Communicating the “Write” Values

Abstract

Computer-aided text analysis has been increasingly recognized as a valuable tool in professional and technical communications (PTC) pedagogy. This research paper explores how such methods can be extended to the less-frequently addressed area of instructor training. It will primarily discuss the development of a methodological pipeline that uses the computational rhetorical analysis platform DocuScope to foster writing instructors' rhetorical awareness of the genres they teach and evaluate, and then propose the value of this pipeline specifically within PTC instructor training settings. While this paper mainly addresses pedagogical applications, the developed methodology also has implications for the workplace, as it can be modified for industry tutorials or training modules. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Education; Computer-assisted instruction; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design process and methods; Activity centered design; • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence ∼Natural language processing.

Automating Research in Business and Technical Communication: Large Language Models as Qualitative Coders

“…By demonstrating how genres are enacted through units such as moves, researchers gain not only insight into the rhetorical constitution of genres but also knowledge about the community values, expectations, and problem spaces that genre usage is intended to address. Genre coding is an established research methodology in the fields of rhetoric (Grabill & Pigg, 2012;Kane, 2020;Larson et al, 2016;Omizo, Clark et al, 2019;Omizo, Meeks et al, 2021;Propen & Lay Schuster, 2010), writing studies (Madden & Tarabochia, 2021), and English for specific (Flowerdew, 2016) and academic purposes (Chang & Kuo, 2011;Flowerdew, 2000). In BTC, genre coding has been used to study the contrasting feedback given by novice and expert communities (Dannels & Martin, 2008) and English and Chinese call centers (Xu et al, 2010), artifactual analysis of professional writing genres such as multimodal crowdsourced proposals (Feng et al, 2023), content marketing materials such as websites and portfolios (Wall & Spinuzzi, 2018), job rejection letters (Thominet, 2020), science and engineering Kickstarter proposals (Mehlenbacher, 2017), and industry white papers (Campbell & Naidoo, 2017), with the latter three studies adopting what has become known as Swalesean move analysis.…”