Purpose: TikTok’s rise in popularity has invited creators across a broad spectrum of interests to contribute content to the platform, including non-expert, instructional subject matter. Previously, technical communication scholars have described ways to assess video instruction online, in relatively long-format lengths. Our project outlines a framework for assessing the video production qualities of instructional content across TikTok. Method: We performed a content analysis of existing frameworks and sets of heuristics for assessing long-format instructional videos. We then analyzed a set of instructional content found across the TikTok platform and analyzed them using previous frameworks. After comparing and contrasting, we developed a new framework for assessing short-format video instructional content. Results: After assessing long-format instructional video frameworks and instructional content found across TikTok, we found that many dimensions and heuristics from previous frameworks applied to short-format video. Unique to short-form video were the dimensions of tempo and level of detail, which describe the pacing of the video from a temporal perspective and the fidelity of instruction, respectively. Instruction on TikTok can take place without explicit step-by-step instruction. Conclusion: We found that many dimensions and heuristics from long-form frameworks carry over to short-form video, but there are features, social norms, and creative norms on TikTok that lend themselves well to “bite-sized” instruction.

Purpose: This article describes how the specialized, rhetorical aesthetic theory of form, posited by Kenneth Burke, highlights humanistic and artistic elements of technical communication exemplified in the technical workplace. A specialized way of understanding how types of communication build relationships between author and audience, the theory of form offers a unique way to contextualize how an artist-rhetor creates and fulfills audience desires, expectations, and appetites. Method: The authors first contextualize technical communication as a field of artistic and creative practice; they then expand that context using Burke???s rhetorical aesthetic theory of form as a framework for application and examine that application in the context of the technical workplace, using a self-reported case study from industry as an example. Results: The rhetorical aesthetic theory of form provides a way of rethinking technical communication practice, emphasizing the humanistic and artistic elements of technical communication in the workplace. Conclusion: Looking at technical communication with an interrelated view of rhetoric and aesthetics can provide scholars, teachers, and practitioners with new insights for how technical communicators can see themselves and their audiences as complex people who have the capacities for arguing, influencing, and persuading–and also with capacities for drama, story, feeling, creating, and being moved by art.

Purpose: This article seeks to provide a set of heuristics for technical communication, addressing the newfound challenges to game developers as a result of the seemingly permanent shift to hybrid and remote work in this industry. In particular, this piece offers developers tangible ways in which they can facilitate productive and equitable means of technical communications that account for the unique needs of this kind of work that now takes place in almost exclusively remote and hybrid working situations. Method: This piece relies on both survey and interview data collected from nearly 300 members of the Independent Game Developers Association (IGDA) and at various games-based conferences (e.g., the Game Developers Conference) over a period of two years through a partnership grant between York University and the IGDA. Results: The results noted two key findings: First, the majority of game developers do not want to or intend to ever return to a fully physical office setting. Second, the results indicate that the shift to remote work more often negatively impacted female and non-binary developers, most likely due to the additional caregiving responsibilities traditionally emplaced on these groups. Conclusion: Technical communication is a central part of the game development process and has become even more pivotal as developers continue to operate under remote and hybrid working conditions. As such, the heuristics developed from this data focus on addressing the needs of these groups so that the remote and hybrid workplaces can operate as equitably as possible in this new industry model.

Purpose: Communication privacy management (CPM) theory is a major theory explaining the tensions between disclosing and concealing private information in interpersonal communication. By considering differences in interpersonal and human-technology information disclosure and drawing on existing work related to privacy and technology, this article presents CPM theory as a broad theoretical framework for human-technology privacy boundary management. Method: This research employed a speculative theoretical approach by drawing on existing literature and synthesizing it to both apply and extend CPM theory’s propositions to human-technology privacy boundary management. Results: CPM theory can be applied to understand the dynamics of human-technology information disclosure and should incorporate technological literacy as a key consideration in human-technology privacy boundary management. Legal ties characterize human-technology privacy boundary coordination instead of social ties. Additionally, in human-technology information disclosure contexts, CPM theory should provide guidance regarding managing third parties that may gain access to information. Conclusion: CPM theory is the most comprehensive framework for how individuals manage privacy boundaries, be it in interpersonal or human-technology contexts. By considering technology as a property of technological actors instead of an actor itself, CPM theory in human-technology contexts becomes a flexible theoretical framework for understanding information disclosure and privacy boundary management, both for existing technologies (e.g., social media, online shopping platforms, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things) and future technologies.

Purpose: Prescriptivism–a concept concerned with “correctness in language use” (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2019, p. 8)–serves an important purpose when editors and other language professionals apply the findings from empirical linguistic studies to practical communication tasks (Oaks, 2021). Usage guides catalog usage rules, but they treat these rules with varying levels of prescriptivism. Therefore, advice varies across usage guides. This study empirically investigates levels of prescriptivism observed in usage guides. Method: Using a scale from 1 (minimally prescriptive) to 4 (maximally prescriptive), two raters coded the level of prescriptivism observed in entries for eight well-known usage problems (e.g., who/whom and lay/lie) from 11 current usage guides relating to American English. Based on the codes assigned to these entries, an overall prescriptivism index was calculated for each usage problem and usage guide. Results: A range in levels of prescriptivism was observed. Overall, the treatment of usage problems skewed high on the prescriptivism scale with six of the eight being treated as maximally prescriptive by at least two usage guides and six having mean indexes at or above the scale’s midpoint of 2.50. Similarly, seven of the 11 usage guides gave maximally prescriptive advice for at least one usage problem and eight had mean indexes at or above 2.50. While these findings indicate a bias toward prescriptive advice, a noteworthy amount of prescription-breaking advice was also observed. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that usage guides vary considerably in their levels of prescriptivism; therefore, writers and editors must critically consider which advice to follow.