The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational—a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

The past two decades have experienced a paradigm shift from a narrow conception of usability to a broader process of user experience. We argue that durable connections to usability remain in TPC. In this perspectives piece, we highlight the paradigm shift and share traces of how the usability paradigm remains durable, primarily in the service course. We share savvy practices of instructors embracing the UX paradigm, even in the face of constraints.

Black mentorship is key to the professional development of Black scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) and writing studies. Blending narrative ethnography and grounded theory, this article extends existing investigations into mentorship among Black professionals, by exploring how mentorship and rhetorical kinship among Black TPC and writing professors enrich their professional development. With implications for both academia and industry, this article highlights how Black TPC scholars develop, negotiate, and sustain Black professional ethos.

This article offers a content analysis of technical and professional communication articles related to user experience (TPC-UX) published between 2013 and 2022 in six TPC scholarly journals. This analysis reveals that TPC-UX primarily focuses on product and process topics and illustrates the terminological comingling of user experience and usability. Specific TPC-UX topics identified include theory, multimodality, health and medicine, localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy. These topics suggest that TPC-UX's key affordances are its attunement to networked power dynamics, its theoretically rich treatment of multimodality, and its strategies for navigating contextual complexities.

In the discipline of technical/professional writing and communication, one of the strongest recruiting tools we use is the potential earning power students will have once they obtain a degree and secure a job in the industry. This article is the result of two professors learning that one of their most advanced and dedicated students accepted, in her first job out of graduate school, a salary we thought was thousands below her earning potential. Our conversations around this student's situation led us to survey other alumni from our programs. What we have learned is that students often do not know what salaries they should expect, nor do they feel comfortable negotiating a salary offer. In addition, graduates’ location (urban vs. rural) and level of education (BA or BS degree vs. MA) impact their earning potential.

Chemist Ethaline Cortelyou, a significant figure in the emerging profession of technical communication in the 1950s, became a national mentor to women in the sciences, first leading them into the practice of technical editing and then away from it. This article presents a case study of her awakening to the true nature and cost of the patriarchal workplace and her own complicity in actively supporting sexist assumptions and the status quo. During the Sputnik crisis, Cortelyou recognized and overcame her internalized sexism, revised her advice to young women in the sciences, and became a public advocate of workplace reform.

While the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format is common in scientific writing, it may not currently be as ubiquitous as often thought. We undertook a systematic, corpus-based study of primary section headings in research articles across a range of STEM disciplines to investigate adherence to the IMRAD structure in relation to type of study (computational, empirical, or theoretical) and field. We identified four categories of structure: IMRAD, IMRAD+ (IMRAD with additional sections and/or different order), Nested IMRAD (multi-part studies), and Non-IMRAD. Papers in biology mainly used an IMRAD format, while less than half in engineering or social sciences did so. While empirical papers tended to use IMRAD formats, most computational papers did not. Thus, our findings show that IMRAD is a common but not universal structure for contemporary scientific writing. Awareness of these differences should encourage teachers of scientific and technical writing and scholars of writing studies to pay closer attention to the actual structural forms used in different STEM disciplines and with different methodological types of research studies.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has disrupted approaches to writing in academic and professional contexts. While much interest has revolved around the ability of LLMs to generate coherent and generically responsible texts with minimal effort and the impact that this will have on writing careers and pedagogy, less attention has been paid to how LLMs can aid writing research. Building from previous research, this study explores the utility of AI text generators to facilitate the qualitative coding research of linguistic data. This study benchmarks five LLM prompting strategies to determine the viability of using LLMs as qualitative coding, not writing, assistants, demonstrating that LLMs can be an effective tool for classifying complex rhetorical expressions and can help business and technical communication researchers quickly produce and test their research designs, enabling them to return insights more quickly and with less initial overhead.

This case study offers examples of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools at a small nonprofit workplace dispute resolution center. It explores the limits and strengths of these AI tools, as well as the mediation field's concerns around using AI as a replacement for mediation work. Further, it explores the implications of AI tool use for the ethos of the writer and the AI tool itself as well as for the current pedagogy deliberations occurring in the technical writing field at large.

This study extends the retrospective analysis of entries for the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication (1999–2003) by Stuart Selber in 2004, focusing on the subsequent two decades (2004 to 2022), to identify the topical research areas and methodologies in technical and professional communication (TPC) via the winning entries of the award. Through descriptive content analysis of 29 dissertations and corresponding summary statistics, this study reports on TPC disciplinary emphases and growth based on the sponsoring institutions on these dissertations, featured topics and their research methods or methodologies, and projected implications for the field. Accordingly, this study reveals the state of TPC graduate research through the lens of the imminent award and what it means for doctoral researchers, their advisors, and programs.

The usability of items is connected to cognition, or how the brain processes information. Many of the related processes occur subconsciously and are guided by the mental models individuals have created based on their experiences. The better communication professional and communication students understand such dynamics, the more effectively they can create usable content for an audience. This article presents an approach, the Actualization, Recognition, Categorization, Operationalization (ARCO) method, for identifying the mental models that influence usability expectations. Individuals can use the results of this process to create content that better addresses an audience’s usability expectations.

This study employs a one-group pretest and posttest design to assess the written and oral technical communication (TC) skills of students in vocational colleges in China. Fifty-nine 1st-year students in automotive engineering participated in a 3-week implementation of a TC module. To measure learner differences, students took oral and written tests before and after the intervention, respectively. Results showed that the module effectively improved students’ written and oral TC skills. In addition, findings from interviews with participants and English teachers indicated that the TC module is suitable from a pedagogical perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic made nearly every teacher and student online teachers and students in some capacity. This article presents a case study of an experienced, contingent technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor showing how she sets up, presents, and, most importantly, labors in her course for the benefit of her students and herself. This article ends with recommendations for other online TPC teachers and program administrators to support online TPC courses.

This article offers perspectives on adopting smart home technology into usability testing for technical and professional communication (TPC) courses. Usability is a valued skill for technical communicators. However, usability testing methods have their problems as pedagogical tools. Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and Smart Home Technology (SHT) may offer instructors tools to overcome some of those problems. This article details advantages and concerns associated with using SHT for curricular usability testing.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher MaggioChristopher Maggio is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where he teaches first-year and technical writing. His research interests include storytelling and antenarrative theory and their applications to community-based writing. He recently co-authored an article for a special issue of 'Communication Design Quarterly' on community-engaged research.

We use a continuous improvement model to evaluate an information design assignment by analyzing 120 student drafts and finals alongside instructor feedback. Using data from across sections ( N = 118), we illustrate a process focused on improving student learning that other technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty can follow, while also offering insights into ways programs can assist a contingent labor force with improving pedagogical practice. This study provides insights into assignment design through data-driven evidence and reflective work that is necessary to help continuously improve a service course and to assist students in meeting learning outcomes.

Forms and surveys often require address information, including state. State data entry fields in online forms typically use a dropdown where the user selects one state from the list. A review of online forms shows a variety of state lists used, with some including the state name fully spelled out while others use the state abbreviation, and still others use a combination of the two, like MD-Maryland. Through a series of three independent experiments, we investigate usability of state list designs as measured by time-on-task, accuracy of answers, or user preference. Results indicate that participants have difficulty with state abbreviations alone. That design results in longer time-on-task, and lower accuracy and preference, particularly for states where the user does not live. We did not find any significant difference in usability for full state names compared to the abbreviation and state name combination in a dropdown design.

Creating new emojis is predicated on a system of technical writing that lobbies for new emojis to the Unicode Consortium. Emojination, an activist collective working for cultural inclusivity, helps everyday people write proposals for inclusive and culturally sensitive emojis. Through a case study of Emojination, this article describes ways that Tactical Technical Communication can work toward cultural inclusivity within regulatory frameworks.

While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923's English For Engineers, I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State. Her rural agricultural background and acquaintance with the engineering faculty, combined with her literature training, led to OSU's engineering faculty demanding successfully that English promote her without reference to her textbook. Harbarger is also a notable early example of navigating being a female professor teaching engineering writing in a male-dominated English literature department.

I propose Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as an approach for understanding the discursive and material implications of technical documents in distant sites. I provide a historical vignette of MCDA and exemplify how technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can critically engage with distant sites through MCDA by analyzing materials about GhanaPostGPS, a geolocation technology. I conclude by discussing limitations of MCDA – access to archives – and propose the creation of crowdsourced technical documentation archives.

Using first-hand experience supplemented by an open-access archive, this article examines case examples of civically engaged, public-facing technical communication (e.g., training for community organizers) as well as the value of stories and storytelling for content strategy. By developing 10 best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, this article offers suggestions for how to design and sustain content strategy for community organizers and contributes to the field's knowledge of the content strategy of politically engaged nonprofits, particularly those with a strong digital presence.

This special issue of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication features work from scholars and practitioners of content strategy. Content strategy is an emerging area within technical communication that boasts a variety of unique practices for publishing, editing, and delivering technical content. The work within this special issue is a testament to the complexity and diversity of this field.

While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession.

This article highlights the role of place in understanding problems, specifically within community-engaged projects in upper-level technical and professional communication courses. Drawing on a year-long participant-generated imagery study with students, instructors, and community partners, the authors argue that photographic research is effective in helping participants and researchers tune to place. Taking photos offers opportunities for documentation, individual interpretation, and collaborative reflection, resulting in a deeper, more nuanced sense of place. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how a greater awareness of place, cultivated through reflecting on visual evidence, enhances engagement projects and helps technical communicators address complex problems.

Technical communication practice can change rapidly over time and across organizations. As a result, lifelong learning is an important mind-set, yet few studies explore how technical communicators learn on the job. This study builds on research about technical communication training by reporting on learning practices in one documentation team working at a large, multinational corporate information technology firm. Based on interviews and artifact analysis, the authors report on topics, technologies, and learning purposes that the team discussed, finding that peer-led, collaborative learning enables documentation teams to create and sustain group dynamics, an underexplored facet of on-the-job learning.

This special issue amplifies the contributions of technical communicators working on climate justice initiatives across the Majority World. By Majority World, we refer not to a specific geography but to the conditions in which most of humanity lives: lacking economic, social, and/or political agency, and absent adequate institutional access to critical infrastructures. The articles in this issue make explicit the need for TPC scholars to rethink, update, and engage in spaces of environmental injustice.

Teaching online students to collaborate effectively with community partners and to solve problems through service-learning projects are “on trend” topics for technical communication faculty. This article presents collaboration specifics as well as the author's Collaborative Communication Framework (CCF) to show the types of communication needed to work well with community partners/clients in service-learning. Tips for teaching, including using the CCF and service-learning, will be highlighted so faculty can make choices about how to meet curricular goals while addressing community partner/client needs. Resources for teaching will be offered. Successful student projects will show detailed examples of key ideas throughout the article.

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

This study analyzes 295 tweets by four U.S. companies engaged in discovering a vaccine for COVID-19. Tweets were analyzed to understand how their Twitter feeds balanced corporate and product branding (vaccine, medicines, etc.) and disseminated scientific information relating to COVID-19. The results suggest that these companies were actively embedding technical information about COVID-19 in their corporate and product branding. Tweets providing technical and scientific information about the progress made toward developing a COVID-19 vaccine garnered high levels of user engagement from their target audience. Findings from this study indicate the growing importance of technical communication in corporate settings during a public health crisis.

This article reports on an interview-based study with COVID-19 vaccine trial participants (n = 40) and addresses three strategies participants used to localize vaccine communication for their communities: (1) presenting embodied evidence, (2) demystifying clinical research, (3) operationalizing relationships. These strategies contribute to understandings of embodiment, relationships, and localization in technical and professional communication (TPC). They also show how participants used TPC to resist dominant individualist approaches to health and to practice collective care.

This Methodologies and Approaches piece interfaces conversations about social justice pedagogies in technical and professional communication (TPC), Black TPC, and online TPC instruction to discuss the social justice affordances of Slack in online instruction. Drawing on our experiences using Slack within an online graduate course during the COVID-19 pandemic, we consider how Slack supports pedagogical community building and accessibility in online instruction before presenting a framework for assessing instructional technologies in terms of social justice.

While entrepreneurship is a pervasive cultural concept, it is not universally applicable. Drawing on a year-long study with nonprofit workers, this piece articulates a frame for understanding technical and professional communication work within nonprofits rooted in comradeship, which privileges community needs, everyday people, listening, and solidarity across stakeholder groups. Such a frame offers a more nuanced understanding of how accountability frames the work of nonprofit employees and other stakeholders dedicated to social justice.

In this article, I argue that the accelerated adoption of political technology during the COVID-19 pandemic evinces exigency for a rhetorically grounded framework to teach, research, and practice political technical communication (PxTC) as a sub-discipline. As a starting point, I use a rhetorical genre studies approach to identify political social actions that separate political communication technologies into four distinct genres: election, electioneering, constituent services, and punditry.

Telemedicine is an alternative healthcare delivery system whereby patients access digital technology to consult with a physician virtually. Patients first interact with telemedicine via a consumer-facing website. Telemedicine promises numerous benefits to patients, such as increased access to healthcare, yet poor usability of the telemedicine user interface (UI) may hinder patient acceptance and adoption of the service. The telemedicine UI moderates patients’ ability to utilize telemedicine, and therefore it must be usable, but it must also be rhetorical to motivate patients to perform certain actions. Digital rhetoric refers to UI elements that influence user actions and knowledge and is tied to usability because of these same human–computer interaction (HCI) factors. This study examined the usability of three telemedicine provider UIs and by identifying usability problems, reveals digital rhetoric that is significant to telemedicine UIs. The article concludes by offering heuristics of digital rhetoric that lead to optimal usability.

Although retrospective project reports are common in the materials development literature, accounts of textbook writing sessions are rare; so too are accounts of open textbook production. Open textbooks are learning resources that are free to use and oftentimes adapt by virtue of their copyright permissions. The authors used concurrent verbalization and interviews to document writing episodes while preparing their first book, an open textbook devised for corequisite technical writing courses. Corequisite designs pair content courses with explicit skill-building modules as a means to support underprepared learners in higher education in the United States. Qualitative content analysis of the data revealed how teaching and other praxis influenced the open textbook’s composition: in the authors’ applications of technical writing principles, pedagogical reasoning skills, and nonteaching work. The findings may encourage open textbook writers to exploit their established composing practices and knowledge bases to proceed with textbook production. In addition, the article highlights the usefulness of concurrent verbalization to textbook research and identifies the various materials development opportunities open textbook projects provide. It also contributes to the underresearched area of textbook production by exposing the complexities of open textbook development and how two novice authors negotiated them during writing episodes.

This article offers a theoretical intervention into the work on posthumanism in technical and professional communication (TPC), an intervention that encourages the field to recognize relationships between objects and users in different ways. Our intervention draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to reimagine how TPC tends to think about the concept of assemblage. We apply this other view in makerspaces, illustrating what it buys us for practice and theory in complex sociotechnical contexts.

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

Instruction in cartographic or map literacy in technical communication courses can support pedagogies promoting social change. Students must develop an ability to read, understand, interpret, use, and critique maps in technical communication contexts. This article argues that attention to cartographic literacy can build on existing visual literacies to promote critical understanding of how to use and create maps that engage with issues related to social change. A description of a sample assignment is included to introduce cartographic literacy in undergraduate technical communication courses. Student map examples support the conclusion that students benefit from instruction in cartographic literacy and that cartographic literacy can be an important component of technical communication pedagogies that work toward social justice.

Scrum is an increasingly important project management framework that has had limited study in technical communication (TC) and TC classrooms. While research has found student collaborations to be both frustrating and challenging, it has found Scrum to be a scaffolding framework that can improve student interactions and outcomes. Therefore, to determine whether Scrum affects the peer assessments of collaborative teams as well as project grades, this quasi-experimental classroom study compares the midproject and postproject peer assessments and grades of advanced TC students who used Scrum as a framework for collaboration against those students who did not use Scrum in their collaborations. The study found that students who used Scrum rated their team members significantly higher on some peer assessment measures and earned significantly higher grades than did those students who did not use Scrum. Additionally, students in the Scrum protocol reported satisfaction with their group experience broadly but did not report satisfaction with Scrum itself.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication | Khirsten L. Scott, Ann Shivers-McNair, and Laura Gonzales ATTW 2020 President’s Welcome | Angela M. Haas Rethinking Access to Data and Tools for Community Partners in Research | Maria Barker and Rachel Bloom-Pojar A Counter-Narrative of Academic Job-Seeking International Scholars: Keynote Address… Continue reading Issue 22.1: Special Issue: Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication

This article introduces “superdiversity,” a concept from migration studies, as a framework for TPC practitioners and scholars defining migrant multilingual audiences. In contrast to intercultural understandings of audience, superdiversity better accounts for cultural complexity in diverse environments. The article uses an extended example to demonstrate how superdiversity operates as an intersectional and social justice-oriented praxis. The example of a nonprofit organization’s intake process illustrates how superdiversity helps this organization better define and understand its clients.

This study investigates the rhetorics of smart cities and how they define citizens’ agency. We consider the framing of human control against automated technological infrastructures in smart and playable cities. Through examining selected smart city plans from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, we share results from the comparisons of these plans to draw implications for technical and professional communication (TPC) practices and pedagogy. We propose a postconnectivist trajectory for TPC toward the increasingly datafied future.

This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.