Purpose: This study examined immigrants’ perceptions of their interactions with financial institutions and asked if U.S. immigrants are considered in these institutions??? formal statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).Method: We interviewed 13 participants and also conducted a content analysis of the DEI statements of the top nine U.S. banks. In addition to content analysis, we also used text mining to gain further information on the key themes prevalent in the diversity statements of the financial institutions.Results: Our findings show a clear disconnect between the top U.S. banks’ DEI statements and the lived experiences of immigrants. For instance, banks had oppressive banking processes that makes it difficult for immigrants to open accounts. We also identified lack of communication channels.Conclusion: As calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field grow, we must pay attention to material conditions of immigrant students/scholars in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) academic programs. Immigrants interviewed in this study wanted clarity about which documents they need to submit to banks, accurate translation of bank-related documents, and detailed explanations of banking industry jargon.
Purpose: This study examined immigrants’ perceptions of their interactions with financial institutions and asked if U.S. immigrants are considered in these institutions??? formal statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Method: We interviewed 13 participants and also conducted a content analysis of the DEI statements of the top nine U.S. banks. In addition to content analysis, we also used text mining to gain further information on the key themes prevalent in the diversity statements of the financial institutions. Results: Our findings show a clear disconnect between the top U.S. banks’ DEI statements and the lived experiences of immigrants. For instance, banks had oppressive banking processes that makes it difficult for immigrants to open accounts. We also identified lack of communication channels. Conclusion: As calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field grow, we must pay attention to material conditions of immigrant students/scholars in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) academic programs. Immigrants interviewed in this study wanted clarity about which documents they need to submit to banks, accurate translation of bank-related documents, and detailed explanations of banking industry jargon.
Purpose: This project contributes a rhetorical approach to search engine optimization (SEO) as algorithmic audience analysis. It positions SEO as an activity that requires strategists to compose website content that is optimized to both human search engine users and the algorithmic audience (Gallagher, 2017) of a search engine???s indexed content. Method: Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005), with its focus on the agency of non-human entities combined with human agency in social activity, provides the theoretical framework for this approach. The project combines usability testing with web development methods to trace rhetorical agency during online search activities (Hocutt, 2019). Doing so demonstrates the role search algorithms play as receptive audiences of SEO strategies. Results: Approaches to teaching SEO within the framework of technical and professional communication (TPC) rhetorical foundations require understanding the algorithmic audiences of SEO practices. By matching timestamp data from videorecorded usability tests and HTTP archive (HAR) files produced during usability testing sessions, content strategists can overlay the chronological recordings with their SEO strategies to better understand how successfully SEO met human and algorithmic audience expectations. When SEO practice identifies human audience expectations effectively and develops content signals attractive to its technological audiences, both audiences succeed in an assembled meaning-making exercise. By applying existing methods of audience analysis to search algorithms, content strategists can improve SEO and help surface relevant content for their human users. Conclusion: The results of this project provide a framework for practicing SEO as rhetorical activity built upon audience analysis of both human and non-human users.
Purpose: As technical and professional communicators (TPCs) use AI to develop content, inaccuracies due to AI limitations are introduced; it is vital TPCs evaluate AI-generated content to improve accuracy and human-centeredness. In this article, we present a human-in-the-loop AI content heuristic (HEAT: Human experience, Expertise, Accuracy, and Trust) as a rating mechanism. Method: This exploratory case study evaluated the quality of content generated by ChatGPT from the perspective of beginner TPC students. We used multiple prompting strategies asking ChatGPT to create documentation on personas using two Darwin Information Type Architecture (DITA) information types namely, concept topics and task instructions, and we evaluated the results with HEAT. Results: HEAT had good intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) reliability (.743 pilot; .825 for scenarios) indicating its fitness as a heuristic for evaluating generative AI output. The findings indicate that ChatGPT was generally good at writing concept topics; however, it performed less well creating step-by-step task instructions. Expert TPC input helped develop a better prompt for improved output. We also found that tokenization in ChatGPT (the way it breaks up text) has a large role in terms of noncompliance with format specifications. Conclusion: There is a need for TPCs to (1) develop new models for AI-assisted content creation, (2) recognize the impact of different prompting strategies on developing specific structured authoring units such as concept and task topics, and (3) be aware of the limitations of AI such as ChatGPT. Human-in-the-loop quality check mechanisms, such as HEAT, can help validate and modify AI-generated content to better serve end users.
Purpose: This research paper explores the following phenomena that impact content strategy in technical communication (TC): 1) understudied user analysis methods that reveal users’ information seeking behavior, 2) changes in infrastructure design for innovative user research practices, 3) skill sets required by technical communicators to carry out content strategy tasks. Methods: Methodologically, the article reports findings from 19 interviews conducted with TC practitioners who hold titles such as technical writer, content strategist, information developer, information architect, and documentation manager. Results: The interviews revealed more than 13 practices/methods in which users’ interactions resulted in data that provided more information about them which impacted the design of content platforms. I classified the findings into 4 main categories of users’ interactions that hold valuable insights about users’ information consumption behavior. These insights that can be used to make informed content strategy decisions are lost if the data is not carefully processed. Conclusion: This paper demonstrates how user interactions can inform research on content strategy in TC and how it impacts the processes of users, as well as the impacts on existing roles of technical communicators. I argue that we need to be more purposeful about analyzing users’ interactions that produce data and design infrastructures to support interactions as part of an organization’s content strategy goals. My future work will focus on how issues such as privacy, surveillance, and incentivization can be handled in situations where users’ information is used for audience analysis purposes.
Purpose: I investigated best practices for teaching content auditing within two graduate classes tasked with content auditing websites. I observed their strategies for developing auditing criteria. The graduate students used the audits to implement website redesign. Two research questions guided this study: 1) How do students create assessment criteria for website content audits? 2)What additional support could help students better determine assessment or rubric criteria to make them specific, and most of all, easily measurable? I focused on how and why students made auditing decisions. Method: I taught two graduate classes in which the students worked with real clients and live websites. Part of the process the students learned and used was content auditing. I used case study, interviews, and text analysis to empirically investigate student auditing. Nine participants shared their perspectives, including students and clients. Results: Simple categories with binary criteria made auditing easier; simple categories also made for simpler assessment. Students asked to see more examples of audits. Students in Class 1 misunderstood the audience, which led to a ripple effect on the resulting web design. Students from both classes were nonetheless able to make incremental improvements to both client websites. Conclusion: Additional training in listening to clients is needed with graduate students who do content auditing of websites. Discussion of the impact of web content evaluation may be needed to help students discover how to tailor auditing guidelines to their specific clients. Practitioners may need recursive auditing to fully define criteria.
Purpose: This teaching case examines challenges in developing technical communication students as organizational leaders managing content strategy through analysis of a graduate course incorporating a client project. Method: Forty-five graduate students enrolled in a content strategy course conducted content audits and assessments for six clients. Their final strategic roadmap reports were analyzed to determine their aptitude for aligning content strategies with business goals. Results: While students adeptly identified technical content quality issues, the majority struggled to connect these to business implications. A minority of students explicitly linked their strategic recommendations to business metrics, such as revenue growth. This outcome suggests a deficiency in achieving the course’s intent to instill a business-oriented approach to content strategy. Conclusion: The case identifies several challenges, including client maturity levels, the intricacy of business contexts, and the ambitious scope of the course’s objectives. Proposed enhancements involve restructuring client interaction, integrating more industry expertise, focusing the project’s reporting component, and refining the course’s aims. These measures aim to strengthen the strategic business thinking and leadership capabilities of technical communication students.
Purpose: This article argues that transnational multilingual entrepreneurs, particularly immigrant Asian/American small business owners, negotiate their access to disaster recovery-related resources by tactically sharing their own user cases through translocal business networks and developing local ethnocultural collaborative entrepreneurships. Method: This study was based on a 9-month user experience study across 14 entrepreneurial sites in two cities located in U.S.-Mexico border regions. Results: User narratives from this study demonstrate that transnational multilingual small business workers tactically adopted nuanced collaboration tactics in navigating resource-constrained environments in post-pandemic workplace settings. Conclusion: The study findings suggest that the binary notion of use and non-use of multilingual resources and the arrangement of multilingual content in federal disaster relief programs should be reconsidered to better situate human-centered design for transnational multilingual users in workplaces in under-resourced disaster-specific bureaucratic writing contexts.
Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine the Atomic Energy Commission’s use of eminent domain to seize the town of Ellenton and initiate the Savannah River Plant (SRP). We disrupt the presiding race-neutral history by reframing the story of Ellenton’s African American residents, who were both disproportionately impacted by the seizure and whose experiences were erased from Ellenton’s history.Method: We analyze official SRP’s histories alongside counter-narratives for examples of deceptive messaging and whiteness as property.Results: Through our analysis of the “race-neutral histories,” we recognize that African Americans–particularly sharecroppers and their families–bore the brunt of the Cold War’s Savannah River Site’s bomb plant.Conclusion: Practitioners who are interested in organizational DEI work should recognize the danger of race-neutral accounts and actively search out excluded perspectives to give fuller context to their organization’s work.
Purpose: This article describes how the specialized, rhetorical aesthetic theory of form, posited by Kenneth Burke, highlights humanistic and artistic elements of technical communication exemplified in the technical workplace. A specialized way of understanding how types of communication build relationships between author and audience, the theory of form offers a unique way to contextualize how an artist-rhetor creates and fulfills audience desires, expectations, and appetites. Method: The authors first contextualize technical communication as a field of artistic and creative practice; they then expand that context using Burke???s rhetorical aesthetic theory of form as a framework for application and examine that application in the context of the technical workplace, using a self-reported case study from industry as an example. Results: The rhetorical aesthetic theory of form provides a way of rethinking technical communication practice, emphasizing the humanistic and artistic elements of technical communication in the workplace. Conclusion: Looking at technical communication with an interrelated view of rhetoric and aesthetics can provide scholars, teachers, and practitioners with new insights for how technical communicators can see themselves and their audiences as complex people who have the capacities for arguing, influencing, and persuading–and also with capacities for drama, story, feeling, creating, and being moved by art.
Purpose: TikTok’s rise in popularity has invited creators across a broad spectrum of interests to contribute content to the platform, including non-expert, instructional subject matter. Previously, technical communication scholars have described ways to assess video instruction online, in relatively long-format lengths. Our project outlines a framework for assessing the video production qualities of instructional content across TikTok. Method: We performed a content analysis of existing frameworks and sets of heuristics for assessing long-format instructional videos. We then analyzed a set of instructional content found across the TikTok platform and analyzed them using previous frameworks. After comparing and contrasting, we developed a new framework for assessing short-format video instructional content. Results: After assessing long-format instructional video frameworks and instructional content found across TikTok, we found that many dimensions and heuristics from previous frameworks applied to short-format video. Unique to short-form video were the dimensions of tempo and level of detail, which describe the pacing of the video from a temporal perspective and the fidelity of instruction, respectively. Instruction on TikTok can take place without explicit step-by-step instruction. Conclusion: We found that many dimensions and heuristics from long-form frameworks carry over to short-form video, but there are features, social norms, and creative norms on TikTok that lend themselves well to “bite-sized” instruction.
Purpose: This article seeks to provide a set of heuristics for technical communication, addressing the newfound challenges to game developers as a result of the seemingly permanent shift to hybrid and remote work in this industry. In particular, this piece offers developers tangible ways in which they can facilitate productive and equitable means of technical communications that account for the unique needs of this kind of work that now takes place in almost exclusively remote and hybrid working situations. Method: This piece relies on both survey and interview data collected from nearly 300 members of the Independent Game Developers Association (IGDA) and at various games-based conferences (e.g., the Game Developers Conference) over a period of two years through a partnership grant between York University and the IGDA. Results: The results noted two key findings: First, the majority of game developers do not want to or intend to ever return to a fully physical office setting. Second, the results indicate that the shift to remote work more often negatively impacted female and non-binary developers, most likely due to the additional caregiving responsibilities traditionally emplaced on these groups. Conclusion: Technical communication is a central part of the game development process and has become even more pivotal as developers continue to operate under remote and hybrid working conditions. As such, the heuristics developed from this data focus on addressing the needs of these groups so that the remote and hybrid workplaces can operate as equitably as possible in this new industry model.
Purpose: Communication privacy management (CPM) theory is a major theory explaining the tensions between disclosing and concealing private information in interpersonal communication. By considering differences in interpersonal and human-technology information disclosure and drawing on existing work related to privacy and technology, this article presents CPM theory as a broad theoretical framework for human-technology privacy boundary management. Method: This research employed a speculative theoretical approach by drawing on existing literature and synthesizing it to both apply and extend CPM theory’s propositions to human-technology privacy boundary management. Results: CPM theory can be applied to understand the dynamics of human-technology information disclosure and should incorporate technological literacy as a key consideration in human-technology privacy boundary management. Legal ties characterize human-technology privacy boundary coordination instead of social ties. Additionally, in human-technology information disclosure contexts, CPM theory should provide guidance regarding managing third parties that may gain access to information. Conclusion: CPM theory is the most comprehensive framework for how individuals manage privacy boundaries, be it in interpersonal or human-technology contexts. By considering technology as a property of technological actors instead of an actor itself, CPM theory in human-technology contexts becomes a flexible theoretical framework for understanding information disclosure and privacy boundary management, both for existing technologies (e.g., social media, online shopping platforms, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things) and future technologies.
Purpose: Prescriptivism–a concept concerned with “correctness in language use” (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2019, p. 8)–serves an important purpose when editors and other language professionals apply the findings from empirical linguistic studies to practical communication tasks (Oaks, 2021). Usage guides catalog usage rules, but they treat these rules with varying levels of prescriptivism. Therefore, advice varies across usage guides. This study empirically investigates levels of prescriptivism observed in usage guides. Method: Using a scale from 1 (minimally prescriptive) to 4 (maximally prescriptive), two raters coded the level of prescriptivism observed in entries for eight well-known usage problems (e.g., who/whom and lay/lie) from 11 current usage guides relating to American English. Based on the codes assigned to these entries, an overall prescriptivism index was calculated for each usage problem and usage guide. Results: A range in levels of prescriptivism was observed. Overall, the treatment of usage problems skewed high on the prescriptivism scale with six of the eight being treated as maximally prescriptive by at least two usage guides and six having mean indexes at or above the scale’s midpoint of 2.50. Similarly, seven of the 11 usage guides gave maximally prescriptive advice for at least one usage problem and eight had mean indexes at or above 2.50. While these findings indicate a bias toward prescriptive advice, a noteworthy amount of prescription-breaking advice was also observed. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that usage guides vary considerably in their levels of prescriptivism; therefore, writers and editors must critically consider which advice to follow.
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.
Purpose: The purpose of this article is to consider: (1) how participatory rhetorics and methodologies can often invoke classed and racialized hierarchies and (2) the rhetorical strategies by which participatory processes in development contexts become co-opted for institutional means rather than for transformative outcomes. Method: Blending critical discourse analysis and rhetorical criticism, I read two influential federal U.S. housing reports associated with the HOPE VI housing program to derive legitimation strategies seemingly at work in divesting local residents of significant participatory input. Results: As suggested by analysis of the two reports, HOPE VI's participatory rhetorics consisted of four key legitimation strategies that constrained participation as: participation -as -cultural narrative, participation-as-bio/necropolitics, participation -asdiversity, and participation-as-theodicy. Conclusion: The legitimation strategies reveal that participation is not a neutral framework. The methodology's institutional privilege has the potential to iterate hierarchy and the reproduction of marginalization. Even in explicit invocations of diversity, race, and community, participation risks the entrenchment of otherization. These problematic qualities challenge organizational and institutional efforts to achieve a transformative agenda for diversity and inclusion.
Purpose: This study examined immigrants' perceptions of their interactions with financial institutions and asked if U.S. immigrants are considered in these institutions' formal statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Method: We interviewed 13 participants and also conducted a content analysis of the DEI statements of the top nine U.S. banks. In addition to content analysis, we also used text mining to gain further information on the key themes prevalent in the diversity statements of the financial institutions. Results: Our findings show a clear disconnect between the top U.S. banks' DEI statements and the lived experiences of immigrants. For instance, banks had oppressive banking processes that makes it difficult for immigrants to open accounts. We also identified lack of communication channels. Conclusion: As calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field grow, we must pay attention to material conditions of immigrant students/scholars in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) academic programs. Immigrants interviewed in this study wanted clarity about which documents they need to submit to banks, accurate translation of bank -related documents, and detailed explanations of banking industry jargon.
