Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

As a discipline and a set of practices, technical communication focuses on designing technical products through the effective implementation of usability to facilitate users in performing tasks with speed, accuracy, and satisfaction. This article proposes that designers in the Global North should consider the effective localization usability implementation in their products or systems so that social justice can be promoted in the Global South’s countries that import such products from the Global North. Using a purposeful sampling research method, this article shares findings from a study, emphasizing that technical products developed through participatory localization for usability might be in a better position to be used for promoting social justice and human rights in resource-constrained settings. The article discusses the implications of the findings, suggesting that northern products should be designed according to the usability expectations of local users in the Global South so that the North–South divide can be, at least, narrowed, if not eliminated.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case study challenges technical writing students to consider complex cultural circuits, or networks, that comprise a specific controversy. The students analyze the rhetorical situation, create new content that contributes to the ongoing discussion, and learn about audience through usability testing their multimodal projects.

American economist Paul Krugman has become a highly influential public intellectual in the social sciences. The natural and physical sciences need a public intellectual like Krugman to make more effective arguments for the existence and urgency of climate change, the benefits of vaccine use, and other pressing issues. To demonstrate how such a goal can be achieved, this article presents a rhetorical analysis of Krugman’s public intellectual writing in The New York Times from 2013 to 2016. The substantial public impact of this body of work stems from Krugman’s use of rhetorical strategies that are both similar to and—more importantly—a departure from strategies used by other well-known public intellectuals in the sciences.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.