Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Though the remote internship is certainly not a new phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of this model for undergraduate experiential learning. As we consider this shift, we must evaluate how to best assist students completing remote internships. In this article, we argue that infrastructure offers a useful framework for understanding students’ internship experience and corresponding professionalization. We present two case studies of student remote internship experiences, analyzing areas of challenge and success through the infrastructural areas of writing projects, communication, and logistics. We offer recommendations for faculty working with remote student interns to promote positive learning experiences.

This essay argues that technical rhetoric in ancient Athens is neither well nor fully understood in its present historical characterization but rather is best realized as occupying a position on a spectrum of literate skills ranging from an art to a craft. The dismissive views of technical writing advanced by Plato and Aristotle should be reconsidered and specialized literate practices be recognized as an important feature of rhetoric in Athens’ classical period. A review of discursive and material (archaeological) evidence reveals that technical writing was evolving into a craft-skill in Athens as early as the archaic period and, by the classical period, would be regarded as a respected “rhetorical” profession of artistic expression. This essay urges readers to reconsider the restrictive characterization of rhetoric advanced by some historians of rhetoric and include the specialist craft-skills of writing as a manifestation of technical rhetoric that both illustrates, and more accurately represents, the range of classical rhetoric in ancient Athens.

When most people think about the water coming from their kitchen faucets, they seldom consider where the water originates and how transporting it to their homes has environmental impacts. Utilities that supply water know the complexity of their systems, but from their position as a “utility,” they view their job as supplying safe water to their customers, not necessarily stewarding the environment. Consequently, when building large projects like dams, canals, and tunnels, utilities regard environmental disruption as a necessary byproduct of serving growing cities with water. Representations of these projects often replicate the “man conquering nature” frame, praising these engineering marvels for their defiance of nature. Denver Water, the utility that serves almost 1.5 million people on the arid eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, has produced films describing its complex system since the early 20th century, and these films reveal an evolution of values from dominating nature to actively stewarding the environment. This paper reports on a grounded theory analysis of films produced by Denver Water between 1933 and 2018 examining how the films frame human relationships to the natural environment. The results reveal that the films increasingly express stewardship ideals over those of domination, with recent public communication actively advocating for environmental causes. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can learn important lessons from Denver Water about ethical organizational action for environmental stewardship.

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems. Representation of the biometric technology, therefore, reflects ways that technical communication can become complicit in silencing, excluding, and marginalizing local voices. I call attention to how communication that focuses on dominant narratives obscures and delegitimizes the knowledge of disenfranchised and less privileged groups.

Fierce competition has made innovation increasingly necessary for business success, and this has increased the importance of user-based innovation strategies like design thinking (DT). While many studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) have explored how DT can be used pedagogically, no studies have done this through investigating how DT is used as a workplace composing process. This study does exactly that. First, it presents the current state of research on pedagogical uses of DT in TPC, and then it builds upon those suggestions with an empirical study that chronicles on how two web design firms use DT to make websites. My main suggestion is to teach DT as a recursive process that allows students transcend potentially incorrect assumptions built into design tasks through gathering data not only from users, but from clients as well.

Work in industrial contexts is confronted with various risks, which are further amplified by the trend toward Industry 4.0. Approaches are needed to examine safety communication (SC) in such changing environments. Existing studies focus on individual SC means and quantitative evaluation measures. This article proposes a qualitative approach for analyzing SC with which a process chain in a metal-working company is investigated. The results reveal that SC is implemented as a complex system of communicative means. Weaknesses in this system entail several problems at the level of both workplaces and process chains. Due to a lack of digitalization, SC does not meet the requirements of Industry 4.0. Several task areas for communication professionals are identified in optimizing SC. These include content preparation for existing SC means according to work contexts and related tasks, creating digital SC content, and increasing the companies’ resilience to novel risks.

This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.

The rhetorical challenges and deliberations of scientific authors writing climate change assessment reports have received scant scholarly attention. As our interviews with 21 authors reveal, authors engage with multiple stakeholders who bring diverse scientific, political, economic, and cultural interests and perspectives. They must remain aware of politically motivated climate change denial and scientific illiteracy while remaining committed to producing policy relevant rather than policy prescriptive statements. These challenges lead to intense rhetorical negotiations over the lexical and visual features of a document they hope will deflect denial and contribute to meaningful policy solutions.

This article presents a reexamination of intercultural components in prominent, recent technical professional communication textbooks. This examination reveals the need for the technical professional communication field to establish a dynamic definition of culture as well as presents a possible definition, presents areas where textbooks have addressed previous scholars’ concerns as well as areas that could still use improvement and may require instructors to add supplemental instruction, and presents considerations for instructors when incorporating intercultural component elements into their courses.

The virtual museum tour has claimed new audiences during the pandemic, but not all virtual tours are created equal. First, this paper will explore the world of virtual museums and UX scholarship. Secondly, the paper will propose a viable set of options in determining effectiveness of virtual museums. Thirdly, the paper will discuss specific examples of UX design among museum virtual exhibits offered currently, specifically those that do not require any additional downloads or software. Finally, the paper intends to discuss the implications of high quality UX design within the realm of virtual museum tour.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

Rhetorical theory has frequently relied on metaphors of place and positioning as heuristics to build better arguments. This article utilizes one such metaphor, that of stasis theory, as a method by which we might change the terrain of the conversation surrounding the climate crisis. As an example, the author does a rhetorical analysis of a recent agricultural report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment and finds that, rather than using traditional questions of conjecture and quality, the authors of the report focus on questions of procedure and definition to reframe the discussion surrounding the climate crisis. Drawing from the rhetoric in this report, the author suggests that technical communicators might similarly produce more fruitful conversations around the climate crisis if they focus on what to do (procedure) and redefining the crisis as a local issue (definition).

Social justice is a framework that has been at the forefront of technical communication in recent years. While social justice is often applied in participatory studies, it can also feature in studies using quantitative methods. In this study, I use corpus-based critical discourse analysis to investigate the portrayal of migrants in the World Migration Reports, the flagship publication of the International Organization for Migration. I emphasize context to bring in the social justice framework in this analysis. This study finds that the World Migration Reports represent migrants within various topoi, with a particular focus on the topos of advantage and that of danger/threat.

This article explores the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, shedding light on the emergence of instructional writing from oral instruction. The 1549 text evinces qualities of preliterate oral communication identified by Ong. By contrast, the 1604 addendum reveals a trend toward modern plain style, which is even more pronounced in the 1647 Westminster Shorter Catechism. The evidence indicates the oral features were useful to the text’s technical aims. What Ramist plain style gains in precision and objectivity comes at the cost of other useful features, such as reiteration, contextualization, and agonism, which (in Tannen's phrase) involve a greater relative focus on interpersonal involvement between speaker and auditor/ reader.

This article interrogates the concept of tactical technical communication specifically questioning the established understanding of de Certeau in the field of technical communication. It argues once readers move beyond the concepts of strategies and tactics, they will find a rich and nuanced explanation of how ordinary people “make do” in everyday life.

Meeting the needs of users requires an understanding of the contexts where they interact with materials. This entry presents an approach for integrating script theory into usability to develop medical materials individuals can use in the settings where they receive or perform healthcare activities. The entry introduces technical communication professionals to script theory and presents mechanisms for using script theory to research patient expectations of and presents usable materials for health and medical contexts.

The authors present the results of a study of a three-way international collaboration project among one Hungarian class and two classes from Michigan and Washington, respectively. This multifaceted study focused on business planning, web design, and accessibility with the aim of investigating the effect of accessibility instruction on the production of business plans and websites. The distinguishing feature of this study was its emphasis to orient the three student groups on disability and accessibility issues from the perspective of the critical social model of disability advanced by disability studies theorists. The researchers collected quantitative and qualitative pre/postproject survey data from their three classes. They combined this data with the text of student emails sent among the project teams and instructor notes about their teaching to arrive at conclusions about the effectiveness of the collaboration using a mixed-methods approach. The results from the data analyses revealed significant benefit of the client–provider relationships among the three classes and the accessibility instruction provided by the Washington class to the other two classes on the business plans and websites.

User experience (UX) researchers in technical communication (TC) and beyond still need a clear picture of the methods used to measure and evaluate UX. This article charts current UX methods through a systematic literature review of recent publications (2016–2018) and a survey of 52 UX practitioners in academia and industry. Our results indicate that contemporary UX research favors mixed methods, and that usability testing is especially popular in both published research and our survey results. This article presents these findings as a snapshot of contemporary research methods for UX.

Health and medical contexts have emerged as an important area of inquiry for researchers at the intersection of user experience and technical communication. In addressing this intersection, this article advocates and extends patient experience design or PXD ( Melonçon, 2017 ) as an important framework for user experience research within health and medicine. Specifically, this article presents several PXD insights from a task-based usability study that examined an online intervention program for people with voice problems. We respond to Melonçon's call ( 2017 ) to build PXD as a framework for user experience and technical communication research by describing ways traditional usability methods can provide PXD insights and asking the following question: What insights can emerge from combining traditional usability methods and PXD research? In addressing this question, we outline two primary methodological and practical considerations we found central to conducting PXD research: (1) engaging patients as participants, and (2) leveraging multidisciplinary collaboration.

In this special issue, we reflect on the past and current connections between TC and UX, it is important to recognize the value the two fields bring to one another. The articles in this collection illustrate a move into new spaces, incorporating new methods, and forging new connections and provide us an opportunity to conceptualize the continuously evolving relationship between the fields.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) and user experience (UX) design are often seen as intertwined due to being user-centered. Yet, as widening industry positions combine TPC and UX, new streams enrich our understanding. This article looks at three such streams, namely, design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence to uncover specific industry practices, skills, and ways to advocate for users. These streams foster a multistage user-centered methodology focused on a continuous designing process, strategic ways for developing content across different platforms and channels, and for developing in smart contexts where agentive products act for users. In this article, we synthesize these developments and draw out how these impact TPC.

Technical and professional communication master’s students work with a faculty advisor to complete a three-credit independent research (IR) project, featuring original research. Stakeholders recommended the IR thesis be revised to better communicate IR to industry. Using a writing, activity theory, and genre theory lens, I analyzed what contradictions emerged between academic and workplace activity systems as stakeholders recommended genre revisions. I analyzed faculty and professional advisory board meeting transcripts, alumni and student surveys, and a Graduate School director and thesis examiner interview. Results indicated the thesis’ spectrum of functions, from its strengths encouraging students’ research proficiency to the limiting way it showcases IR as a product, not a process. Stakeholders suggested no thesis changes but recommended IR genre system modifications. As agents of change, students are uniquely positioned to use the IR genre system to address workplace communication problems and help mend our discipline’s academia-industry divide.

There are two boundary concepts utilized in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship: boundary work and, to a lesser degree, boundary objects. Boundary work functions to demarcate, incorporate, and expel particular ideas, groups, and practices from a field or profession. Boundary objects enhance the capacity of ideas, practices, and theories to translate across different groups. Together, these concepts are useful to TPC scholars interested in moments of controversy. In this essay, I explore the dialectical relationship between these two concepts and apply the resulting synthesis to a contemporary case study, the use of fecal microbiota transplants. I argue that the human microbiome functions as a boundary object and opens space within medicine’s own boundary work for the inclusion of fecal microbiota transplants. Together, the dialectical concepts of boundary work and boundary object create a new kind of analytic that allows TPC scholars to map boundary transformations, recognize moments for intervention, and create strategies for collaboration.

Cybervetting, or the review of job applicants’ social media accounts, is a common practice. This study investigates the use of a typology to increase students’ self-awareness by asking them to assess their social media presence. The majority of Facebook users concluded they post content that is appropriate for potential employers, while most Twitter users concluded they post questionable content. Yet most Facebook users restricted access to their accounts, while most Twitter users left them public. When subsequently asked about the prospect of changing posting behavior, students with questionable content were more open to change, supporting the potential viability of the typology.

When writing journal articles, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their new articles routinely build directly on their own prior work. As a result, STEM authors often reuse material from their completed documents in producing new documents. While this practice, known as text recycling (or self-plagiarism), is a debated issue in publishing and research ethics, little is known about researchers’ beliefs about what constitutes appropriate practice. This article presents results of from an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and post docs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.

Deploying a grounded theory approach, this case study examines 9 years of a nonrenewable energy company’s responses to a voluntary environmental disclosure questionnaire to discover how industrial discourse about climate change is used by industry writers. Through using the rhetorical strategies of emotions, affect, and mythic narrative within theory, balancing norm, and dominion frames, the company communicates climate change does not impact their secure economic future due to their proactive approach toward regulatory compliance with technological innovation and attentive internal and external policy oversight.

This article examines a targeted drought awareness campaign by the city of Cape Town in South Africa to prevent a looming water crisis dubbed Day Zero. Using rhetorical criticism and commonplaces, the article analyzes the design and (rhetorical)circulation of artifacts that heightened public awareness of the crisis, helped shape the public mindset, and galvanized collective action to prevent Day Zero. For one city in Africa to avert a water crisis through a rhetorically orchestrated set of technological, scientific, and civic interventions is significant for (among others) technical communicators who need to know not simply that it was done, but how rhetoric helped avert Day Zero.

This study details a method for mHealth app development and user experience design (UX) evaluation, which generates a comprehensive list of stakeholder-users, acknowledges UX barriers, advocates multiple methods, and argues that developers should address the UX needs of each stakeholder-user in a complex health-care system. A case study of a research project on an mHealth app for women who are considering prevention of or treatment for osteoporosis assists to elaborate and define the method. To find any measure of success, a fully functional app for older users should be integrated into the entire health-care system.

The circulation of scientific and technical genres in online publics can shape both public opinion and policy deliberation about issues such as global warming. While rhetoric and professional writing scholarship has documented the myriad ways that genres are transformed as they circulate across discursive boundaries, few examine how argument shapes those transformation and circulations. Drawing on Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, this article analyzes arguments in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles about global warming to document how editors argue about genre as they deliberate over what counts as reliable sources of global warming knowledge. This analysis demonstrates how argument mediates genre uptake and circulation. In doing so, it helps account for how technical and scientific genres circulate in contemporary online publics.

Despite the recent surge in social justice and decolonial scholarship, technical and professional communication (TPC) research remains a potential site of oppression. This article is meant to be a call to action; it attempts to (re)ignite discussions about what we value and how we express what we value. It encourages the field of TPC to be more responsive to the experiences and struggles of research participants—those we engage during our knowledge production process. I explore what I call oppressive rhetoric in TPC research with a specific focus on the term subjects in institutional review board forms and in the reporting of some TPC research about research participants. I assert that in spite of our best efforts in advancing the goals of marginalized groups and despite the forward-looking trajectory of progressive research, more work needs to be done to address oppressive rhetoric in TPC scholarship.

Research shows that Western and Chinese user instructions use visuals differently. Two basic tendencies may be discerned: Chinese manuals place more emphasis on visuals and their selection of visuals is less strictly confined to usability related functionality. This study investigates whether such cultural differences correspond to user preferences. Three hypotheses were tested: (a) Chinese users value pictures more than Western users; (b) Chinese users appreciate diverting, cartoon-like pictures more than Western users; and (c) Western users appreciate strictly instrumental pictures more than Chinese users. To test these hypotheses, a quasi-experiment ( N = 158) was conducted with cultural background as independent variable and appreciation for pictures as dependent variable. All participants rated 15 pictures, which were presented in the context of user instructions. All three hypotheses were confirmed. Cultural differences regarding the use of visuals should therefore be taken into account when localizing Western manuals for the Chinese market, or vice versa.

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master’s students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate students who are studying multimedia production skills. The author piloted the collaborative project model during a recent academic term. Student response to the format was overwhelmingly positive from both graduates and undergraduates, and the resulting projects were of exceptional quality and well received by their respective clients.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

Unexpected developments in an environment often drive the evolutionary process. This is as true for the evolution of societies as it is for species. The effective evolution of education will involve knowing what the key adaptation factors are and making them central to how educators respond to shifts in socio-pedagogical environments on local, regional, and global levels. Five factors seem central to addressing evolutionary change in higher education—particularly in relation to online environments. Understanding these 5C factors will be essential to educational success in today’s COVID-19 context and in adapting to future educational challenges that emerge.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

This article reports on a revised move analysis of a video abstract (VA) repository curated by Cell Press. The analysis reveals that the VA displays several distinct core moves, optional moves, and move units. The analysis suggests that albeit evidence being inconclusive due to the sample size, the VA is in effect an emerging genre whose implications for further research and practice are worth discussing. The article also questions the assumed analytic pertinence of move analysis to researching multimodal genres and cautions against the uncritical use of the VAs curated by leading academic publishers and journals in professional training.

Apocalypticism is a powerful brew of eschatological belief and political imagination that is extremely persuasive. This article addresses the intersections between apocalyptic rhetoric and the technical communication of risk, disease outbreak, and disaster preparedness by analyzing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign. Specifically, I argue that the framing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s campaign relies on and extends problematic iterations of apocalypticism and undermines the educational objectives of disaster preparedness and response. I conclude with suggestions for how technical communicators designing public awareness and outreach campaigns can use existential risk rhetoric for engagement without succumbing to the pernicious side effects of apocalypticism.

As people today use information products in contexts with distractions, we need to design for people’s attention. User experience design routinely relies on behavioral design to engage distracted users and nudge them toward specific behavior. Although practiced in user experience design, behavioral design is less known in technical communication. In this article, we use the CHOICES (Context, Habits, Other people, Incentives, Congruence, Emotions, and Salience) framework developed by McKinsey’s Behavioral Lab to introduce students to learn about behavioral design principles that make use of cognitive biases to influence people. We maintain that behavioral design is useful for technical communicators because they create digital assets that are part of the user experience.

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To assess collaboration, researchers integrated usability testing on workshop resources with 15 ( N = 15) participants, postworkshop questionnaires with 34 ( N = 34) participants, and interviews with 2 ( N = 2) community partners. Participants responded positively, and 47% of workshop attendees found jobs. The article argues that community-based research should use participatory and iterative models and resilience theory.

In times of public health crises, effective information on how to perform daily activities can be central to the stability of local communities. Technical communicators can make important contributions to these situations by developing materials that meet local informational needs. This entry reviews strategies technical communicators can use to address public health challenges on the local level both today and in the future.

This article uses personas to illustrate the range of technical communication knowledge work developed through its practitioners—to articulate the functions, characteristics, traits, skills, and workplace styles of positions someone in the field might pursue. Recent research has provided valuable data about the expanding and evolving skill sets of the technical/professional communicator. We build on that by triangulating the data from an analysis of job postings, a survey of technical communicators, and interviews and embedded observations of practitioners to develop personas of technical/professional communicators on the job. The personas can help students, programs, and practitioners understand and navigate the many types of roles that are available in the field.

Scholars have given much weight to the question of professional legitimacy in the field of TPC, but much of that focus has been given to practitioners in Euro-Western contexts. However, practitioners in India have also worked to strengthen their own legitimacy in a variety of ways, including by harnessing existing structural mechanisms. This article addresses the founding of the Society for Technical Communication India chapter in 1999 and its subsequent organizational impact as a mechanism toward improving the legitimacy of the field in India. It covers a historical analysis of the founding years of the Society for Technical Communication India chapter and discusses ways that founding members and early participants worked to build their own legitimacy.

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss publishing scenarios and challenges facing such authors and offer guidelines for producing clear, effective, publishable articles, in English, for international discourse. My approach is based on traditional rhetorical principles, plain language studies, research pursued at nuclear security conferences, feedback from internationals at writing workshops, and my experience as editor of the International Journal of Nuclear Security.

This article reports on the first stage of a mixed-methods community-based research project involving residents of a socioeconomically challenged neighborhood in Baltimore City, Richnor Springs, and service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses at Loyola University Maryland (Loyola). To measure outcomes, we analyzed student surveys from 80 respondents and critical reflections from two students. We also analyzed interviews from two students and two community members. Findings indicate that there were no statistical mean differences in the educational experiences between service-learning and nonservice-learning students; however, there were significant mean differences in transformational experiences. Findings also indicate that community members responded positively and that stakeholders valued the personal relationships that developed.

This article presents a case study of the Smarter Crowdsourcing project the International Development Bank and Governance Lab cohosted to cope with the emerging Zika outbreaks in Latin America countries. Using the lenses of intercultural communication methodologies, user-centered design, and global cultural flow, I examine the exclusion of at-risk populations as marginalized end users of the project. I also examine the impacts of this oversight on the effectiveness of the technocratic solutions. I then conclude by discussing the implications this case has for international health intervention, global technical communication, and community-based research.