Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular, nonhierarchical, and nonlinear, which creates user experience issues related to attention as well as information selection, ordering, processing, and navigation. The patterns of language use in topic-based writing reveal how metadiscourse might help readers address these reader experience issues.

As one kind of designed communication, technical communication is created for readers we assume use the content for some situated purpose. Understanding users and their situations to be varied, communicators rely on simplified models of both to create usable content. In many cases, this approach works, but in some commercial sectors, companies are recognizing a need to engage with users directly and to include them in the production of communication. Including users in the production of communication may ease the burden of communicating in ways that are sufficiently detailed, accurate, inclusive, localized, and timely, but these ventures also create challenges of collaboration that direct attention to how users are situated in infrastructures that allow them to act as effective readers and collaborators. This article presents a model of users, situating them amid infrastructures that extend their ability to take rhetorical action. The authors explain and demonstrate a heuristic for analyzing infrastructure as an extension of a user's "mediated potential" for rhetorical action.

Technical communicators can manage the content users share in online communities, but this is only feasible if the users act like a community with a shared understanding of what the software does. When they do not, users discuss technologies as unsettled objects and rely on technical communication to socially construct them. This research describes such uses of technical communication and argues how professional technical communicators can help.

Professional writers adapt their skills to suit expanded professional roles that involve production and management of information, but preparation through mere skill-based training is problematic because that communication work is messy in ways that are not addressable through simple skills training. We must understand how skills "influence and shape the discursive activities surrounding their use" (Selber, 1994). This paper reports the results of a study of people trained in humanities disciplines like communication, English, writing studies, technical communication, etc., on how they have found means to employ their training in their workplace and keep what is humanistic about writing and communicating at the foreground of their interactions with information technologies. Instead of focusing on technology alone, this research encourages a unified approach to preparing students for the workplace.

This study examines user support issues concerning open-source software in computational sciences. The literature suggests that there are three main problem areas: transparency, learnability, and usability. Looking at questions asked in user communities for chemistry software projects, the author found that for software supported by feature-based documentation, problems of transparency and learnability are prominent, leading users to have difficulty reconciling disciplinary practices and values with software operations. For software supported by task-based documentation, usability problems were more prominent. The author considers the implications of this study for user support and the role that technical communication could play in developing and supporting open-source projects.

Background: Online user networks are important points of contact for users who seek help from their peers rather than documentation. Literature review: The appeal of online user networks coincides with and seems connected to growing user interest in topicalized and tailored content, the production of which is inconsistent with the “craftsman” model of technical communication. Studies of online user networks indicate that community members may be practicing a different kind of technical communication. Research questions: This study examines an online user network for an open-source software product and asks how we can study online user networks, with the aim of identifying important people, practices, and relationships associated with the kind of technical communication practiced in those settings. Research methodology: Social network analysis is used to visualize the structural properties of an online user network, in order to identify central figures and their relationships to others. Verbal data-analysis techniques are used to find themes in their contributions. Results/discussion: People who are central to the structure of online interaction are important figures in the distribution of the technical communication effort. They engage users in reciprocal exchanges of information and they influence user practices. They are also important as brokers who link users and developers. Broadly, their conversational exchanges are a kind of distributed technical communication. Implications for practice: We learn what the practice of technical communication looks like in an online user network. By observing the work of participants, technical communicators can understand what it means to do technical communication and make user networks a more integral part of a broader documentation strategy. We see promising ways in which technical experts (e.g., software developers) can engage with users as well.

This article is an investigation of composing practices through which people create networks with mobile phones. By looking through the lens of actor-network theory, the author portrays the networking activity of mobile phone users as translation, what Latour describes as an infralanguage to which different disciplinary perspectives can be appended. Given how much mobile phone use is information-based, the author describes how five people composed on mobile phones to create coordinated networks of professional and domestic activity. To arrive at this discussion, the author first considers the objectives of mobile networking, which include creating a sense of place and coordination within that space. The author then describes the findings of a case study of mobile phone users who build translational networks. The discussion focuses on the participants’ composing practices.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

This article demonstrates, by example, 2 approaches to the analysis of knowledge work. Both methods draw on network as a framework: a Latourian actor–network theory analysis and a network analysis. The shared object of analysis is a digital humanities and digital media research lab that is the outcome of the collective and coordinated efforts of researchers and other stakeholders at North Carolina State University. The authors show how the two methods are drawn to different objects of study, different data sources, and different assumptions about how data can be reduced and made understandable. The authors conclude by arguing that although these methods yield different outlooks on the same object, their findings are mutually informing.

This article considers why users of popular software packages choose to find answers to their task problems on user forums rather than in official documentation. The author concludes that traditional documentation is developed around an antiquated notion of “task,” which leads to restrictive ways of thinking about problems that users encounter and the solutions that might be appropriate. The author argues, instead, that tasks and problems arise from networked rhetorical situations and networked contexts for rhetorical action. The influence of networks requires a redefinition of rhetorical situation and context, from which we derive a networked picture of tasks and problems as emergent and uncertain phenomenon, best addressed in the uncertain and sometimes-chaotic setting of user forums. Forum threads are studied using discourse analytic techniques to determine what they can reveal about qualities making tasks and problems uncertain.

Written communication and its accumulated principles of applied design often serve conservative and preservationist goals. Literacy and its various, sprawling technological apparatuses of production and distribution preserve ideas and prepare them for uptake and adaptation. What is preserved in writing speaks with greater reliability over time and choices about design can influence the validity or appropriateness of those texts, by invoking proper voices and suggesting or demanding appropriate relationships between people and institutions organized around those texts. While this may seem an inhospitable way to open a column in a journal on communication design, my point is not intentionally disparaging. Instead it is to draw a contrast between types of communication design work: that which works to affiliate discourse with a location and practices of uptake and that which creates and works across those locations.

What is communication design? The term may represent, along with technical communication, information design, and content development, the latest permutation of how the work once known as technical writing has been re-named and re-professionalized. This is a reductive answer, of course, since the terms emphasize different qualities of that work and all are pinchy and baggy as generic descriptors. A different answer is that the term communication design captures an awareness that our field lacks a center. It has its genres and its processes, but as Johnson-Eilola and Selber (in press) argue, it is the focus on defining and solving problems in novel ways and in response to the exigencies of highly varied situations that underscores the importance of what we do. I prefer to see communication design as an embrace of that role, a recognition that the scope of our concern is broad: it is communication. It is also constructive work, aimed at producing concrete effects in the world. It is not just writing; it is design.

User-generated tutorial videos are quickly emerging as a new form of technical communication, one that relies on text, images, video, and sound alike to convey a message. In this article, we present an approach—a rubric—for assessing the instructional content of tutorial videos that considers the specific roles of modal and multimodal content in effective delivery. The rubric is based on descriptive data derived from a constant comparative study of user-rated YouTube videos.

Following recent work to advocate a strongly social understanding of technological literacy, this article considers how networking technologies are reshaping our understanding of the social. In this context, technological literacy can be understood as a process of constructing the networks in which literate action is defined. I explore the role of technological literacy as a force of network building accomplished through a mechanism of translation. From the comments of experienced technical communicators, I make observations about how technical communicators are taught to be technologically literate.

Drawing on a study of writers reusing content from one document to another, this study examines the rhetorical purpose of reuse. Writing reuse is predominantly studied through the literature on single sourcing and enacted via technologies built on single-sourcing models. Such theoretical models and derivative technologies cast reusable content as context-less and rhetorically neutral, a perspective that overlooks the underlying rhetorical strategies of reuse. The author argues for a new understanding of reuse as a rhetorical act of creating hybrid utterances that gather their rhetorical strength by assembling ever larger and denser actor networks.

Work activities that are mediated by information rely on the production of discourse-based objects of work. Designs, evaluations, and conditions are all objects that originate and materialize in discourse. They are created and maintained through the coordinated efforts of human and non-human agents. Genres help foster such coordination from the top down, by providing guidance to create and recreate discourse objects of recurring social value. From where, however, does coordination emerge in more ad hoc discursive activities, where the work objects are novel, unknown, or unstable? In these situations, coordination emerges from simple discursive operations, reliably mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that appear to act as discursive agents. This article theorizes the discursive agency of ICTs, explores the discursive operations they mediate, and the coordination that emerges. The article also offers and models a study methodology for the empirical observation of such interactions.

This paper considers how veterinary students compose narratives of patient care. The author discusses the labor required to uncover narrative agents and actions, arrange them in time, posit causal connections, and assemble the elements into a coherent narrative. Students quickly learn how much of this effort can be effectively offloaded to a dedicated infrastructure of cognitive resources and how much must be offloaded to less suitable resources, the latter of which incurs important cognitive costs.

Genres embody typified discursive activity that is situated in an ecology of texts, people, and tools. Within these settings, genres help writers compose recognizable information artifacts. Increasingly, however, many professions are becoming mobile, and mobile technologies (e.g., personal digital assistants [PDAs]) are creating problems of translation as writers attempt to make genres work across contexts. Mobile devices uproot genres from their native contexts, undercutting their ability to mediate discursive activity. The semantically reduced design of PDA-accessible information magnifies these problems by obscuring, but not erasing, genre characteristics that tie information to its native context. Readers must assume the burden of composing meaningful information artifacts, work otherwise offloaded to genres. The author explores the nature of this composition burden in a case study of veterinary students. He finds that context and the degree of mobility both influence student perception of this composition burden.

This article reports findings from a study of writers and reviewers in two complex organizations. The author analyzes the differences between the content, conduct, and resolution of document reviews mediated by hard-copy text and those mediated by textual replay (a series of screen-captured images of the writer’s on-screen writing activity) plus hard-copytext. The results show that reviews mediated by textual replay directed greater attention to issues concerning writing and revision processes. The reviewers offered more tentative revision suggestions and more often enlisted the writers’ participation in articulating, proposing, and implementing the revisions. The article concludes by considering ways that textual replay could be further designed to support the range of joint activities that document review comprises.

The author argues that users see texts as tools when they recognize the texts' specific value and function within highly localized use settings. The author argues that users “ground” their texts to local use settings by altering the ways in which the texts structure and represent information (e.g., underlining, annotation, and sketching). The author discusses three practices by which texts are grounded as tools in document reviews: mode shifting, layering, and marking. These practices reflect different ways by which users add, subtract, and restructure information in a text so that it is usable under very specific conditions. This article explores document review as a practice in which grounding is the object of discussion (how others use the reviewed documents) and a practice by which review is facilitated. These observations will be important for exploration of technology to support “grounding” practices.