This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register – specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns – was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency–structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors’ correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency–structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

At the time of publication B. McNely was at The University of Kentucky, C. Spinuzzi was at The University of Texas at Austin, and C. Teston was at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.