The articles in this special issue advance technical and professional communication engagement with accessibility.

We build on previous scholarship calling for sustainable growth in technical and professional communication programs through maintenance and reflection. Inspired by continuous improvement models used in industry, we offer GRAM—Gather–Read–Analyze–Make—a continuous improvement model designed to identify and align often overlooked practices and processes necessary to build and sustain programs.

This article presents an examination of research methods used in empirical research over a 5-year period in technical and professional communication. This examination reveals that the most common methods used are surveys, interviews, usability tests, observations, and focus groups. In addition, the field does incorporate research categories of case studies, experiments, and ethnographers. This examination, however, reveals serious shortcomings that need to be addressed for the field to have a sustainable research profile.

With joy and gratitude, we present the first double issue of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM), the new scholarly home for the emergent multi-and inter-disciplinary field of the same name. For us, this journal’s manifestation has been a labor of love, borne out of a commitment to advance this field for its pioneers, newcomers, members-to-be, and our various (potential) interlocutors and stakeholders. Although the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has been recognized and named as a field relatively recently (for the most comprehensive accounts of its emergence, see Meloncon & Frost, 2015; Malkowski, Scott, & Keränen, 2016), threads of its scholarship began appearing at least as early as the 1980s (see Reynolds, this volume). Further, the field’s growth has been fueled by the coalescence of community through scholarly meetings (e.g., pre-conferences, conference panels and workshops, RHM Symposium) and special interest groups (e.g., CCCC Medical Rhetoric Standing Group, ARSTM); online forums (e.g., medicalrhetoric.com; Flux Facebook group); and a surprisingly expansive network of scholars and scholarship connected through publication venues (e.g., journal special issues, edited collections, scholarly encyclopedias). RHM is truly a crowd-sourced endeavor, and we are thankful to have been entrusted with it.

A hallmark of business and professional communication is an emphasis on pragmatic but theoretically grounded work. Thus, business and professional communication scholars are ideally suited to turn the theories found in disability studies into practice. In this article, I do just that by creating a theory—orienting access—that draws on concepts from disability studies. Orienting access calls for business and professional communication faculty to consider alternate pedagogies to ensure that our classrooms are truly accessible to all students. It also models the behaviors to teach how to design and create information that is accessible for all audiences.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) programs rely on contingent faculty to achieve their curricular mission. However, contingent faculty lack professional development opportunities. In this article, the author reports survey results (N = 91) and three cases studies that provide information on contingent faculty and their preparation for online teaching and then provides a three-step approach for TPC program administrators and faculty to follow so that programs can create sustainable professional development opportunities for contingent faculty to teach online.

How we argue for, create, and mobilize around writing and rhetoric majors will continue to shape our field’s disciplinarity in crucial ways, including our recognition, resources, and relationships. The range of such majors and their institutional contexts, and the disparate field-level efforts to track and build consensus around them, generate more questions than answers, leaving the turn to disciplinarity an open question. This article proposes techne —rhetoric as the productive art of enacting knowledge—as a conceptual tool for identifying connections across writing and rhetoric majors. Such points of connection can, in turn, serve to guide efforts for supporting and building shared resources for majors, and to enable a contingent and adaptive understanding of our field’s identity and (potential) disciplinarity.

The authors argue that technical and professional communication is currently facing an issue of incommensurability due to the diversity of the field. They call for unifying the field around its research questions to provide a common foundation for the future.

We report the results of a pilot study that offers the field of technical and professional communication its first look at material working conditions of contingent faculty, such as course loads, compensation, and professional support. Findings include that contingent faculty are more enduring with stable full-time, multi-year contracts; they carry a substantial teaching loads; and the majority are satisfied and happy in their present position, but half would prefer to be working on the tenure track.

The introduction to this special issue on the rhetorics of health and medicine charts the formation of an emerging field and its importance to communication design.

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

Disciplinary differences cause multiple problems with trying to create a research study that gauges readers' comprehension of complex scientific information. This paper provides a case study of the some of the issues associated with research methods and methodologies on an on an interdisciplinary team.

The authors report on and analyze a survey they conducted of staffing in college professional and technical communication courses. In addition, they make recommendations for better treatment of contingent faculty who teach such courses.

Abstract In this article, we trace the journey our professional writing program took from marginal area to well-supported specialty in an English department—a journey we made without sacrificing our commitment to prepare students for professional-level employment. In so doing, we explore the grounds of intellectual compatibility between our field and English studies and describe the conditions most conducive to professional writing's finding a respected place in English departments.

While scholars have begun to write a history of reports and instructions, little scholarship exists on the history of proposals. To fill this gap, I analyze proposals written by Dorothy Wordsworth and Anne Macvicar Grant, ca. 1800. My analysis uses contemporary rhetorical theory to determine how they structured their writing and incorporated rhetorical appeals to achieve their goals. My findings show that their texts should be placed on a continuum of the history and development of the proposal genre. Further findings suggest that their use of contemporary rhetorical theories authorized Wordsworth's and Grant's discourse to successfully affect change.

Instead of focusing on technologies of online delivery, specific course design, or reporting on the successes or lessons learned of an online or distance education course, in this essay I focus on the readiness of technical communication teachers for teaching in online settings. Using ideas gleaned from cultural geography, specifically the concept of reading and interpreting landscapes, I develop a framework for instructors to determine their willingness, readiness, and preparedness to teach online. The final section of this essay provides an example of using this framework based on my explorations into my readiness to teach online. I find that self-selection for online instruction is a critical step in developing powerful instructional settings and allows technical communication teachers to cross or remove existing boundaries within their own pedagogical practices.

Instead of focusing on technologies of online delivery, specific course design, or reporting on the successes or lessons learned of an online or distance education course, in this essay I focus on the readiness of technical communication teachers for teaching in online settings. Using ideas gleaned from cultural geography, specifically the concept of reading and interpreting landscapes, I develop a framework for instructors to determine their willingness, readiness, and preparedness to teach online. The final section of this essay provides an example of using this framework based on my explorations into my readiness to teach online. I find that self-selection for online instruction is a critical step in developing powerful instructional settings and allows technical communication teachers to cross or remove existing boundaries within their own pedagogical practices.