Review of "Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication by Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts," Carradini, S., & Swarts, J. (2023). Text at scale: Corpus analysis in technical communication. The WAC Clearinghouse/University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/TPC-B.2023.2104
Abstract
After decades of proliferating digital texts, technical communication scholars and practitioners find themselves with no shortage of documents to examine. These exist in public and private repositories across a gamut of genres and used by varied audiences, communities, and organizations. As Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts (2023) argue in Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication , the "immense amount of text created by the various arms of the field of technical communication" (p. 6) makes the field ripe for a method like corpus analysis. Carradini and Swarts's efficient and approachable book acts as a timely primer on corpus analysis—the systematic study of a collection of texts—that illustrates how the method can support, complement, and extend existing research agendas and professional practices in technical communication. Assuming no prior knowledge about corpus linguistics on the part of readers, Carradini and Swarts's highly useable book may well find uptake in adjacent scholarly areas invested in the study of writing, such as composition studies or the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. But the chosen examples and suggested applications squarely situate Text at Scale as an indispensable volume for technical communication academics and practitioners alike.
- Journal
- Communication Design Quarterly
- Published
- 2026-03-01
- DOI
- 10.1145/3794916.3794923
- CompPile
- Open Access
- OA PDF Gold
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References (1)
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10.37514/TPC-B.2023.2104
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