Physics can be taught by Physics faculty, and that a focus on the writing process can improve student writing. Our curricular goal was to demonstrate to faculty who are unfamiliar with writing studies that writing is a means to learn in Physics (Anderson et al., 2017). The first phase of our effort was to persuade Physics faculty that writing contributes to learning in Physics; we describe a collaboration between Physics and Writing faculty that developed assignments and made curricular interventions. This collaboration built upon scholarship in writing studies that argues genre instruction develops capacities and skills for student writing (Swales, 1990; Winsor, 1996). While genre is not a new concept in Writing Studies, for many Physics faculty the idea that they can teach – and have students learn – how to write in disciplinary genres is novel. Collaboration around curricular revisions enabled Writing and Physics faculty to teach students that learning how to write in a new genre is a skill that can be practiced (Ericsson, 2006; Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009). We developed a process for students to follow when faced with types of writing common to Physics, but potentially new to them, such as the abstract (written), lab research notebook (written), article summary (oral), letter to colleague (written), cover letter and resumé (written), elevator pitch (oral), proposal (written and oral), presentation on issues of ethics and equity in STEM (oral), research presentation (oral), poster (written), poster presentation (oral), final research report (written), and Symposium presentation (oral). The collaboration thus created pedagogical exchange between faculty as well as scholarly synergy between the disciplines of Physics and Writing Studies. Physics faculty have observed that the curricular collaboration has had measurable results for students. Physics student participation in the campus research day has increased dramatically. We attribute this rise partly to the increased, explicit attention in classroom settings to how to engage with Physics genres of writing, especially abstracts and research posters. While the collaboration successfully brought together a small but solid group of Writing and Physics faculty, it also raised questions about how to persuade a broader range of Physics faculty, and other science faculty, that teaching disciplinary genres can improve student writing, and that writing is a means of learning. Given that faculty in STEM disciplines find empirical research persuasive, our next step was to undertake a collaborative research project to measure the impact of the teaching of writing in Physics. The new curricular focus on genre asked students to conceptualize themselves as scientific writers in relation to specific Physics or STEM audiences. The collaborative research therefore investigates if teaching Physics genres improves writing and enables students to conceptualize themselves as emerging scientists engaged in professional communication (Poe et al., 2010; Winsor, 1996). Our longitudinal analysis of student writing in Physics evaluates writing from three sequenced courses, the first before faculty-developed genre assignments, and then after genre assignments. We developed a rubric that evaluates general outcomes – audience, genre, structure, style – and a rubric that evaluates specialized learning outcomes – acknowledgement of past scholarship, working with models, incorporating scholarship, articulation of research questions, working with graphs, and articulation of methods. Preliminary research analysis shows that explicitly teaching Physics genres increases student’s abilities to write successfully in Physics, enabling students to understand how knowledge is communicated persuasively to audiences. Our goal with this research is to show STEM faculty through research by Physicists and Writing Studies scholars that teaching writing socializes students into the discipline of Physics, leading them to identify as professional scientists (Allie et al, 2010; Gere et al., 2019). This increase is exemplified by the large number of students volunteering to present a poster during the University wide research day, giving them experience presenting to an educated audience outside of Physics. Thus, a combination of strategies – curricular collaboration and intervention, collaborative research from within the discipline of Physics, and successful external funding – are what demonstrate to scientists that teaching genre and teaching writing are central to science education. Based on this experience, our contribution is that shared pedagogical and research collaborations, and funding, are what make the knowledge of Writing Studies persuasive to scientists. We have seen success with these efforts. At George Washington, other STEM faculty have observed successes in the Physics curriculum, and have joined efforts to bring writing more explicitly into their curriculum. This year, we began a Writing in STEM symposium that has grown to include faculty in Chemistry, Systems Engineering, Mathematics, Geography, Mechanical Engineering, and other fields. We have also seen an uptick in STEM courses in the WID curriculum. The Physics and Writing research collaboration has led to a National Science Foundation (NSF) submission on genre, and an NSF award for a study of writing and engineering judgement, being conducted by Writing faculty and Systems Engineering faculty. References Allie, S., Armien, M.N., Burgoyne, N, Case, J.M., Collier-Reed, B.I, Craig, T.S., Deacon, A, Fraser, D.M.,Geyer, Z, Jacobs, C., Jawitz, J., Kloot, B., Kotta, L., Langdon, G., le Roux, K., Marshall, D, Mogashana,D., Shaw,C., Sheridan, G., & Wolmarans, N. (2009). Learning as acquiring a discursive identity through participation in a community: improving student learning in engineering education. European Journal of Engineering Education, 34(4), 359-367. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043790902989457 Anderson, P., Anson, C. M., Fish, T., Gonyea, R. M., Marshall, M., Menefee-Libey, W Charles Paine, C., Palucki Blake, L. & Weaver, S. (2017). How writing contributes to learning: new findings from a national study and their local application. Peer Review, 19(1), 4. Ericsson, K. A. (2009). The Influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson, R. R. Hoffman, A. Kozbelt & A. M Williams (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp 685–705). Cambridge University Press. Gere, A. R., Limlamai, N., Wilson, E., Saylor, K., & Pugh, R. (2019). Writing and conceptual learning in science: an analysis of assignments. Written communication, 36(1), 99–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318804820 Kellogg, R., & Whiteford, A. (2009). Training advanced writing skills: the case for deliberate practice. Educational psychologist, 44(4), 250–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903213600 Poe, M., Lerner, N., & Craig, J. (2010). Learning to communicate in science and engineering: Case studies from MIT. MIT Press. Swales, J. (1990). Discourse analysis in professional contexts. Annual review of applied linguistics, 11, 103–114. Winsor, D. A.(1996) Writing like an engineer: A rhetorical education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR). To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support.  We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors. Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020). References Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR].  Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge. Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019 Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge. National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague.

Background: Past research has established the importance of discursive leadership in professional communication, but it has not systematically examined how conformity behaviors emerge as a potentially undesirable consequence of discursive leadership. Literature review: Review of the literature on the centrality of communication in leadership processes and conformity behavior suggest a void of analytic tools to adequately examine the negative consequences of discursive leadership. Research question: Are later interlocutors more likely to speak similarly to earlier ones if the earlier interlocutors occupy a more central position in the conversation network? Methodology: Based on 32,000 words of a transcribed meeting corpus, we measured conformity behaviors using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency scores, which are widely used in the information retrieval setting. We also operationalized the strength of discursive leadership as a positional centrality measure in the conversation network using a matrix algebra approach in social network analysis. Results: Findings support the hypothesis that discursive leadership is associated with conformity in language aligned toward discursive leaders' opinions. Conclusions: This study makes theoretical advances in understanding leadership construction and conformity behaviors between leaders and followers using empirical, authentic meeting data. We also give business people an applied understanding of the process of discursive leadership, which may help them to improve communication efficacy in their organizations by reducing overly conforming behaviors. We recommend that future research include more diverse participants and be combined with a survey to supplement the conversation data.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the co-authors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

Background: Captions do important communicative work, but little research has investigated their content quantitatively. Literature review: Captions help facilitate learning and make retrieving information from databases easier. Yet, few studies have explored the rhetorical moves found in figure captions to better understand their communicative function. Research questions: 1. How do captions found in psychology, linguistics, biology, and technical and professional communication (TPC) journals differ in terms of length? 2. What are the rhetorical structures of figure captions in psychology, linguistics, biology, and TPC journals? 3. How do the rhetorical structures of captions in journals from these four disciplines differ? 4. To what extent does visual type interact with caption length and rhetorical structure? Research methodology: Using quantitative content analysis, I compared the frequencies of moves in captions across disciplines, determined whether the moves were conventional or optional, and identified patterns in the progression of moves in the captions that I analyzed. A supplementary analysis of the types of visuals that accompanied the captions offered insights into the findings of the caption-content analysis. Results: Results suggest a high degree of variation in the rhetorical structure of captions in academic journals. Biology captions were, on average, the longest and contained the most moves. TPC captions were the shortest and contained the fewest moves. Psychology and linguistics captions fell between the biology and TPC captions. Conclusions: Understanding variation in caption content can encourage a more rhetorical approach to caption writing. Researchers in disciplines where shorter captions are standard might consider writing elaborated captions.

While previous research in business communication has surveyed business and professional communication instructors regarding their courses, it has not yet asked instructors about additional factors that affect their ability to teach and their students’ ability to learn. These factors include job satisfaction, institutional and collegial support, academic rank, physical teaching environment, teaching and learning resources, and student issues. This study examines the results of a survey of business and professional communication instructors regarding these factors, discusses implications for the disciplines of business and professional communication, and suggests additional avenues for advocacy and research.

Thematic analysis of interviews with 22 managers highlight their perspectives on exemplary and unacceptable workplace communication skills. Exemplary skills were perceived to be relatability, documentation, and audience awareness/adaptation, while unacceptable skills were verbal aggression, deception, and defensive communication behaviors. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by identifying highly notable skills—both positive and negative—on typical lists of business and professional communication skills. This study also enriches anticipatory socialization scholarship by its application to vocational preparation. Business and professional communication instructors can use the findings here when deciding what topics to emphasize in a course.

This nationwide study of business communication instructors examined course delivery, course outlook, topics and depth of coverage, social media and technology coverage, diversity coverage, critical thinking, and accessibility. The outlook for the course appears positive and promising, and instructors continue to add content to the course. An important finding is that business communication instructors’ level of confidence in technology significantly affects how they cover technology-mediated communication. Therefore, we suggest professional associations and higher education institutions should provide more opportunities for voluntary training in these newer communication technologies. Further research is needed about the strain placed on business communication instructors.

In this original research article, we report findings locating technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs from 1,235 not-for-profit two-year colleges (2YCs); argue for an updated 2YC TPC research agenda at 2YCs; and provide concrete steps for increasing 2YC faculty inclusion in the field of TPC through conference attendance, service, and membership in national TPC organizations.

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To assess collaboration, researchers integrated usability testing on workshop resources with 15 ( N = 15) participants, postworkshop questionnaires with 34 ( N = 34) participants, and interviews with 2 ( N = 2) community partners. Participants responded positively, and 47% of workshop attendees found jobs. The article argues that community-based research should use participatory and iterative models and resilience theory.

Understanding the law and its impact on the practice of technical communication has been an important scholarly thread in technical and professional communication (TPC) for more than two decades. Technical communicators recognize the impact of their work on stakeholders as well as the potential liability issues associated with composing technical communication documents. While this scholarship is widespread, relatively few pedagogical resources are available to prepare students for success in a litigious world or to guide instructors in teaching legal writing. This article offers a case study of a legal writing course that prepares TPC students to develop legal literacy and succeed in the workplace.

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 responds to recent calls for social justice-oriented work in Technical and professional communication, detailing moments from a participatory photovoice project with community organizers working toward a more just regional economy. By juxtaposing participatory action research methods and the rhetorical concept of metis, or embodied, rhetorical cunning, this article highlights how reversals of power might transform research projects for all parties involved; and how disenfranchised groups might challenge extractive practices draining their communities.

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.

In an in-depth study of communication in the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) field, Angeli broadens the scope of health and medical professional communication through an analysis of the high stake...

Informed by the social justice turn, this article highlights the often-overlooked voices and experiences of women working in technical and professional communication in the Global South, specifically in India. Using an apparent feminist frame, this article highlights the networked identities and forces of power at play that can marginalize Indian practitioners in globalized workplaces. Further, it seeks to understand the ways Indian women exercise and establish professional legitimacy by utilizing apparently feminist tactics.

In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific research. A central question the study sought to answer was, “How does one build a new supercomputer?” One of the answers that emerged is that supercomputers are built by the genre assemblages of documents that mitigate financial, political, and technological uncertainties, and their attendant risks, that are inherent to technoscientific cutting-edge enterprises. Given their centrality, these genre assemblages function as essential infrastructure for the U.S. national laboratory system and for big science endeavors in general. In conclusion, this article argues that documentation that mitigates uncertainty serves an important infrastructural function for organizational life more generally.

This paper details the evolution of a course, Arts and Society, and the inception of a student-centered assignment, “Putting ‘US’ back in Museums.” By tapping into a nationwide discussion of inclusion and public spaces, this business proposal style assignment asks students to consider their own observations as museum visitors alongside research that considers community engagement, diversity and accessibility in order to identify a specific issue within a museum and to propose change. Throughout the project, students are supported by the implementation of smaller scaffolding assignments, in-class discussions, an embedded librarian and an assigned writing fellow. Furthermore, they will meet at least eight professionals in the field and visit at least four different local sites. This assignment demonstrates best practices via scaffolding, institutional support, experiential learning, and engagement with the local community.

Writing scholarship has given a lot of attention to structures and lexical-grammatical features of texts in relation to discipline and the discourse community. More attention should be paid to where, when, what, and how academics write, because writing is at the heart of their professional lives. "Academics Writing: The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation" addresses this issue, drawing on literacy studies and socio-material theory. Exploring the writing practices of 16 British academics from three disciplines in nine universities through interviews, observation, and document analysis, this book provides deep insights into the socially situated nature of academics’ writing. It would be an informative and thought-provoking read for those who are engaged with academics writing, professional development, and higher education management.

Business remains a popular major for international students in the United States. Little is known, however, about how these students fare in business communication (BCOM) classes. This qualitative study evaluates the challenges and needs of English as an additional language (EAL) students in BCOM courses at a private university in the United States. We surveyed and interviewed 15 BCOM instructors and 30 students previously enrolled in BCOM. Results reveal faculty are aware of some, but not all, of the linguistic, cultural, emotional, time, and accommodation challenges EAL students face. We discuss suggestions for accommodating EAL students’ unique needs in BCOM courses.

This article outlines opportunities and challenges of teaching neurologically diverse students in the business communication course, providing basic resources and information for instructors to supplement their knowledge and pedagogical ability to support neurodiverse students. While the business communication course may represent obstacles for neurodiverse students, it also provides the ideal opportunity for them to practice and develop the soft skills that are essential to their success. Included are implications for neurodiversity as competitive advantage as employers look to harness the unique talents of neurodivergent graduates through active recruitment programs and universities increase programming to support these diverse and talented students.

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. These assignments are designed to add fuel to oral and written persuasion, including the practical use of rhetorical tools. Ideas to advance learners’ professional development are presented. Also, clever experiential learning techniques are designed to inculcate team-building skills. This article is the second in a two-part series. The first appeared in the June 2020 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments

First-year composition faculty have historically cast a skeptical eye on high-school-based dual enrollment FYC. However, when secondary and post-secondary faculty are allowed to build their program together, trusting each other’s expertise and engaging in mutual professional development, enormous value is generated for both sets of faculty and the DE students. This article presents findings, materials, and recommendations from a long-standing successful DE program built on the assumption that college faculty have just as much to learn from their high school colleagues as high school teachers have to learn about teaching college-level writing.

Over 1.4 million high school students enroll in college-credit-bearing courses yearly, and 80% of that instruction occurs on secondary campuses under the tutelage of high school teachers (US Dept. of Education). Since First-Year Writing remains a common choice among enrollees, Concurrent Enrollment (CE) classrooms present a unique space for inquiry and collaboration into the quality and rigor of CE writing instruction. This study investigates CE writing instructors’ definitions of “rigor” in the college writing classroom and explores the training and support provided to CE writing instructors representing two- and four-year higher education institutions in Ohio. Findings suggest that on-going discipline-specific professional development can lead to definitions of rigor in high school writing spaces that align to postsecondary standards. This study also demonstrates that disparity exists in instructor preparation and support, especially in regard to discipline-specific training that could help close gaps in writing instruction.

The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso, located on the U.S-Mexico border, employs mostly tutors who are bilingual, Spanish-English; however, there are a significant number of international tutors with different linguistic backgrounds. Using a qualitative method approach, this article discusses findings from focus groups and interviews with international multilingual student tutors who worked at the UWC. Through our analysis of the data, we found that international tutors face a unique set of challenges, but also bring a wealth of knowledge to working at the writing center. This article focuses on three major themes discussed by participants: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Tutors’ experiences in leveraging linguistic and cultural differences prompted the need for the UWC to implement changes to its tutor training and policies to support international tutors. As institutions in the United States become more diverse, writing centers need to challenge who best practices in the discipline were created for and who they serve, all while critically examining how we can leverage the experiences of international tutors to reshape writing center pedagogy. Keywords : international writing tutors; multilingualism; linguistic diversity; Hispanic-Serving Institution; writing center pedagogy; tutor training The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is located in El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. El Paso, combined with its sister city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, make it one of the largest bi-national areas in the world. Residents of Juarez frequently commute over the international bridges daily for work; many of these commuters include students at UTEP. UTEP is a Hispanic-Serving Institution where 80% of the student population identifies as Hispanic or Latinx (UTEP, 2019). Furthermore, 20% of these students are students from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and an additional 5% of students are international students from around the world (UTEP, 2019). Due to the diverse and complex linguistic and cultural lived experiences of students at UTEP, the UWC is informed by theories on multilingualism, antiracism, and equity. It is often cited that writing centers are not just places that enact marginalization, but centers for those who are often marginalized in academia. The UWC has drawn from these theories to develop its programmatic identity, including its goals, tutor training and pedagogies, and professional development, in order to adopt socially just practices. This work, and the theories motivating the work at the UWC, serve as a direct response to our institution and to the students it supports. In a typical semester, the UWC assists over 8,000 students with their writing. The UWC offers face-to-face and synchronous online tutoring, employing about 30 writing tutors, undergraduate and graduate. The undergraduate writing tutors are all hired directly by the UWC, and the graduate students are those who have been awarded a master’s or doctoral teaching assistantship through the English Department or the Creative Writing Department. This year alone, over 40% of the 30+ tutors working at the Writing Center are international students and bi/multilingual with languages ranging from Spanish to Nepalese. Needless to say, this creates a linguistically and culturally diverse work environment as international writing tutors assist students with their writing at the center. This diversity of languages is at the core of our approach to training and pedagogy for writing center tutors. An intricate dynamic develops between writing center tutors and students who often have different home languages, many of whom are English language learners often working towards enacting Academic English as their writing assignments require. While the majority of writing center pedagogy focuses on how to tutor English as a Second Language students and many tutoring books include chapters on working with ESL students or multilingual writers (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Gillespie and Lerner, 2009; Ryan & Zimmerelli, 2015; Bruce & Rafoth, 2016; Lape, 2020), very little has been written on the experiences of international tutors from the tutor side. This project started in 2017 when the UWC Director and Assistant Directors were approached by several international students who had been writing tutors, one who is currently the Assistant Director of the UWC and co-author of this piece, asking how training would account for the linguistic differences between the new students joining us from Nepal and the majority of the Spanish speaking students who visited the writing center. Through multiple conversations with international student tutors about their experiences working at the UWC, we were confronted with addressing the following questions: What are the experiences of international tutors working at the UWC? How do non-native English speakers navigate assisting students who are native English speakers, or, in the case of our institution, many non-native English speakers with a different home language? The UWC’s week-long training at the beginning of each academic year includes an entire day focused on tutoring multilingual students, with a larger emphasis on Spanish speakers and writers. However, this was a destabilizing question and set us on the path to try and learn about the experiences of international tutors working at the writing center. In an effort to learn how international writing center tutors navigate concerns about language usage, the UWC needed to reconceptualize training to better account for linguistically and culturally diverse interactions during tutoring sessions. Our article’s contributions to both this special issue and the writing center community opens with an overview of the theories which inform our work at the UWC. First, we came to realize that applying writing center theory and best practices in the UWC was problematic, as some of these best practices did not resonate within the context of UTEP and the UWC–a clear indication of the highly contextualized linguistic ecologies of writing centers on college campuses. Most importantly, these best practices were developed from the ground up and informed by the experiences of students and tutors. Next, we provided a brief description of our study and data collection process. We then structured our data findings into three themes: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Lastly, after discussing the most insightful aspects of our findings and how they informed changes to tutoring training at UWC training, we offer readers insight for how writing centers can reconceptualize and reframe the linguistic and cultural knowledges of international tutors as rich resources to learn from, and move away from the deficit rhetoric that has traditionally circulated about non-native English tutors.

As a writing center community, we are constantly striving for ways to address underrepresentation to help restore justice in our centers. In this article, I discuss how the current makeup of writing center administrators does not reflect the U.S. student population. As a response to this historic underrepresentation in writing center administration, I propose that we utilize structures from mentorship theory to develop actionable ways to bring diverse student voices to the forefront of writing center leadership. These methods for increased representation include tutor-led Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound (SMART) projects, tutors serving as professional development facilitators, and rap sessions. Ultimately, this article should serve as a guided starting point to help writing center administrators to continually critique and reflect on how they represent the voices of the student populations they serve. Keywords : administrative underrepresentation, peer mentorship, professional development, student diversity, writing center leadership

This article reports on the first stage of a mixed-methods community-based research project involving residents of a socioeconomically challenged neighborhood in Baltimore City, Richnor Springs, and service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses at Loyola University Maryland (Loyola). To measure outcomes, we analyzed student surveys from 80 respondents and critical reflections from two students. We also analyzed interviews from two students and two community members. Findings indicate that there were no statistical mean differences in the educational experiences between service-learning and nonservice-learning students; however, there were significant mean differences in transformational experiences. Findings also indicate that community members responded positively and that stakeholders valued the personal relationships that developed.

This study investigates the role of stasis, an ancient rhetorical tool with both heuristic and analytic capabilities, in entrepreneurial rhetoric, specifically in pitching and question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from a multiyear sample of Shark Tank pitches, the author found that funders expect entrepreneurs to account for stases of being, quality, quantity, and place. The findings suggest a series of associated questions within each stasis. When these questions are answered unsuccessfully, standstills occur within the funding argument; when they are successfully addressed, the stasis passes, and ventures are more likely to receive funding. The author discusses the implications of this study for entrepreneurship and professional communication.

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content and answerability.