Tables, one of the most familiar forms of data visualization, are often put to use as a popular workaround for laying out pages in word processing programs. This article illustrates examples of friction, compatibility , and congruence between accepted guidance for designing effective tables in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and widely adopted accessibility standards outlined by the largest international software vendors and non-profit organizations. While acknowledging critiques in critical disability studies and in TPC of standards-based approaches to accessibility, we argue that adherence to standards offers a starting point for redressing the inaccessibility created by some TPC pedagogical practices. Navigating these departures and overlaps is important because designing effective data visualizations, laying out pages, and creating accessible documents are core competencies in technical communication that instantiate deeply held professional and disciplinary commitments to creating usable and ethical documents.

Non-formal learning institutions use interpretive plans to create effective interpretation (mission-based communications) for their visitors. This article argues that interpretive planning offers professional and technical communicators great potential for engaging with communities. Following an introduction to the field of interpretation and interpretive planning, I explain how interpretive plans are a type of metagenre. I then provide technical communicators with specific examples of how technical communicators’ expertise is relevant to interpretation.

Rhetoric is a resilient art.Its stability and mutability across centuries attest to its dynamism as a domain of knowledge production and engaged practice.While resilience is understood differentially across scholarly and popular domains, it nearly always addresses questions of how to respond, adapt, and persist through adverse circumstances (for a review of this diverse literature, see Flynn, Sotirin, & Brady, 2012).For example, resilience has become a key trope for describing the practices of (bio)security, sustainability, human health, child development, infrastructure, technological systems, and other common sites of study in rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM).Recently, rhetoricians have also taken up resilience; these scholars are interested both in using rhetoric to understand resilience and using resilience to understand rhetoric.This special issue of POROI is intended to further the scholarly conversation on resilience rhetorics.In particular, we hope to highlight the deeply rhetorical, critical, cultural, and materialsemiotic work being done by and with theories and metaphors of resilience.The collection of articles assembled here initially arose from our experience co-chairing the Association for Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine's (ARSTM) second annual preconference at the biennial Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2018.The ARSTM preconferences at RSA and the National Communication Association (NCA) meetings always focus on a core theme; other themes have included trust, evidence, and translation (ARSTM, 2019).

This article explores rhetorical practices underlying productive deliberation about climate change. We analyze discussion of climate change on a Reddit subforum to demonstrate that good-faith deliberation---which is essential to deliberative democracy---exists online. Four rhetorical concepts describe variation among this subforum's comments: William Keith's distinction between 'discussion' and 'debate,' William Covino's distinction between good and bad magic, Kelly Oliver's notion of ethical response/ability, and Krista Ratcliffe's notion of rhetorical listening. Using a three-part taxonomy based on these concepts, we argue that collaborative climate change deliberation exists and that forum participation guidelines can promote productive styles of engagement.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

Philip Eubanks’s The Troubled Rhetoric and Communication of Climate Change: The Argumentative Situation is the first book-length treatment of climate change by a scholar of rhetoric. As such, it fi...

The authors performed an interdisciplinary literature review of research on communication and climate change. The authors reviewed STEM, social science, and risk analysis journals to synthesize recent publications on climate change communication which could support research in technical communication. Several applications are proposed for technical communication research, including using this review to contextualize local qualitative work, to spur interdisciplinary projects and address gaps in multidisciplinary literature, and reconsider a role for advocacy in technical communication.

This multivocal webtext details one graduate class’s experiences creating Gregory L. Ulmer’s "mystory" projects fromInternet Invention(2003). As a result of their experiences, the authors find the mystory genre reveals to us the ways in which different discursive networks influence what we do, and do not, see both inside and outside the classroom.