This collection offers a comprehensive overview of approaches to teaching the complex subject of content management. The 12 chapters define and explain content management and its accompanying competencies, providing teaching examples in areas including content strategy, topic-based writing, usability studies, and social media. The book covers tasks associated with content management such as analyzing audiences and using information architecture languages including XML and DITA. It highlights the communal aspects of content management, focusing on the work of writing stewardship and project management, and the characteristics of content management in global contexts. It concludes with a look to the future and the forces that shape content management today. The editor situates the collection within a pedagogical exigency, providing sound instructional approaches to teaching content management from a rhetorical perspective. The book is an essential resource for both instructors new to teaching technical and professional communication, and experienced instructors who are interested in upgrading their pedagogies to include content management.

Teaching Professional and Technical Communication guides new instructors in teaching professional and technical communication (PTC). The essays in this volume provide theoretical and applied discussions about the teaching of this diverse subject, including relevant pedagogical approaches, how to apply practical aspects of PTC theory, and how to design assignments. This practicum features chapters by prominent PTC scholars and teachers on rhetoric, style, ethics, design, usability, genre, and other central concerns of PTC programs. Each chapter includes a scenario or personal narrative of teaching a particular topic, provides a theoretical basis for interpreting the narrative, illustrates the practical aspects of the approach, describes relevant assignments, and presents a list of questions to prompt pedagogical discussions. Teaching Professional and Technical Communication is not a compendium of best practices but instead offers a practical collection of rich, detailed narratives that show inexperienced PTC instructors how to work most effectively in the classroom. Contributors: Pam Estes Brewer, Eva Brumberger, Dave Clark, Paul Dombrowski, James M. Dubinsky, Peter S. England, David K. Farkas, Brent Henze, Tharon W. Howard, Dan Jones, Karla Saari Kitalong, Traci Nathans-Kelly, Christine G. Nicometo, Kirk St.Amant

This practical text offers a research-based account of the technical communication profession and its practice, outlining emergent touchpoints of this fast-changing field while highlighting its diversity. Through research on the history and the globalization of technical communication and up-to-date industry analysis, including first-hand narratives from industry practitioners, this book brings together common threads through the industry, suggests future trends, and points toward strategic routes for development. Vignettes from the workplace and examples of industry practice provide tangible insights into the different paths and realities of the field, furnishing readers with a range of entry routes and potential career sectors, workplace communities, daily activities, and futures. This approach is central to helping readers understand the diverse competencies of technical communicators in the modern, globalized economy. The Profession and Practice of Technical Communication provides essential guidance for students, early professionals, and lateral entrants to the profession and can be used as a textbook for technical communication courses.

This collection of articles is the first attempt by academics and professional writers to delve into the world of content management systems. The knowledge economy's greatest asset and primary problem is information management: finding it, validating it, re-purposing it, keeping it current, and keeping it safe. In the last few years content management software has become as common as word-processing software was five years ago. But unlike word processors, which are designed for single authorization and local storage, content management systems are designed to accommodate large-scale information production, with many authors providing many different pieces of information kept in a web-accessible database, any piece of which might find its way into electronic documents that the author doesn't even know exist. These software systems are complex, to say the least, and their impact on the field of writing will be immense.

This collection calls for improved technical communication for the public through an embodied, situated understanding of environmental risk that promotes social justice. In addition to providing a series of chapters about recent issues on risk communication, this volume offers a diverse look at methodological practices for students, researchers, and practitioners looking to address embodied aspects of crisis and risk that incorporate UX, storytelling, and dynamic text. It includes chapters that bring embodiment to the forefront of risk communication, highlighting the cycle of content creation, dissemination, public response and decision making, continuing iterations of educational efforts, and recovery, toward increasing adaptive capacity as a whole. In addition, this work directs necessary attention to overcoming perceptual difficulties, memory lapses, definitional differences, access issues, and pedagogical problems in the communication of risks to diverse publics. This collection is essential reading for scholars and can be used as a supplemental text or casebook for courses in technical communication, environmental communication, risk and crisis communication, science communication, and public health.

This comprehensive text provides a how-to guide for content strategy, enabling students and professionals to understand and master the skills needed to develop and manage technical content in a range of professional contexts. The landscape of technical communication has been revolutionized by emerging technologies such as content management systems, open-source information architecture, and application programming interfaces that change the ways professionals create, edit, manage, and deliver content. This textbook helps students and professionals develop relevant skills for this changing marketplace. It takes readers through essential skills including audience analysis; content auditing; assembling content strategy plans; collaborating with other content developers; identifying appropriate channels of communication; and designing, delivering, and maintaining genres appropriate to those channels. It contains knowledge and best practices gleaned from decades of research and practice in content strategy and provides its audience with a thorough introductory text in this essential area. Content Strategy works as a core or supplemental textbook for undergraduate and graduate classes, as well as certification courses, in content strategy, content management, and technical communication. It also provides an accessible introduction for professionals looking to develop their skills and knowledge.

This book explicates the relationships between design thinking, critical making, and socially responsive technical communication. It leverages the recent technology-powered DIY culture called "the Maker Movement" to identify how citizen innovation can inform cutting-edge social innovation that advocates for equitable change and progress on today’s "wicked" problems. After offering a succinct account of the origin and recent history of design thinking, along with its connections to the design paradigm in writing studies, the book analyzes maker culture and its influences on innovation and education through an ethnographic study of three academic makerspaces. It offers opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical changemaking in technical communication students and practitioners, showcasing examples of socially responsive innovation and expert interviews that urge a disciplinary attention to social justice advocacy and an embrace of the design-thinking principle of radical collaboration. The value of design thinking methodologies for teaching and practicing socially responsible technical communication are demonstrated as the author argues for a future in the field that sees its constituents as leaders in radical innovation to solve wicked social problems. This book is essential reading for instructors, students, and practitioners of technical communication, and can be used as a supplemental text for graduate and undergraduate courses in usability and user-centered design and research.

This book enables readers to interrogate the technical, rhetorical, theoretical, and socio-ethical challenges and opportunities involved in the development and adoption of augmentation technologies and artificial intelligence. The core of our human experience and identity is forever affected by the rise of augmentation technologies that enhance human capability or productivity. These technologies can add cognitive, physical, sensory, and emotional enhancements to the body or environment. This book demonstrates the benefits, risks, and relevance of emerging augmentation technologies such as brain–computer interaction devices for cognitive enhancement; robots marketed to improve human social interaction; wearables that extend human senses, augment creative abilities, or overcome physical limitations; implantables that amplify intelligence or memory; and devices, AI generators, or algorithms for emotional augmentation. It allows scholars and professionals to understand the impact of these technologies, improve digital and AI literacy, and practice new methods for their design and adoption. This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and professionals in fields including technical communication, UX design, computer science, human factors, information technology, sociology of technology, and ethics. Artifacts and supplemental resources for research and teaching can be found at https://fabricofdigitallife.com and www.routledge.com/9781032263755.

The questions regarding specialized languages are important topics in applied linguistics research. A growing number of areas witness the current trend of automation, robotization and artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, converting information into a form that can be understood by machines is of utmost importance in the future. These three technological advancements require the precise description of languages, consequently, the systematic description of the features of specialized languages is one of the current tasks of linguistics. This book discusses the changed environment of technical communication, the processes, and the legal and standardization backgrounds. The authors delved into the typological, semantic and lexical features of technical texts in the field of technical documentation, and also focused on research related to terminology, translation and text analysis, as well as their relevance in higher education in connection with documentation, content development and technical writing.

This book analyzes the communication and writing strategies necessary to craft and maintain ongoing crowdfunding campaigns to support businesses, nonprofits, artists, and others. Drawing on theory from technical communication and user experience, as well as mixed methods research, and text mining, this book takes an evidence-based approach to understanding the successes and failures of crowdfunding campaigns. It examines campaigns across a range of platforms, including Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, and Patreon. The book breaks down successful exemplar campaigns that have proven long-term success to show what has worked and why, giving readers a solid foundation to research and create a campaign of their own. Sustainable Crowdfunding serves as a supplemental text for courses in technical and professional communication, user experience, communication research methods, and digital marketing, and will be of interest to both communication scholars and advanced crowdfunding professionals. Online interactive tools for qualitative and quantitative analysis are available at https://rhetoricaldata.com. A stop word appendix for the book can be accessed at www.routledge.com/9781032312736