International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

Request emails are vital in workplace communication. This study uses a three-round Delphi method to investigate the types, frequencies, and perceived burdens of request emails in Korean organizations. Fifty workers from large corporations identified and evaluated 32 common email scenarios, revealing that the most frequent requests are sent to superiors asking for approval, feedback, and document reviews whereas the most burdensome requests are sent to colleagues asking them to perform tasks. Highlighting the hierarchical dynamics of Korean workplaces and the importance of culturally appropriate communication strategies, the findings from this study can inform global training programs and curricula on workplace communication.

A customized chatbot and structured interactions with ChatGPT were integrated into professional business communication pedagogy to foster critical reading, evaluative judgment and independent writing skills. The iterative-experiential learning feature of AI was utilized. AI (the chatbot and ChatGPT) was conceptualized as an assistant, coach, and provocateur in learning rather than a shortcut to bypass effort. The effectiveness of the intervention was explored through students’ reflections and learning experiences. The findings suggest that AI interventions for developing critical reading and writing skills can enhance traditional pedagogies and the learning curve. Implications and limitations of the study were also discussed.

With ChatGPT’s public release, artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound effect on professional communication. Although clearly beneficial in manipulating large volumes of information, AI cannot provide the insights into each company’s uniqueness—its culture, organizational dynamics, and operational controls—factors defining the character, precision, and tailoring demanded in professional communications. Those attributes depend on the creativity, reasoning, and theory-based causal logic of human cognition. By reexamining the process of developing professional communications, from discovering embedded purposes through final product, we can demonstrate to students how AI can be applied to encourage creativity and promote the powers of human intellect.

This review analyzes 59 studies from 2014 to 2024 examining design thinking integration in professional communication pedagogy across eight disciplinary journals. Design thinking has evolved from experimental use to systematic pedagogical approaches, with assignment-level integration proving most viable for educators. Empathy interviews and user research bridge design thinking principles with communication pedagogy’s audience awareness focus. Students show enhanced empathy, improved collaboration, and increased creative confidence with high motivation levels. Implementation challenges include time constraints, student resistance to ambiguity, and assessment difficulties. The study recommends scaffolded introduction, integration with existing content, and institutional support for desirable implementation in business and professional communication pedagogy.

Background: Practitioners, academics, and accrediting boards all recognize the importance of communication to the work of engineers, but ensuring that engineering students graduate with effective communication skills continues to be a challenge for programs. Our project examines this problem within our institutional context, with the goal of serving local needs while extending the literature on engineering communication. Literature review: Prior research identifies communication skill gaps, examines the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching engineering communication, and highlights issues of knowledge transfer. Few studies collect both academic and practitioner perspectives. Research questions: 1. How effectively does the required first-year course provide students with foundational engineering communication skills? 2. How much do students’ communication abilities improve by the time they complete the engineering capstone course in their final semester? 3. To what extent are engineering students graduating with the communication skills they will need to succeed professionally? Research methodology: This study involved technical and professional communication instructors’ analysis of student communication work from two courses: 1. first-year engineering communication and 2. the engineering capstone. The study also included surveys of and follow-up interviews with engineering practitioners regarding the communication skills of capstone students and recent engineering graduates more generally. Results: Student work from the first-year engineering communication course was weak; communication work from the capstone was not substantially stronger, even though students were provided with a detailed template for each assignment. The survey and interviews suggest that practitioners tended to view capstone students’ communication skills favorably but found the skills of new hires who were recent graduates to be weaker. Conclusions: The data emphasize the shortcomings of stand-alone communication courses, issues with knowledge transfer, and the role of institutional contexts.

Background: During two major rainstorm disasters in Henan and Shanxi provinces in 2021, digital volunteer groups in China used cloud-based technologies to facilitate rescue and relief efforts. Literature review: In technical and professional communication (TPC), crisis and disaster communication has been studied extensively in contexts such as public health emergencies, terrorist attacks and war, and natural disasters. However, less attention has been given to grassroots, digitally mediated volunteer networks, particularly through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Research question: How did volunteer groups mobilize information through an expanded process of translation for disaster relief during the Henan and Shanxi rainstorm calamities? Research methodology: We conducted virtual, multisited ethnography by joining volunteer social media groups during the disasters. We also interviewed documentation creators and analyzed media coverage to understand the practices and infrastructures that supported their work. Results: We introduce a five-phase model of disaster communication: Problematization, Initiation, Launch, Optimization, and Transfer (PILOT). This ANT-informed model theorizes how distributed digital volunteer groups mobilized, stabilized, and transferred actor networks during crisis response, offering a more granular account of their emergent, decentralized, affective work than previous TPC scholarship. Conclusions: TPC professionals can (re)design adaptive communication infrastructures that support rapid response in digital environments, particularly in terms of organizational coordination, knowledge flow, and technological integration.

Background: Technical and professional communication (TPC) poses a challenge to international professionals (IPs) who are not L1 English speakers or professional communicators. Literature review: There are numerous linguistically low-resource industries which represent high economic and cultural value domestically and internationally. Such is the case of the wine and olive oil sectors in Spain, which have a significant global projection, though their communication in English is often labeled as deficient. Research questions: This study explores the needs, attitudes, and challenges faced by IPs of these fields in Spain. The aim is to be able to develop appropriate actions and tools that help improve the communicative process in this and other linguistically low-resource technical communication scenarios. Research methodology: To define the dynamics in which low-resource L2 English professionals participate, we carried out a demographic study. Specifically, a national survey was conducted focusing on the writing of tasting notes as domain-specific texts produced by Spanish L2 English professionals of the fields. Results: The results show that IPs use language service providers when they can afford it. Otherwise, they employ mainly Machine Translation, risking textual quality and communicative success. Nevertheless, participants show awareness of the relevance of participating in international communication using adequate linguistic means. Conclusion: We conclude that IPs from linguistically low-resource domains strive to find means to engage in international TPC but cannot find adequate tools for it. Institutional and research efforts need to materialize for all segments of society to benefit from language policy and technological advancements.

This study explores educator attitudes, beliefs, and experiences regarding writing and writing instruction before and after participating in a week-long Summer Institute (SI) facilitated by leaders at one National Writing Project (NWP) site. Throughout the SI, the 12 educators (i.e., instructional coaches and classroom teachers) participated in personal, creative, and professional writing designed to support them as writers and writing instructors. Study participants completed a survey before the SI and at its conclusion, which captured their perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences about writing and writing instruction, as well as the importance of writing in education. Findings demonstrated that many participants viewed themselves as writers prior to the SI with this amount increasing at the conclusion of the SI, and many reported increased writing confidence. There were inconsistencies in the ways participants defined what it means to “be a writer,” and findings suggest that writer identity is influenced by writing confidence and enjoyment, with some participants struggling to navigate the dual identities of writer and writing teacher. Study findings suggest that addressing the writer-teacher identity crisis is crucial for fostering effective writing instruction. Teachers need time, space, and opportunity to immerse themselves in their writing and practice different skills to then apply to their instruction. Buy-in from school districts to provide such opportunities and a willingness to support teacher autonomy will enable teachers to better support students as writers and engage them in meaningful writing instruction for authentic tasks and audiences.

Communication scholars have done an excellent work in creating business simulations to engage the students in learning communication concepts. However, more can be done to foster interactive business and professional communication pedagogy. Instructors must continue to devise new ways to enable the students to apply business communication concepts. In response to these calls, this article presents an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways team communication and proposal presentation manifest themselves in business speaking practices. This simulation enables students to engage with team communication issues by understanding persuasion and influence as an essential part of business and professional communication.

Businesses increasingly use Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to screen job applicants’ résumés. A summative content analysis auditing how 18 business communication, business English, and technical communication textbooks cover résumés and AI ATS found a lack of consensus. The study identified the challenge of offering specific advice on emerging AI technology in textbooks. The article recommends writing and teaching practice changes when discussing emerging technology and creating or using textbook content.

Self-reflection is expected in business communication teaching, but e-learning has been argued to create an illusion of direct experience as social presence. This study explores how participants’ negotiation of personal agency is constructed in a digital, asynchronic context. Using data collected from a digital classroom of a European business university, I show how participants enact specific strategies in their presentation of self. My aim is twofold: first, to explore how participants negotiate their social identities in a virtual community, and second, to better understand what both educators and enterprise can do to encourage successful dialogue and further humanize digital context.

Advanced technologies and other rapid changes in the global business environment, especially following the pandemic of 2020, have fundamentally disrupted how, when, and where we work. Through design thinking, business communicators can reenvision the affordance of traditional rhetoric to thrive in this new workplace. The article opens with a scenario based on the postpandemic problem of accommodating a hybrid style of work and then describes how the mindset and method of design thinking transform traditional rhetoric. Grounded in empathetic collaboration, design thinking positions rhetoric as a recursive, nonlinear, and nimble process and provides new perspectives on rhetoric’s time-tested persuasive appeals.

This article presents a curated collection of 11 teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. These MFA presenters demonstrated teaching ideas specifically on improving students’ skills in working in groups. This My Favorite Assignment 32nd edition introduces readers to these classroom approaches in teaching skills involving group dynamics in business contexts. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

For those like me who were eagerly awaiting the publication of the second edition of Document Design: From Process to Product in Professional Communication , you will not be disappointed! The new edition exceeds my expectations for updated content and examples—while staying true to the original focus on design theory and principles in practice. It balances foundational aspects of visual rhetoric and usability, while providing new insights on digital technologies and production.

At a moment when questions of equity and access are reshaping higher education and professional practice, technical and professional communication (TPC) is undergoing a "social justice turn" that centers ethics, equity, and care within its research and design practices. Designing for Social Justice: Community-Engaged Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication (edited by Jialei Jiang and Jason C. K. Tham, 2025) situates itself squarely within this movement, framing justice not as an optional theme but as a guiding principle for communication design. Jiang and Tham note that this collection "explore[s] the intersection of multimodal design and community engagement for social justice" (p. 3), and they introduce design advocacy to capture this orientation.

As Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) adopts User Experience (UX) methods, gaps persist in integrating UX-specific knowledge and practices into curricula. This article advocates for Conversation Design (CxD) as a crucial yet overlooked intersection of TPC and UX. CxD focuses on creating human-centered interactions for chatbots, voice assistants and other conversational interfaces, aligning well with TPC's rhetorical foundations in audience, purpose, and context. Integrating CxD into TPC curricula equips students for emerging industry demands and drives academic innovation. The article defines CxD, examines its relevance to TPC, offers instructional strategies, and presents a course-based case study as a curricular model.

Using eye-tracking and interview methods, this study investigates how business communication students and editing students attend to and evaluate writing. Participants reviewed blog posts embedded with errors and judged publication readiness. While both groups visually fixated longer on errors than non-errors, business communication students were more likely to approve error-containing texts for publication. Qualitative data revealed that business communication students prioritized content while editing students prioritized surface-level issues. These findings suggest that disciplinary background informs evaluative standards, even when error-detection behavior is similar. The results carry implications for instruction in business writing and editing, especially concerning collaborative, cross-disciplinary workplace writing.

Cross-institutional research of pedagogy in the technical and professional communication classroom is needed to understand social justice teaching across multiple contexts. This collective case study discusses social justice-focused assignments given by eight instructors at different institutions. Results show that institutions with more diverse populations may have advantages in making social justice power differentials salient. Further, teacher positionality impacts the degree of social justice content incorporated.

Cookies, or small packets of data sent between programs, have become synonymous with the opaque practices for collecting, storing, and commodifying user-generated data. Convoluted language and misleading design practices impede user understanding and agency over the security of their data, including its collection, use, and storage. This article provides a brief history of cookies, presents concerns related to how websites inform users of the presence of cookies and their choices in how they are used, and introduces heuristics that align with technical and professional communication best practices for crafting user-centered cookie banners.

This grounded theory study, informed by Communication Accommodation Theory, explores how frontline managers ( n  = 11) support early-career employees’ communication development. Findings identify three support strategies—structured scaffolding, adaptive leadership, and onboarding for cultural fit—and suggest colleges emphasize verbal and intercultural communication, applied learning, and professional presence. These insights reframe communication readiness as a relational process shaped by emotion, power, and organizational norms. The study calls for stronger collaboration between higher education and employers.

In today’s digitally advanced, AI-driven workplace, effective communication is more critical than ever. Business communication scholarship empathizes competencies such as professionalism, clarity, conciseness, persuasiveness, and evidence-driven messaging, yet applying these systematically in complex decisions remains a challenge. This article introduces the Evaporating Cloud tool—part of the Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes—as a structured communication aid. Through a fictional case study, we show how EC clarifies objectives, uncovers underlying needs and hidden assumptions, and supports ethical, collaborative decision making. The article highlights EC’s value in enhancing core communication competencies in business and professional contexts.

Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Abstract This article explores the creation and sustainment of a standing antiracist pedagogy group in a technical and professional communication program at a large, predominantly white Midwestern R1 university with a strong STEM culture. Reflecting on personal and collective experiences, group members discuss the evolution of the group, how the group fosters sustained engagement and ongoing development among its members, and its hopes (as well as challenges) for the future. Ultimately, the authors aim to provide a framework for the development of other kinds of support groups in universities and beyond.

This article examines the intersection of technical and professional communication (TPC) and open educational resources (OER) through a social justice lens, critiquing TPC's slow adoption of OER despite its transformative potential. The article highlights how OER addresses accessibility, affordability, and representation challenges in education, showcases successful OER implementations, and outlines strategies for transformative change. It argues that OER empowers educators to tackle inequities directly and calls for greater scholarly focus and adoption of OER to advance equity and inclusion within TPC.

This study explores technical and professional communication (TPC) students’ design of multimodal career portfolios, focusing on their strategies amid technological advancements and shifting workplace dynamics. The study analyzed 155 artifacts from 31 students, including resumes, video resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and rhetorical and modal analyses, using MAXQDA for discourse analysis. The results highlight the importance of research synthesis, intertextuality, audience awareness, personal branding, and adaptability in portfolio development. TPC students effectively create portfolios that meet company expectations across boundaries. A multimodal approach in TPC curricula is recommended, along with further research on emerging technologies’ impact on portfolios.

We conducted 10 focus groups with 32 academic consultants to identify three intrinsic rewards categories for academic consulting: meaningful work, professional development, and enhanced teaching. Based on these findings, we propose a typology of academic consulting, teaching-driven consulting, and a multifaceted framework of academic consultant career identity. Our framework provides rhetorical resources for faculty, staff, and administrators to discuss academic consulting identities, tie aspects of identity to preferred rewards categories, and advocate for consulting resources and support.

We conduct a close reading and micro-level analysis of a market update released by Restaurant Group Plc, a UK leisure firm, during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine its communication functions. While the market update aligns with communicative action theory by enhancing information transparency, it also deploys various rhetorical strategies, including impersonalization, positive self-evaluation, and metaphors consistent with impression management. The overly optimistic tone bears no relation to subsequent corporate outcomes. This study provides valuable insights for business and professional communication practitioners and students, enabling them to interpret the linguistic characteristics of market updates as a distinct genre of corporate communication.

Background: Technical and professional communication and user experience (UX) have become intertwined as sister disciplines. Graduates of technical communication programs are pursuing jobs in UX and researchers in technical communication are studying UX. Literature review: At the same time, little attention has been paid to the skills required for jobs such as UX designer and UX researcher, though one landmark study a decade ago was the first to detail such trends. Research questions: 1. What language do employers use to explain UX job skills? 2. What specific job titles do employers describe when advertising UX positions to potential applicants? Research methodology: As part of an ongoing research project examining nearly 15,000 job ads from the US, in this article, we will analyze a corpus of UX job ads for trends including specific roles that are emerging within UX as definable occupations. We do so by identifying trends in keyword usage across job ads, as well as zeroing in on skill sets that seem important to employers looking to hire UX professionals. Results/discussion: Our findings extend previous research to detail stronger differentiation between the skill sets required of UX designers and UX researchers, as well as revealing new roles previously unexamined in past literature. Conclusions: Several new skill sets emerging in UX are important to introduce to students, including new visual design tools, product design skills, and project management skills. We owe it to our students to continue to track skills that emerge in this fast-moving field.

Background and research problem: The way in which work is done in digital contexts deviates from classical corporate, hierarchical, departmental organizations. Since digital microfirms are becoming more common, understanding the way members organize their activities through communication in this specific type of enterprise represents an appealing field to develop. Literature review: We discuss how the framework of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) allows us to analyze activity systems and trace disruptions in postbureaucratic digital work. We also review research using CHAT along with genre studies to understand, specifically, business communication and entrepreneurial rhetoric in a spaceless microfirm that provides digital services. Research questions: 1. In what activities does this microfirm engage? That is, what different objects and outcomes has it been developed to achieve? 2. How do the contradictions between these activities shape the microfirm’s organization and its orientation to clients? Methods: Guided by the components of activity systems, we coded interviews, questionnaires, instant messages, and databases. Discourse analysis allowed us to identify contradictions. Results: Both from the perspective of some team members and through artifact analysis, flexibility and closeness to the client are the firm’s value propositions. Consequently, they organize their daily activities around addressing the urgent, proximate needs of each client. Conclusion: Although the microfirm’s focus on flexibility and closeness sets it apart tactically from larger competitors, it also hinders strategic planning, requiring greater effort for group communication and decision-making. This insight helps us to understand why microfirms in general seem more tactically than strategically oriented.

This article examines the relationship between politeness, culture, and speech acts in multilingual corporate communication. It emphasizes the role of second language acquisition (SLA) practices in teaching politeness strategies, with a focus on explicit instruction, immersion programs, and authentic language practice. The article also offers suggestions to enhance communication in such environments, using Luxembourg as an example of a multicultural business environment and highlighting the importance of understanding cultural norms and expectations surrounding politeness. By examining the interplay between these factors, this study aims to contribute to improved communication practices in multilingual corporate settings.

The article deals with intercultural business communication challenges that complicate discourses in multinational organizations. The article explores the cultural incompatibility problems with their corresponding cultural dimensions extracted from the seminal theories of intercultural management to identify training needs for multinational managers. The fulcrum of this work rests on the salient value orientations that lead to communication collapses when managers from different countries fail to accomplish optimal cultural attunement in their narratives and script their conversations with ethnocentric biases. To counter these debilitating stressful intercultural conversations, the author presents an innovative training solution of a “20-20 culture-communication template tool” for coaching managers for effective production of ethno-relative dialogues across diverse geo-cultural economies. This culture tool uses a 20-point culture questionnaire format with the complementary application apparatus of 20 culture sensitivity programs that organizations can undertake for a quick tutoring of multinational managers for forging successful intercultural coalitions in plural work spaces.

Managers who are seen as approachable by their employees are the key drivers of building an excellent organizational workplace where supportive communication is available for the employees, especially during difficult situations. Regrettably, not all managers are approachable and communicate supportively. In such situations, the result can be a dysfunctional work environment that demoralizes employees’ attitudes, causing organizational work productivity to deteriorate. Our study explores the factors related to unapproachable organizational managers who do not use supportive communication. We employed a qualitative statistical approach to interview 155 professional employees from various industries representing different countries

The current study aims to evaluate the impact of Facebook integration on student engagement and academic performance on a business communication course taught in an Indian private university in an online teaching environment. A direct relationship was established between Facebook usage in an online learning environment and student engagement—both situational and personal factors. A quantitative data analysis using structured equation modeling was conducted to test the validity of the conceptualized model. The study reports that integration of contemporary social media tools in academia fosters communication, collaboration, and participation in online learning environment to develop discussion-oriented learning and cocreation.

This article presents a curated collection of 12 teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. These MFA presenters demonstrated teaching ideas specifically on improving students’ speaking skills. This My Favorite Assignment 32nd edition introduces readers to these classroom approaches in teaching speaking skills in business contexts. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetoric and Desire in the History of Computing is a little book doing big things. Author Patricia Fancher presents a well-theorized recovery of both queer lives and the lives of women in the history of computing, something of great import to scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC). Fancher engages with queer theory, rhetoric, technical communication, historiography, archival studies, mathematics, computers, and engineering, resulting in a robust interdisciplinary work. At the center of the book is Alan Turing, a pioneering mathematician and gay man, but just as important are the people around him—his queer community and the women of the University of Manchester Computer Lab. Fancher uses queer and embodied techné to explore these communities and the writing that occurred within them. Through this, she presents a case that pushes back against popular narratives of Alan Turing as a solitary genius while also bringing forward the embodied human presence in computing and TPC.

This summer my professional life was marked by a number of exciting changes. In addition to assuming the role of editor in chief of CDQ and producing my first issue, I stepped down from a longterm role with the editorial team at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. In a bittersweet note, I received (and gave) a multitude of well wishes to the amazing colleagues and collaborators I had at Colorado State University, including Sue Doe, Lisa Langstraat, Tobi Jacobi, Todd Ruecker, Sarah Cooper, Chad Hoffman, Tiffany Lipsey, Dinaida Egan, and Meg Suter, while I started a new role as Chair of the Department of Professional and Public Writing at the University of Rhode Island. It was a summer full of packing, unpacking, painting—and new processes, policies, and people. Throughout this moment, I spent a great deal of time reflecting on this change. For instance, I reflected on what CDQ means to the fields of communication and user experience design (CD/UX), technical and professional communication (TPC), and writing and rhetoric studies (WRS). Similarly, I reflected on my editorial philosophy and how I will shape and alter it now that I've been entrusted with serving as steward of CDQ. In this opening editorial, I remark on three themes that emerged while contemplating these changes: gratitude, care, and resilience.