Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Today, diseases can spread internationally faster and farther than ever before, and a range of public health issues can “go global” quickly and easily. The challenge becomes communicating ideas of care—that is, issues of health and wellness—across different cultures, languages, and geopolitical contexts. Doing so involves understanding the dynamics of such factors and how to apply this knowledge effectively. The entries in this special issue examine such factors and provide readers with frameworks for understanding and strategies for addressing these issues.

Patient safety narratives are a globally mandated format for representing individual patient experiences, and they include peer-reviewed case reports and narrative medicine. The authors show how the humanistic values described by Carolyn Miller in 1979 could enhance or contribute to international health and medical communication in relation to such narratives. They do so by expanding on twenty-first century work by Bowdon and Scott to provide a framework for considering how narrative competence and narrative humility may allow technical communicators to strengthen their practices within technical communication and the rhetorics of health and science by examining an individual problem within its broader, intercultural contexts.

Mobile phones offer promising solutions to basic health-care provisions for developing countries like Malaysia. However, for such technologies to be useful for health and medical intervention, information designers must make information shared via small-screen usable for diverse cultural audiences within a nation. In this entry, we use the international patient experience design framework to propose a heuristic for addressing this situation. This approach can provide insights that can facilitate the “glocalization”—or creating materials to address specific cultural contexts and make health and medical information more usable to diverse populations living in the same country.

Pedagogical and programmatic research remains important in technical and professional communication. For such approaches to be effective, meaningful, and successful, they must represent effective scholarship that can be used within and address the needs of the greater field. The authors performed a metasynthesis of pedagogical and programmatic scholarship published in five central technical and professional communication journals between 2011 and 2015 ( n = 82). The authors report the results of this research and what it means for the field to approach pedagogical and programmatic scholarship in the future.

Smart home products continue to rise in popularity but have yet to achieve widespread adoption. There is little research on how the general population perceives benefits of different smart home devices beyond general surveys. Using a living laboratory of five solar houses that we equipped with a range of smart home devices, we assessed how university student residents learn about, use, and gain interest in adopting this smart home technology. Analysis of data confirms that users find lifestyle benefits to be the most important motivators for adopting smart home technology. Yet without training in using that technology, these benefits do not outweigh the risks associated with learning to operate that technology.

Police officers do a significant amount of high-stake writing in police reports, but report writing is given little attention in policy academies, and prevailing guidelines treat the task as a mechanical process of recording facts. As a result, officers are ill-prepared for this essential and inherently complex task. In this study, we interviewed officers to study what makes for a good police report. Our findings reveal that police reports are goal-directed genre actions. This understanding peers through the positivist emphasis on factual details to emphasize the social function of police reports in the criminal justice system.

This article addresses limitations in the scholarship on the Edwardian editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552) and contributes to the growing body of research on early modern technical communication by approaching the Prayer Book as technical writing for a primarily oral–aural culture. I examine three sample texts from the Prayer Book to showcase their oral qualities and how these oral qualities contribute to the utility of the book. This examination shows that the Prayer Book played a role in the development of technical writing in the early modern period and that its oral features contribute to the success of its technical aims.

Cultural logics reveal a culture’s way of reasoning or a belief system. When paired with International Patient Experience Design (I-PXD), cultural logics provide insight into cultural contexts to help health and medical communicators design, test, and shape health and medical information across complex, dynamic international contexts. Using a Swedish context, I demonstrate the cultural logic-I-PXD interplay to construct a cultural logic. The process I highlight reveals how a paired cultural logic-I-PXD approach can provide a method to reveal cultural assumptions, expectations, and dynamics that can inform the design and testing of health and medical information in international contexts.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

This article examines how normative assumptions about disability, family, and care perpetuate barriers to social services in cross-cultural contexts. It reports on an 8-month case study of how a county-sponsored, person-centered disability grant targeted but failed to meet the needs of Somali applicants. I identify four impasses that alienated applicants and demonstrated the grant's process relied on culture norms, including medical definitions of disability, institutional expertise, and normalization of self-sufficiency. I develop three recommendations for future technical communication and policy interventions. This study offers insights into how person-centered initiatives can engage the contexts and expertise of diverse users within institutional structures.

Contrary to current scholarship in technical communication, which places the first women technical writers in the period of 1641–1700 AD, the first technical documents were written by women in 2400 BCE—eight centuries earlier. Enheduanna—the first woman writer and the first nonanonymous author ever identified—wrote many of the period’s great poems, including A Hymn to Inanna. Her work calls into question our discipline’s belief that persuasive writing began with Homer and was conceptualized largely by men. This fact has the potential to completely revise the history of both technical and persuasive writing, and women’s role in that history.

This article reports on a qualitative study of strategies and competencies used by technical communication and translation students to address challenges inherent in global virtual team collaboration. The study involved students from three universities collaborating in virtual teams to write and translate instructional documents. Qualitative content analysis of students’ reflective blogs and team transcripts was used to examine their experiences while collaborating. Students faced challenges related to communication, leadership, and technology, and developed various strategies to address those challenges. Although the students did not face cultural challenges, they reported increased awareness of cultural issues. Students also reported that the project helped them better understand the workplace and define career goals.

In this article, I analyze 73 circuit court opinions in which due process rights are weighed according to a little-known legal test called shocks the conscience. I also offer my observations of a federal trial in the U.S. district court in 2015 upon which the test was imposed. I reveal how requiring the shocks-the-conscience test confirms the authority of the state and silences those who have been singled out as individuals or as groups to be deprived of constitutional rights. In particular, professional communication scholars who examine emotional appeals as rhetorical strategies should find this article of interest.

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.

In the field of intercultural business and technical communication, intercultural communication has been a regular topic in curriculum for decades; various teaching approaches exist for developing students’ cultural awareness and helping them achieve a theoretical understanding about the concept of culture, cultural differences, and cultural conflict. But quite often teaching and learning are limited in the classroom context, although it is true that study abroad programs are available for a small group of students. As a result, students do not have enough opportunities to interact with members of other cultures, which limits students’ potentials for gaining intercultural competence. This study explores the rhetorical nature of simulations, defines the perspective of using activity theory as a framework to understand the learning process occurring in simulations, and provides an intercultural simulation example to explain how instructors can incorporate simulations into the business and technical communication curriculum.

Oral presentations are a common genre in technical and business communication courses. While it is important for students to develop a professional ethos when presenting information, in this article I argue that textbooks’ discussion of professional dress and voice privilege cisgendered bodies and erase the differences and bodily experiences that transgendered individuals face. This may cause dissonance in trans students who may come to believe that they must choose between their genders and being professional.

Online discussion forums for patients offer the benefits of community but the risks of misinformation. A physician-moderated forum may help to mitigate this tension. How do both the professional expertise of a physician moderator and the personal, experiential expertise of patients contribute to trust in a forum? A rhetorical analysis of a year of postings in an online Parkinson’s community reveals that both forms of expertise were trusted, demonstrating the possibility for them to complement each other. This study illustrates the broader ways trust is established in patient communities and offers implications for technical communicators as forum designers or moderators.

This study examined the relationship between stress and social media usage, whether stress was an indicator of social media use, and tested moderators of the relationship between stress and social media use. Participants ( n = 201) were randomly assigned to a stress-inducing recall activity or a control task via an online survey. Next, they completed measures of stress, social media usage, social support, and habitual behavior. We found that seeking social support contributed to an increased usage of social media. In addition, increased usage of social media was related to greater frequency and strength of evoking habitual behavior.

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.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case study challenges technical writing students to consider complex cultural circuits, or networks, that comprise a specific controversy. The students analyze the rhetorical situation, create new content that contributes to the ongoing discussion, and learn about audience through usability testing their multimodal projects.

As a discipline and a set of practices, technical communication focuses on designing technical products through the effective implementation of usability to facilitate users in performing tasks with speed, accuracy, and satisfaction. This article proposes that designers in the Global North should consider the effective localization usability implementation in their products or systems so that social justice can be promoted in the Global South’s countries that import such products from the Global North. Using a purposeful sampling research method, this article shares findings from a study, emphasizing that technical products developed through participatory localization for usability might be in a better position to be used for promoting social justice and human rights in resource-constrained settings. The article discusses the implications of the findings, suggesting that northern products should be designed according to the usability expectations of local users in the Global South so that the North–South divide can be, at least, narrowed, if not eliminated.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.

American economist Paul Krugman has become a highly influential public intellectual in the social sciences. The natural and physical sciences need a public intellectual like Krugman to make more effective arguments for the existence and urgency of climate change, the benefits of vaccine use, and other pressing issues. To demonstrate how such a goal can be achieved, this article presents a rhetorical analysis of Krugman’s public intellectual writing in The New York Times from 2013 to 2016. The substantial public impact of this body of work stems from Krugman’s use of rhetorical strategies that are both similar to and—more importantly—a departure from strategies used by other well-known public intellectuals in the sciences.

This research explores a presumed link between today’s use of digital media and an ever-increasing lack of rhetorical awareness in students. Specifically, the study pilots a method for measuring rhetorical awareness through students’ e-mail transactions with faculty in technical writing service courses, questioning whether rhetorical awareness has decreased in the preceding 10 years. The findings indicate that students might be more rhetorically aware today than they were 10 years ago, but levels remain below expectations.

This article applies identity construction concepts to a professional and technical communication student intern’s use of agency as she negotiates a unique identity for herself within a state legislature. Following a literature review, the author highlights several of the intern’s key efforts to become part of this new governmental and legal discourse community, including learning legislature-specific genres, combatting the “totem-pole” hierarchy, making choices about appropriate professional behavior, socializing by creating an “entire family dynamic,” and making an effort to learn the culture of the legislature. These efforts are documented through the intern’s reflective, self-narratives and documents produced during the internship. Through this discussion, the author suggests practical implications for aiding students and newcomers as they transition to unfamiliar workplace communication environments.

In 2014, Rawlins and Wilson proposed a typology of agential interactions between users and designers of interactive data displays. This article tests that typology by studying 20 users working with three different types of interactive data displays and answering questions, which were coded by verb and actor and analyzed for themes. The authors show that rhetorical agency is marked by thoughts, actions, and language. Affordances by the designer open a shared rhetorical space where user and designer are coparticipants. As interactivity increases, participants see themselves as rhetorical agents in a community of rhetorical agents rather than as conduits of information.

We examine the rhetorical activity employed within software development communities in code texts. For technical communicators, the rhetoricity of code is crucial for the development of more effective code and documentation. When we understand that code is a collection of rhetorical decisions about how to engage those machinic processes, we can better attend to the significance and nuance of those decisions and their impact on potential user activities.

Documenting and characterizing interactions between student interns and their mentors in the workplace offers perspective on student learning and enculturation that can help us introduce these ways of learning to students in the technical communication classroom, even before the internship. Three student intern conversations in the internship setting are the focus of this close discourse analysis, framed by 6-month-long case studies and Vygotsky’s learning theory. Results indicate that many similarities exist between classroom feedback and mentor feedback in the internship, but that differences in student agency may make negotiation important in the technical communication classroom.

Technical and professional communication instruction is well suited to helping students develop digital literacy but must be informed by research regarding how students are using specific social media platforms, particularly the propensity to post content that could damage their career capital. This study examined this question for students in Austria, Australia, and the United States. In Austria and Australia, this behavior was found to be no greater for Twitter than it was for Facebook. Conversely, for the United States, the behavior was found to be more pronounced. These and additional results regarding attitudes toward information privacy are reported.

The success of an application programming interface (API) crucially depends on how well its documentation meets the information needs of software developers. Previous research suggests that these information needs have not been sufficiently understood. This article presents the results of a series of semistructured interviews and a follow-up questionnaire conducted to explore the learning goals and learning strategies of software developers, the information resources they turn to and the quality criteria they apply to API documentation. Our results show that developers initially try to form a global understanding regarding the overall purpose and main features of an API, but then adopt either a concepts-oriented or a code-oriented learning strategy that API documentation both needs to address. Our results also show that general quality criteria such as completeness and clarity are relevant to API documentation as well. Developing and maintaining API documentation therefore need to involve the expertise of communication professionals.

In the field of business and technical communication, scholars have called for research on dealing with cultural conflict for a long time. But the limited study on dealing with cultural conflicts, along with the current political context in the United States, calls for efforts to systematically address diversity issues and cultural conflict in our research and teaching practices. One obstacle to advance effective communication strategies on cultural conflict in business and technical communication is the lack of communication with other disciplines. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, the current article introduces the concept of cultural conflict, examines strategy models to address cultural conflict in different fields, and provides an example on how to identify a strategy model to resolve cultural conflict in business and technical communication practices. This article concludes by emphasizing that there is not a best model that can be applied to handle cultural conflict in all circumstances and calling for research on exploring and identifying effective strategy models to resolve cultural conflict in business and technical communication practices.

This essay expands Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model to bring more attention to the persuasive effects of using the self as a model. To illuminate this technique, I analyze the personal narratives of popular health coaches, who are championing a holistic health movement toward what I refer to as “do-it-yourself healthcare.” This case involves arguments regarding the efficacy of methods in evidence-based medicine and “alternative” or holistic health, as popular health coaches predicate their ability to heal themselves and others on abandoning traditional medicine. In brief, the purpose of this article is twofold: first, to characterize the rhetoric of the movement toward alternative or holistic health, and, second, to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model and address the implications of this expansion.

This article proposes a heuristic that teachers and students can use together to create a vocabulary for discussing the aesthetic aspects of color and typography in document design work. By using this framework, teachers and students can generate a collection of shared visual topoi or commonplaces for describing the aesthetic value of color and typography that they can then draw from to inform visual analysis and production work.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant role in urban economic development. The organizational structure that guides their professional activities has yet to be investigated. Interviews with 18 indie rock musicians provided a way to investigate organizational structure. They reported a build structure featuring the principles of audience development, slow growth, and unevenness. The constraints of the musician’s professional situation require long-term promotion of aesthetic products to a slowly growing audience in a saturated market that produces unevenness through power imbalances. This slow-growing structure contrasts with organizational structures that provide immediate benefits.

This article reports on an analysis of research questions in the emerging field of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM). The data set included 54 articles, published in 4 journals between the years 2000 and 2014. The articles were found to address five areas, including questions about (a) the identity of RHM, (b) disciplinarity, (c) ecological interaction, (d) maneuverability, and (e) process. Overall, this article argues that RHM tends to take a critical stance toward medicine, treating it as a monolithic profession and set of discourses. Given the conclusions of many of the articles in the data set, this stance may be unwarranted. The article concludes by suggesting future directions for scholarship in RHM.

“Cape Wind” is a proposed wind-energy project off the Massachusetts coast. Its environmental effects are detailed in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Writers of an EIS must address rhetorical challenges posed by the complexity of how the “environment” is characterized by many statutes and regulations. These requirements include guidance on the document’s style, and because the text is hundreds of pages long, they also include rules on its arrangement (its genre), and its online delivery. Partly as a result, the writer’s stance is that of an impersonal, corporate author. The EIS is required to address multiple audiences that include decision makers and elected officials; public participation in the process is encouraged. Evidence about the actual audience shows that the public finds out about the project through media reports, web sites, and press releases, rather than studying the EIS. Finally, sustained opposition by a fossil-fuel lobbying group has led to the project’s apparent demise.

This article offers empirical data to explore ways that both industry mentors and academic internship coordinators support student interns in ways that optimize the workplace experience. Rich description of qualitative data from case studies and interviews shows that to optimize the internship, both the industry mentor and the academic internship coordinator ensure that the experience offers professional-level experiences while allowing students to make mistakes in the course of the learning experience. Finally, academic internship coordinators find it most effective to spend time selecting strong industry mentors, and then cultivating these relationships across years of internship interactions.

Certain aspects of social justice research tacitly work from political frameworks of “passive equality.” Passive equality can limit a technical communicator’s ability to enact social justice in terms of (a) signaling the presence of an injustice and (b) waiting for the organization, institution, or state to make the correction (e.g., liberalism’s distributive justice). By contrast, this article foregrounds the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière as a way to cultivate a practice of “active equality” that enables technical communicators to enact social justice rather than wait for institutional redistribution.

Very few articles exist that document technical communication in Hungary. My Fulbright research reveals two general points: First, technical communication pedagogy stresses correct use of professional terms and phrases in technical translations or technical articles for fictional audiences. Second, it does not emphasize the importance of specifying target audiences in students’ work; similarly, Hungarian companies, perhaps driven by oral culture in communication, do not target at any specific audiences in written communication. In this respect, education and practice seems to shape each other. More research is needed to provide more elements to help us understand technical communication in Hungary.

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.