This study examines 50 business responses to negative reviews on Amazon.com in order to identify common genre moves for responding to negative online reviews. To complement the genre analysis and assess the effectiveness of these common genre moves, the author conducted a survey seeking consumers’ feedback on three typical business responses to negative online reviews. This investigation not only provides

Empathy competence is considered a key aspect of excellent performance in communication professions. But we lack an overview of the specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills required to develop such competence in professional communication. Through interviews with 35 seasoned communication professionals, this article explores the role and nature of empathy competence in professional interactions. The

In the information age, discourse plays an increasingly important role in promoting innovative products. But how language works in the innovation process remains underexplored. This study explores the discursive communication strategies used to introduce innovation by analyzing the content, cohesion, and coherence of product launch presentations by Steve Jobs. It reveals that such discursive communication

Scholars within the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) have called for situating the field in wider social, cultural, political, and global contexts. Despite a growing body of scholarship in this area, less attention has been focused on ways these issues are bound up in 21st-century global innovation and start-up ecosystems. This article addresses these issues by examining case

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work

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

This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (ep

In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause

With significantly higher rates of comorbidities and limited access to health care, some Appalachian rural communities face magnified health challenges due to COVID-19. This article looks at one example of how data visualizations might draw attention to health care realities in rural communities and yet render invisible the realities of the most vulnerable community members. The authors urge technical

This article explores science communication in the context of COVID-19 through a case study of a January 31, 2020, bioRxiv preprint publication that led to conspiracy theories by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the laboratory through genetic engineering. Analysis will consider the initial preprint, the scientific critique that led it to be withdrawn, the conspiracy theories that continue to

Many expected federal public health agencies to provide timely and accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic. That did not happen. In response, physicians and epidemiologists have explored new ways to educate the public about COVID-19 and protect against misinformation. One genre that has received significant uptake is the tweetorial, threaded tweets that educate followers on technical matters

This article reports findings from an institutional ethnography of university stakeholders’ writing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the affordances of this methodology for professional and technical communication. Drawing on interview transcripts with faculty and administrators from across the university, the authors contextualize the role of writing in the iterative, collaborative

Typically, the introduction to special issues of journals starts by explaining the topic being covered. One issue I contributed to included a 400-word description of Pokémon Go; another introduction had an extended definition of content strategy in technical communication. I sat down to write this introduction the same way, but doing so felt wrong. COVID-19 does not need a two-paragraph introduction

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

COVID-19 has forced many businesses to adjust their communication strategies to fit a new reality. One surprising example of this strategy adjustment came from the company Steak-umm, maker of frozen sliced beef. Instead of finding new ways to promote its products, the company shifted its focus to the public’s urgent needs, breaking down possible approaches to navigating information flow during the

Although companies have long used email to correspond directly with consumers in times of crisis (George & Pratt, 2012), the Covid-19 pandemic has incited an unprecedented flood of emails to our inboxes from companies reassuring us that “we’re all in this together.” As composition scholars begin to investigate how organizations have responded to this pandemic, this article explores the rise of the

This article employs cross-cultural communication approaches to teaching instructional design in the times of COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on instructions from France, India, Spain, and the United States for making protective masks, the authors highlight how the writers and designers of these four documents from each culture approach their audiences, organize their DIY instructions, make language choices

The COVID-19 pandemic created major disruptions in technical communication classrooms everywhere. Although technical communication instructors are used to teaching in a variety of contexts and settings, adopting a flexible approach in the first place will allow them to be better prepared for the changing dynamics of an unpredictable world. The authors present an approach that constructs pedagogical

Individuals act on information that connects to their daily lives. In emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, these connections are central to maintaining individual health and community safety. Making such connections requires an understanding of audience perceptions; the better technical communicators address these perceptions, the more successful their materials can be. This article presents a cognitive

With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and

Communicating risk amid moments of scientific ambiguity requires balance: Overdelivering certainty levels can cause undue alarm whereas underdelivering them can lead to increased public risk. Despite this complexity, risk assessment is an important decision-making tool. This article analyzes the circulation of the term “risk” in a corpus (74,804 words) of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Upon declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) orchestrated a global risk-communication outreach. The WHO’s objective was to persuade the public to upend and alter their lives so as to contain the disease and minimize its spread and infection. The WHO found a simple and efficient medium to communicate glocally through the social media application WhatsApp, through which

What expectations should professionals and the public place on visuals to communicate the uncertainties of complex phenomena? This article demonstrates how charts during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic articulated visual arguments yet also required extended communicative support upon their delivery. The author examines one well-circulated chart comparing COVID-19 case trends per country and

This article reviews images of people of Asian descent wearing masks in popular press articles discussing mask shortages and argues that visual framing had the potential of fueling racial antagonism during the initial months of COVID-19’s spread across the United States. Technical communicators need to include globalized perspectives in educational materials about masks as an advocacy strategy that

This article addresses how social media platforms can better highlight expert voices through design choices. Misinformation, after all, has exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, and platforms have struggled to address the issue. The authors examine this critical gap in validation mechanisms in the current social media platforms and suggest possible solutions for this urgent problem with third-party

While data1 has shown that COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black people, the CDC’s early data listed race as “missing/unspecified” at high rates. Incomplete demographic data obscures the virus’s full impact on marginalized communities. Without more information about who the virus is affecting and how, we cannot protect our most vulnerable. This article demonstrates disconnects between reported

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

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter has served as a leading public platform for sharing, receiving, and engaging with virus-related content. To protect users from misinformation, Twitter has enforced stricter content-vetting policies. This article positions Twitter as a politically motivated entity and briefly traces Twitter’s use and applications of the term “harmful content.” The author investigates

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

In this second golden age of data design, digital affordances enable the news media to share occasionally misleading charts about COVID-19. Examining data visualizations about COVID-19 highlights three ways that charts can mislead viewers: (a) by displaying inadequate data, (b) by manipulating scales and visual distance, and (c) by omitting contextual labels needed to fully understand a chart’s message

Understanding the law and its impact on the practice of technical communication has been an important scholarly thread in technical and professional communication (TPC) for more than two decades. Technical communicators recognize the impact of their work on stakeholders as well as the potential liability issues associated with composing technical communication documents. While this scholarship is widespread

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

This study investigates the role of stasis, an ancient rhetorical tool with both heuristic and analytic capabilities, in entrepreneurial rhetoric, specifically in pitching and question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from a multiyear sample of Shark Tank pitches, the author found that funders expect entrepreneurs to account for stases of being, quality, quantity, and place. The findings suggest a series

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation

To investigate the contribution of formal communications (FCs) to problem-solving knowledge work, this study examines survey, interview, and observational data from 212 teams who produced contracting documents, reports, and PowerPoint presentations while working on projects for diverse organizations worldwide. The study found that these FCs engaged teams in a contextual–conceptual dynamic involving

This study examines the strategic use of readability to obfuscate negative news in a German financial communication context. Combining a manual and an automated content analysis, the authors assess the tone and readability of three parts (chairman’s address, share-price development, and development in the fiscal year) of the 2014 annual reports of the 30 companies listed in the German stock index DAX

When students cowrite with others who have different levels of proficiency with the English language, they can experience unproductive conflict related to feedback avoidance. The author interviewed...

Although corporate greenwashing is a widespread phenomenon, few studies have investigated its effects on consumers. In these studies, consumers were exposed to organizations that boldly lied about their green behaviors. Most greenwashing practices in real life, however, do not involve complete lies. This article describes a randomized 3 × 2 experimental study in the cruise industry investigating the

Drawing on public comments and drafts of an environmental impact statement, this article examines public participation in policy making via the federal Web site Regulations.gov. Aiming to be our “voice” in federal decision making, Regulations.gov encourages citizens to submit comments on proposed actions. Drawing on Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s “hybrid forum,” the author suggests that ethical and

For many, the academic job-search process involves experiencing rejection, self-doubt, and depression. And a common form of communication during this process—job-refusal letters—can reinforce these negative experiences. This article uses rhetorical genre analysis to study 131 academic job-refusal letters and the applicants’ perceptions of these letters. First it constructs a model of the common genre

As discussed throughout this special issue, interest in design thinking as a process, a set of mind-sets and practices, and also a potential addition to writing studies and technical and professional communication (TPC) program curricula has increased recently, opening discussions about the rhetorical nature of design-thinking practices. Does design thinking align with the already rhetoric scholarship

In this special issue, we explore design thinking as a broad conceptual process as well as a tool that might align with the work of technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. But what is design thinking? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the process? Can design thinking be used to help students address rhetorical challenges and complex problems? How is design thinking showing up

The literature review presents the work of Kees Dorst as a framework for design thinking. The review covers three areas: Dorst’s conception of design problems and how it differs from traditional design paradigms, Dorst’s approach to design thinking and his problem-framing method, and the availability of Dorst’s method for technical communication work.

In design thinking, extreme users have found work-arounds for common problems, but they are few in number and often overlooked in toolkits and write-ups. This article posits that positive deviance, an approach to social and behavioral change that is compatible with design thinking, offers technical and professional communicators an accessible and innovative methodology for engaging extreme users. The

Technical and professional communication (TPC) as a discipline has long been concerned with the process of communication in context and the deep connection between rhetoric, writing, and human-centered design. Inspired by groundbreaking work by Kostelnick (1989) and Buchanan (2001), TPC literature is rich with contributions to pedagogy, program design, and professional practice in the areas of visual

Design-thinking frameworks help professionals to design solutions for complex problems. Design processes take into account the context of a problem, and among these contextual factors is place. Because place is relational, capturing dynamic relationships between other factors of design problems, it deserves special attention from stakeholders trying to tackle wicked problems. This literature review

Design thinking—at times described as a mind-set, practice, process, method, methodology, tool, heuristic, and more—is a productive, iterative approach used to engage divergent thinking. Often made up of stages incorporating empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, design thinking provides a framework for identifying and approaching problems. Design thinking, however, generally lacks

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical

Synthetic biology is a newly emerging interdisciplinary field that aligns engineering principles with biological equipment for adapting life. This article describes an incremental rhetorical experiment to insert human-focused (ethical) equipment into a technical project that adapted a clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat/Cas9 gene-editing system. This ethical equipment was inserted

This article theorizes the term infrastructure as a framework for articulating how writing products, activities, and processes underwrite organizational life in technical organizations. While this term has appeared broadly in writing studies scholarship, it has not been systematically theorized there as it has been in other fields such as economics, computing, and information science. This article

The design of online interactive visualizations is an ongoing area of research within technical communication, with recent work focusing on visualizations in risk-based contexts. This article shares the results of a large-scale user experience study on a popular interactive sea-level rise viewer aimed at facilitating decision making for individual users in coastal communities. Using this viewer, participants

Coworking spaces are shared working environments in which independent knowledge workers gather. Coworking is consistently described in terms of community and collaboration—yet these terms are defined inconsistently in the coworking literature. This study reviews the literature on coworking to better examine how community relates to collaboration. To anchor a more systematic analysis of community in

This study analyzes the December 2014 “nut rage” incident on Korean Air Lines by means of in-depth interviews with corporate communication experts. We examine how Korean Air managed this crisis of legitimacy, asking whether its legitimization strategy and tactics were effective. The authors argue that Korean Air breached both cognitive and moral legitimacy in terms of leadership, corporate culture

Using data from 88 students, 20 advisers, and 24 hirers about U.S. résumés, this article focuses on face of the company, the concept of employers' evaluating how well applicants might represent a company. The results of applying rhetorical listening’s identification–disidentification to “face” suggested two outcomes and their implications. First, primary audiences invoked secondary audiences to the

This study offers a comprehensive review of data-based research on the practice of multicommunicating, that is, the behavior of participating in multiple, overlapping conversations. Initial research has occurred in various academic disciplines and described the phenomenon with a variety of terms. The authors begin by defining multicommunication and then identifying and comparing these various other

This article examines the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rhetorical approaches in professional communication theory, introducing the theory of working closets as central to understanding how LGBT professionals navigate and succeed. The author presents case studies of LGBT professionals at the headquarters of a national discount retail company as examples of working closets

The Eating Well With Canada’s Food Guide (CFG), which represents Canada’s official dietary guidelines, is designed to address high rates of obesity and diet-related chronic disease in Canada. This article presents a qualitative study of the social and ideological actions that the CFG performs. The study draws on the concepts of antecedent genres and uptake from rhetorical genre studies, applying them

This study investigates the themes that drive persuasive recruiting appeals, or stories, designed to attract new, entrepreneurial workers in the direct selling industry. It offers a rhetorical perspective informed by fantasy theme analysis on the themes present in the recruiting content on the corporate Web sites of three direct selling companies (Mary Kay, Stella & Dot, and Scentsy). The analysis

This article calls for recognition of ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in technical and professional communication (TPC)—even social justice work that is not explicitly feminist. The authors distill some areas of feminist TPC scholarship that are relevant to future social justice work: (a) epistemological contributions, ways of knowing and methods for discovering