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.

This thesis explores how metaphors can humanize a technical document and more effectively facilitate user comprehension. The frequent use of metaphor in technical communication reminds us that the discipline is highly creative and rhetorical. Theory demonstrates that a technical text involves interpretation and subjectivity during both its creation by the technical communicator and its application by the user. If employed carefully and skillfully, metaphor can be a powerful tool to ensure users' needs are met during this process. The primary goal of technical communication is to convey information to an audience as clearly and efficiently as possible. Because of the often complex nature of technical content, users are likely to feel alienated, overwhelmed, or simply uninterested if the information presented seems exceedingly unfamiliar or complicated. If users experience any of these reactions, they are inclined to abandon the document, automatically rendering it unsuccessful. I identify metaphor as a means to curtail such an occurrence. Using examples from a variety of technical communication genres, I illustrate how metaphors can humanize a technical document by establishing a strong link between the document and its users.

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This paper investigates the most effective ways of handling cultural differences in the Japanese-to-English game localization process. The thesis advocates for applying the Skopos theory of translation to game localization; analyzes how topics such as social issues, humor, fan translation, transcreation, and censorship have been handled in the past; and explores how international players react to developers' localization choices. It also includes interviews with three Japanese-to-English translators who have worked with major Japanese game companies to gain insight into how the industry operates today. Through the deconstruction of different aspects of Japanese-to-English localization, this analysis aims to help the game industry better fine-tune Japanese media to Western audiences while still sharing valuable aspects of Japanese culture. The thesis concludes that if Japanese game companies work to improve the localization process by considering more diverse international perspectives, hiring native speakers as translators, and approaching the English script as a creative endeavor in itself, they will be able to both broaden the minds of their global audiences and more effectively capitalize on the worldwide fervor for Japanese video games.

ClinicalTrials.gov is a database designed to help clinical researchers make their research publicly available. The clinical trials registered on the database each include a brief summary, which is meant to be a short description that the public can easily understand. In September 2022, ClinicalTrials.gov published a "Plain Language Checklist for Lay Brief Summaries" on their website, which identifies plain language best practices intended to help investigators craft summaries that can be readily understood by the public. This thesis assesses the impact of the checklist on the language use in the brief summaries in the year following the checklist's publication. The analysis examines 62 brief summaries for Phase III and IV clinical trials posted on ClinicalTrials.gov between September 26, 2022, and September 26, 2023. It focuses particularly on summaries associated with rheumatoid arthritis, knee replacement, and conjunctivitis to gauge how well they complied with 4 of the 19 criteria on the Plain Language Checklist: keeping sentences and paragraphs short, aiming for a 6th to 8th grade reading level, writing out acronyms on the first use, and providing both percentages and natural frequencies. It also examines rhetorical moves made in the summaries to address the use of jargon, key term definitions, headings, formatted lists, direct research questions, descriptions of study type, sentence fragments, and the placement of the purpose statement to see how these moves affected the plain language. Although the summaries tended to comply with the paragraph length guidelines, they did not comply with the sentence length, reading level, or acronym guidelines. The variation in compliance could be attributed to researchers' lack of awareness of the guidelines, lack of time to devote to creating brief summaries, or being too immersed in the field to imagine the needs of a lay audience. It could also be attributed to the National Institute of Health not enforcing the guidelines or to researchers not viewing the guidelines as being relevant.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary work that explores the intersection of humanities and technical communication by focusing on the presence and impact of software company workplace bias in technical professional communication. It focuses on workplace bias in technical communication because, when present, bias can impact the experiences that technical communicators and end-users (people who use the software) have with the software. This mixed-methods study consists of a survey, an interview, and a new diagram designed to help technical communicators mitigate biases in technical documentation. To understand better the presence and impact of bias in these workplace contexts, this study surveys and interviews technical communication professionals (TCPs) with software industry work experience. First, I introduce key relationships and terms that connect the software industry to technical communication, discuss the significance of workplace bias in technical communication, and provide an overview of the study, including its research questions, research methods, and design. Next, I present background based on a literature review, including defining and presenting workplace bias issues in the software industry and technical communication field. I also present intersectional feminism as the theoretical framework. Thereafter, I detail research methods, which include the mixed-methods design, strategies for a feminist research approach, and a detailed explanation of the survey and interview design. Next, I present survey and interview results and discuss implications from professional and scholarly technical communication lenses. Finally, I draw conclusions about workplace biases based not only on survey and interview data but also by discussing new intersectional themes that offer new bias-based perspectives and legitimize issues of intersectional feminism and social justice in technical communication.

This research examines the communication styles of five different generations: the Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and the Millennials. The study investigates how current events influence the attitudes of each generation. It explores workplace trends, the effects of new communication platforms, and the evolution of technology. The purpose of the study is to identify the unique approach to communication of each of these groups. The objective is to help organizations create a more efficient working environment by embracing the diverse qualities of the different generations. The study finds that Generation X, Generation Y, and the Millennials prefer to correspond via online forms of communication such as email and social networking sites while the Traditionalist and Baby Boomer generations typically prefer to in• person correspondence. Additionally, the study finds that the people of Generation X prefer to work individually while Baby Boomers, Generation Y, and the Millennials thrive in team environments. It concludes that organizations should strive to accommodate the different generations by assigning them to tasks that focus on their strengths.