This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

People working at the intersection of composition and user experience often serve as the connective material that binds content to use. In merging fundamental skills of both in multimodal UX, practitioners position themselves as essential mediators connecting technical information, storytelling, and technologies that carry impactful messages across disciplines, audiences, and contexts. Building on previous work that advocates for the power of narrative in AR/VR storytelling, we demonstrate how combining the composing strategy of narrative layering with user testing can guide the creation of inclusive, community-centered VR experiences. To illustrate the power of this capacity, we ground our analysis in the design of a Virtual Reality experience about advanced water purification, outlining a method for how narrative layering and UX testing can be woven together to address a variety of perspectives through interdisciplinary, layered storytelling. In doing so, we argue that multimodal UX is most powerful when it blends the needs of a range of audiences to build stories that communicate complex information in an inclusive and engaging way.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Graphs, especially those that are generated automatically, are often subject to mistakes in their processing, framing, and construction, sending unintended messages that neither the viewer nor the author may realize. This article analyzes the eye-tracking data of 57 participants to extend the results of a previous study that investigated how people are deceived by common mistakes and deceptive tactics in data visualizations and titles. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Previous research has suggested that viewers are susceptible to deception by misleading titles or graph presentations, and that such information can influence how they interpret graphs. Previous eye-tracking research has only measured viewing patterns of nondeceptive graphs. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How much attention do participants give to various areas of a graph when not given any instruction on what to look for, nor what they might be asked about? 2. Are there differences in how participants view and interpret deceptive versus control graphs about noncontroversial topics? 3. Are there differences in how participants view and interpret graphs about noncontroversial topics paired with control or exaggerated titles? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> This study analyzed view time, fixations, revisits, and time to first fixation for the graph area, title, y-axis, and x-axis of four line graphs. Qualitative responses were also coded and analyzed. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Among other significant findings, this study found that participants spent significantly less time looking at both line graph axes for graphs with a rhetorically exaggerated title than those with a control title. Participants also fixated on and revisited deceptive graphs more so than control graphs, and fixated and revisited the title and x-axis of control graphs significantly more than deceptive graphs. Qualitative results contribute further patterns. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Discussion:</b> Findings suggest that graphs with exaggerated titles make viewers less attentive to the axes, but deceptive graphs cause viewers to examine the lines of the graphs themselves in greater detail. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> Subtle changes in the makeup of graphics can significantly change how viewers examine such visualizations. It is critical to better understand how these changes influence viewing and how they might be leveraged to ultimately impact understanding.

Background: Visualizations are used to communicate data about important political, social, environmental, and health topics to a wide range of audiences; however, perceptions of graphs as objective conduits of factual data make them an easy means for spreading misinformation. Research questions: 1. Are people deceived by common deceptive tactics or exaggerated titles used in data visualizations about non-controversial topics? 2. Does a person's previous data visualization coursework mitigate the extent to which they are deceived by deceptive tactics used in data visualizations? 3. What parts of data visualizations (title, shape, data labels) do people use to answer questions about the information being presented in data visualizations? Literature review: Although scholarship from psychology, human-computer interaction, and computer science has examined how data visualizations are processed by readers, scholars have not adequately researched how susceptible people are to a range of deceptive tactics used in data visualizations, especially when paired with textual content. Methodology: Participants (n = 329) were randomly assigned to view one of four treatments for four different graph types (bar, line, pie, and bubble) and then asked to answer a question about each graph. Participants were asked to rank the ease with which they read each graph and comment on what they used to respond to the question about each graph. Results/Discussion: Results show that deceptive tactics caused participants to misinterpret information in the deceptive versus control visualizations across all graph types. Neither graph titles nor previous coursework impacted responses for any of the graphs. Qualitative responses illuminate people's perceptions of graph readability and what information they use to read different types of graphs. Conclusions: Recommendations are made to improve data visualization instruction, including critically examining software defaults and the ease with which people give agency over to software when preparing data visualizations. Avenues of future research are discussed.

This paper introduces the concept of transactional design---integrating Druschke's "transactional" model of rhetoric and science and Kinsella's model of "public expertise"---to demonstrate how technical communication and user experience (UX) designers and researchers can play an essential role in helping scientists cultivate meaningful relationships with members of the public toward the goal of making scientific content more accessible and actionable. This paper reports on the challenges that arose when a water modeling system built for experts was adapted for a public museum audience. It discusses specific issues the UX team had in contending with outdated "deficit" and "conduit" models of communication when working with scientists to adapt the system; it provides a checklist for steps that technical communication and UX designers and researchers---as those who best understand audiences and work directly with users---can champion the idea of transactional design to setup knowledge-making partnerships toward the co-construction of public-facing scientific communication projects.

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.

In this article we argue that mobile, design, content, and social media technologies have fundamentally redefined the role of the writer in the workplace. Rather than the originator of content, the writer is becoming a sort of multimodal editor who revises, redesigns, remediates, and upcycles content into new forms, for new audiences, purposes, and media. This article discusses data gathered from over one hundred hours of embedded workplace research shadowing nine different professional communicators. The data demonstrate the iterative, detailed, product-focused types of work happening within a range of workplace constraints and, in turn, emphasize the need for writers and teachers of writing to recognize the importance of developing a broad skillset to prepare for this kind of work.

Background: Qualitative technical communication research often produces datasets that are too large to manage effectively with hand-coded approaches. Text-mining methods, used carefully, may uncover patterns and provide results for larger datasets that are more easily reproduced and scaled. Research questions: 1. To what degree can hand collection results be replicated by automated data collection? 2. To what degree can hand-coded results be replicated by machine coding? 3. What are the affordances and limitations of each method? Literature review:We introduce the stages of data collection and analysis that researchers typically discuss in the literature, and show how researchers in technical communication and other fields have discussed the affordances and limitations of hand collection and coding versus automated methods throughout each stage. Research methodology: We utilize an existing dataset that was hand-collected and hand-coded. We discuss the collection and coding processes, and demonstrate how they might be replicated with web scraping and machine coding. Results/discussion: We found that web scraping demonstrated an obvious advantage of automated data collection: speed. Machine coding was able to provide comparable outputs to hand coding for certain types of data; for more nuanced and verbally complex data, machine coding was less useful and less reliable. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of considering the context of a particular project when weighing the affordances and limitations of hand collecting and coding over automated approaches. Ultimately, a mixed-methods approach that relies on a combination of hand coding and automated coding should prove to be the most productive for current and future kinds of technical communication work, in which close attention to the nuances of language is critical, but in which processing large amounts of data would yield significant benefits as well.

In this editorial, Lauer argues for expanding our methods of research to include a greater emphasis on quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. This expansion will compliment and help frame the qualitative data collection we already prioritize in the fields of writing studies and design. Lauer discusses the benefits of a mixed-methods approach and presents ten recommendations for how scholars, especially those who may be new to quantitative methods, can learn and employ these methods. Lauer suggests that we need to value this more comprehensive approach to data collection in order to better answer the many questions that remain uninvestigated in our field.

This article proposes a more complex consideration of the idea-generation stage of the document design process. Survey data collected from multiple sections of graphic design and technical communication classes show that design software and other technology can help students generate solutions to design problems by enabling them to realize design options that they may not have known exist and to adopt a bricolage approach to design that facilitates the process. The author makes several recommendations for how instructors can negotiate the sketching-software divide in their classrooms to ensure that the invention process is optimized for all students.

This article reports on results of a nationwide survey of alumni in professional and technical communication. It presents a series of snapshots from the results, including the types of texts written and valued, where those types are written, with and for whom, and with what technologies. A range of implications are explored.

As I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my course in Visualizing Information, I am struck by how quickly visualization software and techniques are advancing. As an academic, whose primary job is as a researcher and teacher, my relationship with technology is rooted at the crossroads of excitement and dread; of just catching up and being perpetually behind. I feel excitement that advancements in web functionality and design, visualization techniques, and other technology-enabled practices are finally happening and can benefit my work and the work of my students. Conversely I am filled with dread that I rarely feel fully in-the-know, much less at the bleeding edge of these developments because my job doesn't necessarily reward that kind of knowledge. As a graduate student in the fall of 2000 (Is that really 14 years ago?) I earned a webmaster certification and followed that by helping in the redesign of several websites at my university. A decade later, as an assistant professor on the tenure clock, I was composing an academic webtext and I found myself needing the help of an undergraduate student to teach me how to integrate something called jQuery into my HTML5. I was dismayed over how rusty my skills had become once my tenure responsibilities had taken over.

In this article we propose a Janus-faced approach to survey design—an approach that encourages researchers to consider how they can design and implement surveys more effectively using the latest web and database tools. Specifically, this approach encourages researchers to look two ways at once; attending to both the survey interface (client side; what users see) and the database design (server side; what researchers collect) so that researchers can pursue the most dynamic and layered data collection possible while ensuring greater participation and completion rates from respondents. We illustrate the potentials of a Janus-faced approach using a successfully designed and implemented nationwide survey on the writing lives of professional writing alumni. We offer up a series of questions that a researcher will want to consider during each stage of survey development.

This article examines the role that reflective assessment plays in contributing to the quality of students' visual designs. Students who are required to account for their rhetorical decisions in the design of a document benefit from the practice of verbalizing those decisions. However, this study shows that students who engage in reflective assessment actually produce stronger visual designs as well. This effect should help determine the extent to which such assessments should be included in the classroom.

In a 2009Computers and Compositionarticle, I examined how the terms multimedia and multimodal were used in academic and industry situations. This webtext extends that argument to investigate the ways in which a variety of other terms, including digital media and new media, are defined by scholars in the fields of computers and composition and education. These interview-based conversations laid the framework for a broader consideration of the anatomy of a definition: how we develop definitions and how definitions shape our work in academia, the classroom, and public life.

It has been suggested that teaching professional writing students how to think visually can improve their ability to design visual texts. This article extends this suggestion and explores how the ability to think visuospatially influenced students’ success at designing visual texts in a small upper-division class on visual communication. Although all the students received the same instruction, students who demonstrated higher spatial faculties were more successful at developing and designing visual materials than were the other students in the class. This result suggests that the ability to think visuospatially is advantageous for learning how to communicate visually and that teaching students to think visuospatially should be a primary instructional focus to maximize all student learning.