Usability has been widely implemented in technical communication curricula and workplace practices, but little attention has focused specifically on how usability and its pedagogy are addressed in our literature. This study reviews selected technical communication textbooks, pedagogical and landmark texts, and online course syllabi and descriptions and argues that meager attention is given to usability, thus suggesting the need for more in-depth and productive discussions on usability practices, strategies, and challenges.

Field narratives that (re)classify technical genres as liberating for women risk supporting the notion that feminism is a completed project in technical communication scholarship. This article suggests that technical communicators reexamine the impact of past approaches to critical engagement at the intersections of gender studies and technical communication; cookbooks provide a material example. The authors illustrate how a feminist approach to cookbooks as technical/cultural artifacts can productively revise field narratives in technical communication.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

This article introduces Speculative Usability. Whereas traditional models of usability rely on the salient features of an object–user relationship focused around the uses for which the object was designed, the goal of Speculative Usability is to notice an object as it interacts with other objects (in addition to but including human users) and to be vulnerable to an object’s unintended effects. The payoff of this speculative approach is an increased inventional capacity for usability testing.

Women decide on about 80% of the goods that their household buys. But marketers often sell products, especially technical ones, that are designed by men and therefore are oriented largely toward their needs. Consequently, assembly instructions for these products are also oriented toward men’s needs. To illustrate the impact of gender orientation in assembly instructions, this study investigates whether theoretical cognitive or psychological gender differences have a practical influence on the usability of assembly instructions. This study has direct implications for technical writers who strive for a more universal design for such instructions.

This article introduces apparent feminism, which is a new approach urgently required by modern technical rhetorics. Apparent feminism provides a new kind of response that addresses current political trends that render misogyny unapparent, the ubiquity of uncritically negative responses to the term feminism, and a decline in centralized feminist work in technical communication. More specifically, it suggests that the manifestation of these trends in technical spheres requires intervention into notions of objectivity and the regimes of truth they support. Apparent feminism is a methodology that seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for feminist critique of contemporary politics and technical rhetorics. It encourages a response to social justice exigencies, invites participation from allies who do not explicitly identify as feminist but do work that complements feminist goals, and makes apparent the ways in which efficient work actually depends on the existence and input of diverse audiences.

This article reports the results of an experiment that was conducted to determine the impact of media synchronicity theory (MST) training on media-fit behavior, communication quantity, communication quality, and group effectiveness. MST training introduces students to a framework for assessing a media’s capabilities and matching those capabilities to a particular task. From three technical communication courses, 80 participants were randomly divided into two groups and compared using a between-subjects design. The MST training group reported significantly higher levels of media-fit behavior, communication quantity, and the communication-performance qualities of discussion quality, richness, and openness. The article discusses practical ways to implement MST training into technical communication group projects.

Our goal is to map the relationships between global open-access publishing, the accessibility of those publications to diverse users, and sustainability and preservation of digitally published and archived texts, in all their designed formats and media. We are short-handing these concepts through the word "access/ibility," which we take to encompass open access, access and preservation, and accessibility in terms of availability, usability, and disability.

As Open Educational Resources (OER) increasingly receive attention from academics, educational foundations, and government agencies, exemplars will emerge that lower student textbook costs by moving away from commercial publishers through self-publishing or curating web-based resources. Joe Moxley’s Writing Commons serves as a scaled OER model in its careful consideration of the processes involved in producing accessible resources that meet user needs. Writing Commons hosts hundreds of peer-reviewed resources on writing instruction for use as a course text or supplement by students and faculty in a variety of disciplines. Moxley’s work on the site reflects the challenges and rewards of putting the entire publishing process of educational resources in the hands of faculty.

While composition studies researchers have examined the ways social media are impacting our lives inside and outside of the classroom, less attention has been given to the ways in which social media—specifically Social Network Sites (SNSs)—may enhance our own research methods and methodologies by helping to combat research participant attrition and build a community around a research project. In this article, we share some of the successes and shortfalls of using SNSs for research purposes, based on our own experiences using Facebook in the context of our writing program’s Longitudinal Study of Student Writers. Specifically, we present five considerations related to the integration of Facebook for research—Building a Community, Sharing Study Data, Constructing Identity, Understanding Analytics, and Conducting Usability Testing—and we discuss how these methods can be extended to other SNSs.

This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka’s approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka’s pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes educational theory that insists upon the importance of disequilibrium. We then report how our students respond to our disequilibrating pedagogy, collecting survey responses via an IRB approved study. We hope these responses can help instructors interested in our postpedagogical notion of creativity anticipate and prepare for student discomfort and resistance—to recognize the fine distinction between productively confused and hopelessly lost. With that goal in mind, we conclude by addressing difficult questions of assessment.

Research problem: Our study focuses on how students collaborate online to produce specific written genres, using particular collaborative technologies to work together productively, and how instructor feedback and student perspectives on collaborative work influence those activities in online classrooms. Research questions: When composing using collaborative web-based writing applications, do students focus primarily on the interface or the text space? What kinds of expectations about collaborative writing do students bring to the interface and text space? To what extent can we characterize students' acknowledgement of a third space, what we have identified as “communicative interaction?” Literature review: Workplace collaboration is important because organizations increasingly demand effective collaborators, team members, and team leaders, and technologies for sharing, cobuilding, and feedback are readily available to support these activities. Student preparation for workplace collaboration is important because students struggle when they are asked to write together, particularly when the collaborative process involves new technologies, and yet knowledge of collaborative writing strategies and experience with collaborative technologies, such as Google Docs, are the very competencies that organizations expect of them. Methodology: Thirteen groups of 3 to 4 technical writing students and science communication students enrolled in online professional writing courses at a major research university wrote feature specifications and reports on the globalization of the sciences, respectively, using Google Docs within Google Drive. Sixteen of 37 students responded to a set of questions asking them to reflect on their experiences working collaboratively, learning new genres, using the collaborative environment, and revising with instructor feedback. Results and conclusions: We found that students struggled most with adapting their already established collaborative strategies grounded in face-to-face learning situations to an online learning environment, where they felt their means of communication and expression were limited. The results suggest that effective collaborative experiences, properly executed, represent a repertoire of competencies that go well beyond only technical considerations, such as being able to effectively assign roles, set milestones, and navigate the numerous tasks and processes of writing as a team. The small number of students and the single instructor with her own particular feedback style limit the study. Future research includes looking at how different feedback styles influence student collaborative writing.

This study examines previously untested variables that influence social loafing in professional and technical communication group projects by determining the influence of communication quality and task cohesion on social loafing. A set-up factors model, which included group size, peer review, project scope, and method of team formation, was also tested for means of comparison. The results indicated the communication quality and task cohesion model significantly reduced social loafing, explaining 53% of the variance in social loafing. The model of set-up factors only explained about 4% of the variance. The article discusses instructional strategies that foster quality communication to reduce loafing.

This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. Ipresent a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and pedagogical attention.

The authors provide a robust framework for using rhetorical foundations to teach multimodality in technical communication, describing a pedagogical approach wherein students consider the rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory—when developing texts beyond print. Students learn to assess their own work, reflecting on how each canon contributed to the rhetorical effectiveness of their multimodal projects. The authors argue for using the canons as a rhetorical foundation for helping students understand technical communication in the digital age.

Technical communication programs preparing students to perform as symbolic analytic workers can improve a student's creative problem-solving abilities by offering study-abroad opportunities. Newer research from the field of psychology is used as a conceptual framework for discussing the author's development of curriculum for a study-abroad offering within a professional writing program. Details on the study-abroad curriculum proposal such as course assignments, readings, credit hours, and program destination and logistics are included.

A field’s identity and sustainability depend on its research as well as on programs, practice, and infrastructure. Research and practice have a reciprocal relationship, with practice identifying research questions and researchers answering those questions to improve practice. Technical communication research also has an exploratory purpose, using the knowledge and methods of the field to explain how texts work in a variety of contexts. A gap between research and practice developed in the 1990s. Defining explicitly how the parts of our research and our practice connect to form a whole will give the field a stronger identity

In my half century as a technical communicator, I have seen many changes. The profession has evolved from one that supported the work of engineers and programers to one that stands on its own, providing important tools and capabilities to audiences. I too have evolved within the profession—from someone who had little idea what technical communication was, to a practitioner, to an educator. The changing nature of the profession and my participation in it has made for an exciting time—our profession is anything but dull.

Teaching technical writing without formal training can be daunting. However, there are many resources available that can provide background and materials for teaching. My approach involved reading textbooks and articles not only on approaches to technical writing but also on what students can expect once they complete their education and are hired. Journals both in the field and in similar fields, working as a technical editor or writer, and attending conferences and talking with both other academics and those in the field offer help. This article, therefore, describes my approach from the day I was hired to teach two technical writing courses to my retirement 37 years later.

This article proposes a more complex consideration of the idea-generation stage of the document design process. Survey data collected from multiple sections of graphic design and technical communication classes show that design software and other technology can help students generate solutions to design problems by enabling them to realize design options that they may not have known exist and to adopt a bricolage approach to design that facilitates the process. The author makes several recommendations for how instructors can negotiate the sketching-software divide in their classrooms to ensure that the invention process is optimized for all students.

As state and federal legislation continues to regulate women's reproductive health, it follows that the field of technical communication must continue to develop methodologies to facilitate stakeholder participation in health policymaking practices. Scott's (2003) scholarship on HIV testing and his "ethic of responsiveness" serve as a foundation for methods to broaden stakeholder participation. Yet, as current legislation attempts to regulate health decisions of female bodies, more explicit feminist methods inviting feminist perspectives to resist such anti-feminist legislation must be developed. Frost's (2013, 2014a, 2014b) apparent feminism serves as a useful methodology that builds upon Scott's methods to enact feminist interventional methods. This article provides a case study of the reVITALize Gynecology infertility initiative, a health intervention project that appears to function as an ally of apparent feminism. Applying an apparent feminist analysis to the initiative reveals limitations of the project's feminist commitments. To address the limitations of the initiative, the article articulates the need to expand apparent feminism's methodology by accounting for stakeholder participation throughout health intervention projects. This article posits that expanding feminist approaches to designing public stakeholder input is vital to upholding technical communication's commitment to advocacy and an ethical feminist commitment to facilitating spaces for all citizens to contribute as public intellectuals.

Background: The diffusion of component content management and structured authoring workflows and technologies in technical communication requires that instructors of documentation courses determine effective ways to teach component content management to students who may initially be intimidated by authoring environments and structures, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This teaching case describes how component content management and DITA were integrated into the Creating User Documentation course of an undergraduate professional writing program. Research questions: How can instructors of technical and professional writing best teach English and humanities students to operate within a structured authoring workflow? How can computational abstraction be combined with students' previously acquired genre knowledge to ease their adoption of the DITA to create technical documentation? Situating the case: The development of this course was informed by literature from a variety of scholarly and industry sources, which reveal connections between DITA, computational thinking, and Rhetorical Genre theory. Specifically, the concept of “layers of abstraction” guides the development of the course's structure, allowing students to separate and independently process the various aspects of a structured authoring workflow. How the case was studied: The case was studied informally through the experience of the authors as they developed and taught the course, through informal discussions and structured interviews with industry professionals, and through student reflections from discussion forum posts from Fall 2012 through Fall 2013. About the case: Initially developed with a focus on print manuals and online help, the course began teaching topic-based authoring in the mid-2000s; however, most enterprise-level editors and tools were cost-prohibitive for students and faculty. Furthermore, many computing concepts associated with structured authoring were intimidating for an audience of students in an English department. An affordable solution was adopting the open-source DITA standard, using free trials or open-source editors. The intimidation factor was minimized by designing the course around five layers of abstraction that draw on students' previous rhetorical knowledge: Layer 1: Developing quality documentation, Layer 2: Separating content from design, Layer 3: Authoring granular content with XML, Layer 4: Authoring and linking Component Content Management modules with DITA, and Layer 5: Single-sourcing and content reuse. This case discusses each layer of abstraction, the associated assignments for each layer, and the results of each layer based on student feedback. Results and conclusions: Although the course is not universally loved by students, it has seen many successes and provides a much-needed foundation in component content management and structured authoring for students who might become technical communicators. The teaching team has learned to avoid overemphasizing coding and automation in structured authoring, maintain a solid grounding on writing principles and good technical communication requirements, and draw upon students' existing knowledge of genres and their constraints.

Background: When an organization decides to adopt a technology, such as a content-management system (CMS), the choice affects writing styles and processes, and conversely, writing styles affect the implementation of the technology. This case study compares and contrasts the experiences of writers in organizations that implemented different types of CMSs: a web CMS (WCMS) and a component CMS (CCMS), with a focus on the different types of training given to each group to facilitate the implementations. Research questions: (1) What are the dependencies between technology choices and the corollary editorial constraints that writers must consider in order to realize the benefits that the technology can bring? (2) What types of training are needed to ensure that writers become fully productive in a collaborative, structured-authoring environment? Situating the case: When adopting structured information technologies, such as CMS, organizations seek to reduce costs and improve efficiencies through the reuse and better management of content components, such as text and images, which can significantly reduce the costs of translation, reproduction, and maintenance of publications. Structured information technologies, such as a CMS, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Darwin Information Technology Architecture (DITA) affect technical communicators by changing writing styles to a more structured, topic-based approach, by introducing new tools and concepts for authoring and publishing, and by requiring more involvement in the selection, use, and maintenance of the technologies. Previous efforts to address these issues through training include works by Critchlow, who addressed the use of database systems to address challenges in developing documentation in collaborative environments; Edgell, who related how technical communicators proposed a CMS-based documentation solution to a software firm; and Lanier, who described how one organization overcame the resistance to new structured information technologies by writers. Methodology: The case was studied as an experience report by one of this article's authors (Bailie), in which the organizations engaged a consultant during their CMS implementation projects. The observations are qualitative and reflect consulting engagements with two teams over a period of almost three years. About the case: A common problem in implementing CMSs is interdependencies between content structures, on which the technology depends, and the editorial changes required to ensure that the content is best structured to take full advantage of the capabilities of the technology chosen. This case describes a four-phase training process provided to two clients: one with several contributors to the content-management effort in a single location; the other with more than a dozen contributors in several locations. Each client received four phase of training: (1) theoretical training-understanding pertinent theories behind good content development; (2) application of theory-how to apply the theories to their workplace; (3) software training-learning the new software to produce the content; (4) production-support immediately following training, during implementation. The results of the training were to increase the skill levels of the writers to understand how to leverage content in powerful ways using sophisticated technology. Conclusions: Determine the production needed for the content when choosing a class of CMS to address those production needs. Afterwards, match the training of the writers to the complexity of the system. Content strategists, project managers, technical communicators, and others involved in implementing a CMS need to allow sufficient time and training for writers to adjust their skills to the new technology and the new processes and techniques required to effectively use them.

Background: This case study examines the implementation of an early single-source (the reuse across documents and projects of content stored in a database) content-management system among technical communicators and how they influenced the decision to adopt the technology. Research questions: (1) Why was a component content-management system developed and what was the process of its implementation? (2) How did technical communicators, functioning as both adopters and change agents, influence the new system's adoption? What affected their perceptions of agency during the implementation? Situating the case: Diffusion of Innovations Theory defines innovation adoption as a communication process that occurs over time. When participating as change agents in innovation diffusion, technical communicators are uniquely qualified to support technological change because they are skilled in making technologies accessible to users. Technical communicators can also be the recipients of change, particularly when organizations adopt new technologies, such as content-management systems. Given their expertise at the interface of technology and its users, technical communicators are well positioned to impact the adoption of content-management systems. Methodology: A single, retrospective instrumental case design examined the early 2000s' implementation of a single-source content-management system in the technical communication group of a global company. Surveys, interviews, and document analysis were used to examine the case over a six-year period About the case: A single-source system was adopted to contain costly increases in document cycle time resulting from: (1) customized production of complex and varied products and (2) new European Union regulations requiring all product documentation written in the national language at the point of sale. The system stored product information in a central repository as numbered modules that could be reused in future deliverables. Doing so brought greater continuity to authoring, translation, and publication of content. The system eliminated retranslation of information and automatically recorded and applied any subsequent changes to all affected documents. Technical communicators functioned as change agents and adopters during the system's implementation. Technical communicators in the organization had the choice to adopt the system, and adoption rates varied among staff members. Despite preparation for possible resistance, several staff initially rejected the new system. Those who adopted it did so quickly and created a shared meaning about the system with change agents, a meaning not shared with resistors. The decision of whether to adopt was influenced by perceptions of the innovation and of agency (positive and negative) about the change agents. Conclusions: A pro-innovation bias can impede the creation of shared meaning between change agents and adopters. Emphasizing technical knowledge about the innovation over persuasive elements of empathy for the uncertainty it produces and identity of what it means to be a writer can also stifle adoption. As change agents, technical communicators influence adoption through their rhetorical understanding of situation and capacity for establishing contexts that allow for the construction of shared meaning between change agents and potential adopters. Also, a perceived lack of decisive leadership or a champion for the change risks restricting the power of change agents to influence adoption and can create a space for protracted resistance to it.

Research problem: The widespread adoption of component content management in organizations calls for a comprehensive summary of the territory of this phenomenon. A summary provides stakeholders in component content management with a sense of how the practice has evolved and its implications to research, theory, and future practice. The last such review was published in 2003. This integrative literature review is intended to fill the gap in the literature by describing the current state of component content management as presented in the current publications. Research questions: How is “content” currently defined, described, and approached in the component content-management literature? What processes and tools are organizations adopting to achieve the goals of component content management? Literature review: The theoretical orientation of this review is Rhetorical Genre theory, which allows for classifying individual components as a genre characterized by granularity, reusability, and potentiality. Component content management gained recognition in the mid-1990s when early adopter organizations were looking for more efficient and effective approaches to reusing information between similar products or versions of the same product. Developments in the 2000s include a surge of publications focused on defining and describing component content management; new best practices for implementing a component content-management initiative; evolving processes and technologies for creating highly engineered, modular content that can automatically adjust to specific user requests and device capabilities; and collaborative efforts to integrate content creation and management strategies across organizational units. Scholarly and trade publications increasingly explore different concerns; whereas scholarly publications tend to offer critical perspectives on component content management, trade publications tend to describe processes and technologies and articulate best practices. Both focus on the goals of component content management, such as single sourcing, content reuse, multichannel publishing, and the structured content components required to achieve these goals. Methodology: To answer the research questions, we reviewed the body of literature on component content management. To do so, we searched library databases, Google, and Amazon.com for articles and books in both the scholarly and trade literature; we also sought out publications by well-known voices in component content management who direct successful consultant and/or research organizations. We then classified selected publications in relation to research questions and identified themes within each research question. The review did not explore other types of content management. Results and conclusions: Current component content-management literature suggests that component content management has evolved from a practice focused on single sourcing and reuse strategies for product documentation to a mature discipline concerned with designing pre-sales and post-sales information products for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. In recent years, trade publications have led the way to standardizing the discipline's core concepts, methodologies, processes, and technologies, such as structured content, structured authoring, single sourcing, component-based content strategy, Extensible Markup Language authoring tools, and component-content-management systems. Scholarly publications, however, have had comparatively little impact on advancing the discipline of component content management because only a handful of publications have focused on the topic and almost no crosstalk exists between these publications and the trade literature. Several questions about the practices of component content management still need to be answered, particularly in the areas of multilingual communication and content quality and usability. Based on the results of the literature review, we call for a coherent, robust, and ambitious component content-management research agenda that addresses topics such as content quality and usability, the diffusion of content-management systems, and global content management and that leads to studies that both advance scholarship and improve component content-management practice.

The articles in this special issue focus on content management. Here, content management is used to refer to a particular type of content management: component content management. Component content management is an interdisciplinary area of practice characterized by methodologies, processes, and technologies that rely on principles of reuse, granularity, and structure to allow communicators to create and manage information as small components rather than as entire documents. An example of component content management is a product user guide that can be generated on demand. A customer who has questions on how to use particular product features, for instance, might select relevant topics from a menu available on a product support webpage or mobile application and, upon submitting a request, receive a just-generated customized guide that meets his or her immediate information needs. When information is created and managed as small components, these components can be assembled and published in myriad ways, as in the case of the above example. By shifting the focus of information development from entire documents to reusable units of information, content management has brought on a magnitude of changes to the field of professional and technical communication over the past 15 years. It has changed work processes and practices and, in doing so, redefined what it means to be a communicator. The promise of component content management

Interviews with 14 technical communicators reveal that skills in rhetorical invention help them creatively address communication problems. They define creativity in relation to four interrelated exigencies of invention: thinking like a user, reinvigorating dry content, inventing visual ideas, and alternating between heuristic and algorithmic processes. They recognize intrinsic factors such as curiosity and sympathy as motivations for their creativity, while being conscious of the external factors (people, money, and time) that may restrain creativity.

Reading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay "Semantic and Poetic Meaning," this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a "mathematical" ideology of language is an attempt to render language "neutral" and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.

This article analyzes a proposal submitted to a funding unit in Michigan Technological University by a PhD Forestry student. A rhetorical-cultural approach of the text provides evidence to argue that scientific writing is rooted in a cultural practice that valorizes certain kinds of thought, practices, rituals, and symbols; that a scientist’s work is grounded and shaped by an ideological paradigm; hence, scientific texts have material existence. We find out that science writing is kairotic, selective, and persuasive. The results of the analysis provide enough insights for technical communicators to think about the role that institutions and disciplines play in knowledge production. Thus, technical communicators will not only think about rhetorical moves when they are composing, they will also think about the articulations between contexts and ideological practices and how they shape the identity of writers and communicators.

Quad charts are a genre frequently used in scientific and technical environments, yet little prior work has evaluated their potential for reinforcing technical communication fundamentals. This article provides background information about quad charts and notes the benefits of implementing quad charts in the classroom. In particular, introducing engineering students to this genre appeals to their tendency to outline information and incorporate visuals in the planning stages of the composing process. The authors share their approach for integrating quad charts within a collaborative project in a fluid dynamics course and note the ways in which the genre facilitated effective project planning and communication within student teams.

Ethics and technical communication have a long history. Much of the discussion has ignored, though, the evil in language—overnaming. We see clearest this evil in what some have called “administrative evil.” Technical communicators, like all good rhetoricians, need to understand how to respond to it. Overnaming as part of “administrative evil” is that evil which grounds all other evils. It is a certain understanding of language and what naming can do. When we overname, we try to control words to mean one thing eternally. Rhetoric is a move of renaming those words that have been overnamed. Such invention is needed as part of any rhetorical education for technical communicators.

Culture as a research site and tool has been well established in the field of intercultural business and technical communication. In recent years, the perspective of culture as an ongoing process responding to contextual forces has been widely embraced in the field. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of culture helps communicators make contextual evaluations in intercultural business communication practices. While researchers strive to examine the dynamic nature of culture and contextual factors’ influence on culture and communication, little efforts has been made to examine the process of a cultural element’s generation, development, and transmission. To understand the notion of culture as a dynamic process for effective intercultural business and technical practices, it is necessary to conceptualize or describe how a cultural element or unit originates and develops along an evolutionary path. In this study, we focus on how the online meme serves as an empirically useful unit of culture, explore an online meme’s evolution process when it successfully transfers from an online marketplace to cultural space, and identify the qualities that constitute the success of the online meme.

When games are approached as a pedagogical methodology, the homologies between games and technical communication are highlighted: pedagogy that teaches people to play and succeed within certain confines; classroom assessment that provides meaningful feedback to encourage self-improvement; instructional design that incorporates gaming theory and game design principles; and usability to ensure optimum success. This article provides an overview of these topics for instructors to consider when designing a technical writing course as a game.

This article establishes traits of adaptable communicators in the 21st century, explains why adaptability should be a goal of technical communication educators, and shows how multimodal pedagogy supports adaptability. Three examples of scalable, multimodal assignments (infographics, research interviews, and software demonstrations) that evidence this philosophy are discussed in detail. Asking students to communicate multimodally drives them to effectively filter information, remix modes, and remake practices that are core characteristics of adaptable communicators. Beyond teaching students how to teach themselves as an essential part of living in an information society, contending with new and unfamiliar tools also prepares students for their roles as empathic mediators in the workplace.

Although most technical communication pedagogy provides students with solid advice on how to visualize particular numerical representations, it underproblematizes the rhetorical decisions we make in choosing which numbers to display in the first place. This pedagogical reflection uses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of interpretative level to foreground the rhetorical choices that underlie our decisions on how to summarize, aggregate, and synthesize the data we visualize. It then describes two informal classroom activities that emphasize the importance of interpretative level and help students see the recursive nature of data visualization and invention.

The design of interactive applications for online communication is an ongoing area of research within technical communication. This study reports on the development of an interactive sea-level rise (SLR) viewer, a data visualization tool that communicates about the potential effects of SLR along coastlines. It describes the formative evaluation of a location-specific SLR viewer created via integral stakeholder engagement. Participants performed a series of tasks, answered questions about the tool's usability and communicative effectiveness, and made suggestions for ways to improve its application to desired tasks. The authors discuss the implications of this study for visual risk communication and make recommendations for others developing similar interactive data visualization tools with audience input.

In technical communication education, design is often narrowly and essentially framed as execution of features. This approach fails to account for the innovative phase of user research, the iterative design process, and contextual factors such as workflow and governance. Inspired by Alan Cooper's Goal-Directed Design (2014), this paper advocates for a "design strategy" approach to the practice and pedagogy of design in technical communication. In particular, it calls for treating design as a process of research, discovery, prototyping, execution, and evaluation. This design process must strategically serve organizational objectives and user goals.

Increasingly, health and medical communication involves a global perspective. This perspective now includes coordinating international efforts ranging from treating globally dispersed patients to containing infectious diseases. In many cases, the focus of such information is instructional---content that tells individuals how to perform certain health-or medical-related processes. In such situations, usability is essential to success. That is, individuals must be able to use instructional materials as intended to achieve a particular purpose or objective. Communication designers therefore need to identify approaches that can facilitate the usability of health and medical content in a range of international settings.

Though usability is a must for all new applications, small organizations often lag behind in this area. This trend is frequently posed as a resource problem: User Experience design (UX) teams, usability testing software, and professional web developers are typically lacking in cash-strapped small businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions, so creating cutting-edge designs may seem impossible. We propose that what is lacking in these settings is actually knowledge of effective design workflows, however, not resources. What is lacking is a sound understanding of UX and an effective means of mobilizing existing resources. Based on a case study of a redesign process for a mobile application, we present evidence that all organizations can build awesome applications if they simply learn how to better manage their design processes.

This paper explores the potential for technical communicators to employ usability research with risk-based interactive geovisualization technologies as a method of cultivating "critical rhetorics of risk communication" for local communities. Through integrating theories from usability studies and risk communication, I offer some new directions for thinking about the productive usability of online, participatory technologies that promote citizen engagement in science. I argue that the key tenets of productive usability afford technical communicators the opportunity to build localized knowledge of risk in real, local users, which in turn improves the capacity for a community and its stakeholders to more effectively communicate risk.

Screencasting is a technology that enables the user to record screen activity on video while also capturing audio or video narration of the lecturer demonstrating that screen activity. This technology has improved over the years, and has now become streamlined enough to be integrated easily in popular learning platforms like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle. The technology’s high usability factor and the varieties of screencasting software now available as open source makes screencasting appealing to writing instructors, not only as a means to improve teaching, but also as a tool for students to create and engage with multimedia texts that facilitate the acquisition of contemporary literacy skills. In the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English proposes that 21st century definitions of literacy must, among other things, include the ability of writers and readers to analyze, create, and interact with multimedia texts and to gain proficiency with the use of modern technologies. I argue that screencasting is a practical and creative technology that can be used for a variety of purposes: to address 21st century literacy requirements in writing classes, to improve teaching effectiveness in both online and “flipped classroom” learning, and to enhance the instructor’s social presence in online learning environments. I give examples from my own teaching experience using Camtasia and ScreenFlow software, as well as review some popular applications of screencasting technology currently in use in academic environments.

This article is based on the idea that there is latent storytelling already in proposals. It explores the various ways in which storytelling functions as a pedagogical model of teaching the writing of proposals in business and technical writing courses. The central premise is that stories, like proposals, are forms of discourse that place events sequentially from beginning to end with meaningful and graspable connections in between. Stories take (identified) audiences into account by being selective of events that are carefully rearranged and described through composites of scenarios and characters. This article explores those storytelling patterns in theory and in practice. It aims to enhance the perspective of teaching proposal writing by calling attention to a seemingly inconsequential or unrelated notion – storytelling.

Research problem: Over the past decade, the popularity of fantasy sports games has grown dramatically. A fantasy sport is a simulation game in which game players act as owners to build, manage, and coach imaginary teams that compete against one another, based on statistics generated by actual players or teams of a professional sport. In line with this, we have seen the emergence of various forms of media content being produced directly for those who participate in fantasy sports games-the most prolific example of this is writing for fantasy sports. This study aims to establish an understanding of how fantasy sport articles are currently being constructed by assessing the contributions of professional journalists and amateur writers. Research questions: RQ1: If the standardization of written discourse genres stems from the reciprocity between generic conventions and the responses to situations, then what are the differences between the discourse strategy used by professional journalists and that by their amateur counterparts in fantasy sports writing? RQ2: What are the writers' rhetorical goals and the reader-writer relationships they wish to establish through the fantasy sports texts? Literature review: This study is rooted in the notion of genre, a communicative event through which the writer and reader interact to make meanings in a particular context. Communication of fantasy sports involves the production of content that provides readers with news, analysis, and opinions about-and knowledge of-matters that concern the games, thus creating pools of intelligence which other fantasy sports players can use, add to, argue against, or ignore. This amateur-produced content and resulting knowledge communities formed by fantasy sports players have led to a genre development that professional communicators should examine because it reflects so much technical documentation and instructions have migrated into user-generated spaces. “The move” in genre analysis is a meaningful rhetorical unit that is related to the communicative purpose of a social activity and that contributes to the text's overall strategy within its situational context. Moves operate in coherence rather than isolation in a text. Methodology: A discourse analysis was conducted on 60 fantasy sports texts (30 by professional journalists and 30 by amateur writers) randomly selected from a few specific sources in 2012. A custom move scheme was devised for analyzing fantasy sports texts in this study. The results were analyzed using a chi-square test. Results and discussion: Results reveal significant differences between the discourse strategy used by professional journalists and that by amateur writers. These differences include amateur writers differing to some extent in their rhetorical goals from professional journalists as they offer media consumers a more balanced spread of information, that professional journalists place a substantially lower value on making predictions, that amateur writers and professional journalists share similar regard in terms of the appropriate amount of casualness to include in their writing although amateur writers are more included to build casualness in their articles, and that the use of writing techniques to invite further connection or engagement from readers is being underutilized by both professional and amateur writers. The major implications for the professional communicators are the insights into user-generated content, an approach in which organizations increasingly rely on for their product and service documentation.

Research problem: No study has explored how incorporating personas into heuristic evaluation of products, namely websites, affects the kinds of findings reported and the recommendations presented by usability evaluators. Research questions: (1) Do findings resulting from heuristic evaluations of a website without the use of personas differ from findings resulting from heuristic evaluations of the same website with the use of personas? (2) Do findings from persona-based heuristic evaluations in which evaluators develop their own personas differ from findings from persona-based heuristic evaluations in which evaluators are given personas? (3) If findings and recommendations are different, how do they differ? (4) How does the use of personas affect the evaluators' confidence in the findings of a heuristic evaluation? Literature review: First, previous research of heuristic evaluation has concluded that although heuristic evaluation is inexpensive and does not require advance planning, it has several shortcomings, including its too-intense focus on minor issues and its inability to capture all usability issues. Second, data-driven personas, which have long been a resource in user-centered design, have been suggested as a way to improve or enhance heuristic evaluation, and several studies suggest that usability professionals are indeed using personas in their evaluations. However, no empirical study has assessed heuristic evaluations that include personas. Methodology: In this exploratory study involving three sections of an advanced technical writing course, groups of evaluators conducted a heuristic evaluation of a website. Each section was randomly assigned a different condition with which they would conduct the heuristic evaluation: (a) a traditional heuristic evaluation, (b) a persona-led heuristic evaluation in which the personas were given to the evaluators, or (c) a persona-led heuristic evaluation in which the evaluators themselves created their own personas. Each group wrote a report identifying the major problems with the website and provided recommendations to solve the identified problems. The evaluators completed pretesting demographic surveys and posttesting confidence surveys. Results and discussion: This exploratory study found few detectable differences in the findings reported by groups that used personas in heuristic evaluation and groups that did not use personas. The groups that used personas were more likely to report findings related to navigation than the groups that did not use personas, while the groups that did not use personas were more likely to report findings related to design than the groups that used personas. The groups that created their own personas were more likely than the other groups to include complex issues in their reports and include language that directly references users and user needs. All groups were confident in their findings.

Research problem: Subversive environmental texts, those that strive against hegemonic discourse, such as the book Ecodefense, have a long history of use by radical environmentalists as a means for recruitment and distribution of best practices. This study aims to investigate the role of plain language in the subversive text Ecodefense, and consider some ethical implications of plain language by conducting a close textual analysis. Research questions: (1) Is the subversive text Ecodefense an artifact of plain language? (2) If Ecodefense is written in plain language, what does that suggest about the inherent ethicality of plain language? Literature review: Plain language refers to clear expression designed to help users achieve desired goals. In the sense that it is a communication practice, it is guided by standards put forth by various agencies and bureaucratic bodies. In the sense that it is a movement, plain language is characterized by the proliferation of organizations advocating for plain language practices in society. This study is rooted in the investigation of the ethical practices of social movements. It considers the ethics of plain language practices when they are put toward subversive ends and explores the ethical value of plain language itself. Methodology: Ecodefense is analyzed using the Center for Plain Language's (CPL) Plain Language checklist and Writemark's criteria for documents, which includes consideration of the audience, structure, language content, and design of a text, as well as usability testing. Results and conclusion: Analysis shows that Ecodefense is partially representative of plain language use and practice under the CPL's standards, and appears somewhat more fully representative under Writemark's standards, which are designed for use by a trained assessor. Analysis further suggests that adherence to checklist-driven language practices may unwittingly enable an ethic of exigence; thus, research is needed into the ethical implications for list-driven, or standards-based, rhetoric in order to ensure that plain language practices consider long-term implications for users and for organizations that employ these practices.

Background: Virtual teams collaborate across distances using information communication technologies (ICTs). A distinctive set of communication skills is needed by people who work successfully in virtual teams, and few universities or companies provide structured education and training in virtual teamwork. At a midsized southeastern Masters Comprehensive University, professors from the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education came together to explore how they might use cross-disciplinary student teams (groups comprised of students with different backgrounds and educational goals) to teach concepts in their own disciplines while providing students with the opportunity to become more proficient in virtual team communication. Research questions: (1) Can cross-disciplinary student team projects successfully support learning in virtual team communication as well as address the learning objectives of specific courses? (2) What can faculty learn from a cross-disciplinary teaching model that can be applied to virtual teams? Situating the case: Experiential learning is based on performing real tasks and reflecting on that process; it benefits learners by engaging them in complex, authentic situations. Virtual teams are significant because they support a great deal of the work currently taking place in our global economy; they are significant in higher education because students need to develop skills in international virtual communication before they are introduced to high-stakes work environments. In previous cases, students have collaborated across national cultures to develop project deliverables, such as websites, reports, and usability studies and present them in virtual environments using such tools as WebEx, Skype, and live streaming. How this case was studied: The findings from this case are based on individual student reflections, which were used to create a data matrix for each project, and instructor observation and evaluation. About the case: In Spring 2013, six faculty from the same university worked together to incorporate virtual teams into their classrooms. These six faculty members were divided into two groups of three with each group representing three colleges mentioned earlier. The faculty developed two interdisciplinary projects (one on infographics and another on social media) that enabled rich and diverse student collaboration. In both groups, the three faculty leaders worked together to define a project scope that students could achieve and that would relate to learning goals in each discipline. Conclusions: The lessons learned from this experience are that: (1) technical challenges will occur; (2) students from all disciplines must receive the same information; (3) instructors must balance respect for their colleagues and support for their students; (4) team assignments need to be consistent and fair; (5) instructors need to establish appropriate and fair assessment measurements for their own students; and (6) projects need to be realistic in order to show the students the value of virtual work.

This collection of 11 narratives is a well-crafted assemblage of stories that illustrate diverse experiences in the technical communication academic program offices at colleges and universities across the country. This book is intended for those who are responsible for creating and administering technical communication programs and aims to provide its readers with lessons learned from the field. The readers of this book will come away with some thoughtful points to consider as they work within the framework of their own academic resources, whether it involves multidiscipline departmental influences, or resistance to change from long established traditions.

Women technical communicators helped to organize many of the first professional associations for technical communicators in the 1940s and 1950s. For some of these women, organizing was an occupational closure strategy of revolutionary usurpation: They may have hoped to position themselves favorably to shape a future profession that was not predicated on hidden forms of their inclusion. Exclusionary and demarcationary forces, however, seem to have ultimately undermined their efforts, alienating some of them and inducing others to adopt a strategy of inclusionary usurpation. In addition to using gender-sensitive revisions of occupational closure theory to explain the phenomenon of the woman organizer, the author chronicles the emergence of 8 professional associations for technical communicators and identifies the women technical communicators who helped to organize them.