This article examines the role of TPC professionalism keywords on early career scholars' disciplinary enculturation. The article reports on a collaboration between the article's authors that explored how the deployment of professionalism keywords in teaching and research created conditions for defining what it might mean to work as a TPC professional. The article offers insights into the challenges keywords pose to forwarding non-normative understandings of professionalism that enable broader inclusion and visibility for TPC stakeholders.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) has recently turned to social justice to interrogate seemingly neutral documents’ impacts on marginalized populations, including disabled individuals. In workplace contexts, such efforts are often impeded by rights-based discourse that maintains ableist institutional spaces and impedes efforts toward broader institutional change. Recognizing that TPC practitioners likely will encounter rights-based discourse, this article offers an ethical decision-making framework that couples the field's previous disability studies work with disability justice. We offer guidelines and a critical vocabulary for bridging legal rights and social justice concerns to inspire ethical articulations of disability access needed for transformative change.

Introduction: Building on scholarship and practices in the fields of technical and professional communication (TPC), disability studies (DS), and legal studies (LS), this article calls for a fusion of these fields to help technical and professional communicators (TPCers) negotiate legal understandings of access that recognize it as a complex, social phenomenon. About the case: To demonstrate such fusion's value in interrogating corporate discourse around disability inclusion and access, we examine the public-facing documents in JP Morgan Chase & Company's (JP Morgan) diversity and inclusion initiatives. Situating the case: Prior cases have traced the impacts of ADA law in transforming corporate culture around disability inclusion and access. These cases suggest that although the ADA has made significant progress toward inclusion and access for disabled employees, it has been limited through the influence of normative corporate culture. We thus extend these findings through DS. Methods/approach: We use thematic coding to analyze a sampling of JP Morgan's disability and inclusion documents to better understand their contributions to disability discourse. Results/discussion: We identify tensions across four discursive expressions, which we recognize both as opportunity spaces for TPCer intervention and as justification for integrating TPC, DS, and LS. We then offer guidelines for more equitable documentation practices. Conclusions: Through the fusion of TPC, DS, and LS, TPCers may engage more nuanced understandings of disability and access that support the dynamic and relational nature of each.

In contemporary knowledge-intensive spaces, workers often team with experts from different disciplinary backgrounds and different geographic locations and, thus, they face the challenge of integrating knowledge in their work. When modeling how communication can be improved in these circumstances, previous studies have often relied on social network analysis to understand the aggregate exchanges among team members. In this study, rather than analyze social networks (people linked by communication), we argue that network analysis of knowledge networks (people linked by common knowledge) presents an opportunity to better understand and address the challenge of knowledge integration in organizational contexts. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How can professional communicators use the distribution of knowledge on teams as a structure for planning interventions in the work of complex, collaborative teams? 2. What kinds of insights do networks of specific knowledge areas offer professional communicators about team communication challenges? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> We describe prior uses of network analysis in professional communication research that inform our development of a knowledge network. In particular, we review current literature and highlight network-based concepts that we believe are organizing principles of knowledge networks. Previous literature has shown that network models, particularly social network models, are useful tools for professional communication researchers to examine a range of communication factors and practices. However, professional communication research has yet to fully explore the possible contributions of knowledge networks to understand communication processes. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> We conducted an ethnography of a team science collaboration and used observations to create a survey of terms that measured subjects’ self-professed understanding of key concepts. We used the survey results to produce a bimodal network model of agents and terms, in which we binarized link values after filtering for only the highest-rated terms for each subject. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> The model demonstrated that the team collaboration broke into two distinct groupings. Ego networks extracted from this parent network showed that concepts commonly well-understood in the team join together multiple subgroups of expert knowledge. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> The knowledge network is a useful instrument in helping team members understand possibilities for integrating knowledge across disciplines and subspecialties. The visual produced by this model also can be useful for developing research questions and strategizing work processes.

This article offers an empirical study of literature in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and the medical humanities (MH). Article traces the topics, funding mechanisms, research methods, theoretical frameworks, evidence types, audience, discourse arrangement patterns, and action orientation that constitute the scholarship in the sample to offer a landscape of the current state of RHM and the MH. Findings can be leveraged to assess the potential for alignment between these fields for future research.

Gaining access to interdisciplinary research sites poses unique research challenges to technical and professional communication scholars and practitioners. Drawing on applied experiences in externally funded interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship about interdisciplinary research, this article describes a training protocol for preparing graduate students to understand the dynamic nature of access in interdisciplinary work as well as to develop a capacity for making a case about the value of their expertise in interdisciplinary research contexts. The authors situate the training protocol in the context of three distinct phases of case-making (individual, relational, and speculative) and note how the conditions for negotiating access vary within and across these phases. The authors conclude by describing implications to graduate students and faculty for theorizing access in this way and developing training to support graduate students’ negotiation of access in interdisciplinary work.

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

This article describes a flipped classroom activity that requires students to integrate research and audience analysis. The activity uses Twitter as a data source. In the activity, students identify a sample, collect customer tweets, and analyze the language of the tweets in an effort to construct knowledge about an audience’s values, needs, and attitudes. The article first presents an overview of audience analysis frameworks. It then presents a step-by-step tutorial for integrating the activity. The authors also provide business communication instructors with resources for implementing the activity including video lectures, handouts, and instructional guides.

This article explores shared language development in secondary to postsecondary transitions. Based on survey findings of secondary students, the authors advocate using a shared language corpus to access and collect student and instructor language about writing to smooth secondary to postsecondary transitions and transitions beyond the FYC classroom.

Abstract This article discusses the need for technical communicators to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between law and their work. The author reviews the discipline's literature regarding the relationship between law and technical communication and argues that technical communicators must learn to see themselves as coproducers of the law. To that end, the author offers pedagogical strategies for helping technical communication students develop skills for recognizing the legal implications of their work.