This practical text offers a research-based account of the technical communication profession and its practice, outlining emergent touchpoints of this fast-changing field while highlighting its diversity. Through research on the history and the globalization of technical communication and up-to-date industry analysis, including first-hand narratives from industry practitioners, this book brings together common threads through the industry, suggests future trends, and points toward strategic routes for development. Vignettes from the workplace and examples of industry practice provide tangible insights into the different paths and realities of the field, furnishing readers with a range of entry routes and potential career sectors, workplace communities, daily activities, and futures. This approach is central to helping readers understand the diverse competencies of technical communicators in the modern, globalized economy. The Profession and Practice of Technical Communication provides essential guidance for students, early professionals, and lateral entrants to the profession and can be used as a textbook for technical communication courses.

This collection of essays focuses on both how and why assessment serves as a key element in the teaching and practice of technical and professional communication. The collection is organized to form a dual approach: on the one hand, it offers a landscape view of the activities involved in assessment - examining how it works at institutional, program, and classroom levels; on the other, it surveys the implications of using assessment for formulating, maintaining, and extending the teaching and practice of technical communication. The book offers teachers, students, scholars, and practitioners alike evidence of the increasingly valuable role of assessment in the field, as it supports and enriches our thinking and practice. No other volume has addressed the demands of and the expectations for assessment in technical communication. Consequently, the book has two key goals. The first is to be as inclusive as is feasible for its size, demonstrating the global operation of assessment in the field. For this reason, descriptions of assessment practice lead to examinations of some key feature of the landscape captured by the term 'technical communication'. The second goal is to retain the public and cooperative approach that has characterized technical communication from the beginning. To achieve this, the book represents a 'conversation', with contributors chosen from among practicing, highly active technical communication teachers and scholars; and the chapters set up pairs of opening statement and following response. The overriding purpose of the volume, therefore, is to invite the whole community into the conversation about assessment in technical communication.

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication helps technical communicators make better sense of technology’s impact on their work, so they can identify new ways to adapt, adjust, and evolve, fulfilling their own professional potential. This collection is comprised of three sections, each designed to explore answers to these questions: How has technical communication work changed in response to the current (digital) writing environment? What is important, foundational knowledge in our field that all technical communicators need to learn? How can we revise past theories or develop new ones to better understand how technology has transformed our work? Bringing together highly-regarded specialists in digital literacy, this anthology will serve as an indispensible resource for scholars, students, and practitioners. It illuminates technology’s impact on their work and prepares them to respond to the constant changes and challenges in the new digital universe.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Professional Communication provides a broad coverage of the key areas where language and professional communication intersect and gives a comprehensive account of the field. The four main sections of the Handbook cover: Approaches to Professional Communication Practice Acquisition of Professional Competence Views from the Professions This invaluable reference book incorporates not only an historical view of the field, but also looks to possible future developments. Contributions from international scholars and practitioners, focusing on specific issues, explore the major approaches to professional communication and bring into focus recent research. This is the first handbook of language and professional communication to account for both pedagogic and practitioner perspectives and as such is an essential reference for postgraduate students and those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and professional communication.

Administrators of academic professional and technical communication (PTSC) programs have long relied upon lore--stories of what works--to understand and communicate about the work of program administration. Stories are interesting, telling, engaging, and necessary. But a discipline focused primarily on stories, especially the ephemeral stories narrated at conferences and deliberated at department meetings, usually suffice primarily to solve immediate problems and address day-to-day concerns and activities. This edited collection captures some of those stories and layers them with theoretical perspectives and reflection, to enhance their usefulness to the PTSC program administration community at large. Like the ephemeral stories PTSC program administrators are accustomed to, the stories told in this volume are set within specific institutional contexts that reflect specific institutional challenges. They emphasize the intellectual traces--the debts the authors owe to those who have informed and transformed their administrative work. In so doing, this collection creates another conversation--albeit a robust, diverse, and theoretically informed one--around which program leaders might define or redefine their roles and re-envision their administrative work as the rich, complex, intellectual engagement that we find it to be. This volume asks authors to move beyond a notion of administration as an activity based solely in institutional details and processes. In so doing, they emphasize theory as they share their reflections on core administrative processes and significant moments in the histories of their associated programs, thereby affording opportunities for critical examination in conjunction with practical advice.

Global awareness and competency has become an essential part of higher education and professional development. Expanding beyond the traditional ideas of learning and education, it is important to provide research that will help students prepare for the global future. The Handbook of Research on Promoting Higher-Order Skills and Global Competencies in Life and Work is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the intersection of life and work skills in higher education and professional development. While highlighting topics such as research engagement, learning assessment, and multicultural competence, this publication explores the preparation of twenty-first century learners, as well as the methods of promoting critical and creative thinking. This book is ideally designed for educators, academicians, education administrators, researchers, and upper-level students seeking current research on global knowledge and skills in contemporary education and organizations.

In Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication, teachers, researchers, and practitioners will find a variety of theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, and teaching approaches to advocacy and citizenship. Specifically, the collection is organized around three main themes or sections: considerations for understanding and defining advocacy and citizenship locally and globally, engaging with the local and global community, and introducing advocacy in a classroom. The collection covers an expansive breadth of issues and topics that speak to the complexities of undertaking advocacy work in TPC, including local grant writing activities, cosmopolitanism and global transnational rhetoric, digital citizenship and social media use, strategic and tactical communication, and diversity and social justice. The contributors themselves, representing fifteen academic institutions and occupying various academic ranks, offer nuanced definitions, frameworks, examples, and strategies for students, scholars, practitioners, and educators who want to or are already engaged in a variegated range of advocacy work. More so, they reinforce the inherent humanistic values of our field and discuss effective rhetorical and current technological tools at our disposal. Finally, they show us how, through pedagogical approaches and everyday mundane activities and practices, we (can) advocate either actively or passively.

In Talking Back, a veritable Who’s Who of writing studies scholars deliberate on intellectual traditions, current practices, and important directions for the future. In response, junior and mid-career scholars reflect on each chapter with thoughtful and measured moves forward into the contemporary environment of research, teaching, and service. Each of the prestigious chapter authors in the volume has three common traits: a sense of responsibility for advancing the profession, a passion for programs of research dedicated to advancing opportunities for others, and a reflective sense of their work accompanied by humility for their contributions. As a documentary, Talking Back is the first history of writing studies in autobiography. Contributors: Jo Allen, Ann N. Amicucci, Akua Duku Anokye, Paige Davis Arrington, Doug Baldwin, John C. Brereton, Judy Buchanan, Hugh Burns, Leasa Burton, Ellen C. Carillo, William Condon, Dylan B. Dryer, Michelle F. Eble, Jennifer Enoch, Joan Feinberg, Patricia Friedrich, Cinthia Gannett, Eli Goldblatt, Shenika Hankerson, Janis Haswell, Richard Haswell, Eric Heltzel, Douglas Hesse, Bruce Horner, Alice S. Horning, Asao B. Inoue, Ruth Ray Karpen, Suzanne Lane, Min-Zhan Lu, Donald McQuade, Elisabeth L. Miller, Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, Sean Molloy, Les Perelman, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Stacey Pigg, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Jessica Restaino, J. Michael Rifenburg, Eliana Schonberg, Geneva Smitherman, Richard Sterling, Katherine E. Tirabassi, Devon Tomasulo, Martha A. Townsend, Mike Truong, Victor Villanueva, Edward M. White, Anne Elrod Whitney, Kathleen Blake Yancey

Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work provides action-focused resources and tools—heuristics, methodologies, and theories—for scholars to enact social justice. These resources support the work of scholars and practitioners in conducting research and teaching classes in socially just ways. Each chapter identifies a tool, highlights its relevance to technical communication, and explains how and why it can prepare technical communication scholars for socially just work. For the field of technical and professional communication to maintain its commitment to this work, how social justice intersects with inclusivity through UX, technological, civic, and legal literacies, as well as through community engagement, must be acknowledged. Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work will be of significance to established scholar-teachers and graduate students, as well as to newcomers to the field. Contributors: Kehinde Alonge, Alison Cardinal, Erin Brock Carlson, Oriana Gilson, Laura Gonzales, Keith Grant-Davie, Angela Haas, Mark Hannah, Kimberly Harper, Sarah Beth Hopton, Natasha Jones, Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo, Liz Lane, Emily Legg, Nicole Lowman, Kristen Moore, Emma Rose, Fernando Sanchez, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Adam Strantz, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Josephine Walwema, Miriam Williams, Han Yu

This collection, aimed at scholars, teachers, and practitioners in technical communication, focuses on the praxis-based connections between technical communication and theoretical movements that have emerged in the past several decades, namely new materialism and posthumanism. It provides a much needed link between contemporary theoretical discussions about new materialisms and posthumanism and the practical, everyday work of technical communicators. The collection insists that where some theoretical perspectives fall flat for practitioners, posthumanism and new materialisms have the potential to enable more effective and comprehensive practices, methodologies, and pedagogies.