ABSTRACT Recruitment advertisements published in technical and professional communication (TPC) conference programs and proceedings offer a snapshot of the messages that these programs use to market themselves and distinguish their value in the marketplace of graduate programs. Using an exploratory mixed methods approach informed by Bakhtin's theory of addressivity, we developed a two-phase study to assess recruitment advertisements from three perspectives: from the advertisement content itself, from the students being recruited, and from the TPC program coordinators or directors. Recommendations for improving TPC advertising and promotion are given.

The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields is a concise manual for engineers, technical professionals, scientists, researchers, teachers, and students to improve their writing skills. Each chapter is short—ranging from 20 to 40 pages—and the entire book is 200 pages, including appendices. The book accomplishes its purpose of providing recommendations for writing activities and for "assessing the social situation of writing, then using that assessment to make writing decisions" (p. 5). Throughout the book, the authors offer short, manageable takeaway lessons to help readers make writing decisions and learn IEEE style for references. Compared to other engineering communication textbooks and manuals, this guide is short and manageable, yet its approach still considers the rhetorical and contextual dimensions of writing. Because it is brief, the guide does not explicitly cover ethics, risk communication, information graphics, presentations, and global or international communication. It also does not provide as many examples or complete samples of the genres and best practices discussed. Finally, as with other textbooks, some genres are missing, such as reviews, evaluations, and regulations. Nevertheless, these limitations do not diminish the value of the book in giving a concise and convenient overview of standard engineering communication genres and a rhetorically grounded framework for readers to use when writing in the engineering workplace. The book has potential for use in writing-intensive courses, where students must compose documentation for labs and projects, as well as for in-house training for employees. Its hybrid framework for making decisions as you write is flexible and can be applied to many different writing situations. Furthermore, the guide offers valuable, basic help on writing mechanics. It offers readers an approach to engineering communication that can help them think about the decisions that they make when they write and make thoughtful, informed choices in their writing.

Risk communication professionals, teachers, and trainers will find this book useful and practical. It accomplishes its purpose of presenting, in plain language, several historical cases of risk communication—good and bad—as object lessons for extrapolating best practices to follow and worst practices to avoid. Chapter 1 stresses the importance of considering and incorporating the reader’s background, knowledge, expectations, and reading process when writing about risk prediction, as illustrated by correspondence from two cases: memos between the Bureau of Bridges and the Department of Transportation that warned about leaks that caused the Chicago Floods in 1992, and a memo from Morton Thiokol, Inc., responding to questions from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center about whether to proceed with the Challenger launch in 1986. The author defines the reader-centered context upon which risk communicators should concentrate. The author also encourages writers to avoid writer-based documents and favor reader-based documents, which anticipate why readers need the information, how they will use it, what decisions they will make with it, and how they will read it.

Facebook (FB) is a popular communication medium and community building tool for health outreach, promotion, and support groups for patients with chronic and rare conditions. Medical writers and health communication specialists are often tasked to write the content and support community interactions in health-related FB interventions. However, studies have reported mixed results at sustaining patient participation and engagement in FB interventions. Questions remain about the relationship between health behavior and FB usage and best strategies for evaluating health-related FB interventions. Furthermore, few studies examine health-related FB usage of people not designated as patients, which might help identify native activities that can sustain participants’ interest in and engagement with FB interventions. This study examines offline and online health-related activities of FB to identify characteristics shared by people who use FB for health-related purposes. The data from 455 users indicate that offline social health activities do not transfer online; privacy issues, interaction preferences, and differences between FB and offline networks may be barriers. FB campaigns and interventions should have modest and focused goals, such as supplementing offline activities and increasing preexisting FB activity. Designing FB interventions for networks and social groups with preexisting emotional ties and trust would be ideal.

Technical communicators, engineers, and designers in the automotive industry, as well as researchers with expertise and interest in this book. It provides provides a framework for better understanding and explaining the ecological, economic, and political stakes invested in contemporary culture’s use and valuation of automobiles. The book constructs an ANT-inspired framework for rethinking automobility. In the manner of similar projects, such as Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition that establish ANT as a primary mode of analysis, the book achieves its purpose of recovering terms from ancient rhetoric—techne, kinesis, energeia, hyle, logistikos, metis, tyche, and kairos—for the purpose of demonstrating how they always, already accommodated analysis of human and nonhuman agents involved in activities, such as transportation use and design. For this reason, the book could serve as useful reading in courses on professional communication as it pertains to transportation or ANT, and as food for thought for automobile industry professionals.