This article examines how nineteenth-century participants in technical and professional communication (TPC) used rhetorical techniques of ridicule to critique audiences’ assumptions and advocate for expanded educational opportunities. Encouraging laughter ostensibly about college mathematics, Vassar students drew on their knowledge of rhetoric and higher education to disrupt audience expectations regarding the gendered identities of mathematician and college student. Using a case study, this article broadly urges the development of the role of humor as a technique in TPC.

This study details a method for mHealth app development and user experience design (UX) evaluation, which generates a comprehensive list of stakeholder-users, acknowledges UX barriers, advocates multiple methods, and argues that developers should address the UX needs of each stakeholder-user in a complex health-care system. A case study of a research project on an mHealth app for women who are considering prevention of or treatment for osteoporosis assists to elaborate and define the method. To find any measure of success, a fully functional app for older users should be integrated into the entire health-care system.

Despite the recent surge in social justice and decolonial scholarship, technical and professional communication (TPC) research remains a potential site of oppression. This article is meant to be a call to action; it attempts to (re)ignite discussions about what we value and how we express what we value. It encourages the field of TPC to be more responsive to the experiences and struggles of research participants—those we engage during our knowledge production process. I explore what I call oppressive rhetoric in TPC research with a specific focus on the term subjects in institutional review board forms and in the reporting of some TPC research about research participants. I assert that in spite of our best efforts in advancing the goals of marginalized groups and despite the forward-looking trajectory of progressive research, more work needs to be done to address oppressive rhetoric in TPC scholarship.

Research shows that Western and Chinese user instructions use visuals differently. Two basic tendencies may be discerned: Chinese manuals place more emphasis on visuals and their selection of visuals is less strictly confined to usability related functionality. This study investigates whether such cultural differences correspond to user preferences. Three hypotheses were tested: (a) Chinese users value pictures more than Western users; (b) Chinese users appreciate diverting, cartoon-like pictures more than Western users; and (c) Western users appreciate strictly instrumental pictures more than Chinese users. To test these hypotheses, a quasi-experiment ( N = 158) was conducted with cultural background as independent variable and appreciation for pictures as dependent variable. All participants rated 15 pictures, which were presented in the context of user instructions. All three hypotheses were confirmed. Cultural differences regarding the use of visuals should therefore be taken into account when localizing Western manuals for the Chinese market, or vice versa.

University business incubators (UBIs) are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. UBIs facilitate the launch of start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. This study uses assemblage theory to profile four UBIs. Its findings concern their process of exporting incubation models and training transnational entrepreneurs, the roles of alumni and students, and the genres and conventions of entrepreneurship.

ABSTRACT This article examines pedagogical results from an IRB-approved study that used the Omeka platform in two sections of technical writing classes. The research question explored how a digital humanities (DH) project can be an opportunity for students to learn concepts and take ownership of publicly facing content. The method used is qualitative, and findings indicated that students embraced an open-source and collaborative project. Results also demonstrated how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors might find DH tools well suited to TPC competencies.

ABSTRACT “Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master’s students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate students who are studying multimedia production skills. The author piloted the collaborative project model during a recent academic term. Student response to the format was overwhelmingly positive from both graduates and undergraduates, and the resulting projects were of exceptional quality and well received by their respective clients.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

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.

In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause a crisis in the first place. Drawing from literature on crisis communication and the experiences users described in the Zoom CEO’s blog post, the author concludes that while Zoom did indeed have technical issues that contributed to its privacy crisis, users also experienced its technology in unexpected ways, and the company underestimated the privacy expectations of its new users. Zoom’s privacy crisis ultimately provides a useful discussion of why it is increasingly important for companies to incorporate privacy by design and to be frank about their privacy practices with a public who has a growing interest in, and dissatisfaction with, corporate privacy practices.

This article reports findings from an institutional ethnography of university stakeholders’ writing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the affordances of this methodology for professional and technical communication. Drawing on interview transcripts with faculty and administrators from across the university, the authors contextualize the role of writing in the iterative, collaborative, distributed writing processes by which the university transitioned from a traditional A–F grading scheme to a pass or fail option in just a few business days. They analyze these stakeholders’ experiences, discussing some effects of this accelerated timeline on policy development, writing processes, and uses of writing technologies within this new context of remote teaching and learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic created major disruptions in technical communication classrooms everywhere. Although technical communication instructors are used to teaching in a variety of contexts and settings, adopting a flexible approach in the first place will allow them to be better prepared for the changing dynamics of an unpredictable world. The authors present an approach that constructs pedagogical scaffolding to emphasize outcomes, interactions, relationships, and projects. These interrelated aspects form a coherent vision that can support both pedagogical planning and real-time decision making in specific instructional situations.

This article reviews images of people of Asian descent wearing masks in popular press articles discussing mask shortages and argues that visual framing had the potential of fueling racial antagonism during the initial months of COVID-19’s spread across the United States. Technical communicators need to include globalized perspectives in educational materials about masks as an advocacy strategy that can help communities and individuals to navigate the crisis situation and better protect themselves and those around them.

Analyzing data gathered around COVID-19 can increase our understanding of its spread and the social and economic impacts. Data visualizations can help various stakeholders understand the outbreak. To this end, this article seeks to understand how COVID-19 data dashboards utilized actionable metrics to inform various stakeholders. Used in lean methodology, actionable metrics specifically tie data visualization to actions to improve a specific situation. The authors discuss how actionable metrics were used in COVID-19 data dashboards to inspire actions of various stakeholders by modeling different outcomes through future projections. In turn, the authors explore how actionable metrics in data dashboards can inform new business and technical communication practices for data visualization.

Transgender (trans) people always already live with health care precarity, particularly concerning gender transition. During a pandemic, this precarity is heightened. Trans people find themselves without access to necessary cross-sex hormones or isolated with unaccepting or hostile family members. As a result, some engage in tactical technical communication, using the Internet to source knowledge and supplies to manage their transition. This article analyzes these do-it-yourself forms of tactical technical communication that support gender transition in the time of COVID-19.

Apocalypticism is a powerful brew of eschatological belief and political imagination that is extremely persuasive. This article addresses the intersections between apocalyptic rhetoric and the technical communication of risk, disease outbreak, and disaster preparedness by analyzing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign. Specifically, I argue that the framing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s campaign relies on and extends problematic iterations of apocalypticism and undermines the educational objectives of disaster preparedness and response. I conclude with suggestions for how technical communicators designing public awareness and outreach campaigns can use existential risk rhetoric for engagement without succumbing to the pernicious side effects of apocalypticism.

As people today use information products in contexts with distractions, we need to design for people’s attention. User experience design routinely relies on behavioral design to engage distracted users and nudge them toward specific behavior. Although practiced in user experience design, behavioral design is less known in technical communication. In this article, we use the CHOICES (Context, Habits, Other people, Incentives, Congruence, Emotions, and Salience) framework developed by McKinsey’s Behavioral Lab to introduce students to learn about behavioral design principles that make use of cognitive biases to influence people. We maintain that behavioral design is useful for technical communicators because they create digital assets that are part of the user experience.

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To assess collaboration, researchers integrated usability testing on workshop resources with 15 ( N = 15) participants, postworkshop questionnaires with 34 ( N = 34) participants, and interviews with 2 ( N = 2) community partners. Participants responded positively, and 47% of workshop attendees found jobs. The article argues that community-based research should use participatory and iterative models and resilience theory.

Understanding the law and its impact on the practice of technical communication has been an important scholarly thread in technical and professional communication (TPC) for more than two decades. Technical communicators recognize the impact of their work on stakeholders as well as the potential liability issues associated with composing technical communication documents. While this scholarship is widespread, relatively few pedagogical resources are available to prepare students for success in a litigious world or to guide instructors in teaching legal writing. This article offers a case study of a legal writing course that prepares TPC students to develop legal literacy and succeed in the workplace.

Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear. To investigate how companies use Twitter, this study analyzes the content of the Twitter accounts of four large information technology companies, focusing on the arrangement of different Twitter accounts and on message characteristics (content, message elements, and communication strategies). The results show that companies used architectures of different Twitter accounts to serve various stakeholder groups. The companies’ tweets covered diverse topics within the corporate, marketing, and technical communication domains. The tweets focused more on providing information and promoting action than on facilitating dialogue.

This article responds to recent calls for social justice-oriented work in Technical and professional communication, detailing moments from a participatory photovoice project with community organizers working toward a more just regional economy. By juxtaposing participatory action research methods and the rhetorical concept of metis, or embodied, rhetorical cunning, this article highlights how reversals of power might transform research projects for all parties involved; and how disenfranchised groups might challenge extractive practices draining their communities.

Technical communicators can manage the content users share in online communities, but this is only feasible if the users act like a community with a shared understanding of what the software does. When they do not, users discuss technologies as unsettled objects and rely on technical communication to socially construct them. This research describes such uses of technical communication and argues how professional technical communicators can help.

Informed by the social justice turn, this article highlights the often-overlooked voices and experiences of women working in technical and professional communication in the Global South, specifically in India. Using an apparent feminist frame, this article highlights the networked identities and forces of power at play that can marginalize Indian practitioners in globalized workplaces. Further, it seeks to understand the ways Indian women exercise and establish professional legitimacy by utilizing apparently feminist tactics.

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. The guest editors briefly overview intersections between comics and technical communication, then introduce the special issue’s contents and contributions to ongoing conversations in the field.

Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic adaptation of Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions. Using discourse analysis, it argues that Sikoryak’s adaptation, while an impressive piece of art, is not an example of accessible user agreement as media reports claim. The article concludes with practical implications on producing comics-style technical communication.

Technical communication research has relied heavily on participatory, user-focused strategies as well as “participative”, posthuman frameworks. Both research methodologies have various strengths, yet also have been critiqued for underplaying the role of human and non-human agency (respectively) in rhetorical situations. Through an analysis of an urban planning comic book, I suggest that turning to the Greek concept of methexis – or “participation” – may help technical communication researchers bridge posthuman and user-centered investigative approaches.

This article uses personas to illustrate the range of technical communication knowledge work developed through its practitioners—to articulate the functions, characteristics, traits, skills, and workplace styles of positions someone in the field might pursue. Recent research has provided valuable data about the expanding and evolving skill sets of the technical/professional communicator. We build on that by triangulating the data from an analysis of job postings, a survey of technical communicators, and interviews and embedded observations of practitioners to develop personas of technical/professional communicators on the job. The personas can help students, programs, and practitioners understand and navigate the many types of roles that are available in the field.

Scholars have given much weight to the question of professional legitimacy in the field of TPC, but much of that focus has been given to practitioners in Euro-Western contexts. However, practitioners in India have also worked to strengthen their own legitimacy in a variety of ways, including by harnessing existing structural mechanisms. This article addresses the founding of the Society for Technical Communication India chapter in 1999 and its subsequent organizational impact as a mechanism toward improving the legitimacy of the field in India. It covers a historical analysis of the founding years of the Society for Technical Communication India chapter and discusses ways that founding members and early participants worked to build their own legitimacy.

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss publishing scenarios and challenges facing such authors and offer guidelines for producing clear, effective, publishable articles, in English, for international discourse. My approach is based on traditional rhetorical principles, plain language studies, research pursued at nuclear security conferences, feedback from internationals at writing workshops, and my experience as editor of the International Journal of Nuclear Security.

This article reports on the first stage of a mixed-methods community-based research project involving residents of a socioeconomically challenged neighborhood in Baltimore City, Richnor Springs, and service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses at Loyola University Maryland (Loyola). To measure outcomes, we analyzed student surveys from 80 respondents and critical reflections from two students. We also analyzed interviews from two students and two community members. Findings indicate that there were no statistical mean differences in the educational experiences between service-learning and nonservice-learning students; however, there were significant mean differences in transformational experiences. Findings also indicate that community members responded positively and that stakeholders valued the personal relationships that developed.

Early, theoretically informed program assessment can be particularly beneficial for professional and technical writing programs that seek to incorporate and sustain service-learning approaches. This article adapts Burkean pentadic analysis for use as a form of institutional critique and illustrates the power of this method through a case study of its application at one state university.… Continue reading Pentadic Critique for Assessing and Sustaining Service-Learning Programs by Amy Rupiper Taggart

Reflecting upon current research and my own pedagogical practices when teaching and administering client-consultant projects in business and technical writing courses, I outline how critical stakeholder theory can help to establish an ethic of care among the participants in client-consultant projects and connect students’ professional and civic lives. Link to PDF

In response to recent calls for internationalization and greater social relevance in professional communication teaching and research, this article links service-learning pedagogy with participatory action research (PAR) methods. A multi-year collaborative project in Kenya illustrates both the challenges and the positive outcomes of international partnerships, which include increased intercultural communication skills, significant contributions to the… Continue reading Technical Communication, Participatory Action Research, and Global Civic Engagement: A Teaching, Research, and Social Action Collaboration in Kenya by Robbin D. Crabtree and David Alan Sapp

This article adopts the perspective of rhetorical theory to examine student, teacher, and client assessments of community service writing projects created by students in a technical writing course. The study compares both students’ and clients’ assessments of the benefits of the service-learning experience and the teacher’s and clients’ evaluations of the documents. It highlights significant… Continue reading In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing by Teresa M. Redd

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The practice of helping users accomplish tasks with various technologies has long been a central concern for technical communicators. For Jason Swarts, this activity sits at the core of technical c...

Building upon critical and intercultural work in the field, Haas and Eble’s edited collection, Key Theoretical Frameworks: Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century offers a soci...

This article presents a case study of the Smarter Crowdsourcing project the International Development Bank and Governance Lab cohosted to cope with the emerging Zika outbreaks in Latin America countries. Using the lenses of intercultural communication methodologies, user-centered design, and global cultural flow, I examine the exclusion of at-risk populations as marginalized end users of the project. I also examine the impacts of this oversight on the effectiveness of the technocratic solutions. I then conclude by discussing the implications this case has for international health intervention, global technical communication, and community-based research.