Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

This essay argues that technical rhetoric in ancient Athens is neither well nor fully understood in its present historical characterization but rather is best realized as occupying a position on a spectrum of literate skills ranging from an art to a craft. The dismissive views of technical writing advanced by Plato and Aristotle should be reconsidered and specialized literate practices be recognized as an important feature of rhetoric in Athens’ classical period. A review of discursive and material (archaeological) evidence reveals that technical writing was evolving into a craft-skill in Athens as early as the archaic period and, by the classical period, would be regarded as a respected “rhetorical” profession of artistic expression. This essay urges readers to reconsider the restrictive characterization of rhetoric advanced by some historians of rhetoric and include the specialist craft-skills of writing as a manifestation of technical rhetoric that both illustrates, and more accurately represents, the range of classical rhetoric in ancient Athens.

Technical communication has long acknowledged that documents can be unethical and even oppressive and harmful. But not all forms or experiences of oppression are equivalent or similar, and it can be instrumental to analyze in particular how certain groups are wounded by specific documents. In this article, the authors use Ahmed's queer phenomenology to analyze institutional and government documents and demonstrate the ways that these technical documents create failed orientations. Then, through a focused analysis of a federal proposal policy, they show how these documents can produce failures for trans people in particular. The authors close by suggesting courses of actions for redressing these failures.

Successfully adapting to organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis necessitated the effective deployment of technical communication texts delineating the expectations and structures for guiding behavior and interactions. A dearth of system-wide familiarity with changes in modalities has disrupted expectations and impacted engagement. During acute events, business and technical communicators will probably not be the initial source of transition messaging. Instead, this task will fall on managers, faculty, and other front-line communicators. The authors present pragmatic recommendations for adapting familiar discourses, semiotics, and mental scripts so that communicators can more effectively intervene during crises to ease organizational transitions and decrease uncertainty.

Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular, nonhierarchical, and nonlinear, which creates user experience issues related to attention as well as information selection, ordering, processing, and navigation. The patterns of language use in topic-based writing reveal how metadiscourse might help readers address these reader experience issues.

Abstract: In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice for instructors… Continue reading From Awareness to Advocacy: Using Intimate Partner Violence Awareness Campaigns to Teach User Advocacy and Empathy in a Trauma-Informed Technical Communication Course

PDF version Abstract The paper, titled “Wikis as Third Space for Diversifying Access for Technical Communication,” introspects the process of building a wiki site that represents the translanguaging practice of the author who is a translingual—uses Bangla and English simultaneously. In response to recent calls for a social justice approach for the field of technical… Continue reading Wikis as “Third Space”—Diversifying “Access” for Technical Communication

PDF version Abstract: In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice… Continue reading From Awareness to Advocacy: Using Intimate Partner Violence Awareness Campaigns to Teach User Advocacy and Empathy in a Trauma-Informed Technical Communication Course

PDF version Abstract This article weaves narrative, tweets, relevant literature, and conference session summaries from the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference. Topics include discussion of power, language, and a short guide for graduate students (predominantly first-generation) to assist with navigating virtual conferences. The article includes questions and ideas that scholars in technical communication may be interested… Continue reading What’s in a Tweet? A Graduate Student Rumination of the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference

PDF version This special issue contains articles, reflections, and discussions stemming from the 2021 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Virtual Conference, which was themed “Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication.” This theme was originally set for the 2020 ATTW Conference. When the conference co-chairs Ann Shivers-McNair and Laura Gonzales originally developed the… Continue reading Introduction to the Special Issue: Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication

This article argues that through embodied presentations and the multimodal, international and intercultural affordances of YouTube, the rhetoric of Black hair care YouTubers is tactical TPC toward social justices. We note the interactive comments section as a place for technical communicators to identify and redress issues in normative instructional discourse. This scholarship extends TPC beyond “how to do it” and “how I do it” toward “how we must view it in order to do it.’

This article offers an approach to providing identity-specific routes for engagement in pro-Black futures in distributed ways. We outline a model designed for Black practitioners and non-Black practitioners in professional environments to navigate their complex relationships given the historical, cultural, and social nature of coalitional work. We demonstrate this model as a possible pathway for situated and distributed everyday coalitional work through reflective and introspective storytelling based on individual and shared positionality.

This article highlights technical and professional communication (TPC) as a literacy practice used to plan and sustain Black family reunions. Specifically, I examine the work of three families who create and engage with technical and business writing genres to complete internal and external reunion organizing work. I argue that the field of TPC needs more focused inquiry into research that centers Black families as TPC practitioners.

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems. Representation of the biometric technology, therefore, reflects ways that technical communication can become complicit in silencing, excluding, and marginalizing local voices. I call attention to how communication that focuses on dominant narratives obscures and delegitimizes the knowledge of disenfranchised and less privileged groups.

This article presents an ethnographic study on the user experience (UX) design of the photo- and video-editing apps of millennial and Generation Z participants from different cultural groups. The case study calls attention to the implications of rhetorical misrepresentations of reality that photo- and video-editing apps afford and encourages future large-scale studies on the negative psychological and behavioral impacts such apps can have on users’ psychology, behaviors, and well-being. The authors use frameworks in virtue ethics to argue that despite slight variations, photo and video app UX has ethical implications that can negatively impact young adult users. For example, the study suggests that the photo and video app features tend to subvert the traditional Chinese virtues of modesty, honesty, and the middle way and that hyperbolic and playful designs can cause addictive behaviors.

This article historicizes the impact of the Common Rule, which mandates the existence of Institutional Review Boards, on technical and professional communication (TPC) research with a focus on the principle of justice. Justice is discussed as a complex principle that must be internally and coherently balanced along several axes in the design, implementation, and promulgation of research in technical communication. The author proposes that with shared language, which in this article begins with one principle—justice—TPC researchers can more plainly articulate their positions in the development and dissemination of scholarship, thereby adding coherence to ethical work in the 21st century.

This paper theorizes historical marker texts (HMT) as succinct, public facing informational reports that reinforce white supremacy and minimize or erase the memory of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) individuals. In this layered content and discourse analysis, I evaluate the demographics of the commissioners at the local and state level, the instructions for the HMT application, and the text of a selected group of HMTs.

Attention to the ethical dimension in technical and professional communication (TPC) is paramount, especially when dealing with new, emerging technologies. Such technologies frequently rest within corporate environments that may resist ethical gatekeeping. I suggest several methods by which TPC instructors can critically question the limits of corporate structure to show students that they have a variety of options for responding to assignments other than those their employers may offer them.

This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.

This article presents a reexamination of intercultural components in prominent, recent technical professional communication textbooks. This examination reveals the need for the technical professional communication field to establish a dynamic definition of culture as well as presents a possible definition, presents areas where textbooks have addressed previous scholars’ concerns as well as areas that could still use improvement and may require instructors to add supplemental instruction, and presents considerations for instructors when incorporating intercultural component elements into their courses.

This article advocates for web scraping as an effective method to augment and enhance technical and professional communication (TPC) research practices. Web scraping is used to create consistently structured and well-sampled data sets about domains, communities, demographics, and topics of interest to TPC scholars. After providing an extended description of web scraping, the authors identify technical considerations of the method and provide practitioner narratives. They then describe an overview of project-oriented web scraping. Finally, they discuss implications for the concept as a sustainable approach to developing web scraping methods for TPC research.

Through an ethnographic study conducted with an Indigenous language rights organization, this article illustrates how translation and interpretation can be further considered in global technical communication research. By providing examples of how Indigenous language translators and interpreters approach their work, this article advocates for a reframing of multilingualism in technical communication through a deliberate attunement to the relationships between language, land, and positionality. The author argues that as technical communicators continue conducting research in multilingual contexts, researchers should acknowledge how translation and interpretation impact the results and methodologies of contemporary global research.

This article argues that science fiction is a powerful tool for teaching ethics in the technical communication classroom. As a literary genre, science fiction is uniquely situated to critique the social and political consequences of technological progress and to guide future behaviors. Using a speculative fiction-themed technical communication seminar as a case study, this essay demonstrates how science fiction theory, narratives, and projects can encourage students to think more holistically about their future roles as scientists and communicators. Such an approach can reinvigorate traditional workplace genres, support responsible decision-making, and promote multiculturalism, environmentalism, and social justice.

This Methodologies and Approaches piece argues artificially intelligent machine learning systems can be used to effectively advance justice-oriented research in technical and professional communication (TPC). Using a preexisting dataset investigating patient marginalization in pharmaceuticals policy discourse, we built and tested 49 machine learning systems designed to identify and track rhetorical features of interest. Three popular and one new approach to feature engineering (text quantification) were evaluated. The results indicate that these systems have great potential for use in TPC research.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

Social justice is a framework that has been at the forefront of technical communication in recent years. While social justice is often applied in participatory studies, it can also feature in studies using quantitative methods. In this study, I use corpus-based critical discourse analysis to investigate the portrayal of migrants in the World Migration Reports, the flagship publication of the International Organization for Migration. I emphasize context to bring in the social justice framework in this analysis. This study finds that the World Migration Reports represent migrants within various topoi, with a particular focus on the topos of advantage and that of danger/threat.

This article interrogates the concept of tactical technical communication specifically questioning the established understanding of de Certeau in the field of technical communication. It argues once readers move beyond the concepts of strategies and tactics, they will find a rich and nuanced explanation of how ordinary people “make do” in everyday life.

The social justice turn in technical and professional communication (TPC) has inspired a substantial body of progressive scholarship and discussion. But it is not clear how these scholarly efforts have shaped (or are shaping) programmatic and curricular efforts. This article reports the findings of a survey of TPC instructors and an analysis of 231 TPC programs to examine their curricular efforts toward social justice. Drawing from the mixed findings, the authors argue that vigorous curricular efforts in social justice enable TPC to fully and practically demonstrate the core mandate of our discipline.

Hewett and Bourelle (2019) have collected a series of essays aimed to help program administrators (PAs) develop and fine-tune online training and professional development programs in technical and ...

Based on two user experience (UX) classes, this article describes an approach for incorporating community-engaged learning into intensive online classes. This approach relies on (1) sustainability for creating a flexible and meaningful thematic context with potential for an existing community engagement infrastructure and (2) the lean UX framework for serving as a foundation of the course structure. This approach showed promising results for students, community stakeholders, and faculty and is transferrable to various institutional contexts.

This article introduces the term “queer usability” to technical communicators. Queer usability is the anticipation of marginalized communities and the application of this anticipation to user-centered design to create a digital space in which marginalized populations are centered. In short, queer usability anticipates and centers marginalized users and their anticipated needs. To ethically create social media worlds, we must embrace and implement queer usability.

Meeting the needs of users requires an understanding of the contexts where they interact with materials. This entry presents an approach for integrating script theory into usability to develop medical materials individuals can use in the settings where they receive or perform healthcare activities. The entry introduces technical communication professionals to script theory and presents mechanisms for using script theory to research patient expectations of and presents usable materials for health and medical contexts.

User experience (UX) researchers in technical communication (TC) and beyond still need a clear picture of the methods used to measure and evaluate UX. This article charts current UX methods through a systematic literature review of recent publications (2016–2018) and a survey of 52 UX practitioners in academia and industry. Our results indicate that contemporary UX research favors mixed methods, and that usability testing is especially popular in both published research and our survey results. This article presents these findings as a snapshot of contemporary research methods for UX.

Health and medical contexts have emerged as an important area of inquiry for researchers at the intersection of user experience and technical communication. In addressing this intersection, this article advocates and extends patient experience design or PXD ( Melonçon, 2017 ) as an important framework for user experience research within health and medicine. Specifically, this article presents several PXD insights from a task-based usability study that examined an online intervention program for people with voice problems. We respond to Melonçon's call ( 2017 ) to build PXD as a framework for user experience and technical communication research by describing ways traditional usability methods can provide PXD insights and asking the following question: What insights can emerge from combining traditional usability methods and PXD research? In addressing this question, we outline two primary methodological and practical considerations we found central to conducting PXD research: (1) engaging patients as participants, and (2) leveraging multidisciplinary collaboration.

In this special issue, we reflect on the past and current connections between TC and UX, it is important to recognize the value the two fields bring to one another. The articles in this collection illustrate a move into new spaces, incorporating new methods, and forging new connections and provide us an opportunity to conceptualize the continuously evolving relationship between the fields.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) and user experience (UX) design are often seen as intertwined due to being user-centered. Yet, as widening industry positions combine TPC and UX, new streams enrich our understanding. This article looks at three such streams, namely, design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence to uncover specific industry practices, skills, and ways to advocate for users. These streams foster a multistage user-centered methodology focused on a continuous designing process, strategic ways for developing content across different platforms and channels, and for developing in smart contexts where agentive products act for users. In this article, we synthesize these developments and draw out how these impact TPC.

Since 1985, the field of professional communication has grown in size and reputation while maintaining a space within its primary disciplinary home of the English department. This article relies on historical evidence to examine how a field that was once evenly divided between business communication and technical communication is now technical communication-centric, almost to the exclusion of business communication. The authors pose questions about the field of professional communication and how faculty who consider business communication to be their primary discipline (regardless of their disciplinary home) might play a role in future discussions related to disciplinarity and domains of knowledge.

Academic work increasingly involves creating digital tools with interdisciplinary teams distributed across institutions and roles. The negative impacts of distributed work are described at length in technical communication scholarship, but such impacts have not yet been realized in collaborative practices. By integrating attention to their core ethical principles, best practices, and work patterns, the authors are developing an ethical, sustainable approach to team building that they call constructive distributed work. This article describes their integrated approach, documents the best practices that guide their research team, and models the three-dimensional thinking that helps them develop sustainable digital tools and ensure the consistent professional development of all team members.

More than 20 years ago, Elizabeth O. Smith published her points of reference that documented the research trajectory of technical communication from 1988 to 1997. Her results indicated a focus on rhetorical analyses, a decrease in collaborative research, and a disproportionate representation of male authors. This study builds on these points with a quantitative content analysis of 1,271 articles that were published in five leading technical communication journals and Intercom, the trade magazine for the Society for Technical Communication, from 1996 to 2017. The results show that both the research journals and Intercom have pivoted to process-driven rather than product-driven content. The results also suggest that the primary topics of communication strategy and collaboration might be the most likely places to foster future industry–academic ties and that the greatest division between the two populations is the primary topic of rhetoric. This study offers an updated baseline for future investigations by offering an evaluation of disparate content foci between the publication types.

In this introduction, we emphasize the urgency of centering bodyminds and communities whose lives and experiences have been disregarded, or viewed as disposable, in medical and technical communication. With an expansive vision of health, we set the interdisciplinary stage for authors who answer the call of multiply-marginalized scholars working in (and beyond) medical rhetorics to reimagine health-related research that centers the perspectives, experiences, and embodied realities of multiply-marginalized communities (Jones, 2020; Walton, Moore, Jones 2019).

This article introduces “rhetorical body work” as a framework for understanding professional embodiment in health provider education and technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. Using the case study of clinical nursing simulations and drawing on sociological theory, I provide a detailed analysis of three components of rhetorical body work as they manifest in three simulation scenarios: physical, emotional, and discursive. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the embodied teaching of TPC.

This article provides an overview of robust social justice work already done in technical and professional communication (TPC) to introduce the transformative paradigm, an action research framework articulated by Donna Mertens. Research articles in TPC offer examples of the axiological, ontological, epistemological, and methodological tenets of the transformative paradigm. Together with a measured discussion of the paradigm, this Methodologies and Approaches article responds to calls in TPC scholarship to articulate and practice methodologies resonant with the social justice turn.

This paper studies the language of job descriptions in rhetoric and technical and professional communication to explore how this language might be exclusionary of international scholars. Through critical discourse analysis, we reviewed current U.S. labor and immigration laws and contrasted those laws with the language of hiring documents. We found that hiring documents do not always align with U.S. labor and immigration laws and consequently hinder the hiring prospects of international scholars.