Technical Communication Quarterly, the journal of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing is pleased to announce our upcoming publication of Issue 33.4 for October-December 2024. The Table of Contents is provided next with abstracts.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES
· ’F——SharkTank:’RethinkingtheCentralityoftheBusinessPitchinMicroenterprise Entrepreneurship
Mason T. Pellegrini
This project investigates how the goals of microenterprise entrepreneurs affect their use of communication genres. Although slide-based business pitches are key for traditional entrepreneurs, microenterprise entrepreneurs have little interest in investment. Therefore, acquiring customers through short elevator pitches takes this central position. This article also explores the social justice dimensions of microenterprise acceleration, finding that such organizations can provide important services in combating inequality. This project uses writing, activity, and genre research as a theoretical framework, and the research site is a microenterprise accelerator in Tacoma, Washington called Spaceworks Tacoma, which supports both lower-income and Black owners of small businesses.
· “A Proficiency in What We Call Rhetoric”: A Role for Community-Engaged Technical Communicators in Interpretive Planning Processes
Lauren E. Cagle
Nonformal learning institutions use interpretive plans to create effective interpretation (mission-based communications) for their visitors. This article argues that interpretive planning offers professional and technical communicators great potential for engaging with communities. Following an introduction to the field of interpretation and interpretive planning, I explain how interpretive plans are a type of metagenre. I then provide technical communicators with specific examples of how technical communicators’ expertise is relevant to interpretation.
· Social Justice and “Harmful Tech”: Dis-Orienting Militarized Research
Calvin Pollak and Sanvi Bhardwaj
This study examines technological research in higher education as a social justice issue. Focusing on technologies developed for war, surveillance, and policing at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), we compare institutional and activist discourses about these projects, uncovering significant differences in accommodation strategies and values-based arguments. We conclude that locally situated controversies such as this one might value not only for social justice research, but also in providing pedagogical and theoretical scaffolding towards real local change.
· “IFeelLikeI’minaBox”:ContrastingVirtualReality“Imaginaries”intheContextofAcademic Innovation Labs
Brent Lucia, Matthew A. Vetter, and David A. Solberg
As immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users’ experience at the University of Connecticut’s OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google’s VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab’s promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates “top-down” imaginaries that contrast with “bottom-up” imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.
· Editors’Use of Comprehensive Style Guides:The Case of Singular They
Jo Mackiewicz, Shaya Kraut, and Allison Durazzi
We asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to them.
· The Paradigm Shift to UX and the Durability of Usability in TPC
Emma J. Rose and Heather N. Turner
The past two decades have experienced a paradigm shift from a narrow conception of usability to a broader process of user experience. We argue that durable connections to usability remain in TPC. In this perspectives piece, we highlight the paradigm shift and share traces of how the usability paradigm remains durable, primarily in the service course. We share savvy practices of instructors embracing the UX paradigm, even in the face of constraints.
· AStasisNetworkMethodologytoReckonwiththeRhetoricalProcessofData:HowaDataTeam Qualified Meaning and Practices
Chris A. Lindgren
Prior scholarship argues that facts derived from data are not separate from their contexts and values. In this study of a data journalism team, I define and apply a sociotechnical network approach to stasis that maps their rhetorical actions with their quantitative work. The stasis network methodology identified how their process confronted competing definitions of metrics, which impacted their sense of what was significant and ethically possible, when developing the goals for their report.
BOOK REVIEWS
· Nestwork:NewMaterialRhetoricsforPrecariousSpecies
Alexandra Gunnells
· WorksLikeaCharm:IncentiveRhetoricandtheEconomizationofEverydayLife
Oren Abeles
· Covid and … How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic
Brittany Smart
Tracy
Dr. Tracy Bridgeford
Editor in Chief, Technical Communication Quarterly
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Department of English
6001 Dodge Street
ASH 192A
Omaha, NE 68182
tbridgeford