Background: Undergraduate engineering students often receive insufficient support when crafting résumés. Most notably, there is often a lack of disciplinary-specific instruction and a lack of emphasis on the persuasive function of résumés. Ultimately seeking to strengthen instructional materials, this study investigates a way to quantify the quality of engineering résumés, focusing specifically on the use of disciplinary discourse. Research questions: How do engineering résumés exhibit disciplinary discourse? How can disciplinary discourse be quantified as a way of promoting strong engineering résumé writing and professional development skills? Literature review: This project builds on research exploring the qualities of effective résumés. It extends on work establishing disciplinary differences in desired résumé qualities, as well as work characterizing résumé writing as an opportunity for professional identity development. Grounded in activity theory, this project seeks to elucidate the “rules” of effective engineering résumés at the lexical level. Methodology: This project analyzed a corpus of 31 engineering résumés through both qualitative and quantitative means. Résumés were initially ranked via a rubric, then coded for disciplinary discourse according to the American Association of Engineering Societies' Engineering Competency Model. Disciplinary discourse scores were then analyzed through descriptive statistics. Results and conclusion: Significant differences in the use of disciplinary discourse were found among strong, moderate, and weak résumés. Though these results are not generalizable due to the small corpus size, they indicate that disciplinary discourse may be a fruitful area for future research on résumés and the development of pedagogical materials.

This study aims to investigate the different and competing perspectives of stakeholders of cultural heritage sites by examining the Mutianyu Great Wall in China.Literature review:Most studies focus on investigating the tourism destination image from the perspective of only one stakeholder, and only a small amount of research has attempted to integrate the perspectives of competing stakeholders into a single study.Research questions:1. How did the business operator perceive the Mutianyu Great Wall? 2. How did UNESCO perceive the Mutianyu Great Wall? 3. How did international tourists on TripAdvisor perceive the Mutianyu Great Wall? 4. What are the dynamics among the three stakeholders' perceptions? 5. In those dynamics, what are the contested issues in the Great Wall's heritage preservation and tourism development? Methodology:The study adopts a discursive approach to social constructivism in examining the images of the site as perceived by the three important stakeholders. It incorporates qualitative thematic and multimodal discourse analysis with quantitative high-frequency word analysis, supplemented by an interview with the heritage site administrator and a field trip. Results:The business operator perceived the Mutianyu Great Wall as a scenic spot for modern rural tourism, UNESCO emphasized its historical and cultural significance, and international tourists perceived it as a hybrid image.Conclusions: The study identified a preservation-growth continuum and showed different and even competing perspectives. It also discussed two contested issues in the field. The study contributes to heritage studies by developing an interdisciplinary discursive framework and suggests practical implications to heritage management and professional communication.

An analysis of user interactions, proceedings papers, and Association for Business Communication–sponsored journals reveals an absence of attention to accessibility and disability. While researchers may have demonstrated a passing awareness of the 1990 American with Disabilities Act (ADA) and its implications, so far those implications have not taken center stage. Researchers in fields related to business and professional communication have been publishing work informed by Disability Studies for some time. Thus, a scholarly agenda for accessibility and disability in business and professional communication is long overdue, with a need for studies that address both theory and practice.

This article addresses the importance of teaching transformative usability and accessibility concepts through the lens of disability studies in general business and professional communication courses. It argues that when students learn to analyze audiences, include diverse users, and foresee accessibility before the final draft because they practice user-centered design, their documents become more accessible for all users and situations. It presents a four-unit course plan that integrates disability studies and usability, including legal requirements. The unit plan advocates considering disability and diverse users and uses at the beginning of the design process.

Despite the excellent work by scholars who invite us to consider disability, social justice, and business and professional communication pedagogy, little attention has been given to what a disability- and social-justice-centered business and professional communication course might look like in design and implementation. This case study offers an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways disability advocacy and civic engagement manifest themselves in foundational business writing theories and practices. This simulation enabled students to engage with social justice issues by understanding access as an essential part of business and professional communication.

This article explores pedagogical frameworks closely associated with d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing persons from the perspective of a disabled instructor to increase student awareness of the needs of diverse audiences they will encounter in the workforce. The author argues that students and instructors can use captioning theory to strategize one of the harder business communication genres, the presentation, for d/Deaf audiences to make communication more accessible. By raising critical awareness of the limits of technology, current trends in pedagogy, and disability, this article seeks to further the conversation about providing accessibility for disabled users in the classroom.

A hallmark of business and professional communication is an emphasis on pragmatic but theoretically grounded work. Thus, business and professional communication scholars are ideally suited to turn the theories found in disability studies into practice. In this article, I do just that by creating a theory—orienting access—that draws on concepts from disability studies. Orienting access calls for business and professional communication faculty to consider alternate pedagogies to ensure that our classrooms are truly accessible to all students. It also models the behaviors to teach how to design and create information that is accessible for all audiences.

This article investigates how normative attitudes about work construct barriers to workers who are blind and visually impaired. The researcher collected narratives about rhetorical experiences from blind and visually impaired participants in the United States and analyzed accounts of these workplace interactions to identify rhetorical commonplaces that drive arguments about work. These commonplaces reveal the ableist assumptions that construct access barriers and constrain rhetorical possibilities for disabled workers’ self-advocacy. The author proposes that business and professional communication students and practitioners should engage in collaborative approaches to flexible thinking and leadership necessary for reimagining work in ways that promote accessibility.

Incorporating universal design (UD) both as a topic of discussion and as a pedagogical approach allows business and professional communication instructors to foreground accessibility in ways that acknowledge the rhetorical situatedness of accessibility. This article offers UD strategies that reimagine accessibility not just as a requirement that accommodates users but as an opportunity to create a rich rhetorical user experience for diverse populations. To illustrate how accessibility can be foregrounded in professional communication curricula, this article details the development of an information design course focused on usability and accessibility.

As usability research and user-centered design become more prevalent areas of study within technical and professional communication (TPC), it has become important to examine the best practices in designing courses and programs that help students better understand these concepts. This article reports on a case study about how usability research and user-centered design were introduced to TPC students. The article examines how students responded to and articulated new concepts and looks forward to ways TPC programs can develop comprehensive curricula that introduces students to these topics.

Except for metaphor, tropes are arguably irrelevant to the analysis of science and technology. Among tropes, moreover, hyperbole and irony seem particularly ill-suited as the former exaggerates, while the latter undermines, two strategies at odds with a language intent on closely following the contours of the world of experience. While neither hyperbole nor irony has a place in the professional discourses of science and technology, both play a role in their popular representations. Hyperbole expresses our sense that these achievements exemplify the sublime, a form of experience applied at first to feelings of awe generated by great literature, then in succession to natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, triumphs of science like Newtonian physics, and such technological achievements as the computer and the Large Hadron Collider. While the Collider, the largest and most powerful experimental apparatus ever built, is an unalloyed technological triumph worthy of hyperbole, some of the alterations in social life that the computer has ushered in are open to skeptical debate. This is especially true to the extent that computer-facilitated communication has taken the place of the face-to face interaction that makes a robust social life possible. Irony is this skepticism’s vehicle.

This article argues that technical and professional communication (TPC) programs and specialists need to contribute more to health humanities scholarship and program curricula. The article reviews the writing courses offered by baccalaureate health humanities programs and “to support further TPC engagement in these programs” offers core generalizations and strategies for managing their approval process.

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the extent to which an accredited Academic Writing and Publishing (AWP) module for faculty and graduate students helped them develop as scholars and how, over time, it affected their instructional beliefs and attitudes in working with their own undergraduate students. For the two module tutors, it was important to know how the participants applied what they learned from the module in their own teaching practice and to identify particularly effective aspects of the module that translated to this other context. Therefore, key themes explored in this paper are the impact of the module’s critical thinking-reading-writing (CTRW) strategies on faculty writing practice and their subsequent transference to students across a range of disciplines. The module participants include faculty from higher and further education, PhD students, and professional educators (consultants and trainers). While the module tends to draw in new faculty and PhD students, in particular, for the support it provides for increasing their academic publications, this support is balanced with the assistance it can give participants to subsequently help their own students navigate critical thinking, reading and writing in the disciplines. Academic reading and writing, as well as research strategies and the ability to engage with ideas critically, are core expectations in most fields of study in higher education (Spiller & Ferguson, 2011). Complementing these generic competencies are the unique requirements associated with reading, writing and methods of inquiry in particular disciplines. However, Migliaccio and Carrigan (2017) reported that programs often struggle to address writing adequately because of the difficulty of fully evaluating student work and responding to any identified limitations, largely because of the impact on staff workload. Faculty may understand that teaching students to write is nevertheless a shared responsibility, not left to dedicated writing centers or foundational writing/composition courses alone. There are simple strategies that can form part of their daily teaching, such as those suggested by Angelo and Cross (1993) and Bean (2011)—strategies that can help students to deepen their intellectual grasp of a subject and develop the capacity to manage complex ideas in writing. Menary (2007) maintained that “writing is thinking in action” and “the act of writing is itself a process of thinking” (p. 622). Writing can force the clarification of ideas, attention to details and the logical assembly of reasons. However, designing writing activities that can only be completed with mind engagement takes effort on the part of the faculty member, and again, professional development has a role to play here. Clarence (2011) argued that there is a gap between what faculty think students need to do to develop as competent writers and thinkers and what these faculty are doing to help students achieve this goal. The AWP module, which is focused on supporting faculty writing and publishing, can, in turn, be applied pedagogically to students’ holistic writing development in order to begin to close the gap. The next section of this paper describes the context for the study (the AWP module and the participants who provided the data for the study). A literature review discussing critical thinking-reading-writing in the disciplines is then included. A subsequent section explains how this theoretical discussion informs aspects of the module. The research design of the qualitative study (with the module as its context) is then described, followed by an outline of how data were analysed using appropriate qualitative methods, including a process for coding transcripts. Given next is a presentation of the findings, which offer a basis for generalization and conclusions.

Background: Research incorporating large data sets and data and text mining methodologies is making initial contributions to writing studies. In writing program administration (WPA) work, one could best characterize the body of publications as small but growing, led by such work as Moxley and Eubanks’ 2015 “On Keeping Score: Instructors' vs. Students' Rubric Ratings of 46,689 Essays” and Arizona State University’s Science of Learning & Educational Technology (SoLET) Lab. Given the information that large-scale textual analysis can provide, it seems incumbent on program administrators to explore ways to make regular and aggressive use of such opportunities to give both students and instructors more resources for learning and development. This project is one attempt to add to this corpus of work; the sample for the study consisted of 17,534 pieces of student writing representing 141,659 discrete comments on that writing, with 58,300 unique words out of over 8.25 million total words written. This data is used to examine trends in the program’s instructor commentary over five years’ time.  By doing so, this study revisits a fundamental task of writing instruction—responding to student writing, and from the data’s results considers how large writing programs with constant turnover of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) might manage their ongoing instructor professional development and how those GTAs will improve their ability to teach and respond to writing.Literature Review: Researchers have attempted to unpack and understand the task of instructor commentary for several decades; the published literature demonstrates a complex and occasionally ambivalent relationship with this central task of writing instruction. Recent scholarship has moved from the small-scale studies long used by the field to implement large-scale examinations of the instruction occurring in writing programs. Research questions: Three questions guided the inquiry:Does the work of new instructors (MA1s) more closely resemble the lexicon of novice or experienced responders to student writing?How does the new instructors’ work compare to that of more experienced (PHD1 or INS) instructors in the program throughout their time?How does their work evolve over a four-semester longitudinal time frame (as MA1 or MA2 experience levels) in the first-year writing program? [Please note that the abbreviations used above and throughout the article to designate instructor experience levels are as follows: MA1 (first-year master’s students); MA2 (second-year master’s students); PHD1 (first-year doctoral students); INS (instructors—those with 3 or more years’ experience teaching and who are not currently pursuing an additional degree—nearly all of these individuals held a Master’s degree)].Methodology: This study extends the work of Anson and Anson (2017) who first surveyed writing instructors and program administrators to create wordlists that survey respondents associated with “high-quality” and “novice” responses, and then examined a corpus of nearly 50,000 peer responses produced at a single university to learn to what extent instructors and student peers adopted this lexicon. Specifically, the study analyzes a corpus of instructor comments to students using the Anson and Anson wordlists associated with principled and novice commentary to see if new writing instructors align more closely with the concepts represented in either list during their first semester in the program.  It then tracks four cohorts for evolution and change in their vocabulary of feedback over their next three semesters in the program; the study also compares the vocabulary used in their comments to that used by experienced instructors in the program over the same time.Results: The study found that from the outset, the new instructors (MA1) incorporated more of the principled response terms than the novice response terms. Overall, in comparing the MA1 instructors with the most experienced group (INS), the results reveal three important findings about the feedback of both MA1s and INSs in this program.While there are some differences in commentary as seen via examination of the two lexicons, the differences are perhaps less than one might assume.The cohorts do increase their use of the principled terms as they move through the two years’ appointment in the program, but few of the increases demonstrate statistical significance.Few of the terms from either the novice or principled lexicon, with the exception of terms that also appear in the assignment descriptions, what I label as “content terms,” appear frequently in the overall corpus.Discussion: Based on the results, the instructors in this program had acquired a more consistent vocabulary, but not primarily one based on Anson and Anson’s two lexicons—instead, the most frequent and commonly used terms seem to come from a more local “canon,” that is, one based on the assignment descriptions and course outcomes. Regardless of whether the acquisition of a common vocabulary came from more global concepts or an assignment-based local canon, using common terms is something that Nancy Sommers (1982) saw as contributing to “thoughtful commentary” on student writing. As no one has previously studied how quickly new instructors acquire a professional vocabulary for responding to student writing, it is hard to know whether or not the results of this particular group of instructors would be considered “typical.” However, it may well be that the context of this writing program contributed to a more accelerated acquisition.Conclusions: Working with the lexicons developed via Anson and Anson’s survey is a useful starting point for understanding more of what our instructors actually do when responding to student writing, as well as for identifying critical differences in our instructors’ comments. The lexicons, though, only provide us with a subset of expected (thus acceptable) terms included in commentary—terms that afford students the opportunity to act upon receiving them via revision or transfer. Directions for Future Research: Additional research is necessary to expand and refine the lexicons and their impact on student writing. One possibility is to return to the current data set to engage in additional lexical analysis of both the novice and principled lexicons as well as the overall frequency tables to understand how terms are used in the context of response by the various instructor groups. Differences in the application of the terms might help us understand why comments might be labeled as more or less helpful to writers.  Another strategy is to examine the data in terms of markers of stance; finally, topic modeling could be used to locate more subtle differences in the instructor comments that are not as easily identifiable with lexical analysis. Such examinations could serve as a baseline for broadening the study out to other sets of assignments and commentary, perhaps helping us build a set of threshold concepts for talking about writing with our students. Ultimately, it is important to replicate and expand Anson and Anson’s survey to other stakeholder groups. As with much research on the teaching of writing, we default to the group most accessible to us—other writing professionals. Replicating this survey with other stakeholders—graduate teaching assistants, undergraduate students at both lower and upper division levels— could help us understand whether or not a gap exists in understanding what constitutes good feedback from the various stakeholders.

Considering the need for writing and language programs to develop translingual and transdisciplinary pedagogies for teacher development at the graduate level (Canagarajah, 2016; Williams & Rodrigue, 2016), the authors examine the design of a multilingual pedagogy professional development series for first-year Spanish and Writing teaching assistants (TAs). As designers of and participants in the series, the authors explore the benefits and challenges inherent in transdisciplinary and translingual conversations and discuss implications for teaching and research in language and writing instruction and teacher development. In order to advance transdisciplinary and translingual approaches as a new normal in composition studies (Tardy 2017; Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue 2011), the authors hope to provide a professional development framework that adapts to the linguistic realities of different institutional contexts and students’ lived language experiences.

Multimajor professional writing courses are becoming extremely common in English departments, which presents specific challenges for curricular design because of the diversity of the majors and professional goals of students. This article describes the theoretical, programmatic, and curricular details of a multimajor professional writing course. We argue that the design of a course that places a central focus on writing theory and writing knowledge can encourage learning transfer. Such an approach helps to overcome the challenges of a multimajor course by allowing the study of a common subject among students hoping to enter a number of different professions after college. Our design leans heavily on concrete knowledge domains—genre knowledge, social knowledge, procedural knowledge—and their application to specific disciplinary or professional contexts. The article’s discussion of course assignments and contexts demonstrates how these domains are applied and provides detailed information on our experiences teaching the course.

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.

Claims abound about passives and the impersonal style they create. Few studies, however, check the claims with a large, systematic analysis of texts from either academia or industry. Motivated by the need to teach effective workplace writing skills to undergraduate engineering students, this study investigates the use of passives and associated impersonal style features in 170 practitioner reports, journal articles, and student reports from civil engineering. Using multidimensional analysis (a technique from corpus linguistics) and interviews of practitioners, students, and faculty, the study found that, as expected, engineering texts, compared to nontechnical texts, have a frequent use of impersonal style features; however, they use passives for a wider range of functions than is typically described in technical writing literature. Furthermore, compared to the journal articles and student reports, the practitioner reports use significantly fewer features of impersonal style. The findings inform teaching materials that present a more realistically complex picture of the language structures and functions important for civil engineering practice.

When writing center administrators (WCAs) consider educating tutors, they do so with a range of perspectives in mind. Tutors need to first be confident in both their tutoring and writing abilities. However, new tutors must also be able to put themselves in the perspective of a struggling student writer who they may work with in a tutoring session. In this article, we conceptualize this issue dealing with self-efficacy or “people’s beliefs in their abilities to produce given attainments” (Bandura 307). Research has begun to explore this topic (Nowacek and Hughes), but has not specifically called this “self-efficacy.” Composition research has a long history of examining self-efficacy, but little research has explored tutors’ self-efficacy. This research has not examined the relationship between tutoring and writing self-efficacies, nor has previously research considered how tutoring experience may impact self-efficacy. To extend this conversation, we developed and administered a survey to writing center tutors across the US to answer the following research questions: What are tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies? Do tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies correlate? Do experienced tutors have different writing and tutoring self-efficacies than new tutors? Results indicated that tutors had high writing and tutoring self-efficacies (mean scores were from 80-100), but the range varied pretty significantly (ranges for writing were 40-100 and ranges for tutoring were 49-100). Writing and tutoring self-efficacy scores were strongly correlated (r=.815 and p =.001). Finally, tutoring self-efficacy and tutoring experience were weakly correlated (r=.186 and p =.025). These results suggest that tutoring and writing self-efficacies inform one another and that tutors have different experiences with developing self-efficacy with their tutoring and writing, which suggests that tutoring and writing self-efficacy is very individualized.

This article presents data from a 2013 survey of students enrolled in a longstanding rhetoric and composition Ph.D. program at the University of Louisville (U of L), a mid-sized public institution in the American South. The survey collected data regarding graduate students’ perceptions of language diversity in the context of their professional development as composition teacher-scholars. It interprets the data in relationship to what Yasemin Yildiz has described as the “postmonolingual condition” of 21st century Western social life: a field of tension between monolingualist ideology and increasingly visible multilingual practices. Drawing from student recommendations, it suggests ways this program, and others like it, can leverage students’ positive perceptions of and attitudes toward multilingualism to norm language differences in its mainstream rhetoric and composition graduate curriculum.

This tutorial explores ethical implications of cognitive load theory and intersectional theory on technical and professional communication, and proposes plain language as an ethical imperative to redress social inequities. Key concepts: When the cognitive load of a learning task is too high and overwhelms working memory, learning is impaired. The greater stress and mental burden that marginalized populations experience can leave less working memory available for reading and learning. Using plain language to reduce cognitive load can be considered a political act that increases marginalized populations' opportunities to understand. Key lessons: 1. Consider whether marginalized populations are part of your audience. 2. Using personas to represent those populations, audit their mental burden to exercise cognitive empathy. 3. Consider reducing cognitive load via plain language an ethical imperative. Implications for practice: Assessing the presence and absence of specific marginalized groups is iterative and takes practice, but developing plain-language communications that accommodate these audiences reduces cognitive load for all readers. And although personas are useful for developing cognitive empathy, nothing replaces user testing in determining your communication's effectiveness.

Background: Although plain language is almost universally promoted by teachers of professional writing, editors, and communication professionals, some have argued that the effects of and preferences for plain style in written messages differ among groups of individuals. Research questions: 1. Do professionals prefer plain style? 2a. Do preferences differ for different categories of style? 2b. Do preferences differ for different groups of workers? Literature review: Style, the word- and sentence-level elements in a written text, is a critical element of plain language. There is evidence that plain style, however, affects readers differently based on their level of subject matter knowledge. Plain style is even criticized by a few. There is a long history of tensions surrounding linguistic prescriptivism, the notion that one manner of language use is superior to all others. Further, readers' preferences for writing style, plain or otherwise, may not be consistent across occupational positions, education levels, nationalities, personality types, or genders. Research methodology: We conducted a quantitative study of preferences for two major style categories (conciseness and word choice) using an online survey instrument. The student-recruiter technique provided us with usable responses from 614 working adults in the US. Using that data, we calculated proportions of respondents, with confidence intervals, who chose the plain-style options. We also used statistical tests to explore associations between preferences and respondent characteristics. Results and conclusions: Our findings support an overwhelming preference for plain style among US professionals who are native speakers of English. Reader preferences were stronger for elements associated with word choice than with conciseness. Those with lower education levels and blue-collar occupations had lower preferences for plain style. The study had two major limitations: 1. We investigated only two aspects of plain style rather than the full range of elements that make up plain language. 2. Our data-collection instrument presented readers with an artificial rather than an authentic reading experience. Future research may investigate the role of personality on stylistic preferences and the attributions readers make about writers based on their style.

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

Because social media skills are increasingly viewed as essential for professionals, social media is incorporated frequently in business communication courses. When students are asked to consider professional uses of social media, however, they are often unwilling to critically engage these technologies. This article continues discussions of students’ reticence due largely to negative cultural narratives that label social media as unprofessional, or that link social media only with reputation management. Using student interviews and writing from a social media writing course, I discuss challenges posed by students’ adherence to these narratives and conclude with five suggestions for implementing social media successfully.

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of the four listening styles of business communication students on their demonstration of compassion for others and themselves. A sample of 387 business students completed a questionnaire that inquired about their perceptions of their preferred listening style, their compassion for others, and their self-compassion for those in a given organization. This study found that people listening positively affected both compassion and self-compassion. Another finding was that action listening negatively affected both compassion and self-compassion. Other findings are also discussed along with future directions.

Alumni are an underutilized resource for input on the oral presentation skills employees need at work and what should be taught in oral-presentation-focused business communication courses. Yet they are in a unique position to assess the utility of what they learned and recommend coursework changes. In survey responses, 1,610 business alumni who make oral presentations two or three times per month on average recommended more instruction on how to present business data visually, more impromptu presentations, more help dealing with difficult audiences and with nervousness, and three to five presentations assigned in oral presentation courses for business students.

The implementation of genre theory in the business communication classroom could lead to the cultivation of critical thinking skills in students. The lack of a common definition of critical thinking skills across academia and the workplace creates a difficult end goal to pursue; therefore, teachers should consider explicitly teaching to the outcome, or telos , of critical thinking through genre. This article examines a small corner of genre theory, identifies a genre theory framework for business communication, and discusses the implications of such a framework.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

Understanding technological literacy for technical communicators is crucial for effective pedagogy in technical and professional communication. Challenges of teaching technical communication students the functions and concepts of workplace software include the number of rapidly changing applications, a desire to focus on education over training, limited faculty expertise in software, limited resources for teaching software, and a desire to focus on technical communication principles. To address these challenges, the authors explore how to use a four-level framework of technological literacy along with existing resources to design a course to help students use, understand, and evaluate technical communication technology.

This study examined the effects of an innovative comprehensive writing program in upper primary education on students’ writing performance and on teachers´ classroom practices, beliefs and skills. The program focused on the communicative nature of writing, on writing as a process, and on explicit teaching of five genre-specific writing strategies. It was implemented by 43 teachers in their regular classrooms (Grades 4 to 6, N = 1052), with three conditions: (1) a writing program condition, (2) the same program complemented by professional development sessions and coaching, and (3) a control condition in which teachers taught their usual writing lessons. Students’ writing performance was measured three times with multiple writing tasks. Data on teachers’ practices, beliefs and skills were collected through lesson observations, interviews, questionnaires, teacher logs, and a text assessment task. The comprehensive writing program had a beneficial effect on students’ writing performance and the extent to which teachers taught writing strategies. The complementary professional development and coaching had a direct effect on the number of lessons implemented, and an indirect effect on students' performance. Overall, the innovation proved to be effective for improving students’ writing performance in the upper grades of primary schools.

This article examines the tactical online rhetorical choices of a young African American professional communicator, Gina. Drawing on situated analysis to show how Gina engaged with her African American Hush Harbor (AAHH) of young professionals online, the author argues that Gina used Twitter to maintain professional network ties in her AAHH community while resisting organizational discourses of surveillance. The author further argues that analyzing particular choices in boundaryless career situations allows us to see important nontask-based professional writing activity.

Online learning modes can provide convenience and flexibility to students. But communicating the value of online education in technical and professional communication should not end there. Program directors should rearticulate the narrative about the value of online graduate education beyond flexibility and convenience by reevaluating the ways that program assessment is designed and implemented. This pilot study suggests that a community of inquiry framework can help to communicate the value of the online learning environment to a variety of stakeholders, including prospective and current students, administrators, instructors, and potential employers.

Background: This study examines the generic structure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, which are becoming standard practice for corporate communication of social and environmental performance beyond financial disclosure. Literature review: Genre theories provide a framework for exploring genres contextualized in different cultures. Based on the English for Specific Purposes approach of genre analysis, this study compares the move structure of CSR reports in Italian, Chinese, and English from a corpus-based perspective. Research questions: 1. What are the main moves used in CSR reports? 2. Are there any cross-cultural similarities or variations in terms of generic features? Methodology: Combining genre theories with concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics, we designed an observational framework for move identification. Based on a 15-move scheme, we annotated 18 CSR reports for comparative analysis. Results and conclusions: The CSR report is characterized by rhetorical recursivity and hybridity of speech acts: beyond “reporting” and “presenting,” it is also “demonstrating,” “evaluating,” and “committing.”As a globally established genre, it presents noticeable generic similarity in different languages, suggesting that the communicative purposes of CSR reports are recognized by different cultures. The top six moves in the Performance-reporting section of the CSR reports present identical trends in terms of extensiveness ranking in all three languages. Cross-cultural variations mainly involve the use of optional moves, such as the dominant use of the move “Presenting individual cases” in the Chinese sample. The observational framework for move identification may also be transferable to other genres. The limitations of this study include the sample size and the absence of an author survey. Future research could investigate the CSR report from a diachronic perspective, to explore how its genre structure has developed over time.

This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 12 assignments designed to help students increase their online communication skills, conduct professional conferences, use advanced presentation software, develop problem-solving and critical thinking, gain greater awareness of gender effects in communication, and perform community service. These teaching innovations debuted at the 2016 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://salesleadershipcenter.com/research .

Technical and professional communication (TPC) programs rely on contingent faculty to achieve their curricular mission. However, contingent faculty lack professional development opportunities. In this article, the author reports survey results (N = 91) and three cases studies that provide information on contingent faculty and their preparation for online teaching and then provides a three-step approach for TPC program administrators and faculty to follow so that programs can create sustainable professional development opportunities for contingent faculty to teach online.

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

The author reports on social media research in technical and professional communication (TPC) training through a national survey of 30 professional and technical communication programs asking about their use of social media in technical communication. This research forms the basis of recommendations for training online TPC faculty to teach with social media. The author offer recommendations throughout for those who train online TPC faculty as well as for the teachers themselves.

This article addresses emerging calls for online education and cross-cultural technical communication training, specifically by outlining and reporting on the development and sustainability of two online programs: the graduate online technical and professional writing certificate and the emerging undergraduate bilingual professional writing certificate at the University of Texas at El Paso. Data presented suggest cultural and linguistic diversity should be embedded and streamlined across all aspects of online technical communication programs.

This article explores how to train educators to teach online internship courses. The article introduces an online internship course focused on workplace communication available to students across the university. Approaches to training educators to teach this course include requiring educators to immerse themselves in experiential learning situations, leveraging innovative uses of contemporary technologies for communication, and reflecting on online teaching processes.

Online writing courses have developed in importance to meet student learning and institutional expectations; over time, a controversy about training online instructors and building sustainable programs has emerged. This article relates training demands within the University of Arizona’s Writing Program and development of an online professional & technical writing certificate. The article proposes training instructors with master courses and building a sustained program through a participatory design to create a professional and integrated environment.

Using cultural empowerment as a conceptual framework, this study emphasizes the interrelated role of culture, rhetorical agency, and empowerment in discursive analysis and communicative practice. Twelve black business owners were interviewed using a narrative inquiry approach. Thematic analysis revealed that these entrepreneurs enacted rhetorical agency in ways that work within oppressive systems and resisted damaging dominate discourses about black businesses. By highlighting the rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs, this study also addresses the need for a more culturally sensitive approach in business, professional, and organizational communication.

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students’ design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action within a classroom simulation and support professional genre uptake. First, the range of rhetorical choices available to students in designing their simulation health records are discussed. Then, the article draws on an extended example of how student uptake of the patient health record within a clinical simulation emphasized its intertextual relationship to other genres, its role mediating social interactions with the patient and other providers, and its coordination of embodied actions. Connections to students’ experiences with professional genres are addressed throughout. The article concludes by considering initial implications of this research for disciplinary and professional writing courses.