The authors examined a corpus of figure captions from technical and professional communication (TPC)-journal articles to test their sense that TPC captions do not fulfill their communicative potential as well as, they sensed, journals in science often do. The authors performed a content analysis on captions from biology-journal articles and iteratively tested a coding scheme of caption content. The resulting scheme can help in analyzing caption content, developing captions, and imparting a variety of TPC-related skills to students.

This article argues for the need for a social justice approach to technical communication research and pedagogy. Given previous calls by scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) for an attention to diversity, inclusion, and equality, the author examines the place and purpose of social justice in TPC and provides useful approaches for promoting a more genuine and critical interrogation of how work in TPC impacts the human experience.

The authors argue that technical and professional communication is currently facing an issue of incommensurability due to the diversity of the field. They call for unifying the field around its research questions to provide a common foundation for the future.

This article considers how issues of power and legitimacy in technical communication are connected to clearly defining what a technical communicator does. An articulation of what technical communicators do can grant the field power in presenting a united front to employers with respect to the value technical communicators bring to the workplace. So as to leverage the power and legitimacy associated with articulating what technical communicators do, this article reviews and revises the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH)’s definition of technical communicator. To effectively revise the OOH’s definition, this article reviews academic and practitioner scholarship in technical communication and the administration of technical and professional writing programs. It demonstrates that concerns about practical skills, conceptual skills, and flexibility are related to legitimacy and power. These concerns can be used as criteria to evaluate and revise the OOH’s definition of technical communicator. In closing, the article discusses the benefits associated with the revised definition and how these benefits are related to issues of power and legitimacy in the field.

In this article, we use extant International Business Machines' internal communications to demonstrate how Boje’s notion of “antenarrative” can serve as a methodology for feminist historiography and as a way of uncovering forgotten and unchallenged systems of power and legitimacy in technical and professional communication. The antenarrative fragments of any official, sanctioned story give us insight into the ways in which power has been distributed throughout an organization and where agency can be claimed in real time. We also see that a methodology that considers the untold and unofficial stories of women in the workplace works to explain current distributions of power. This can be done by investigating the antenarratives that threaten to disrupt the prepackaged grand narrative of organizations; we show this specifically through a case study of International Business Machines' archival memos in contrast with the company’s website and public relations documents.

We report the results of a pilot study that offers the field of technical and professional communication its first look at material working conditions of contingent faculty, such as course loads, compensation, and professional support. Findings include that contingent faculty are more enduring with stable full-time, multi-year contracts; they carry a substantial teaching loads; and the majority are satisfied and happy in their present position, but half would prefer to be working on the tenure track.

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

K6015, a South Korean firm seeking to commercialize its magnet technology in the US market, entered a technology commercialization training program structured as a competition. Through this program, K6015 (and others in the program) used several genres to progressively interest different sets of stakeholders. To understand how K6015 applied these genres, we analyze this case study in terms of interessement, a concept from actor-network theory, and standing sets of transformations, a related concept from workplace writing studies in which enacting a set of genres entails a controlled, progressive transformation of arguments. We examine the entire competition process, using K6015 and three other competitors to illustrate this process and to examine rhetorical transformations responding to different criteria. In enacting these standing sets of transformations, K6015 and other competitors transformed their innovations into commercialized technologies–and transformed themselves from innovators into entrepreneurs. Finally, we discuss implications for understanding entrepreneurship rhetorically.

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

This article presents data from an electronic survey asking 101 entrepreneurs in Wisconsin and North Alabama about the documents they write before opening and while operating their businesses, the writing skills they value, and the audiences they consider when writing. The results demonstrate that entrepreneurs highly value writing and rhetorical skills, produce a huge range of documents, and require distinctive genres at different stages of their ventures. The results can help professional communication instructors, entrepreneurship and small-business consultants, and aspiring entrepreneurs to more effectively anticipate and meet the rhetorical challenges of opening and operating a business.

Present Tense is happy to announce that one of our Editors has started a tenure-track position this year. Don Unger, our Social Media Editor, is now an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at St. Edward’s University.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

This article examines the historical professional project that created the Institute of Radio Engineers’ Professional Group on Engineering Writing an Speech (IRE PGEWS)—now called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Professional Communication Society (IEEE PCS)—and recounts the group’s early history in detail. It also traces the career and recovers the professional contributions of the main organizer of PGEWS: Eleanor M. McElwee (1924–2008). The formation of PGEWS in 1957 was an intraoccupational strategy of inclusionary usurpation by “publications people” seeking to elevate their status within the engineering profession rather than attempting to build a separate profession of technical communication.

This article analyzes literature on university–workplace partnerships and professional writing pedagogy to suggest best practices for workplace mentors to mentor new employees and their writing. The article suggests that new employees often experience cultural confusion due to (a) the transfer of education-based writing strategies and (b) the employees' lack of cultural knowledge of the new workplace. The article then outlines implied mentoring strategies based upon this transfer and lack of cultural knowledge. The article also analyzes the literature on discourse community theory, activity theory, service learning, and internships, each of which also imply potential mentoring practices. These comprehensive best practices are also contextualized through social cognitive, community–cultural, and motivational–attitudinal components that writing mentors should consider when mentoring writing in the workplace.

This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. We argue that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing–professional writing (WAW-PW) course can look like.

Technical and professional communicators spend a good deal of time managing teams and documentation projects, and their organizations are increasingly introducing new project management practices. This article introduces Agile project management strategies that were created in software development environments, exploring how these iterative strategies can complement the traditional linear project management approaches that are taught in technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. To do so, the author presents a brief history of Agile, a case study of how the author applied specific Agile strategies in a grant writing course, and a comprehensive set of tips for implementing Agile in other TPC courses.

Professional writing scholars have often turned to activity theory (AT) as a rich framework for describing and theorizing human activity. But AT-based studies typically emphasize the uniqueness of activities rather than examining how certain types of activities share configurations. Consequently, these analyses often miss the chance to examine activities’ internal contradictions that are a result of interference between different configurations of activity. This article argues that a typology of activities can deepen our understanding of these internal contradictions. Drawing from a range of literature, it describes the general characteristics of different types of activities, providing examples from other AT-based studies. It concludes by discussing how this typology can help such studies to better analyze internal contradictions in activities.

This article examines memory and distributed cognition involved in the writing practices of emergency medical services (EMS) professionals. Results from a 16-month study indicate that EMS professionals rely on distributed cognition and three kinds of memory: individual, collaborative, and professional. Distributed cognition and the three types of memory reduce cognitive workload during a 911 response, and they help evoke information as an EMS professional composes the legally binding patient care report. In addition to presenting results, the article details the author’s interaction with two institutional review boards, which influenced the study’s methods. The article argues that scholars should conduct more research on the collaborative and distributed nature of memory as it relates to workplace writing practices. Furthermore, the article calls for developing writing research methods that involve participant recollection.

Teaching intercultural rhetoric and professional communication seminars has been one of my most enjoyable experiences as a college professor. It comes with a cost though. Finding relevant and updat...

Metis is an underexplored rhetorical counterpart to phronesis that can be described as a flexible, innovative intelligence used in unexpected or unprecedented situations. This article explores metis in relation to techne, praxis, and phronesis, arguing that our programs should strive to cultivate students' metic intelligence through client projects and service-learning experiences. Adapting Agile project management strategies used in software development may offer one means of scaffolding this learning.

In this article, I explain how integrating Google Drive into your classroom can help prepare students to participate effectively in workplace writing practices and can promote student responsibility, collaboration, and effective revisions.

Professional identity is oft explored in the field, but such identities usually reside institutionally and may exclude women who engage in professional communication from the workplace of the home. One instantiation of this extra-institutional professionalism is mom blogs, the authors of which create content, find sponsors, and address issues important to mothers. Yet the women lack legitimacy as professionals because of the title “mommy blogger” and because of the notion that blogging is a hobby. My qualitative study explores how mom bloggers claim a professional space in communication. I interviewed 22 mom bloggers, using Faber's (2002, [18]) theory of professionalism and Durack's (1997, [17]) ideas of redefining terms, such as “workplace,” to include women. My findings show that mom bloggers engage in the characteristics of professional communicators, model egalitarian professionalism, employ an ethic of care that combats elitism, and challenge the field to include their work, from the home and through new media, as professional.

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

Over the last 2 decades, the nations that once comprised the Soviet Union have begun to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. As a result, today's technical and professional communicators could find themselves interacting with co-workers, colleagues, and clients in these nations. Being successful in such contexts, however, requires an understanding of the cultural, historic, educational, and economic factors that have affected and continue to shape technical and professional communication practices in these countries. This article provides an overview of the literature that has been published on technical and professional communication practices in the former USSR as well as reviews educational factors that have contributed to such practices. Through such an examination, the article provides readers with a foundation they can use to engage in future research relating to technical and professional communication practices in post-Soviet states.

Globalization promises a world without boundaries that will increasingly necessitate the exchange of international and intercultural business communication. In this globalization process, a significant proportion of future economic growth (and the exchange of messages associated with this development) is projected to be centered in Asia, with a shift in such growth and power away from the United States and Europe. Following Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, mainland China and, to a lesser extent, India are moving to upscale positions on value-added chains in global industries. New major Asian players (e.g., countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) are replacing the United States and Europe, who are taking on downscale positions. In addition, the Middle East, because of global dependence on it for oil, is a critical player in international business. With this shift in global trading patterns, we must focus on Asia in order to gain an up-to-date understanding of business communication in global contexts. But previous research and theory have been directed toward business communication in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe.

This study questions the conventional view of the indirectness of Chinese communication. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Finnish and Chinese business professionals, the authors examine the effect of cultural identity on the directness of the communication of Chinese professionals who work for internationally operating Finnish companies located in Beijing and Shanghai, China, and who use English as the shared language with their Finnish colleagues. Three components of cultural identity (i.e., vocation as an international business professional, fairly young age, and the use of English as the business lingua franca) are particularly relevant in the participants’ professional communication and stimulated its openness and directness. The study finds that the evolution of English as the business lingua franca can be detected in the signs of convergence identified in Chinese and Finnish professional communication.

In this article we propose a Janus-faced approach to survey design—an approach that encourages researchers to consider how they can design and implement surveys more effectively using the latest web and database tools. Specifically, this approach encourages researchers to look two ways at once; attending to both the survey interface (client side; what users see) and the database design (server side; what researchers collect) so that researchers can pursue the most dynamic and layered data collection possible while ensuring greater participation and completion rates from respondents. We illustrate the potentials of a Janus-faced approach using a successfully designed and implemented nationwide survey on the writing lives of professional writing alumni. We offer up a series of questions that a researcher will want to consider during each stage of survey development.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Space does not permit us to express adequate thanks to those who contributed essays for this special issue, nor to the more than 30 other scholars whose proposed essays we could not include. We hope that many of them will publish the work they proposed in this or other journals. Thanks also to the TCQ editors who helped and encouraged us throughout the development of the issue: Scott Mogull, Ken Baake, Ryan Hoover, Brent Henze, and the patient and kind Amy Koerber. Our humble thanks finally to the wise and generous scholars who served as reviewers of proposals and manuscripts: Michael Bokor, Daniel Ding, Sam Dragga, Richard Hunsinger, Robert Johnson, Kyle Mattson, Mya A. Poe, Jingfang Ren, Julie Stagger, and Huatong Sun. Additional informationNotes on contributorsHuiling Ding Huiling Ding is an assistant professor of professional communication at North Carolina State University. She has published in Technical Communication Quarterly; Rhetoric, Globalization, and Professional Communication; Written Communication; China Media Research; Business Communication Quarterly; Rhetoric Review; and English for Specific Purposes. Gerald Savage Gerald Savage is a professor emeritus from Illinois State University. He has published in numerous journals and essay collections and has coedited several books, including Negotiating Cultural Encounters: Narrating Intercultural Engineering and Technical Communication, coedited with Han Yu and forthcoming from Wiley-IEEE.

This article reviews the deeply conflicted literature on learning transfer, especially as it applies to rhetorical knowledge and skill. It then describes a study in which six students are followed through their first co-op work term to learn about which resources they draw on as they enter a new environment of professional writing. It suggests that although students engage in little one-to-one transfer of learning, they draw on a wide range of internalized rhetorical strategies learned from across their academic experience.

This article discusses the ways issues of audience and authority are encountered and addressed by classroom teachers who write journal articles for publication. Drawing on an interview study of K-12 classroom teachers who have published articles in NCTE’s journals Language Arts, Voices from the Middle, and English Journal, we show that teachers developed and deployed strikingly different conceptions of audience at different points in their composing process. Before and after writing, they acknowledged the wide and mixed readership of those journals, including university-based scholars; however, while drafting their articles they thought about a much more limited group of “teachers like them.” In doing so, these teacher-authors found a concrete way to navigate the contested place of classroom teachers in wider education discourses. We highlight two major implications of this work. First, it complicates the standard advice to writers to “know your audience,” showing instead how considerations of audience are closely linked to questions of one’s status relative to members of that audience. Second, our work might complicate understandings of legitimate peripheral participation and how members of communities of practice are positioned relative to one another vis-à-vis authority: teacher-authors manipulated notions of authority, temporarily redefining some readers as more central and others as more peripheral, in ways that shifted according to the authority stances those definitions allowed them to take in composing.

Community-based projects immerse technical writing students in intercultural communication, addressing local needs and shaping documents in human terms. Students at a South Texas university work to establish communication with clients in a city-county health department to create effective documents and disseminate family health legislation. To prepare students for interactions in multicultural settings, the teacher provides an instructional framework that highlights the concepts and values of intercultural communication and the principles for effective problem-solving. Students engaged in the Baby Moses ( el niño Moisés) project encounter misunderstandings, rhetorical challenges within the process of document creation, and cultural tensions that thwart their goal to disseminate information to the community. Students and the teacher learn that the classroom, like the city-county health department, is a fertile site for cultural disequilibrium, tensions, and potential cultural awareness. To insure a viable Technical and Professional Writing Program in a culturally diverse university and surrounding community, the teacher identifies opportunities that help students develop and enhance their identities as culturally-sensitive communicators and effective problem solvers.

Colleges of business grapple with a perceived lack of quality in their graduates’ professional writing and recognize students’ need to learn disciplinary discourses. This article describes the motivation, design, and preliminary outcomes of a business-writing prototype at Auburn University. Writing consultants trained in business communication worked with one class on a substantial writing project. They provided conferencing and written feedback, greatly lowering the faculty workload. Student surveys and informal interviews indicate that students, faculty, and consultants were satisfied with this prototype program.

Writing performance of a complex recommendation report produced by student teams for an actual client during a 15-week semester was compared in a writing-intensive Agronomy 356 course and in paired Agronomy 356/ English 309 courses. The longitudinal study investigated differences that existed between reports produced for each learning environment in terms of argument effectiveness, document usability, and professionalism. Three agronomy and three professional communication raters ranked the 12 lengthy reports in the sample. The study found that all top-rated reports were generated in the paired courses and all lowest-rated reports were generated in the stand-alone agronomy course. Four pedagogical factors appear influential in this result: working in dual problem-solving spaces, pushing the boundaries on problem solving, incorporating workplace realities, and using just-in-time teaching.

Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric and Professional Communication is a collection of 11 essays (in four parts) that explores the complexity of digital technology in educational, industrial, ...

This article tracks the socialization of a Chinese intern into a Hong Kong PR company and considers the factors that enabled her to move toward acquiring the discourse of the profession. Taking a case study approach, the research is based on a detailed daily journal written by the intern during her internship, and two interviews. Over the 3-month period of the internship, her written discourse changed considerably, revealing the extent of her socialization into the organization. Specifically, the intern’s writing changed from detailed general descriptions of her activity to discourse resembling that of PR practitioners. The study demonstrates the power of the workplace as a context for learning, yet data show that the academy, by providing tools for understanding and reflecting on organizational culture, also has a role to play in socialization processes.

It has been suggested that teaching professional writing students how to think visually can improve their ability to design visual texts. This article extends this suggestion and explores how the ability to think visuospatially influenced students’ success at designing visual texts in a small upper-division class on visual communication. Although all the students received the same instruction, students who demonstrated higher spatial faculties were more successful at developing and designing visual materials than were the other students in the class. This result suggests that the ability to think visuospatially is advantageous for learning how to communicate visually and that teaching students to think visuospatially should be a primary instructional focus to maximize all student learning.

This article introduces an assignment that uses key messages to introduce students to the different ways that rhetoric is used in professional writing. In particular, this article discusses how analyzing and writing reports about organizational web sites can help students perceive the rhetorical nature of professional communication, gain familiarity with several professional writing genres and writing conventions, become more critical readers, and recognize the relationship between an initial study and a report that communicates the findings from that study.

The authors report on and analyze a survey they conducted of staffing in college professional and technical communication courses. In addition, they make recommendations for better treatment of contingent faculty who teach such courses.

This study investigates the genre structure of Chinese call-center discourse based on data collected from the call centers of a telecommunication company in China. Using an integrated theoretical framework informed by approaches to genre from English for specific purposes, systemic functional linguistics, and social perspectives, the study focuses on an analysis of the recurrent situation and social practices, the communicative purposes, the move structure, the exchange structure, and the generic-structure potential of call-center communication. A corpus-based quantitative analysis further reveals the dynamic complexity of interaction at call centers. The study compares Chinese and English call-center interactions in order to illustrate universal language functions as well as institutional and cultural differences in this professional discourse. The findings may have implications for both academics and practitioners in the call-center industry.

This article explores the uses of coaching and mentoring as they apply to organizational communication professors. The authors contend that these professors already are proficient at coaching and mentoring and the coaching and mentoring processes are routinely undertaken as part of their standard university teaching responsibilities. As coaches, these faculty members assist their students in improving student communication abilities through observation, discussion, and follow-up. As mentors, these faculty members enter into a developmental relationship with students that extend beyond the classroom. A greater knowledge of coaching and mentoring will enhance instructional efforts and benefit students in multiple ways.

This article describes a beginning research partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two Mexican universities, the Universidad de Quintana Roo (UQROO) and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, that has developed and implemented an environment merging the pedagogies of English as a foreign language (EFL) and writing across the curriculum (WAC). The article presents a theoretical background for this partnership based on the research on globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) and then focuses on the early stages of the project as the research teams define their objectives, research methods, and teaching approaches.

Although academy-industry partnerships have been a subject of interest in professional communication for many years, they have barely been considered in terms of globally networked learning environments (GNLEs). This empirical case study of an academy—industry partnership, in which the authors participated, examines the opportunities and challenges in applying GNLE practices to the design of a corporate engineering communication workshop. Using genre-ecology modeling as the analytical framework, the study demonstrates how the pedagogical processes considered for inclusion in such a workshop may be embedded in a network of institutional genres, some of which are associated with strong regulating controls. The findings from this study have implications for those who are interested in applying GNLE practices in workplace contexts and for those interested in using a principled framework for representing the work of such partnership activities.

Even a cursory glance at the daily news will provide ample testimony to the importance for professional communication of the contributions to this special issue of Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC). Indeed, as recent events have made abundantly clear, the most pressing challenges and crises we face—be these economic or environmental crises or social justice issues—are global. And yet, despite their global nature and their far-reaching consequences for local communities, much deliberation and decision making about these issues has been shifted to global economic

This article draws on activity theory, politics of the artifact, and speech act theory to analyze how language practices and technology interplay in establishing the social relationships necessary for globally networked teams. Specifically, it uses activity theory to examine how linguistic infelicities and the politics of communication technologies interplay in virtual meetings, thereby demonstrating the importance of grounding professional communication instruction in social as well as technical effectiveness. That is, students must learn not only how to communicate technical concepts clearly and concisely and recognize cultural differences but also how to use language and choose media in ways that produce the social conditions necessary for effective collaboration in globally networked environments. The article analyzes two case studies—a workplace and a classroom—that illustrate how the mediating functions of language and the politics of technology intersect as mediating tools in globally networked activity systems. It then traces the implications of that intersection for professional communication theory and pedagogy.

This article provides an account of the academic location of 142 technical communication programs as reported on program Web sites as well as in an online survey sent to technical communication program coordinators. According to the findings, most technical communication programs are located in departments of English, but programs outside of English are more likely to offer graduate degrees and a more technically oriented program focus.