While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession.

To prepare students for the workforce, instructors of business, technical, and professional communication must incorporate team projects in their curriculum. However, both instructors and students have negative perceptions of team projects due to a variety of factors including team dysfunctions like social loafing. No prior study has examined the relationship between leader rapport management (LRM) and social loafing. LRM refers to the use of linguistic strategies to manage relationships between leaders and members. Therefore, we built and tested a model that examines the relationship between LRM and social loafing that is mediated by leader-member exchange and communication quality.

Background: Although some have noted that combining technical and marketing content is precarious, technical communication professionals are increasingly involved in content marketing, which includes the creation of white papers. Literature review: The little existing literature on white papers provides conflicting guidance about managing the combination of technical and marketing content. Both soft-sell and hard-sell marketing approaches have been recommended. One source of such inconsistent guidance may be the lack of agreement about definitions. Research on print advertisements has described hard and soft selling as multidimensional rather than binary aspects of persuasive appeals. Research question: Which dimensions of hard and soft-sell appeals are predominant in white papers? Research methodology: To complete our descriptive study, we collected a corpus of documents labeled as white papers in TechRepublic, and then selected and trained three raters to complete a series of judgments about dimensions of persuasive appeals in the corpus. We aggregated those ratings, calculating the mean and standard deviation for the dimensions to describe their distribution across the corpus. Results/discussion: Overall, hard-sell dimensions were more prevalent than soft-sell dimensions. However, the soft-sell category of “implicitness” was also dominant. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the value of treating hard and soft selling as multidimensional, complementary, and combinatory marketing appeals that allow, for example, a single white paper to be both “subjective” (soft sell), and “precise” (hard sell), or both “creative” (soft sell) and “informative” (hard sell).

Background: Preparing students to work on teams in the workplace is both important and challenging. The transfer of learning from school to work requires that faculty provide guidance to support teamwork processes, including team communication. Literature review: Leader communication, especially when nondirective, has been associated with team success. Nondirective leaders influence others and develop quality relationships through personal rather than position power. Personal power is created partly through interactions in which a leader's linguistic behavior effectively manages rapport with team members. Research questions: We wanted to explore the influence of team member feedback on leader rapport management, leader-member relationship quality, and perceived team effectiveness. Research methodology: We designed a feedback intervention that was delivered to team leaders within multidisciplinary student teams in a technical writing course. The study was a traditional, intervention-based, between-subjects quasi-experiment. Results/discussion: Despite its singular focus on team leader behavior, the intervention resulted in higher perceived group effectiveness. Although leader rapport management and leader-member relationship quality were higher in teams with feedback intervention, the effects were not statistically significant. Conclusion: We discuss several potential causes of our results, including several options for future research. Ultimately, because the intervention is simple to create and efficient to share, we conclude that it can supply instructors with one useful tool for intervening in student teamwork processes to improve team outcomes and for emphasizing the importance of interpersonal communication and leadership in teams.

Background: Although plain language is almost universally promoted by teachers of professional writing, editors, and communication professionals, some have argued that the effects of and preferences for plain style in written messages differ among groups of individuals. Research questions: 1. Do professionals prefer plain style? 2a. Do preferences differ for different categories of style? 2b. Do preferences differ for different groups of workers? Literature review: Style, the word- and sentence-level elements in a written text, is a critical element of plain language. There is evidence that plain style, however, affects readers differently based on their level of subject matter knowledge. Plain style is even criticized by a few. There is a long history of tensions surrounding linguistic prescriptivism, the notion that one manner of language use is superior to all others. Further, readers' preferences for writing style, plain or otherwise, may not be consistent across occupational positions, education levels, nationalities, personality types, or genders. Research methodology: We conducted a quantitative study of preferences for two major style categories (conciseness and word choice) using an online survey instrument. The student-recruiter technique provided us with usable responses from 614 working adults in the US. Using that data, we calculated proportions of respondents, with confidence intervals, who chose the plain-style options. We also used statistical tests to explore associations between preferences and respondent characteristics. Results and conclusions: Our findings support an overwhelming preference for plain style among US professionals who are native speakers of English. Reader preferences were stronger for elements associated with word choice than with conciseness. Those with lower education levels and blue-collar occupations had lower preferences for plain style. The study had two major limitations: 1. We investigated only two aspects of plain style rather than the full range of elements that make up plain language. 2. Our data-collection instrument presented readers with an artificial rather than an authentic reading experience. Future research may investigate the role of personality on stylistic preferences and the attributions readers make about writers based on their style.

White papers are commonly produced by for-profit organizations to market high-tech products and services and are often created by technical writers. But writers of this genre have little evidence-based research to guide them. To fill this void, the authors tested a rhetorical move structure with a sample of 20 top-rated marketing white papers and found that, despite the lack of industry standards for white papers, those written for marketing purposes display similar rhetorical moves: introducing the business problem, occupying the business solution niche, prompting action, establishing credibility, and providing disclaimers or legal considerations. Based on the results of this study, the authors advance guidelines for writers of this genre and suggest areas for future research.

Flipping originated in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, where didactic transmission of conceptual knowledge has been the standard pedagogy. Flipping has resulted in additional focus on procedural knowledge within class meetings. This article argues that business and professional writing pedagogy, which already focuses largely on procedural knowledge within class meetings, would benefit from flipping because it could create an additional focus on conceptual knowledge outside of the classroom. The article explains why we need to teach conceptual foundations, why video is a good choice for that teaching, and what challenges we face in creating those instructional videos.

Hostile challenges to planned organization change are common and challenging to deal with effectively. Little research has explained successful responses to such stakeholder hostility. To address this gap, we use the concept of readiness to characterize the content of hostile challenges. We also use rhetorical strategies based on speech act theory to describe options for responding to those challenges. Because change agents must choose among multiple strategies, we continue a line of research investigating relative preferences among them. Ultimately, our aim is to offer six lessons for change agents who face hostile challenges based on evidence from research.

This issue represents the end of the first 50 years of publication for the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Three of the six articles in this anniversary issue were written by researchers who have been named as Landmark Paper Authors.

Research activity is an integral component in the formation of professions. Evidence shows that business and technical communication specialists conduct research in both academic and practitioner career fields. In other disciplines, course work has been recognized as the primary means for preparing students to conduct and consume research. Yet, no publications document the status of research methods course work for U.S. students specializing in business and technical communication. This study provides a descriptive basis for assessing three areas in those courses: research methods topics, required readings, and teaching or assessment methods. An analysis of the results leads to a proposed agenda for preparing students specializing in business and technical communication for their future work roles in both academe and industry.

As environmental communicators partcipating in public meetings and interviews, engineers and scientists must sometimes walk a thin line between representing the best interests of their organizations and responding to the public's need to know. Unfortunately, published guidance designed to aid technical communicators in such situations is not clearly based on theory or actual behavior. This study analyzes actual responses to hostile questions by drawing upon speech act theory to demonstrate that spokespersons use five strategies for composing indirect answers to questions perceived as hostile.

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Although Halliday and Hasan claim that cohesion is a semantic relation, this paper suggests that cohesion might be better understood as a general perceptual phenomenon. Specifically, repetitions of both structural and semantic textual elements are analogous to repetitions of visual patterns in that both provide a uniform background against which distinctions are foregrounded and therefore more easily perceived. This article supplements Halliday and Hasan's categories of cohesive devices by discussing three types of structural cohesion based on an analysis of technical texts. First, cohesion produced through thematic progression (i.e., the repetition of topics and comments) is demonstrated; second, cohesion produced through parallelism (i.e., the repetition of syntactic structure) is illustrated; and finally cohesion produced with graphic devices (i.e., the repetition of typography, enumerators, and chart elements) is discussed.

Advice about how and when to implement the you-perspective is sometimes vague or contradictory. Many authorities simply advise writers to use the second person pronoun as often as possible, in either subject or object position; others suggest that the first person pronoun may be preferable for certain types of messages such as negative ones. Concepts from speech act theory can be used to clarify the most effective use of first and second person pronouns in two types of structures frequently found in professional communication: commissives and directives.