This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register – specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns – was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency–structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors’ correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency–structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

research-article Share on Taking things seriously with visual research Author: Brian McNely University of Kentucky University of KentuckyView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 2February 2015 pp 48–54https://doi.org/10.1145/2752853.2752859Published:27 March 2015Publication History 3citation39DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads39Last 12 Months8Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Everyday spaces and places are increasingly experienced as hybrid---as a confluence of material and informatic possibility---thanks to the ubiquity of always connected mobile devices and robust sociotechnical networks. For example, the interiors of many contemporary vehicles are personal area networks that move with drivers through daily commutes, connecting them to their phone's text messages and social networks in and through the material space of their car. In such cases, communication flows strongly mediate people's experiences in, movements through, and perceptions toward spaces of work, learning, and leisure. This article explores such hybrid spaces from the perspective of communication design, offering a heuristic approach to user experience in a world where spaces are often crosshatched and multiple. This exploration focuses on the kinds of tools and practices common to knowledge work and its recent extensions into forms of knowledge play, where the means of knowledge work are coordinated and transformed for non-work pursuits. This article, then, presents a practical, persona driven perspective on the relationships between communication flows and hybrid spaces, challenging design of communication researchers and user experience professionals to rethink the everyday combinations of symbolic action, knowledge work tools and networks, and mundane locations and movements.

At the time of publication B. McNely was at The University of Kentucky, C. Spinuzzi was at The University of Texas at Austin, and C. Teston was at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

I consider the “when” of rhetorical literacies by exploring individual and aggregate posts in the popular photo-sharing service Instagram as meaningful pivot points along broader continua of literate activity. In this way, social media participation is seen as a nexus and fulcrum from which scholars and students of writing and digital rhetorics may trace literate activity both backwards and forwards—to see social media as one public component in a host of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical practices.

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In his 2005 bookAmbient Findability, Peter Morville argued that what we find changes who we become. In 2012 and beyond---in an information environment of filter bubbles, contextual advertising, and friend-of-friend chains that push ordinary folks well beyond the Dunbar number---perhaps Morville is in need of some updating: whatfinds uschanges who we become.