Today's technical communicators enjoy an increasingly broader role and influence in the workplace, and are often given latitude to use engaging rhetoric and personal touches in many kinds of communications. Historical documents, particularly those that are substantially removed from our own era, can offer fresh approaches and insight into the enduring elements of successful communication. This study explores the technical writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and considers their usefulness to professionals today. Although the political writing of Franklin and Jefferson is more familiar, both men frequently wrote about scientific and technical subjects and were well-known in their day for these documents. Franklin created a captivating persona and arguments which carried emotional and logical appeal. Jefferson was a student of ancient rhetoric and applied classical principles of arrangement to guide readers. His fondness for statistical records led to a skill in presenting numerical data and other types of information in creative, efficient ways. By using tone, language, and description, both Franklin and Jefferson created technical narratives that are equally informative and aesthetically pleasing. The contemporary era of technical communication has been shaped by positivism, the plain language movement, and humanism, among other significant trends. Franklin's and Jefferson's approaches to technical communication both support and challenge the guiding philosophies of these movements. Their styles are reviewed in this study against the context of modern approaches. Opportunities for further historical study are also offered, including additional writings of our Founding Fathers and technical writing from the turn of the twentieth century.

Technical and professional communicators have in recent research been challenged to make significant contributions to the field of knowledge management, and to learn or create the new technologies allowing them to do so. The purpose of this dissertation is to make such a combined theoretical and applied contribution from the context of the emerging discipline of Texts and Technology. This dissertation explores the field of knowledge management (KM), particularly its relationship to the related study of artificial intelligence (AI), and then recommends a KM software application based on the principles of narratology and narrative information exchange. The focus of knowledge is shifted from the reductive approach of data and information to a holistic approach of meaning and the way people make sense of complex events as experiences expressed in stories. Such an analysis requires a discussion of the evolution of intelligent systems and narrative theory as well as an examination of existing computerized and non-computerized storytelling systems. After a thorough discussion of these issues, an original software program that is used to collect, analyze, and distribute thematic stories within any hierarchical organization is modeled, exemplified, and explained in detail.

Traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) is based on 'cold' models of user cognition; that is, models of users as purely rational beings based on the information processing metaphor; however, an emerging perspective suggests that for the field of HCI to mature, its practitioners must adopt models of users that consider broader human needs and capabilities. Affective design is an umbrella term for research and practice being conducted in diverse domains, all with the common thread of integrating emotional aspects of use into the creation of information products. This thesis provides a review of the current state of the art in affective design research and practice to technical communicators and others involved in traditional HCI and usability enterprises. This paper is motivated by the developing technologies and the growing complexity of interaction that demand a more robust notion of HCI that incorporates affect in an augmented and holistic representation of the user and situated use.

This thesis seeks to develop a pedagogy for teaching academic writing to nonnative graduate students of technical disciplines in order to give them the skills they need to write papers that they can submit to academic journals and conferences, thereby advancing their careers and gaining recognition for their academic institutions. The work draws on research from the fields of technical communication and second-language acquisition in order to develop pedagogical principles for a class in which nonnative technical graduate students write an academic paper that they can submit for publication. The thesis proposes an approach that incorporates content-based instruction, certain plain language principles, and guided drafting, and then discusses some specifics of a potential class based on those conclusions.

This thesis presents an alternate career path for technical communicators in the area of content marketing and expands on the ethical and goal-related issues associated with a career change to a marketing-focused role. Many of the skills necessary for technical communication are transferable to marketing communication roles; however, a successful career change requires that technical communicators understand how the ethical values and goals of marketing professionals can differ from those of technical communicators. Through a detailed literature review and autoethnographic study, this thesis discusses the performance goals of marketing professionals to determine how these clash with those of technical communicators. This study also discusses the ethical values of technical communicators and marketing professionals, and how these values are shaped by their unique job functions. The overall goal is to determine how this affects the technical communicator working with content marketing. After combining the data available in the literature and the data gathered from the autoethnographic study, this study suggests that due to the differing job functions and training received by technical communicators and marketing professionals, ethically charged situations and ethically questionable practices are likely to be viewed under different perspectives by each professional. This can lead to vastly different perspectives on a particular situation and result in the two groups having vastly different ideas in regard to how ethical-decision making should proceed.

Online collaborations are more prevalent in society due to electronic communication allowing students and professionals to communicate with each other, without needing to spend time or money traveling. The lack of visual cues in electronic communication means writing styles primarily set the tone of a message. A group member‟s gender can affect his or her writing style and what he or she assumes about the message. The differing writing styles and potential gender bias can cause misunderstandings, which delay projects and sometimes lead to ostracizing a group member. The gender composition of an online collaboration, therefore, can have a positive or negative effect on a project. This study helps technical communicators understand how to manage online collaborations effectively to produce a successful project. The study explains how the effects of gender composition on a project are influenced by electronic communication, gender roles, and online collaborations. Society-imposed gender roles include differing writing styles for each gender causing gender bias in both writing and reading electronic messages. Group members, monitors, and project managers must take care in managing online collaborations due to the differences in each gender‟s communication style, and differences in gender roles and expectations for multinational online collaborations. The study shows mixed-gender collaborations have increased chances of misunderstandings because of the differing communication styles of each gender compared to same-gender collaborations. However, the advantages of mixed-gender collaborations outweigh the disadvantages due to the variety of ideas, motivations, and expectations. Technical communicators understanding how all the major topics relate together to influence a iv collaboration are better able to manage an online collaboration and reduce the chances of misunderstandings to create a successful project.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, even though 97% of classrooms have at least one instructional computer available, only 40% of teachers in public schools (including elementary and secondary) report using computers in the classroom often. My project aims to illustrate the barriers that are keeping K-12 teachers from integrating technology in their classrooms, such as the lack of availability for training, teacher’s lack of knowledge or schooling, or a lack of IT support. It also discusses possible solutions to the problem, such as teacher training and better resources. By assessing the Level of Technology Integration, or LoTi, we can learn how much or how often a teacher is using technology in a classroom. My project consists of conducting a research study that will aim to reinforce the hypothesis that the LoTi in K- 12 schools is lower than expected, considering the availability of computers and technology. By learning the severity of the obstacles teachers face, we can work on possible solutions. The findings of this study were that teachers face barriers that inhibit them from implementing technology no matter what type of school environment they are in. These barriers come from lack of time, access, but most strongly from the self-efficacy of the teachers. Teachers need professional development and training to develop their skills and confidence, which will positively impact students, the school, and the overall education system.

Within the realm of technical communication, humor has often been regarded as an unnecessary or risky rhetorical device that can negatively impact the credibility of a document. While many other professional fields, such as medicine, computer technology fields, or business have used humor, and humor continues to crop up in "user as producer" documentation, technical writing continues to approach humor cautiously and with little theoretical guidance. In order to fully understand how humor functions, it is important to understand the main theories of humor: superiority, relief, and incongruity. It is also important to understand how humor functions, by looking at Meyer’s four functions of humor: identification, clarification, enforcement, and differentiation. Some primary and secondary manuals have successfully used a rhetorical strategy incorporating humor. Google uses a persona and situated ethos that projects a sense of fun and humor, and incorporates some humor into their documentation. The ""For Dummies"" series is well known and recognized for the situated ethos of providing fun, entertaining direction, while individual authors choose a specific invented ethos for each book written. The three theories of humor and four functions of humor can be applied to humor used in Google and ""For Dummies"". This demonstration better highlights how humor operates and functions in communication, and can provide technical communicators with a tool to use when considering the application of humor in documentation. The application further highlights the need for greater understanding of how humor affects the credibility and success of documentation.

This thesis examines the ethical challenges faced by technical communicators working in global virtual teams. Virtual teams usage are becoming increasingly more popular and diverse. As a result, it is valuable for technical communicators to understand and recognize the challenges that are faced within global virtual teams in order to find solutions and preventive measures for these challenges. The ethical challenges present in global virtual teams were determined by examining the literature on virtual teams and intercultural ethics and conducting a survey of practicing technical communicators who have experience in virtual teams. The purpose of the survey was to determine the ethical challenges that are present for technical communicators and how these issues were resolved. The survey results reveal valuable approaches to resolving and preventing ethical challenges in virtual teams. This thesis contributes to a better understanding of virtual teams and intercultural ethics and examines the ethical challenges that are faced by technical communicators. Furthermore, the thesis presents preventive measures for addressing ethical challenges. Finally, the thesis also provides suggestions for future research into the ethical challenges that are faced within global virtual teams, particularly those related to cultural differences.

In this dissertation, I analyze the organizational and political constraints that technical writers encounter when dealing with complex rhetorical situations, particularly within risk-management discourse. I ground my research in case studies of safety briefings that airlines provide to their passengers because these important documents have long been regarded as ineffective, yet they ve gone largely unchanged in the last 20 years. Airlines are required to produce these safety briefings, which must satisfy multiple audiences, such as corporate executives, federal safety inspectors, flight attendants, and passengers. Because space and time are limited when presenting safety information to passengers, the technical writers must negotiate constraints related to issues such as format, budget, audience education and language, passenger perceptions/fears, reproducibility, and corporate image/branding to name a few. The writers have to negotiate these constraints while presenting important (and potentially alarming) information in a way that s as informative, realistic, and tasteful as possible. But such constraints aren t unique to the airline industry. Once they enter the profession, many writing students will experience complex rhetorical situations that constrain their abilities to produce effective documentation; therefore, I am looking at the theories and skills that we re teaching our future technical communicators for coping with such situations. By applying writing-style and visual-cultural analyses to a set of documents, I demonstrate a methodology for analyzing complex rhetorical situations. I conclude by proposing a pedagogy that teachers of technical communication can employ for helping students assess and work within complex rhetorical situations, and I offer suggestions for implementing such practices in the classroom.