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This research paper attempts to provide a details descriptive analysis on the terminological work done by Samuel Fisk Green, an American Medical Missionary as part of the Scientific Tamil initiatives in the nineteenth century in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Green being a foreign or more accurately an alien to Tamil language started to teach western medicine in Tamil at his own Medical College at Manipay and translated medical science related books from European languages into Tamil to enhance medium of instruction and disseminate healthcare information within community. During the translation process he was in need of terminology development on specific terms and he developed terminological principles and methods such as term creation, term formation, paraphrasing, compounding, borrowing, transliteration, derivation and others to use to create accurate and appropriate equivalents that could support beginners to communicate successfully in scientific Tamil language. Thus this descriptive analytical paper provides a details analysis of the significant contribution made by Green on Terminology while providing an indebt insight to the both novice as well as experienced future researchers. Further it will support the policy and strategies concerning scientific Tamil language with the hope of promotion of scientific and technical communication.

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.

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

Background: Accessibility of digital materials within workplaces continues to be an issue that is not readily and completely addressed through legal compliance and institutional policy. Despite the lack of marked improvement in digital accessibility, many continue to pursue a policy approach to accessibility, including checklists and guidelines. Literature review: Despite the attention paid to accessibility and surrounding issues by scholars in the field of technical and professional communication, little direction has been given to help practitioners advocate for accessibility in the workplace. Research question: Can common ground between institutional values and accessibility be discovered and leveraged to motivate value-driven accessibility? Research methods: Common ground theory was used to code and analyze data obtained from research interviews of 18 university instructors to determine how they consider accessibility within the process of developing their course documents. Data were coded and analyzed to discover common attitudes toward accessibility. Results and discussion: The data revealed that although instructors approached accessibility differently, all were motivated to work for student success, a fact that indicated common ground between instructor practices and accessibility. This finding suggests that accessibility advocates can motivate value-driven accessibility by leveraging common ground. Conclusion: I used the revealed common ground to inform the development of a digital accessibility resource, which underwent usability testing. My research-informed design process illustrates that despite institutional variability, technical and professional communicators can find and leverage common ground to move away from a singular, policy-driven approach to accessibility in favor of a more sustainable value-driven accessibility, which generates and supports long-term accessibility design.

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.

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

This article provides an overview of technical content marketing and examines the audiences and messaging for technical product messaging, which differ from general consumer products. Notably, technical products, particularly those in innovative categories, require a varying marketing strategy throughout the technology adoption lifecycle as products appeal to customers with different attitudes towards technologies. Especially, content marketing for innovative technologies requires an understanding of the technical consumers' (or audiences') psychological motivations and needs, which have yet to be reviewed in the technical communication literature. In this article, the foundations of marketing innovative technical products are explored, with a specific focus on the messaging strategies as it changes to educate and persuade different categories of technology consumers during different phases of the technology adoption lifecycle. For new technical products and categories of products, the messages and channels of information evolve as the technical innovation progresses from the early market to a mainstream market, with both requiring adaptation to different audience segments and in response to emerging competitive pressures. For the majority of technical innovations, the technical content marketing strategy and messaging is a long-term investment for change to reach different consumer groups at the appropriate stage of the technical product life cycle.

In this introduction, we emphasize the urgency of centering bodyminds and communities whose lives and experiences have been disregarded, or viewed as disposable, in medical and technical communicat...

Background: People born between 1995 and 2012, referred to as Generation Z, grew up alongside significant technological advancements in communication. This cohort's oldest members are now entering the workforce. Literature review: Although the merits of generational research have been questioned, Generation Z's personal communication preferences and habits demonstrate unprecedented technological experiences and expectations in the workplace. Research questions: 1. What are Generation Z's current habits in using smart technology, social media, and voice communication for personal communication? 2. How does the current workplace communication environment appear through the lens of Generation Z? 3. Do the personal communication habits of Generation Z conflict with current workplaces? Methodology: The study reports on a 207-participant exploratory survey and 6 interviews with Generation Z members in January–March 2020. The survey included multiple choice and open-ended questions regarding respondents’ personal and workplace communication habits and expectations. The interviews allowed further investigation of survey responses. Results: Working Generation Z respondents hold unexpected attitudes and behaviors, including awareness of the negatives of technology use, differences in personal preferences and professional behaviors, self-regulation of technology use, and concern for boundaries between personal and work life. Conclusion: Generation Z's ability to adapt to current workplace norms may slow changes in workplace communication. Their awareness of disruptive communication habits could make positive changes to workplace communication in the future. Employers should resist negative generational stereotypes and develop new communication policies to reflect current and future-looking technology use. This study was completed prior to COVID-19 and does not include pandemic-related workplace technology changes.

The establishment of Soviet artists’ unions in remote parts of the country has not been fully studied, but it is of interest for understanding the processes of formation of national fine art. One of the most important documents for the Soviet cultural space of the 1930s was the resolution of April 23, 1932, of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations”. Its impact is of a prolonged nature: artistic associations, originally created in the form of regulated unions, still exist, already having the status of entities exempt from direct government control. The main object of this research is the organization that united the masters of fine arts of a vast territory — the East Siberian Regional Union of Soviet Artists. The source base of the research is archival documents that make it possible to reconstruct the process of uniting provincial artists into a single regular organization and to assess the decisions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks from the point of view of the development of the cultural space of the East Siberian Territory. Despite the regulatory actions common to the creation of such institutions, the process of organizing the association of Soviet artists in the peripheral parts of the country had a number of features that formed the final assessment of the outcome of the above-mentioned resolution. The article demonstrates that the geographic remoteness from the capital, the separation from the cultural centers, the harsh climatic conditions, the small population on a large territory, and technical communication difficulties had predetermined the specificity of the processes of Siberian social design, and the need for certain decisive actions and support from the authorities to create a viable association of fine art masters.

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

Purpose The Nursing Activities Score (NAS) is a management tool that measures nursing workload, quantifying the care and the degree of complexity involved in the assistance, and can subsidize the managers for an adequate dimensioning of the team. Objective The objective of this study is to evaluate impressions of users who work in the intensive care unit (ICU) of APP NAS in the APP and WEB modules, comparing them with classical methods of score evaluation: printed paper (PP) and/or spreadsheet (SS). Methods This was a longitudinal, quantitative-descriptive study with professional nurses working in the intensive care of a University Hospital in Brazil. For the assessment test, the quality assessment process model was used, according to the NBR ISO / IEC 9126-1 standard employing the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS). The research participants were nurses and nursing residents (n = 9) working in an ICU for at least 3 months in the institution. QUIS allows the evaluation of the following domains by grouping questions for each study group: general impressions, functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, and maintainability. Results Statistically significant satisfaction scores (p

This article describes how one technical communication program succeeded in creating an independent department by separating from English. We describe the context that led to the decision to create...

University business incubators (UBIs) are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. UBIs facilitate the launch of start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. This study uses assemblage theory to profile four UBIs. Its findings concern their process of exporting incubation models and training transnational entrepreneurs, the roles of alumni and students, and the genres and conventions of entrepreneurship.

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

Building on the work of technical communication scholars concerned with social justice and electoral politics, this article examines the Coray for Congress (1994) campaign as a case study to argue in support of a more formal disciplinary commitment to political technical communication (PxTC). Specifically, I closely analyze the ideographic communication design of pre-digital PxTC artifacts from the campaign archive. The type of pre-digital political communication design products analyzed in this article are ubiquitous even today. The implications of four dominant ideographs are analyzed in this case study: , , , and . Key takeaways for PxTC practitioners, educators, and scholars are discussed.

This paper introduces the concept of transactional design---integrating Druschke's "transactional" model of rhetoric and science and Kinsella's model of "public expertise"---to demonstrate how technical communication and user experience (UX) designers and researchers can play an essential role in helping scientists cultivate meaningful relationships with members of the public toward the goal of making scientific content more accessible and actionable. This paper reports on the challenges that arose when a water modeling system built for experts was adapted for a public museum audience. It discusses specific issues the UX team had in contending with outdated "deficit" and "conduit" models of communication when working with scientists to adapt the system; it provides a checklist for steps that technical communication and UX designers and researchers---as those who best understand audiences and work directly with users---can champion the idea of transactional design to setup knowledge-making partnerships toward the co-construction of public-facing scientific communication projects.

Technical communication and user experience studies traditionally uphold Western onto-epistemological distinctions between technical users and objects. Recent calls for the inclusion of cultural approaches to technical communication, however, have asked scholars to consider the influence cultural knowledge has on communication design. This article takes up these calls by reading technical documentation through new materialist and Indigenous ways of knowing. Using a prominent Jewish cemetery in Gainesville, Florida as a case study, this article treats technical artifacts and subjects as co-constitutive, arguing for the cultural and material agency of technical documentation design in mediating and shaping user experience.

“Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive ...

This essay reflects on a three-part assignment in which students plan, design, and reflect on a text-based videogame. Created originally for a composition course focused on rhetoric and videogames, the assignment lends itself to teaching about the writing process, especially invention and revision, teaching procedural rhetorics, and teaching technical communication concepts such as iterative design and usability. This essay is coauthored by the instructor with two students who took the course in different semesters, highlighting the collaborative nature of even solo-authored game design, as well as how making games can help students take up rhetorical concerns in other genres.

The central components of an interpersonal communication framework such as uncertainty reduction theory can be adapted to design and evaluate crisis communication addressing uncertainty between citizens needing access to services and organizations attempting to manage risk and ensure continuity of operations. Through a content analysis of organizational crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article adapts uncertainty reduction theory as an applied, user-centered framework that can guide technical communicators in managing uncertainty during unprecedented crises.

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

Transgender (trans) people always already live with health care precarity, particularly concerning gender transition. During a pandemic, this precarity is heightened. Trans people find themselves without access to necessary cross-sex hormones or isolated with unaccepting or hostile family members. As a result, some engage in tactical technical communication, using the Internet to source knowledge and supplies to manage their transition. This article analyzes these do-it-yourself forms of tactical technical communication that support gender transition in the time of COVID-19.

Analyzing data gathered around COVID-19 can increase our understanding of its spread and the social and economic impacts. Data visualizations can help various stakeholders understand the outbreak. To this end, this article seeks to understand how COVID-19 data dashboards utilized actionable metrics to inform various stakeholders. Used in lean methodology, actionable metrics specifically tie data visualization to actions to improve a specific situation. The authors discuss how actionable metrics were used in COVID-19 data dashboards to inspire actions of various stakeholders by modeling different outcomes through future projections. In turn, the authors explore how actionable metrics in data dashboards can inform new business and technical communication practices for data visualization.

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.

The use of technology has now become an integral part of higher education in Malaysia because of its positive outcomes in teaching and learning. Despite its use, students are not able to fully benefit from its full potential. This study investigated the use of digital annotation tools in Interactive Reading for Academic Disciplines to facilitate reading of English for Science and Technology materials in a blended course among university students. Data were collected from 12 students enrolled in English for Technical Communication in a public university on the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Data collection consisted of online annotations and focus group interviews. Analysis was descriptive and thematic, using SPSS and NVivo software, respectively. Inter-rater reliability analysis was measured using Cohen Kappa reliability analysis that yielded an almost perfect score, proving that the data were reliable. The findings revealed that digital annotation tools facilitated reading comprehension among students in an online reading environment. Annotation analyses revealed consistency in interview data when students were able to paraphrase, extend and synthesize ideas. An implication from this study suggests that training students’ regarding strategies on how to deal with annotation tasks should be mandatory. This is integral for students to achieve comprehension of English for Science and Technology materials in an online environment.

Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear. To investigate how companies use Twitter, this study analyzes the content of the Twitter accounts of four large information technology companies, focusing on the arrangement of different Twitter accounts and on message characteristics (content, message elements, and communication strategies). The results show that companies used architectures of different Twitter accounts to serve various stakeholder groups. The companies’ tweets covered diverse topics within the corporate, marketing, and technical communication domains. The tweets focused more on providing information and promoting action than on facilitating dialogue.

Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions...

Comics-based how-to instructions have historically figured into a gender-aware category of technical communication. Studying such comics-based literature for gendering is a promising endeavor that ...

In global product development projects, coordinating complex technical communication among teams across time zones in the overlapping process is a fundamental challenge. To optimize a global product development organization to reduce the negative impact of time separation on coordination, this article presents an innovative approach to solve two key problems: how to quantify the coordination among distributed teams and how to identify efficient global product development organization. We build structural models to capture the coordination dependency strength among global product development teams from the time separation and overlapping process perspectives, employing the design structure matrix method. Then, we analyze the factors that influence synchronous and asynchronous communication due to time separation. We also apply the random walk method to identify a team similarity matrix, taking into account the direct and indirect dependency relationships among teams associated with their performed activities. Finally, we use the team similarity matrix as an input to a spectral clustering algorithm to identify the clustering strategy for the global product development organizational architecture, yielding and reinforcing several managerial insights, including how to analyze the coordination among global product development teams as well as how the offshoring costs impact the clustered organization.

Technical communicators can manage the content users share in online communities, but this is only feasible if the users act like a community with a shared understanding of what the software does. ...

Writing skills are critical as emergency medical services (EMS) use them to support patient care, yet limited research supports EMS writing practice and pedagogy. The field of writing studies and its sub-field of technical communication offers theories and methods to understand these skills. Grounded in writing theory, this article reports on a longitudinal study about paramedic documentation training and uses the framework of ‘threshold concepts’: ideas, knowledge, and skills writers gain that transform learning. This study collected paramedic students' writing over 2 years, and participants also completed interviews and focus groups. Grounded theory and textual analysis guided data analysis. Findings suggest that paramedic students pass through significant learning thresholds when they write during field training, including developing expertise, audience awareness, and reflection. In turn, writing provides an opportunity for paramedic students to learn critical skills. This article provides assignment ideas that training programmes can use to harness writing's transformative power.

Background: Although some have noted that combining technical and marketing content is precarious, technical communication professionals are increasingly involved in content marketing, which includes the creation of white papers. Literature review: The little existing literature on white papers provides conflicting guidance about managing the combination of technical and marketing content. Both soft-sell and hard-sell marketing approaches have been recommended. One source of such inconsistent guidance may be the lack of agreement about definitions. Research on print advertisements has described hard and soft selling as multidimensional rather than binary aspects of persuasive appeals. Research question: Which dimensions of hard- and soft-sell appeals are predominant in white papers? Research methodology: To complete our descriptive study, we collected a corpus of documents labeled as white papers in TechRepublic, and then selected and trained three raters to complete a series of judgments about dimensions of persuasive appeals in the corpus. We aggregated those ratings, calculating the mean and standard deviation for the dimensions to describe their distribution across the corpus. Results/discussion: Overall, hard-sell dimensions were more prevalent than soft-sell dimensions. However, the soft-sell category of “implicitness” was also dominant. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the value of treating hard and soft selling as multidimensional, complementary, and combinatory marketing appeals that allow, for example, a single white paper to be both “subjective” (soft sell), and “precise” (hard sell), or both “creative” (soft sell) and “informative” (hard sell).

This paper reports on a preliminary comparative study of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant voice assistants (VA) that explores the origins of answers provided on each platform in an attempt to determine the extent that these origins influence responses. Questions were selected from Text Recognition (TREC) 2017 Live Question Answering (QA) Track Data, a collection of pre-assessed questions that are part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) TREC QA track. Responses were collected as voice memos and screen captures, then analyzed to determine the origins of each answer or set of answers provided. Results indicate that the origins of answers are different search engines, and that algorithm-centered processes in each voice assistant result in vast differences in answers to questions. Because the online search results provided as answers by voice assistants are influenced by content and structured data, technical communicators and UX practitioners can help ensure that voice assistants are able to provide accurate, complete, and ethical responses to users’ questions.

This article analyzes user discourse in a containment thread to examine how game developers can create more inclusive user experience (UX) processes and communities. Containment threads are typically used to keep undesirable conversations in a single place on a forum. In the case discussed here, the containment thread was a response to increasing rates of gender-based aggression after a game developer included nonbinary pronouns in the character creation interface. Ultimately, the analysis found that the containment thread, combined with the design of the forum discourse space, acted to highlight and sustain the gender-based aggression over time. Drawing on recent work on online aggression and queering technical communication, the article closes by offering initial recommendations for supporting more inclusive UX communities.

Communicating heat safety to public audiences constitutes a difficult task which requires negotiating multiple layers of public perception and experience. While research into heat safety communication has focused on survey data and the efficacy of forecasting technologies to predict meteorological events, communicating extreme heat via digital social media environments presents an opportunity to study both communication from official sources along with the public response to information provided. This article compares communication about extreme heat on the National Weather Service Phoenix Facebook page during the hottest summer ever recorded (May-September 2020) with information delivered the following summer regarding heat awareness (May 2021). The findings from this study suggest that information that seeks to protect individuals from severe forecasts should be included in ways that garner more public attention, highlighting the need for vulnerable communities to take action to protect their health from the impacts of extreme heat. In the discussion, recommendations are offered for how technical communication regarding extreme heat could be modified to better account for safety concerns and vulnerability.

Scholars in TPC have called for research that evaluates the relationship between advocacy and technical communication practices. Current public health vaccination efforts are currently struggling to reach those who are underserved, vaccine hesitant, or anti-vaccination. This project takes up the efforts of people with polio and post-polio syndrome to participate in vaccine advocacy in order to theorize how public health efforts might approach vaccine outreach in other contexts, like COVID-19. Using a combination of interviews and web content analysis, I draw attention to the ways that visible disability and the health consequences of a still unfolding epidemic intersect with stigma, ableism, public memory, and healthcare access.

It is the intention of this abstract to do research that explores a history of domestic technical figures from the 19th to the 21st centuries to consider previously overlooked technical documentation in what has been known as “women's work.” This technical communications research is being conducted with considerations of gender theory, rhetorical theory, and usability. It spotlights historically unconsidered technical communication documents as legitimate technical communication, specifically within the genre of cookery books. The importance of documenting these histories is addressed and recipes are followed through the history of American cookery publications to exemplify the progression of domestic technical figures from the 1800s and into the digital age. Plaited bread is selected for this task, bread being one of the oldest domestic technologies. Technical figures are evaluated based on Method of Figure Creation, Clarity, Style, and Appropriateness and general conclusions are then presented along with calls for additional research.

This report analyzes the digital/electronic textbook user experience (eBUX) of web-based open educational resources (OERs) for professional and technical communication (PTC). Data and information were gathered from students enrolled in introductory PTC courses (with IRB oversight and input from faculty and writing program directors) via online surveys (Google Forms), collaborative documents (Google Docs), remote interviews (Zoom), learning management system analytics (Desire2Learn), workshop documentation (pre-pandemic), and email correspondence. User research revealed issues of use and usability with web-based open-access PTC textbooks related to functional specifications, content requirements, interface and interaction design, information architecture, navigation, and aesthetics. The conclusion discusses the evolution of digital OERs for PTC over the past quarter century and reflects on their future.

This case study outlines a user experience design approach, with specific emphasis on persona building, of a web-based mapping and information tool aimed at helping developers site wind energy projects. Relying on philosophies of user experience in the field of technical communication, particularly ones that focus on usefulness, problem solving, and political participation, the authors of this paper present how user experience design was used as a framework for negotiating political differences between stakeholders in wind energy, namely the military and energy developers but also municipal permitting offices and state agencies overseeing energy regulation. In doing so, the authors speculate about the possibility of implementing user experience design as a method for political negotiation, particularly as it pertains to environmental regulation and communication.

In the field of technical communication, the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) global pandemic directly impacted how mentorships are conducted as mentors and mentees adapt to a virtual and socially distanced communication context. This Industry Insight report examines one formal mentorship relationship in the IBM Pathfinders Mentorship Program between a Red Hat / IBM employee and a North Carolina State University graduate student. This report provides perspectives from both the mentor and mentee regarding the benefits and challenges of virtual and socially distanced mentorship and outlines recommendations for a successful mentorship based on lessons learned. The global pandemic is sure to have lasting impacts on how global organizations conduct business, train employees, and conduct mentorships. The recommended best practices in this report offer important insights into how, moving forward, global corporations can successfully create and foster formalized mentoring partnerships with university programs in a virtual and socially distanced context. These recommendations are also relevant to less formal mentorship relationships in both corporate and academic settings.

This study examines the emerging practice of using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to automatically generate content. Using the case study as methodology, this research aims to address the gap in the literature that little publication has been done in the field of technical and professional communication to investigate the wide applications of automated writing (AW) technologies. Composed of semi-structured interviews and a content assessment study, this project investigates how AW is embedded in the current writing practices in business, its effectiveness and potential impacts, and its strengths and drawbacks in comparison with human writers. The preliminary results of this study may provide advice for professional writers and technical communication programs on the core skills desired in the AW age.

Syllabi as an academic genre used by students and instructors should not only be primarily focused on its content, but also the modality. This study investigates students’ experience of using web-based liquid syllabus through a questionnaire in an online synchronous technical communication service class and evaluates the usefulness of liquid syllabus through usability testing after the semester ends. Findings from the pre-study survey and usability testing show students’ self-reflection on using the two types of syllabi, reveal the problem of liquid syllabus design, and address their experience. The paper discusses the study limitation and suggests that instructors could use a liquid syllabus to improve students’ learning experience.

Luxury drug and alcohol rehabs exhibit the hallmarks of wealth and comfort as selling points, in direct contrast to the 12-step programming they most often use for treatment. 12-step programs are designed by and for recovering addicts, and center service, unity, and recovery as their priorities, explicitly rejecting materialism and marketing of any kind. Analysis of the different communication materials used by luxury rehab facilities and 12-step programs reveals two differing rhetorics of recovery. Technical communicators have an opportunity to construct new modes of communicating with and informing addicts seeking recovery using the rhetoric they have constructed as creator-members of 12-step programs. With a thorough understanding of 12-step programs’ rhetorics of recovery, technical communicators can move beyond the goal of selling recovery and towards building community and participatory design which centers addicts’ unique needs and modes of understanding their addictions.