Digital media abound, so technical communicators must continually invent new ways to communicate in these new technologies. They must understand new media and find the most effective ways to use them. Using rhetorical and ethical theory, the authors of this book analyze the changes to professional communication provoked by technological advancement. The book offers case studies and analysis to demonstrate approaches to network interactions such as phatic communication, rhetorical interaction, social listening, and artificial-intelligence (AI) agents. This book is divided into two sections. The first details rhetorical and ethical approaches in communication; the second examines four “Cases of Network Interaction.” The first half of the book explains how rhetoric and ethics can be used to help create successful networked communication. The second half recommends how to apply rhetoric and ethics in specific workplace settings. Each chapter contains detailed subheadings and a helpful conclusion summarizing its main points, a feature sure to help students and novices digest the theoretical concepts presented. The summaries will also help readers who must quickly read and understand a specific topic without having to read the book in its entirety. This book provides a fairly general overview of the main issues influencing communication using digital media and new technology. It offers case studies and key concepts that could be applied to a variety of fields. This book could be used as an introduction to corporate communication across industries. It focuses on a few key rhetorical concepts; therefore, other theories such as postcritical approaches are not considered. This book introduces rhetorical theory applied to realworld cases. Doing so might help a wider range of readers see practical applications for it, even though the book does not offer rules, checklists, or guidelines to follow in networked communication. Nevertheless, the book clearly offers a comprehensible introduction to cases and considerations for professional communication and network interaction.

Introduction: Professional communication instructors in transnational contexts face unique challenges when helping students transition into the workplace. These challenges include preparing students for multilingual workplaces and educational settings, as well as multicultural communication in English at transnational workplaces. About the case: The authors, working at an international branch campus (IBC) in the Middle East, wanted to revise their assignments in a technical writing course for engineers in order to better prepare students for the realities of professional communication in the region. Situating the case: Engineering students matriculate into an increasingly diverse workplace, but instructors may not adequately understand the needs of employers in transnational corporations. Methods: Semistructured interviews were conducted with students and alumni of the IBC, and transcripts were coded for common themes. Results/discussion: Students and alumni had different perceptions of workplace communication genres, expectations for detailed writing, and the ability to adapt rhetorical strategies for different contexts. Alumni experienced a gap between their professors' and their workplaces' expectations for business genres and level of detail. They also reported that one of their significant challenges was adopting a flexible mindset toward written and spoken communication practices. Conclusions: Professional communication instructors should emphasize the strengths of multilingual writers, particularly their sense of language difference and rhetorical attunement, to better prepare them for the transnational workplace, in both the US and abroad. The authors describe changes in their pedagogy to help students adopt a more flexible and industry-oriented mindset toward technical communication.

This study describes how reflections allowed students to express their audience awareness as they wrote a multiaudience messages packet. We present an analysis of 27 reflections in which students described their experience when responding to the various audiences. Students’ reflective depth varied, though deeper reflections demonstrate sophistication in considering audience constraints and values. Students reported difficulty with negative and persuasive messages and indicated concern about their credibility. Reflections can help instructors understand how students are considering audiences for business documents, which instructors can use to improve their instruction and assess how well students consider business audiences.

In this article, we present a study focusing on the learning experiences of business students in an organizational and marketing communication course. The pedagogical approaches of a flipped classroom, collaborative inquiry, and communication in the disciplines guided the planning of the course. A mixed-methods approach was used. The key findings include positive student evaluations of the pedagogies utilized. Moreover, a wide variety of learning outcomes was reported, particularly in the fields of crisis communication and workplace communication. The pedagogies utilized enabled a comprehensive model for teaching communication and contributed to relevant learning experiences and skill development for the 21st century.

This article offers readers 13 My Favorite Assignments that were presented at the Association for Business Communication’s 83rd annual conference held in Miami, Florida, in 2018. The teaching innovations offered include assignments that present quick, fun icebreaker exercises; visual communication and diversity; rhetoric; email; and informational interviews. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

Current literature suggests that students have equal or higher learning outcomes in a “flipped” classroom compared with a traditional lecture. However, there are few robust analyses of the flipped-class teaching method. This research uses a yearlong, quasiexperimental study across six sections of a business communication course to track student outcomes and perceptions of student engagement and learning. The results indicate that there were no significant differences between flipped and traditional classes across the learning and engagement variables in how students perceived these different conditions. However, the flipped condition produced better outcomes for oral and written assignments.

This study investigates how students perceive the outlining process. Students in two business communication sections completed a survey regarding outlining perceptions and reasons for outlining or not. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding, the researcher and an independent coder analyzed 34 students’ responses regarding outlining process, use, and reasons for outlining or not. Results indicate that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. Notable reasons for not outlining include concern for outlining time and difficulty generating content for the outline.

Engineering laboratory courses often contain laboratory reports as writing assignments to be used as an assessment and grading tool for the course. While laboratory report writing is a useful skill, this article discusses an assignment which was used as an alternative to a traditional laboratory report within a dynamic systems laboratory course. This writing assignment is framed within the context of a hypothetical scenario involving a supervisor requesting a laboratory experiment to compare the effectiveness of two different designs for controlling the speed of a gearbox unit. Performance goals are specified by the ``customer'' so that students have a reference with which to frame their responses. Despite the shortened length of the writing assignment, students are forced to apply critical thinking and use evidence from their experiments to answer the posed question with a clear conclusion.

Present Tense would like to welcome our new Annotated Bibliography Editor Matt Cox, an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. Matt has a background in Cultural Rhetorics and in technical and professional communication and will take over the responsibilities of providing developmental editing assistance for all new annotated bibliographies. Currently, Dr. Cox is working on […]

To help prepare students for the rigors of an online master’s degree in technical and professional communication, I created a course-embedded online student orientation (OSO) structured by the community of inquiry theory of online learning. The study researched the effect of the OSO on student satisfaction, student perceptions of online learning, and students’ program retention. The OSO was effective in helping students to reflect on their learning and demonstrated students’ interest in peer collaboration.

In this article, I analyze 73 circuit court opinions in which due process rights are weighed according to a little-known legal test called shocks the conscience. I also offer my observations of a federal trial in the U.S. district court in 2015 upon which the test was imposed. I reveal how requiring the shocks-the-conscience test confirms the authority of the state and silences those who have been singled out as individuals or as groups to be deprived of constitutional rights. In particular, professional communication scholars who examine emotional appeals as rhetorical strategies should find this article of interest.

We build on previous scholarship calling for sustainable growth in technical and professional communication programs through maintenance and reflection. Inspired by continuous improvement models used in industry, we offer GRAM—Gather–Read–Analyze–Make—a continuous improvement model designed to identify and align often overlooked practices and processes necessary to build and sustain programs.

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.

Background: Professional communication instructors give profuse feedback on student writing in service or introductory courses; however, professional communication has traditionally borrowed feedback practices from first-year writing. In addition, professional communication instructors have relied on lore instead of data when giving students feedback. Literature review: Three recent studies examine the content of feedback comments given by professional communication instructors; nevertheless, these studies open questions about how professional communication instructors enact their pedagogical values when giving feedback. Research questions: 1. What do instructors value when teaching professional communication service courses? 2. What do instructors emphasize in their feedback? 3. To what extent do instructors' values align with the feedback that they give on students' writing? Research methodology: To answer these questions, this pilot study does close qualitative work to test interview questions and a coding scheme formed by inductive content analysis. I triangulated four interviews about instructors' pedagogical values with content analysis of their 599 feedback comments on students' writing. Results and discussion: The results reveal three implications: Rhetorical terminology may contradict the goals of professional communication, overly conversational or directive feedback may not give students tools to improve their writing, and borrowing pedagogical training from first-year composition may not prepare instructors to teach professional communication. Conclusion: Tensions between instructors' values and their feedback comments highlight a lack of consensus about professional communication's pedagogical values for the service course, particularly higher order values, such as audience analysis or purpose through giving feedback.

Introduction: Technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors value audience awareness, using peer- and client-based projects to facilitate it. We explore how students' audience awareness is facilitated by the case method, which presents students with a professional communication task within a workplace scenario. Situating the case: Case-method research suggests including a detailed audience and situation, multiple genres, and multimedia. Few studies have explored how case materials facilitate students' audience awareness. About the case: A 12-week case that was consistent with case-method research asked students to respond to an engineering firm's internal problem with a proposal and report. How the case was studied: Students from two sections of a genre-based course completed reflections about their audience awareness after the proposal and report. We qualitatively analyzed 51 reflections. Results/discussion: Students stated they could understand the facts about their primary audience but couldn't identify secondary and tertiary audiences. Students stated they could identify audience needs, but they disagreed about the amount of detail to understand those needs. Also, students stated they could respond to the audience using appropriate evidence and writing style. Conclusions: When using the case method, instructors should know that students may need varying levels of detail to interpret their audience's needs. Also, including data and conflicting needs gives students opportunities to make strategic decisions about content.

Introduction: Under the influence of economic globalization, many enterprises are seeking more markets in developing countries, and more Chinese business expatriates are being sent to work in host countries. This study explores Chinese business expatriates' communication experience and identity work in three African countries, and their perceptions of the functions of English or the local language in transnational business communication. About the case: This article explores the following research questions: 1. How do Chinese business expatriates experience their cultural and national identity when using a foreign working language in a host country? 2. How do Chinese business expatriates evaluate the functions of a foreign language in their transnational communication? 3. What suggestions can be provided for future business expatriates and their transnational/globalizing companies? Situating the case: The process of identity construction and business expatriates' identity work in a host space are interpreted in the context of Hofstede and Hofstede's acculturation curve. Other key concepts related to transnational business communication, including third space as defined by Bhabha, are also addressed. Methods/approach: Using a case study approach, the researchers examine four participants' transnational business communication experiences and interpret their identity work through the data collected in the form of interviews. Results/discussion: The researchers find that the business expatriates realized the importance of English or local language communication competence in a transnational business space, although they still kept their Chinese cultural and national identity. Conclusions: This study contributes to transnational business communication by helping professionals to understand the language and cultural challenges faced by Chinese business expatriates, and offers suggestions for globalizing companies that send employees to host countries.

In clinical nursing simulations, a group of students provide care for a robotic patient during a structured scenario. As care is transferred from one group to another, they participate in a patient handoff, with outgoing students passing key information onto incoming students. In healthcare, the nursing handoff is a critical and perilous communication moment that is mediated by a range of participants and texts. Drawing on observations and video recordings of 52 simulation handoffs in the United States, this article examines how two student-designed texts – a collaborative patient chart and individual notes – are leveraged during the handoff. I also consider how handoff talk and writing changes as student nursing knowledge increases over the course of a year. By focusing on textual mediation of the simulated nursing handoff, this article contributes to existing research on professional writing pedagogy and to nursing scholarship on the handoff. Ultimately, it argues that a textual mediation framework can help bridge classroom and professional contexts by evaluating student writing not for how successfully it meets a set of imposed criteria but for how effectively it supports classroom activities.

This article offers readers 13 teaching innovations debuted at the 2018 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Miami, Florida. The ideas include communication analysis, client assessment and reporting, and oral presentations—all designed to enhance students’ communication skill building. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

Effective undergraduate instruction requires accurate knowledge of professional communication practices and employer expectations, but ongoing contradictions between academic and professional expectations reflect historical, rhetorical, and pedagogical causes for inaccurate presumptions. Taking a customer service perspective, one business faculty revised its undergraduate goals in terms of empirically determined employer expectations. Interviewing professionals familiar with expectations of entry-level business graduates, the authors identified 10 communication activities, each comprising three to nine subtasks that constitute entry-level communication competencies. The results suggest a need to reconsider traditional curricular organization and instructional focus across the business curriculum to develop relevant skills across all business majors.

We argue that language awareness and discourse analytical skills should be part of business communication curricula. To this end, we propose a three-step analytical model drawing on organizational and critical discourse studies, and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, to explore agency and action in business communication. Focusing on language and discourse helps students to analyze texts more systematically, researchers to gain deeper insights into organizational discourse, and practitioners to reflect on communication processes and produce texts with more impact. We view discourse as central to organizational processes and render a specific approach accessible and easy to integrate into business communication curricula.

This article extends a dialogue regarding how (and what) communication skills are stressed within business schools, which should be regularly examined and updated. Specifically, this article addresses which skills interns and employers perceive as important. Results indicate that interns and their supervisors have similar perceptions of which communication skills are most important. Furthermore, emphasis placed on communication skills in the business curriculum did not necessarily translate to perceived importance by the interns. Skills employers perceived to be important were compared with adequacy of interns’ skills. Writing, proofreading, interpersonal skills with customers, and listening were among the skills interns lacked.

The arts have not received much attention from business and professional communication (BPC) scholars who are interested in workplace communication. This article begins to fill that gap by explaining a course focused on the BPC that artists produce in their careers. Students learned BPC genres by addressing arts situations: They crafted email pitches to promoters, took promotional photography, created crowdfunding proposals, and more. I argue that teaching artist communication can give a new context to existing BPC assignments, encourage interdisciplinary initiatives, and allow for the incorporation of natively digital communication genres into existing courses.

Although most students have learned to succeed academically, by the time they enter our business communication courses, their time as students is almost over. This article describes the challenges facing “students who will soon stop being students” and introduces the professional online portfolio as a project which enables them to develop the confidence, the capacity, and a concrete platform with which to communicate with the world outside the black box of school.

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Oral presentations are a common genre in technical and business communication courses. While it is important for students to develop a professional ethos when presenting information, in this article I argue that textbooks’ discussion of professional dress and voice privilege cisgendered bodies and erase the differences and bodily experiences that transgendered individuals face. This may cause dissonance in trans students who may come to believe that they must choose between their genders and being professional.

This article presents an examination of research methods used in empirical research over a 5-year period in technical and professional communication. This examination reveals that the most common methods used are surveys, interviews, usability tests, observations, and focus groups. In addition, the field does incorporate research categories of case studies, experiments, and ethnographers. This examination, however, reveals serious shortcomings that need to be addressed for the field to have a sustainable research profile.

This study analyzes the December 2014 “nut rage” incident on Korean Air Lines by means of in-depth interviews with corporate communication experts. We examine how Korean Air managed this crisis of legitimacy, asking whether its legitimization strategy and tactics were effective. The authors argue that Korean Air breached both cognitive and moral legitimacy in terms of leadership, corporate culture, internal and external communication, and legality. The results demonstrate to other organizations what types of legitimacy resources and tactics are required in order to meet social expectations in their responses to crises.

Reaching Out GloballyIEEE's vision is to "be essential to the global technical community and to technical professionals everywhere, and be universally recognized for the contributions of technology and of technical professionals in improving global conditions."Like its parent organization, the IEEE Professional Communication Society has been working for more than two decades to address the needs of engineers and professional and technical communicators worldwide by making research in our discipline available to those who need to use it.In our TRANSACTIONS, we have published the work of increasing numbers of authors from outside North America, particularly from Europe and Asia, and have likewise added representation from these two continents to our Editorial Board.Although we recognize that English is the lingua franca of business, science, and technology these days, we also know that not everyone who is a potential member of the TRANSACTIONS audience reads and comprehends English fluently.Even for those with fair proficiency, reading only the abstract of a journal article may require time and attention that are in short supply.Being able to review abstracts more quickly should increase research efficiency although the full text of the articles is in English.

Business communication programs and business school competitions are a prevalent component of graduate-level business education. Both activities help students develop problem-solving skills, critical thinking, high-level communication, and applied experiential learning. While business competitions may aid in the development of advanced communication skills, to date there has been no comparison of the effectiveness of coursework, competitions, or both. Using U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top 100 U.S. MBA programs as a proxy for program quality, we find that business communication coursework provides greater benefits when compared with internal case competitions. Specifically, findings indicate a higher ratio of graduate business communication classes to internal competitions correlated to higher rank. Furthermore, reputational advantage was also associated with required communication coursework and a higher number of internal competitions offered for graduate business student participation.

This special issue asks us to refl ect on the transformative potential of disability studies to reimagine technical and professional communication (TPC). Informing this special issue is the notion that disability "enables insight---critical, experiential, cognitive, sensory, and pedagogical insight" (Brueggemann, 2002, p. 795). Rather than consider questions of access from the margins---e.g. after we receive a letter of accommodation from a student, when we need to satisfy a legal mandate, or when we turn to our organization's web accessibility checklist---disability studies places disability and difference at the center of our practices and pedagogies (p. 814).

Authors in issue 3.1 of *Prompt* present ideas for teaching proof writing in math, examining scholarly writing in the classroom, and reinvigorating approaches to teaching professional writing genres.

This essay describes a project that introduces undergraduate students in a technical and professional writing course to rhetorical genre studies, context, and ethics. In this project, students (1) study examples of meeting minutes and consider their functions within specific contexts, (2) take meeting minutes of a class session, and (3) analyze their minutes to abstract larger lessons on the rhetorical, epistemological, and ethical work of technical and professional writing. This project brings students' attention to the complex decision-making processes writers face as they seek to produce useful, ethical, recognizable professional documents.

This assignment demonstrates how writing instructors can cultivate students' mētis, a flexible and adaptive way of thinking, by requiring participation in naturalistic rhetorical situations that arise outside the classroom. The assignment, developed for an undergraduate, mixed-major professional writing course, asks students to pursue external professional opportunities. The affordances of naturalistic situations and the requirements of the assignment work together, enabling students to develop three key features of mētis: vigilance, tricks, and multiplicity. Exercising mētis improves students' chances of success when they pursue opportunities in competitive industries.

Technical communication scholarship is in the midst of a social justice movement with scholars interrogating considerations of race in technical professional communication (TCP) (Haas, 2012), revea...

Women continue to face difficulties in the technical and professional communication (TPC) workplace for a myriad of reasons. However, they are not powerless, and interviews with 39 female practitioners of TPC reveal that they use interactional power to maneuver within and around the system of the traditional workplace to solve problems of devaluation, exclusion, harassment, and siloing. A key aspect of being able to navigate power through interaction is becoming aware of the context in which power struggles take place and then using that knowledge to design new participation. Women who claim agency in the workplace understand that power is not possessed, but that they can access resources to participate in power shifts and dynamics.

This article reports findings from a month-long research project in Vietnam working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). The authors found that VAVA did not always abide Western prescriptions for “good” technical and scientific communication yet were extremely effective technical communicators among victims and families. This article reports findings that call for an expanded definition of what it means to practice good technical communication, especially in understudied cultural contexts.

Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down to the many nontenure-track faculty and graduate students teaching first-year writing. The authors introduce two methods of moving beyond writing program management to include greater attention to community engagement and leadership post-Trump: through revising curricula and course materials and by diversifying professional development opportunities. WPAs may find themselves in a rare moment where the pedagogical approaches for which we have long advocated—attention to marginalized voices, representation of complex arguments grounded in material realities, validation of the rhetorical import of nonacademic texts—are immediately practicable as a condition of civic engagement. Curricula and course materials may convey these commitments beyond the classroom. Further, the authors address the need for greater attention to professional development for faculty, particularly focusing on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They discuss two professional development resources beyond individual campus resources: the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR). By grounding this renovated image of the writing program administrator as a writing program leader, situated theoretically in leadership studies, the authors extend the work of scholars who see the WPA as a site of radical advocacy.

The value of higher education in the United States tends to be addressed in terms of the postmodern commodification of knowledge.As Lyotard (1984) reported, the grand narratives of modernity, which had unified knowledge and legitimated it as Truth or Emancipation, have disintegrated into incommensurate language games, fragmenting knowledge, which is now legitimated by performativity.According to Lyotard, each game consists of rules that form among its players a consensus on which utterances, or moves, are meaningful, with the objective of the game being to produce, with maximum efficiency, knowledge as a commodity: a game is legitimated when investment in it is exceeded by the economic value of the knowledge it produces; conversely, a game is delegitimated when investment in it exceeds the economic value of the knowledge it produces.As college tuition costs continue to outpace median income, with student loan debt having collectively surpassed a staggering $1.5 trillion, what return on an investment in the game of higher education can be expected by graduates entering a highly competitive global economy?It seems uncertain.Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Schlueter (2016) argued that with digital technology making information widely available, the purpose of colleges and universities must be to teach the critical thinking skills necessary to process that information.Having surveyed a number of university mission statements, Schlueter observed that higher education has indeed come to widely promote critical thinking as its central learning outcome.But at the same time, he contended, there exists as yet no consensus on what critical thinking is, whether it exists, and whether it can be taught.Given the stakes involved, it is clear, according to Schlueter, that "higher education has gambled on critical thinking" (para.7) and that it needs to secure a consensus on it "if we are not to lose our shirts on this bet" (para.22). 1 Schlueter's (2016) discussion of critical thinking suggests a conflict within performativity between how this knowledge operates and its legitimation in economic terms.As a gamble on what students will be able to do by graduation, critical thinking has essentially become a commodity in the futures market.The uncertainty of its value is, however, due not to the vicissitudes of the market but to an instability of the rules needed to produce critical thinking as a clear and coherent product, which can thereby be assigned a value.Consider that, beginning in 1981, when college tuition costs began to increase sharply, 2 so did the frequency of the phrase "critical thinking" appearing in American English books. 3It seems that as investment in the game of higher education has grown, it has been played more often.And yet, despite the stakes having been raised over these last four decades, research over this period has shown a range of critical thinking definitions, theories, and test results, reflecting, both implicitly and explicitly, variations in the rules of the game.So if higher education has gambled on critical thinking, it is a wager in which final gains or losses seem to be deferred indefinitely and can, therefore, be neither legitimated nor delegitimated by performativity.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.

This article examines the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rhetorical approaches in professional communication theory, introducing the theory of working closets as central to understanding how LGBT professionals navigate and succeed. The author presents case studies of LGBT professionals at the headquarters of a national discount retail company as examples of working closets and asks what the implications are for professional communication studies. He also looks at the need to learn from and through queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, and social justice frameworks, especially given the cultural turn of professional communication studies in the early 21st century.

Heeding previous scholars' calls for a critical investigation of the role of reflection in the professional development of tutors, this article examines reflections written by tutors in the context of conference records. More specifically, the authors investigate the consequences of incorporating a prompt to reflect on tutoring strategies into our online conference-records database. The authors first present the results of their opening coding of nearly 300 conference records, offering a taxonomy of specific types of reflections found in the conference records. The authors then identify three shifts in the content of conference records written after the introduction of the reflection prompt. Finally, the authors draw on analysis of tutor interviews to illuminate how the positive influence of the reflection prompt is inextricably linked to a larger culture of reflection that is often collaborative and leads to transfer of learning within and beyond the writing center.