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.

This article reports the results of a survey of professional writers about the nature and importance of visual communication in their work. The results confirm the suggestions in the field's literature that visual communication is important to workplace practice and that the role of the professional writer has expanded beyond the domain of the verbal. Visual communication responsibilities are complex and varied, but the practitioners surveyed typically engage in substantial amounts of design-related work and value visual communication abilities. The data suggest that visual communication should be a curricular priority in professional writing programs.