Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) has been facing concerns of viability, in both its relationship with industry and its ability to build a relevant and valid body of research. TPC's disconnection with industry may be reflected in its relationship to UX as well, despite both fields' shared values. To better understand how TPC and User Experience (UX) are relating to each other, we conducted a citation analysis of a sample of SIGDOC papers and a sample of Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) practitioner articles focused on research methods. The SIGDOC papers tended to cite TPC sources, while the NN/g articles cited no TPC, but did cite disciplines such as HCI and Psychology. The findings point to opportunities for TPC to improve its connection and influence beyond academia.

Background: The participatory web complicates professional communicators' goals of providing accurate, usable, and trustworthy content, especially for health and medical topics. Professionals can better reach their audiences by understanding individuals'purposes for using e-health. Literature review: Previous literature has shown the need for audience analysis in e-health, and has called for personalized, nuanced, and contextualized methods for developing audience-centered content. Professional communicators in e-health can use personas as a strategy to help account for users' diverse, evolving, and extra-institutional purposes in accessing e-health, whether that content is professionally-generated or user-generated. Research questions: 1. What are patients' larger information-seeking contexts? 2. For what purposes do patients use e-health? 3. How can professional communicators leverage this deepened understanding of their audience's purposes to improve their content? Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with seven community members who self-identified as e-health users. They were asked about their larger health information-seeking practices, specific instances of using e-health, and website preferences. Results: Participants use e-health among other sources including medical professionals. They use an array of e-health sites, including professional and user-generated sites, and have diverse purposes in using that array of sites. Conclusion and implications: The results suggest that professional communicators deepen their audience analysis to account for informational context, emotional context, and the diverse and shifting purposes of their users. Heuristics for professionals are provided to develop purpose-driven personas.

Online discussion forums for patients offer the benefits of community but the risks of misinformation. A physician-moderated forum may help to mitigate this tension. How do both the professional expertise of a physician moderator and the personal, experiential expertise of patients contribute to trust in a forum? A rhetorical analysis of a year of postings in an online Parkinson’s community reveals that both forms of expertise were trusted, demonstrating the possibility for them to complement each other. This study illustrates the broader ways trust is established in patient communities and offers implications for technical communicators as forum designers or moderators.

This article explores rhetorical implications of extending the audience of written physician notes in hospital settings to include patients and/or family members (the OpenNotes program). Interviews of participating hospital patients and family members (n = 16) underscored the need for more complex understandings of audience beyond “universal” and “particular” explanations. Interviews were organized around the aspects of comprehension, affect/emotion, and likes/dislikes about receiving notes. Results from these interviews indicated that participants understood the notes overall but had questions about abbreviations and technical terms. Many participants felt reassured about the care they were receiving, and many liked having the notes as a reference and springboard for further discussion with health care staff. A more detailed content analysis of the interview data yielded themes of document use, readability, involvement, and physician care. Findings from this study reveal an expansion of audience in this case to include both universal and particular audiences. Also, findings point to the possibility of audience involvement among patients and family members through activities such as asking questions about the physician notes. This study has implications for other forms of written communication that may extend readership in novel ways.