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In the discipline of technical/professional writing and communication, one of the strongest recruiting tools we use is the potential earning power students will have once they obtain a degree and secure a job in the industry. This article is the result of two professors learning that one of their most advanced and dedicated students accepted, in her first job out of graduate school, a salary we thought was thousands below her earning potential. Our conversations around this student's situation led us to survey other alumni from our programs. What we have learned is that students often do not know what salaries they should expect, nor do they feel comfortable negotiating a salary offer. In addition, graduates' location (urban vs. rural) and level of education (BA or BS degree vs. MA) impact their earning potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article investigates why workplace lactation law, guidance, and policy may fail to support women. It examines the epistemological and ethical bases of technical communication governing Virginia K--12 teachers and considers complex material conditions and opportunities for social justice intervention. Method: I employed a qualitative critical discourse analysis of three Virginia codes governing workplace lactation and one state human resources guidance document, examining their interaction with the Federal Labor Standards Act and 10 local school district policies. I drew on Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) social justice scholarship, disability studies, and apparent feminism scholarship to interpret my findings. Results: Documents governing workplace lactation are based on an ableist mindset that marginalizes women's bodies. They prioritize an ethic of expediency, draw on medical knowledge while ignoring women's knowledge and material conditions, and perpetuate systemic inequities. Conclusion: To promote social justice, technical communicators should continue questioning the epistemological and ethical bases of laws, policies, and guidance since documents informed by knowledge and ideologies that devalue the people they purport to protect will fail in implementation. Local policymakers need not wait for institutional changes but can look for opportunities to reimagine design approaches and intervene to create supportive, inclusive workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic made nearly every teacher and student online teachers and students in some capacity. This article presents a case study of an experienced, contingent technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor showing how she sets up, presents, and, most importantly, labors in her course for the benefit of her students and herself. This article ends with recommendations for other online TPC teachers and program administrators to support online TPC courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication features work from scholars and practitioners of content strategy. Content strategy is an emerging area within technical communication that boasts a variety of unique practices for publishing, editing, and delivering technical content. The work within this special issue is a testament to the complexity and diversity of this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching online students to collaborate effectively with community partners and to solve problems through service-learning projects are "on trend" topics for technical communication faculty. This article presents collaboration specifics as well as the author's Collaborative Communication Framework (CCF) to show the types of communication needed to work well with community partners/clients in service-learning. Tips for teaching, including using the CCF and service-learning, will be highlighted so faculty can make choices about how to meet curricular goals while addressing community partner/client needs. Resources for teaching will be offered. Successful student projects will show detailed examples of key ideas throughout the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the author received an email that would change the course of his teaching for the following twenty‐four months. The university‐wide communication indicated that, due to the emerging COVID‐19 crisis, all classes, activities, and university business was suspended, with the email further instructing faculty to wait at home for more details. As the author mulled over the educational shifts ahead of him, his training as a technical communicator—and more specifically his knowledge of user‐experience (UX) and design thinking—kicked in, offering him a set of tools he could pull from as he sought to create courses that reflected the quickly shifting needs of his students. In this article, the author discusses how the use of design thinking expands the limited conversations about course co‐creation, a practice that leads to more effective and equitable course designs. The author additionally uses his experience employing design thinking in the creation of his Shakespeare seminar course as a case study, demonstrating the value that the collaborative nature of design thinking has for pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an interview-based study with COVID-19 vaccine trial participants (n = 40) and addresses three strategies participants used to localize vaccine communication for their communities: (1) presenting embodied evidence, (2) demystifying clinical research, (3) operationalizing relationships. These strategies contribute to understandings of embodiment, relationships, and localization in technical and professional communication (TPC). They also show how participants used TPC to resist dominant individualist approaches to health and to practice collective care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that the accelerated adoption of political technology during the COVID-19 pandemic evinces exigency for a rhetorically grounded framework to teach, research, and practice political technical communication (PxTC) as a sub-discipline. As a starting point, I use a rhetorical genre studies approach to identify political social actions that separate political communication technologies into four distinct genres: election, electioneering, constituent services, and punditry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The communication of technical information is often susceptible to cognitive biases. Technical communicators need to understand cognitive biases and know how to tackle them accordingly. This article devises a framework of principles that provides technical communicators an operable affordance and a vocabulary to approach cognitive biases and to communicate empathetically. Method: I review a vast body of literature in technical communication with a focus on problems caused by cognitive biases. This work reveals significant problems in information visualization that can provide for a nuanced discussion on cognitive biases in technical communication. Using these problems as a guide, I draw upon cognitive theories in how people use information, the prospect theory about how people make decisions, and the self-determination theory about how such decisions are influenced by the social context. I then assemble a framework of principles that illuminates the workings of cognitive biases. I extrapolate sample questions that technical communicators can use to examine cognitive biases in information visualization and technical communication. Results: The framework of principles explains how cognitive biases affect technical communication. These principles are useful for gaining a deeper understanding of users from a cognitive bias perspective and optimizing for empathetic communication. Conclusion: Technical communicators and users are prone to cognitive biases. The framework of principles, cognitive biases, and sample questions presented in this article provide technical communicators a new lens to examine their work and improve user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article presents a UX study conducted during a roundtable collaborative event with Indigenous interpreters and translators. The work highlights the value of Indigenous testimonios as a UX method for gathering narratives that trace a user's experience through a collective voice. Testimonios also trace users' social and cultural contexts while prompting participants to exercise their agency and promote social change. Method: This UX study engages Indigenous testimonios as a primary method. Mapping testimonios allows researchers to explore a participant's narrative arc that begins with a personal experience that links a collective struggle resulting from a system of oppression and ends with a call for social change. Results: Using testimonios as a UX method yielded data that traced individual and collective pain points that defined the critical issues with which Indigenous interpreters and translators grapple and emphasized their civic engagement, amplifying their agency through a method situated in their contexts. This work also highlights dialogue and desahogo, or emotional relief, as key elements of testimonios shared in a collective setting. This study shows that Indigenous interpreters and translators, as technical communicators, are foremost community activists. Conclusion: A testimonio method prompts participants to reflect on issues at a deeper level through narratives and dialogue. It also engages the unique differences of participants while revealing general similarities. Testimonios can ultimately help design content, products, and processes that better align with the unique contexts of Indigenous individuals and other underrepresented groups who express their needs in a collective manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing civil engineering graduates' technical writing and oral presentation-related drawbacks have necessitated the design and implementation of demand-driven courses applying interdisciplinary pedagogy. This study investigates civil engineering academia-industry interdisciplinary contents, methods, and situations needed to design technical communication course. The analysis which engaged students, instructors, and professionals from industries employed sequential mixed methods design which grounds the quantitative analysis with exploratory detailed interviews. This revealed that classroom, internship, and industry contexts are essential foundations of interaction for stakeholders. Oral presentation, writing, reading, and evaluating technical documents infused with engineering design processes of initiating, designing, managing, and evaluating civil engineering projects were the contents selected from the needs analyses. Basic skills, rhetoric analysis, ethical and critical issues, and teamwork were the precedence pedagogical frames preferred to establish the methods of technical communication instruction. These interdisciplinary needs analyses imply how technical communication-related courses should be designed to enhance students' multiple competencies better than solely addressing instrumentally codified skills that deny the author and the discourse community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Technical communication (TC) is an emerging topic which has received attention in both the field of language studies and among the technical profession in the last few decades. In this article, a scientometric review of academic publications to explore the intellectual landscape and evolutionary characteristics of TC research worldwide between 2001 and 2020 is conducted. Methods: Visualization software was employed to analyze co-citation and co-word networks from 2,183 articles published in Web of Science and Scopus databases from 2001 to 2020. Results: The findings indicate that TC research has increased in recent years and has been done in the English language departments and technology departments in recent years. Then, five clusters form the intellectual structure of TC research: translation training, methodologies in TC, composition studies, rhetorical action, and the industry's needs. Finally, the findings indicated there were paradigm shifts in the field of TC. Further, the evolution analysis has shown that the current trends of TC research is now focused on TC pedagogy, a global TC, human-computer interaction, and language learning and training. Conclusion: This review provides reliable information for academics and practitioners to identify the knowledge base, the evolutionary process, and the emerging trends in the TC field from visualized maps. This review can serve as a prelude for future TC research and can provide a guide for the TC skills required among professionals in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Twitter is a promising technical communication platform for companies, but a thorough understanding of how it works best is lacking. This study analyzes characteristics of IT companies' technical communication tweets and relates them to users' online engagement (likes, retweets, replies). Three message characteristics were included: content, message elements, and communication strategies. Method: We collected technical communication tweets posted by four IT companies in two weeks (N = 1,604). We developed a content categorization and also coded the tweets for message elements, communication strategies, and online engagement. Message elements and communication strategies were compared with those used in the companies' corporate and marketing communication tweets. Negative binomial regression analyses were used to map relationships between message characteristics and online engagement. Results: Ten content types were distinguished, illustrating the versatile nature of technical communication on Twitter. Hyperlinks were the most prominent message element; two types of elements were less prevalent: elements enhancing attractiveness (photos, videos, emojis) and elements connecting to a broader Twitter discourse (hashtags, mentions). Communication strategies did not include community-building tweets; evoking action was most prominent. Several links were found between message characteristics and online engagement: Providing user instructions or updates and feedback opportunities, including photos or videos, and providing one-way information promoted online engagement. Conclusion: Although Twitter might work differently for technical communication than for other domains, it seems fruitful to add more attractive message elements and explore community-building strategies within technical communication. However, there is also reason to relativize the importance of online engagement indicators for technical communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Recently, interest in usability has grown in the technical communication (TC) field, but we lack a current cohesive literature review that reflects this new growth. This article provides an integrative literature review on usability, its goals, and approaches to accomplish those goals in relation to TC's commitment to social justice and empowerment. Methods: I conducted an integrative literature review on usability to synthesize and characterize TC's growing commitment to social justice and empowerment. I searched scholarly publications and trade literature that included books and book chapters on usability. Adopting grounded theory and content analysis as research techniques to systematically evaluate data corpus, I read and classified selected publications to approach the research questions and iteratively analyzed the data to identify themes within each research question. Results: Surveying the definitions and descriptions of usability in the literature corpus shows that there is no consensus definition of usability. Findings suggest that the goal of usability can be classified as: a) pragmatic or functional goals, b) user experience goals, and c) sociocultural goals. Given the recent cultural and social justice turns in TC, my findings reveal a number of social justice-oriented design approaches for usability. Conclusions: Usability should not be viewed solely as a means of achieving pragmatic and/or user experience goals. Practitioners also need to consider usability from sociocultural orientations to accomplish its sociocultural goals. From interconnected global perspectives, the review implies the need for adopting more viable and culturally sustaining design approaches for successfully accommodating cultural differences and complexities for promoting social justice and user empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Contemporary non-profit organizations must reach a variety of audiences in order to sustain themselves and must compel these audiences to take action on behalf of a specific cause. At the same time, past research has indicated that nonprofit professionals often lack the necessary training and expertise to leverage digital technologies for effective communication. This research study explores how technical communicators can assist non-profits by helping them develop effective content strategies. Method: This report of research findings is based on an ongoing Participatory Action Research (PAR) project, which included a series of focus groups with representatives of thirteen different organizations as well as interventions with several other organizations. The goal has been to learn about and help improve non-profit content strategy in the community of Greenville, North Carolina. Results: We found that while non-profits do rely on a variety of media to fulfill their goals, they prefer pre-digital media. Our participants also defined audiences in a very loose manner, used content in a non-targeted way, and favored existing organizational processes over content strategy best practices. Conclusions: Ultimately, we provide several ways technical communicators can assist non-profits through low-cost or free consulting and the development of educational materials. We hope that fellow professionals will engage in this necessary work because non-profits in the United States form an important "third sector" of the economy that provides essential services to countless individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving assessment of engineering students' technical communication skills is a good way to monitor and improve teaching of these skills, and positively impact associated learning. The present study reports on a method used to assess students' technical writing abilities, while also evaluating the impact of technical writing-related instruction and associated curricular and pedagogical approaches. In this way, students' improvements can be mapped to instruction methods. The strategies for enhancing the delivery of technical writing-related instruction are discussed in terms of the proposed assessment method. This method has three main parts: 1) Sample Generation Procedure – the strategic establishment of a pair of written reports, serving as BEFORE-Labs and AFTER-Labs, and similar enough in topic to justify comparison after assessment, but unexpected to students so that reports are not simply replicated; 2) A Rubric for Technical Writing – encompassing major features of technical writing requirements of engineering lab courses and developed to be both descriptive (having descriptions in each category, to make expectations explicit for evaluators and students) and holistic (having short summarizing narratives for different levels of work, to capture overall quality quickly); and 3) an Evaluation Demonstration – in which a matrix of faculty instructors from sections of different engineering lab courses used the rubric to retroactively assess the samples. Together, these efforts are used not only to assess improvements in students' technical writing, but by effect also gauge teaching and effectiveness of curricular and pedagogical interventions. In two engineering lab courses, a thermo-fluid lab course and a solid mechanics lab course, BEFORE-Labs and AFTER-Labs were generated using either a method of impromptu "one-hour labs", with experiments conducted and reports submitted all within an hour at the beginning and end of one semester, or comparison of full lab reports from consecutive semesters of students. Evaluation results clearly show that there were aggregate improvements in students' technical writing skills, and as such it is concluded that the teaching methods were effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This article describes our work to build an undergraduate program in user experience centered on empathy, access, and humanism. About the case: This teaching case is focused on how we situated accessibility (a11y, a numeronym) at the core of our undergraduate degree. Based on our program values, industry experience, and market need, we aimed to build a program that focused on accessibility. Situating the case: Our work is situated in the literature of technical communication, specifically on accessibility as social justice design. Focusing primarily on issues of pedagogy, we discuss the market need for this work, both inside the academy and within industry. Methods/approach: Through our experimental work applied within the program's framework, we built a foundational course, launched an intensive short program (study away), and developed opportunities for student knowledge sharing on the local, regional, and national levels. Results/discussion: Focusing on accessibility gave our students a strong foundation and broader connections with outside partners focused on user experience. Conclusions: Placing accessibility at the center of the mission, scholars and practitioners alike can address these concerns and keep their commitment to creating user experiences centered on shared values of equity, sustainability, and usability. With the rising need for accessibility specialists in the workforce and structured programs in academia, this article describes how technical communicators can develop these foundations in their own organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the subject of persuasion in technical and professional communications (TPC) with a specific focus on proposals in U.S. Government contracting. It demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between the intent of proposals, which is to persuade, and the rhetorical traditions and professional boundaries of technical writers. The analysis draws on the existing rhetorical- and genre-based TPC literature and borrows from theory in other disciplines—management, organizational theory, sociology, and psychology among others. To advance the scholarship on proposals, this analysis is framed within the overall context of a structural analogy to U.S. military Information Operations (IO). Through use of analogy, it is suggested that the IO community's approach to the concepts of “influence,” “narrative,” “target audience,” and “unity of effort” may offer useful insight for State and Federal contractors to consider in their efforts to write persuasive proposals. This analysis is then used to develop a research agenda for the study of proposals. Areas for future research include the science of persuasion and the use of narrative as it relates to proposals, improved rigor in the use of target audience research, and organizational constructs to improve collaborative writing in proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research analyses a small corpus of in-house writing of a multinational SME by nonnative speakers of English and the edits and revisions made by a marketing expert and a technical writer (native English speakers). The analysis focuses on identifying, classifying and analyzing edits regarding the voice and tone guidelines, i.e., how pragmatics concepts (politeness and audience accommodation) are grammatically and semantically encoded. The research uses style guides to analyze the "comparable" monolingual corpus of drafts and final versions, while the annotation includes tags for pragmatically motivated changes whose purpose is establishing a friendly relationship with the target audience. The research employs norms for qualitative research in public relations and marketing communication (Daymon & Holloway, 2010) and shows that a) non-native speakers of English tend to have a self-centered approach to workplace English writing and often fail to achieve the company voice and tone, and b) the company voice and tone require elimination of culturally specific concepts and use of relatively simple grammatical structures and lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper presents the conclusions related to the approaches in which the online learning on the topic of technical education has influenced the quality of the way the information is conveyed. The paper presents a case study on a group of 10 students from each specialization of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology within the "George Emil Palade" University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș, approximately 10 months after the teaching activities have taken place exclusively online. The conclusions refer to a number of rules specific to technical communication and how they are used by the facilitators, namely by the teachers. The purpose of the paper is to identify the constraints related to the online environment, in the event that this system is practical and useful to future engineers as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Students enroll in college to gain expertise for the workplace. Students are trained in academia to avoid plagiarism by citing sources and refraining from copying others' written works. However, in workplace writing and technical communication, common workplace practices reuse, repurpose, and remix content of works authored by others. Unfortunately, this causes a significant disconnect between what students learn and how this learning applies in the workplace. The following questions guided the study: 1. How do the latest editions of widely used technical communication textbooks in the United States teach students about plagiarism, collaboration/authorship, copyright, and ethics? 2. How do the approaches used in textbooks align with workplace practices? Method: In the first phase of the analysis, each textbook was searched to locate any depictions of plagiarism, collaboration/authorship, copyright, and ethics as they relate to the workplace. Then a qualitative content analysis was conducted using a rating scale developed incorporating suggestions researchers made on how to best teach plagiarism and copyright infringement avoidance. Results: Each of the eight texts was rated on each criterion with a possible total of 30 points. Most texts scored 10 or less, one scored 12, and two of the texts scored 15 or above. The extent to which introductory textbooks address each of the criteria was generally abysmal. The texts largely did not address common types of workplace writing and how copyright and plagiarism apply in those situations. Conclusion: The majority of widely used introductory technical communication textbooks do not thoroughly and clearly explain plagiarism, collaboration/authorship, copyright, and ethics in workplace writing. Additionally, these textbooks do not present context-specific scenarios to which students can apply this information. However, several of the texts do provide examples of workplace activities that contradict academic views of authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Engineering programs must take creative approaches to ensure that their students receive needed communication instruction in curricula constantly experiencing pressures of accreditation, state, and industry requirements: expectations for students’ knowledge and skills increase although curricula are compressed. Situating the case: Technical communication and engineering education scholarship describe multiple models for integrating writing instruction into engineering curricula: 1. writing across the curriculum, 2. partnership models, 3. embedded models, and 4. support models. About the case: Technical and professional writing and engineering faculty collaborated to develop a hybrid model, which borrows from multiple existing models for integrating technical writing education throughout the engineering curriculum, both in and outside of courses, including collaborative workshops, specialized writing center support, and other interventions. Methods/approach: Survey research was conducted with students on the effectiveness of multiple writing interventions. Results/discussion: The hybrid model enables students to experience a variety of writing interventions; students perceived them as beneficial. Students found most effective writing interventions occurred in the context of their engineering coursework. Faculty and administrators found the approach beneficial because of its collaborative nature and because it balanced instructional time with external support methods. Conclusions: Local solutions to universal problems must take many variables into consideration: people and programmatic cultures, disciplinary and institutional contexts, and curricular, regulatory, and funding constraints. The authors’ hybrid model for integrating technical writing into the engineering curriculum represents a flexible, sustainable approach adaptable to meet specific needs in specific environments at different institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper presents the conclusions related to the approaches in which the online learning on the topic of technical education has influenced the quality of the way the information is conveyed. The paper presents a case study on a group of 10 students from each specialization of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology within the "George Emil Palade" University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș, approximately 10 months after the teaching activities have taken place exclusively online. The conclusions refer to a number of rules specific to technical communication and how they are used by the facilitators, namely by the teachers. The purpose of the paper is to identify the constraints related to the online environment, in the event that this system is practical and useful to future engineers as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this article, we (re)consider the moments of creativity and beauty in the work of technical communication and how those moments can be better incorporated into, emphasized, explored, and engaged with in classroom instruction or other training. Method: We performed a literature review of texts published in the last 25 years, identified by searching for the keywords "creativity" and "beauty" in technical communication journals, to understand how these concepts have been theorized and included in the field recently. We then extended this prior literature to consider how beauty and creativity might be incorporated into technical communication teaching/training. The suggestions offered are grounded in experiences, observations, and student feedback from our own classrooms and training, and/or from other classroom studies and additional literature from the field. Results: We identified creative approaches that help students and practitioners think more intentionally about audience, purpose, and visual elements in technical communication. These approaches reinforce (rather than distract from) established principles of technical communication. We offer practical solutions for instructors and trainers who are intrigued by more creative techniques but may, for various reasons, consider artistic elements inappropriate or unworkable in their classrooms. Conclusion: Fostering an appreciation for creative and beautiful communication in the classroom helps develop more effective technical communicators. Especially considering that the ways audiences encounter and interact with information have been changing rapidly, technical communicators must be able to think and create both visually and spatially, as well as connect with users on a human level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The maturity of technical communication merits a comprehensive, longitudinal analysis of the content published in its leading journals and the scholars who produce this research. Although reflexive research is common in the sciences and social sciences, few studies have analyzed the body of research in technical communication. Clarity on content and authorship patterns can help position the field for future relevance and sustainability. Method: We conducted a quantitative content analysis on 672 articles published in five leading technical communication journals from 1996-2017. Articles were coded on nine content variables related to primary topic, primary audience, and authorship. We subsequently conducted a correspondence analysis on the variables to identify how specific content areas associated with the journals. Results: Content and authorship patterns were near identical to the patterns found in the field 30 years prior. The journals published content primarily focused on rhetoric, genre, pedagogy, and diversity. In contrast, field-defining topics--usability/UX, comprehension, design, and editing and style--appeared in the sample less than expected. A majority of research was single-authored and written by female first authors; further, a majority of the first authors had academic affiliations in the United States. Conclusion: Scholars must consider if these content and authorship patterns are the products of deliberate choices and, if so, if this is the field's inevitable trajectory for the next 30 years. We argue that certain topics are being overproduced while other topics that established the field are being underproduced and, in some cases, being assumed by other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are potentially overlapping disciplines with open disciplinary questions. A comparative topical analysis of research topics can identify similarities and differences between them, addressing intellectual and physical concerns for each. Literature review: Recent topical analyses have been done for technical communication. Historical topical analyses have been done for business communication. Few professional communication topical analyses exist. Some studies were done 15 or more years ago, and one related comparative study exists. Research questions: 1. What research topics are unique to each of the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963–2017? 2. What topics are shared among the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963–2017? Research methodology: I used collocation analysis on the target phrases technical communication, business communication, and professional communication from a 4822-abstract corpus. I compared words collocated with target phrases to find words unique to a single term, those shared with two terms, or those shared with all three terms. Results/discussion: Findings identified science communication as a technical communication topic; other findings corroborated previous research. Business communication findings corroborated previous research and identified an emphasis on global communication. Findings show professional communication as a rhetorically flexible term that creates a space for emerging concepts and expands disciplinary boundaries. The three shared communication, pedagogy, international, and disciplinary concerns. Conclusions: The disciplines feature some overlap but maintain distinct research foci. Professional communication is a distinctive discipline that assists technical communication and business communication by incubation of emerging concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been a trend towards English-medium instruction (EMI) with increasing numbers of programs taught in English (Wächter & Maiworm, 2014). At the same time, there has been a long tradition of ESP courses aiming at preparing students for effective academic and professional communication. In an increasingly internationalized context, it is necessary to reappraise current ESP courses in order to find out the extent to which they are adapted to the ever-changing needs of engineering graduates in a globalized world. Within this context, this study looks at the impact of ESP courses on university students of engineering in two European universities (Spain and Austria). Specifically, our research was based in three campuses: two campuses from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), UPC-Vilanova (n = 52) and UPC-Barcelona (n = 26), and a third campus at FH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences (FHJ) in Austria (n = 17). This research set out to track participants' perceptions of how ESP courses prepared them for academic communication in general and EMI in particular (N = 95). Data stem mainly from surveys administered both at the start and at the end of an ESP course. Students were asked about their perceived initial level of proficiency, their expectations, and their learning objectives (first survey, T1) as well as their perceived development in the different skills, the degree of fulfilment of their initial learning objectives, and their evaluation of the ESP course as preparation for international academic and professional communication (second survey, T2). These data were complemented with qualitative diary entries from students (n = 7) who reflected on their learning at different stages of their ESP course. Results point to overall satisfaction with ESP courses and greater awareness of the nature of specialized communication and yield deeper insights into students' strategies and areas where ESP can contribute to better student preparation and empowerment. • Students perceive their ESP courses as good preparation for future academic and professional communication. • Students show awareness of the importance of technical communication. • Students report boosted confidence in using English. • Students are aware of need to further improve their English. • Higher proficiency students also appreciate the ESP training received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to address the changing identity of the technical communication (TC) field based on how it's defined, what hard and soft skills are needed, what courses are beneficial, and how to best prepare students for the evolving workplace. Method: We interviewed 15 technical communicators in three different categories (academic program directors, practitioners, and recent graduates) and analyzed the interviews to determine if technical communicators have similar perspectives about the field. Results: Findings showed inconsistencies among the definition of TC, the required skills for students entering the workplace, the field's outlook, the value of professional development, the courses, and requirements of academic programs in TC. Conclusion: The hybrid perspectives on these important questions challenge the framework for how we have traditionally considered these questions. This study provides additional context into how the academic field sees TC, how practitioners see it, and whether or not students are prepared for the workforce after graduation based on the coursework they have completed and the skills they have gained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem: Few frameworks exist for building content strategies around user-generated content. We present a framework for building content strategies that enable user participation in the development and delivery of content. Key concepts: For this framework to be successfully implemented, this implementation team needs a working knowledge of user-generated content strategy, or the development of strategies for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content that encourage user participation. The framework also requires an understanding of the relationship between content models and technologies. Finally, practitioners utilizing the framework must also understand the role of content moderation in facilitating development of user-generated content. Key lessons: Our framework for user-generated content strategy specifies three main practices: 1. Developing a content strategy that enables interactions among administrators, moderators, users, types of content, and technologies within a given network; 2. building content models within technologies so that all interactions flow seamlessly; and 3. using content moderation to ensure that users are empowered to contribute content while respecting quality guidelines. Implications: Though there are challenges to facilitating user-generated content that unites organizational goals and user goals, the use of a framework like ours can benefit organizations that want to make user-generated content a core part of what they do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous research on user-generated content in technical communication focused primarily on non-traditional forms of technical communication outside of traditional institutions and organizations. User-generated content from the forum StackOverflow provides rich knowledge and stories behind problems faced by web and software developers. This study explores how technical communicators engage in this knowledge-rich content specific to web and software developers. Our findings provide insights into how researchers, instructors, and practicing technical communicators might leverage user-generated forum content in their work. Literature review: Previous research examined how user-generated content is a form of technical writing and technical editing. Furthermore, some research in technical communication has examined how technical user forums present a type of user-generated content to which technical communicators might add value. However, no research on user forums has explicitly examined how technical communicators engage in user forums to gain subject-matter familiarity or expertise. This study seeks to explore how technical communication students engage in user forums to troubleshoot coding problems. Research questions: 1. Are technical communication students able to successfully solve unfamiliar coding problems using user-generated content posted on the StackOverflow website? Are they able to identify the conceptual knowledge needed to solve the coding problem? 2. When learning about new, unfamiliar technical content, how do technical communication students search for information and decide which forum content to engage with? 3. Do technical communication students make meaning and actively fill knowledge gaps when they engage in new, unfamiliar technical content on StackOverflow? 4. After searching and reading through user-generated forum content to troubleshoot a coding task, do technical communication students feel confident enough in what they learned to teach someone else? Results: Most participants were unable to solve any of the coding problems using StackOverflow. Those who did successfully troubleshoot the coding problems exhibited more active scanning when selecting a search thread and made meaning of thread content more closely. Conclusions: Actively engaging and making meaning of thread content reveals insights into the stories behind the thread. These stories provide important details and clues for gaining subject-matter familiarity, but users must actively engage in meaning-making to access the stories and fill knowledge gaps. Practitioners and instructors can leverage content on StackOverflow to better understand coding problems. StackOverflow threads, along with other user-generated forum content, also give instructors insight into technical audiences and can be leveraged to teach students how to use primary research to better understand audiences. Researchers can continue to study how novice users interact with user-generated content by investigating how confidence levels affect meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: As digital media continue to proliferate into every aspect of our lives, sound is playing an ever-increasing role in the conveyance of information. Because digital messages via the Internet, cell phones, smart devices, and personal devices are typically shorter and more direct than traditional text-based communication, digital communication will necessarily improve via other, less textual cues. Visually, we already see this through the use of digital cues, such as emojis and graphical displays (e.g., GPS charts). But digital communication, in the future, will gain much from the expanded use of sound. As yet, no analytical framework for classifying sound in technical communication has been established. Method: The author revisits some historical uses of sound in technical communication before proposing a model for analyzing current and future sounds. Results: Tools that encompass signaling, linguistics, paralinguistics, extralinguistics, and rhetoric can be used to analyze complex sonic combinations and to generate new sounds for technical communication. Conclusions: A first model is proposed along with recommendations for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study adopted a corpus-linguistics approach to investigate the gender effects in students’ technical and scientific writing. Specifically, we analyzed whether gender influenced how males and females used adverbs (e.g., very, really , and definitely) and passive voice (e.g., the article was published in the journal). The overuse of both adverbs and passive voice has been associated with poor writing clarity and concision. Literature review: Previous research works on gender effects in language have been mixed. Since these are all the essential elements of effective technical communication, teachers need to know what gender effects might exist. Research questions are as follows: 1. Does gender influence the student writers’ use of adverbs? 2. Does gender influence the student writers’ use of passive voice? Methodology: The sample included 87 writers (46 females and 41 males) who contributed to a 757,533-word corpus. Researchers analyzed 12,111 instances of adverbs and 4,732 instances of passive voice within a variety of technical texts. Results/discussion: Female writers used significantly more adverbs as well as more additive/restrictive, degree, and stance adverbs than expected. Male writers used more linking and manner adverbs than expected. Female writers also used significantly more passives, particularly passive verbs associated with reporting findings and interpretation. In contrast, male writers associated with passive verbs used to describe methods and analyses. Overall, the results suggested that females and males used the same style markers to fulfill different rhetorical functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: As the field of Technical Communication adapts to changing conditions, new ways of describing the field are vital. This article discusses important characteristics of hypertext theory, developed over the last 70+ years, as a theoretical foundation that informs and defines the core competencies and practices of the field of technical communication. Method: This article initially reviews the significant literature on hypertext theory as well as recent selections, which help situate or define technical communication in the 21st century. From this literature, we developed a framework to examine correlations between characteristics of hypertext theory and compared those to skills, processes, and products in technical communication. Results: Hypertext is a foundational theory which informs the processes and practices of contemporary technical communication, and in particular, core competencies in developing content, design, structure, and in the processes of information development and user experience design. Given technological evolutions, technical communicators continue to work with content informed by hypertextual theories and practices, to create multi-pathed, user-driven, dynamic experiences. Conclusions: Characteristics of hypertext theory have become essential parts of the core competencies required in the daily work of technical communicators. Furthermore, they can be used to describe our daily work as well as to help us frame professional development, certification programs, and identify as a field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 2013 article "Slow Ideas," Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Atul Gawande discusses two forms of disciplinary change. He describes two surgical innovations from the mid-19th century, and traces why one (anesthesia) was easily and rapidly adopted, whereas the other (antiseptic) was accepted only slowly, over the course of decades. This happened because the more significant innovation (antiseptic) required a fundamental redefinition of the profession of surgery, including a significant rethinking of the field's methods and values. Instead of "warriors against disease," surgeons needed to become scrupulously sterile practitioners of cleanliness—and many, advanced in their careers, resisted such a change. This article contents that usability and user experience represent a similarly slow change in the field of techncial communication, and that we are still in the midst of transformations within our discipline which may require similar redefinition of scholarly work within this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from literature on communication as a physical, material experience, this article expands Cargile Cook’s “layered literacies” (2002) pedagogical framework to include a seventh literacy—embodied literacy. The article uses a classroom case study in which students coproduced a cookbook with low-income, elderly, disabled users, to demonstrate how students can become more responsible and effective technical communicators by recognizing users’ divergent embodied experiences. The article includes suggestions for concrete classroom practices that encourage such embodied literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Automated classification is usually not adjusted to specialized domains due to a lack of suitable data collections and insufficient characterization of the domain‐specific content and its effect on the classification process. This work describes an approach for the automated multiclass classification of content components used in technical communication based on a vector space model. We show that differences in the form and substance of content components require an adaption of document‐based classification methods and validate our assumptions with multiple real‐world data sets in 2 languages. As a result, we propose general adaptions on feature selection and token weighting, as well as new ideas for the measurement of classifier confidence and the semantic weighting of XML‐based training data. We introduce several potential applications of our method and provide prototypical implementation. Our contribution beyond the state of the art is a dedicated procedure model for the automated classification of content components in technical communication, which outperforms current document‐centered or domain‐agnostic approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]