Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

This article aims to help doctoral students in technical communication prepare themselves for the academic job market and for the subsequent process of earning tenure and promotion in increasingly demanding environments. The authors propose that students do four things: (a) learn to spot and articulate research problems; (b) find their vocation—the work to which they feel a personal calling—within technical communication; (c) identify the research methods that best suit their personalities; and (d) articulate a research identity and agenda that they can explain at three different levels of abstraction: describing individual projects, naming the coherent themes that connect these projects, and defining themselves concisely as scholars. All these orienting practices involve students in stepping back, looking for larger patterns in their work and in their professional interests, and finding specific language to represent them.

Can technical writing still be taught credibly by teachers with only academic experience? This article draws a distinction between courses designed for students expecting to be full-time technical communicators and general-purpose service courses designed for students in a variety of fields. The article then argues that teachers of service courses can teach credibly without having worked as writers in nonacademic workplaces if they fulfill these conditions: they should have a critical command of research into nonacademic writing, rhetorical theory, and reading theory; they should define technical writing broadly enough to see themselves as technical writers; they should seek and take advantage of everyday opportunities to practice technical writing and reading; and they should carefully consider the sense in which their courses reflect reality.