With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and examinations of positionality, privilege, and power, the authors suggest three research methods that help capture the intricacies of blurred personal and professional lives: time-use diaries, embodied sensemaking, and participatory data collection and coding. These methods seek to illuminate the invisible work of women, as well as the diversity and range of experiences of home-based workplace communicators.

Image-based research conducted on and by research participants holds promise to extend participatory studies in technical communication by delivering research techniques that have been used for Policy Research in Public Health and other areas of participatory research (e.g., community-based participatory research). Even though they can expand policy (or even user design work), the use of participants’ images is not without challenges. The article discusses those challenges and suggests practices that stabilize the research logistically, relationally, and thematically; it also presents the approach as attractive for use in arenas that reward scrutiny even though they have traditionally been difficult to study.

This article brings together the communication needs and positioning of women in technical areas, and asks “how can technical communication classes contribute to the mentoring of young women engineers at a time when many of those women want to be identified as engineers instead of being spotlighted as women in engineering?” Incorporating research into mentoring for women in engineering, and feminist approaches to mentoring in general, we adopt Heath and Heath's strategy in Switch, instituting small changes in technical communication classes (and sometimes their infrastructures) that target a mentoring problem—i.e., talk about time—with the hope of flipping a switch toward larger changes. Thus, the article demonstrates two tactics that we can use to deliver improvement in managing the discourse surrounding time and its deadlines. Our approach both mentors undergraduate women in more actively and effectively discussing and scheduling their work without singling them out as women and also integrates good mentoring practice into the infrastructure of technical communication service classes.

Using tracings from a 1924 technical writing class, this article follows some normally unmarked processes of teaching and learning in order to highlight the humanities–utility binary from the perspective of the shadows of instructional practice. First, the article situates the humanities–utility debate as it is being addressed in postwar America, and second, it offers evidence of how far-reaching the resolution might have been, evidence taken from the margins of a copy of Watt’s (1917) The Composition of Technical Papers. Both the professional discussions and this textbook’s philosophy are reflected in jottings made by a technical writing student. This article suggests that tracing these issues through this underside of pedagogical history offers a type of evidence that is difficult to recover but worth seeking.

Our pedagogical histories lean on textbooks, institutional records, and the words of famous teachers. Students rarely appear in situ. Here, the voices of two very different Progressive Era students cast spotlights on the shadows of long-ago classroom practices—offering a liveliness that is difficult to recover, but worth seeking.

We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and com-position has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the de-partment of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.

Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers. Stephen Doheny‐Farina. Cambridge: MIT, 1992. 279 pp. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 312 pp. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 212 pp. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Richard Rorty. Cambridge UP, 1991. 226 pp. Color for the Electronic Age: What Every Desktop Publisher Needs To Know About Using Color Effectively in Charts, Graphs, Typography and Pictures. Jan V. White. New York: Watson‐Guptill Publications, 1990. 208 pp. Eye on the News. Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark. St. Petersburg: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991. 86 pp. Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing. Roger C. Parker. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: Ventana, 1990. 371 pp. The Makeover Book. Roger C. Parker. Chapel Hill: Ventana, 1989. 278 pp. Graphic Design for the Electronic Age: The Manual for Traditional and Desktop Publishing. Jan V. White. New York: Watson Guptill, 1988. 212 pp. Technical Editing. Joseph C. Mancuso. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1992. 191pp.

The visual dimension of meaning is widely accepted in technical communication. But theories (and pedagogies) that direct the making of visual meaning are still under development. A guidelines approach, a design decisions approach, and an information/reader model approach are applied as lenses for viewing the marking of meaning on an instructional page. A case study invokes these approaches to describe the visual markers students employ as they write descriptive and instructional text. Although neither group described marked their texts thoroughly, beginning technical writing majors enrolled in a writing class used fewer illustrations and visual markers than technical majors used. The difference in beginning students' performance may be due to prior reading patterns, since the difference is more pronounced in the descriptions than in the instructions. Thus, the paper proposes a longitudinal approach to sensitizing writing majors to visual cues.

Computers in technical writing classes are growing in popularity because professionals increasingly use computers for writing reports and because the computer can aid in producing more visually sophisticated documents. Yet, we do not know what computer experience students bring with them to the computer classroom, a lack of knowledge that makes the task of integrating the computers into the classroom more cumbersome. This article presents the results of a survey of Purdue University students' knowledge of, use of, and attitudes toward computers as they enter the technical writing class. It contrasts the technical students with upper division humanities students and draws conclusions about the documentation requirements and the appropriate computer use goals for the Purdue students surveyed. Finally, suggestions are made about how to use a survey of this type.