The Technical World of Warcraft explores the various technical instruction elements of World of Warcraft, more specifically observing issues faced by players who take on content at the highest level. The thesis raises the problem of the in-game technical documentation being utterly ineffective for the aforementioned players, causing them to create their own technical documents. While observing the environment found exclusively within the game, research from Jennifer DeWinter and Ryan Moeller, Mark Chen, Sarah Bishop, and more, is used to analyze the game's instructional elements from a critical angle. Several job listings from other major game development companies are also used to bring forward the idea that Activision-Blizzard does not have technical communicators creating their own in-game technical instruction. By considering these factors, the study calls attention to an area within the gaming industry that technical communicators could provide a great benefit and create better support for those who do enjoy video games.

While the field of writing studies has studied digital writing as a response to multiple calls for more research on digital forms of writing, research on hashtags has yet to build bridges between different disciplines' approaches to studying the uses and effects of hashtags. This dissertation builds that bridge in its interdisciplinary approach to the study of hashtags by focusing on how hashtags can be fully appreciated at the intersection of the fields of information research, linguistics, rhetoric, ethics, writing studies, new media studies, and discourse studies. Hashtags are writing innovations that perform unique digital functions rhetorically while still hearkening back to functions of both print and oral rhetorical traditions. Hashtags function linguistically as indicators of semantic meaning; additionally, hashtags also perform the role of search queries on social media, retrieving texts that include the same hashtag. Information researchers refer to the relationship between a search query and its results using the term "aboutness" (Kehoe and Gee, 2011). By considering how hashtags have an aboutness, the humanities can call upon information research to better understand the digital aspects of the hashtag's search function. Especially when hashtags are used to organize discourse, aboutness has an effect on how a discourse community's agendas and goals are expressed, as well as framing what is relevant and irrelevant to the discourse. As digital activists increasingly use hashtags to organize and circulate the goals of their discourse communities, knowledge of ethical strategies for hashtag use will help to better preserve a relevant aboutness for their discourse while enabling them to better leverage their hashtag for circulation. In this dissertation, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Twitter discourse that used #OrlandoStrong over the five-month period before the first anniversary of the Pulse shooting, I trace how the #OrlandoStrong discourse community used innovative rhetorical strategies to combat irrelevant content from ambiguating their discourse space. In Chapter One, I acknowledge the call from scholars to study digital tools and briefly describe the history of the Pulse shooting, reflecting on non-digital texts that employed #OrlandoStrong as memorials in the Orlando area. In Chapter Two, I focus on the literature surrounding hashtags, discourse, aboutness, intertextuality, hashtag activism, and informational compositions. In Chapter Three, I provide an overview of the stages of grounded theory methodology and the implications of critical discourse analysis before I detail how I approached the collection, coding, and analysis of the #OrlandoStrong Tweets I studied. The results of my study are reported in Chapter Four, offering examples of Tweets that were important to understanding how the discourse space became ambiguous through the use of hashtags. In Chapter Five, I reflect on ethical approaches to understanding the consequences of hashtag use, and then I offer an ethical recommendation for hashtag use by hashtag activists. I conclude Chapter Five with an example of a classroom activity that allows students to use hashtags to better understand the relationship between aboutness, (dis)ambiguation, discourse communities, and ethics. This classroom activity is provided with the hope that instructors from different disciplines will be able to provide ethical recommendations to future activists who may benefit from these rhetorical strategies.

Since being named as one of the BRICs nations by Goldman Sachs in 2003, Brazil has gained global attention for its rapid development. Under the leadership of their two latest Presidents, Lula and Dilma Rousseff, Brazil has tried to capitalize on their substantial economic potential with the hope of developing their own nation in the long run. This culminated in Brazil being awarded the two megaevents, the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, that were supposed to serve as symbols for the advancement and international relevance of Brazil. Today Brazil faces an internal struggle as they try to preserve their economic potential while the government tries to keep hold of the trust of the nation. The last few years have shown growth within Brazil, but every positive step domestically seems to come with dramatic repercussions. While Brazil may not have the same potential as it did in 2003, there is still much room for economic growth, both domestically and internationally. It is now the job of the government to shift their focus back to the domestic sphere in order to ensure that the progress the nation has made to become their regional and global power is not undone by domestic turmoil.

Digital texts present significant challenges to technical communicators in terms of genre and persona. Because of the ubiquity of electronic media, we increasingly embrace digital formats over print-based documents. As a result, technical communicators must now devise the means to cue audiences to the purposes of digital documents in any given discourse community. We can only convey meaning to our Internet audiences through the use of appropriate standards and elements recognizable generic forms and rhetorical cues that we designate as conventions in specific digital discourse. Just as we use file and folder office metaphors for information stored on computers, digital activist communities use campaign metaphors to signal the intentions of their electronic pages. Although these electronic pages, such as Take Action, Donate, Lobby, and Speak Out, have the same names as their print-based counterparts, they represent digital generic forms, such as letters, flyers, and receivables, which occur in a virtual world rather than genres that exist in a physical community. If we examine activist sites in terms of digital-format texts, we can become familiar with the genre and forms of activist sites and determine site-visitor responses to the personas of the sites, which will help us to determine our ability to inform our audiences and call them to action. This study looks at six activist websites in terms of genre and persona to identify electronic-text conventions and forms that must be recognizable to site visitors in order for digital activists to effectively communicate. Activist organizations were among the first to understand the power of digital media as tools to disseminate information, lobby decision-makers, boycott corporations, broadcast opportunities for real and virtual legal protests and civil disobedience, and engage in subversive activities. Activist websites already use a number of text forms and visual rhetorical elements to cue the site visitor; many of these text forms are common to the activist websites examined for this thesis and constitute an identifiable and distinct genre. In terms of persona, this study examines the electronic public self of activist websites. The arena is a metaphor for the virtual world; the rhetors are the activist sites; and the debate the intertextual conversation is the digital discourse that occurs among website users, activist sites, and targets. By categorizing activist sites in terms of their primary activities helping, protest, and revolutionary - we determine which elements of genre repeat according to categories and we ultimately gauge the intensity of the outcome that the website rhetor hopes to create in the user. Designers and owners of activist sites have goals which can only be reached by means of effective, well-considered, digital genre and persona. Because many technical communicators and students of technical communication first experience the profession through service learning for a nongovernmental organization often an activist organization this study will help those technical communicators to reconsider their own assumptions about genre and persona and may lead those students to understand the importance of privileging genre and persona when designing and redesigning digital texts. This study provides a framework that both experienced and new technical communicators can apply to documents in order to (1) cue site visitors to the meaning of electronic texts and (2) construct effective public personas in the digital forum.

XML is quickly being utilized in the field of technical communication to transfer information from database to person and company to company. Often communicators will structure information without a second thought of how or why certain tags are used to mark up the information. Because the company or a manual says to use those tags, the communicator does so. However, if professionals want to unlock the true potential of XML for better sharing of information across platforms, they need to understand the effects the technology using XML as well as political and cultural factors have on the tags being used. This thesis reviewed literature from multiple fields utilizing XML to find how tag choices can be influenced. XML allows for the sharing of information across multiple platforms and databases. Because of this efficiency, XML is utilized by many technologies. Often communicators must tag information so that the technologies can find the marked up information; therefore, technologies like single sourcing, data mining, and knowledge management influence the types of tags created. Additionally, cultural and political influences are analyzed to see how they play a role in determining what tags are used and created for specific documents. The thesis concludes with predictions on the future of XML and the technological, political, and cultural influences associated with XML tag sets based on information found within the thesis.

While research has been conducted on social media, few comparisons have been made in regards to the privacy issues that exist within the most common social media networks, such as Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. Most research has concentrated on technical issues with the networks and on the effects of social media in fields such as medicine, law, and science. Although the effects on these fields are beneficial to the people related to them, few studies have shown how everyday users are affected by the use of social media. Social media networks affect the privacy of users because the networks control what happens to user contact information, posts, and other delicate disclosures that users make on those networks. Social media networks also have the ability to sync with phone and tablet applications. Because the use of these applications requires additional contact information from users, social media networks are entrusted with keeping user information secure. This paper analyzes newspaper articles, magazine articles, and research papers pertaining to social media to determine what effects social media has on the user's privacy and how much trust should be placed in social media networks such as Facebook. It provides a comprehensive view of the most used social media networks in 2012 and offers methods and suggestions for users to help protect themselves against privacy invasion.

This text highlights the small Japanese community in New Orleans, along with its cultural traditions.

Professional writing students must analyze communications in multiple modalities, on page or screen. This project argues that student analysts benefit from using articulated heuristics, summaries of articles, books, or theories in chart form that remain in the visual field with the communication to be analyzed. Keeping the heuristic in view reduces students' cognitive load by narrowing the search for solution to the categories in the heuristic. These heuristics, often one page or one screen, contain key words, phrases, or questions that allow students to approach analysis from experts' points of view at more than one level of complexity. Students locate instantiations of the categories in the communication analyzed, incorporating the category/instantiation pairs into personal schemas for analysis. As students classify communications, relate parts together and to other communications, and perform operations on the content, they see how communication achieves its meaning and formulate appropriate responses. Rather than rely on one all-purpose heuristic, this dissertation presents a range of heuristics reflecting rhetorical, discourse, linguistic, usability, and visual strategies that enable students to critique both form and function in communication. The heuristics reflect a systematically ordered workplace context, articulate an appropriate and specific theory for the situation, interface with other heuristic systems for depth and efficacy, and instantiate the categories at some helpful secondary level of complexity. To theorize the visual nature of the heuristic chart displays, I employ the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, working through the implications of chart construction as I diagram Peirce's theory of diagrammatic iconicity.

Plain language is defined in a variety of ways, but is generally understood to refer to language and design strategies that make texts easier for target audiences to understand and use. Research has helped demonstrate that plain language strategies work, not only to improve reader comprehension, but also to save individuals and organizations time and money. Most plain language research focuses on the outcomes of plain language texts; however, there are a variety of complex processes that happen behind the scenes as these texts are produced. To better understand the complexity of plain language work and the challenges of producing these texts, this dissertation studies plain language using rhetorical and sociolinguistic theories. This framework allows us to see how plain language produces meaning within complex social and cultural contexts. Using the rhetorical triangle as an organizing framework, this dissertation proposes three models of research for studying plain language, each emphasizing a different part of the triangle: readers, writers, and texts.

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