This fully revised edition provides a practical introduction to research methods for anyone conducting and critically reading technical communication research. The first section discusses the role of research in technical communication and explains in plain language how to conduct and report such research. It covers both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as surveys, usability studies, and literature reviews. The second section presents a collection of research articles that serve as exemplars of these major types of research projects, each followed by commentary breaking down how it corresponds to the information on that research type. In addition to five new chapters of exemplars and commentaries, this second edition contains a new chapter on usability studies. This book is an essential introduction to research methods for students of technical communication and for industry professionals who need to conduct and engage with research on the job.

This book explores the language and literacy practices which sustain transnational migration across generations and across traditional boundaries such as school and home. The author has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and the UK to study migration between the two countries. Individuals' access to the dominant literacies of migration are contrasted with the vernacular practices which migrants take up at home as part of their digital literacies. The study explores the blurring of boundaries between home and school as well as the blurring of boundaries between language varieties. Tracing access to literacy in this way also shines a light on the literacy mediators migrants turn to for help with English language learning and when trying to access the bureaucratic literacies of migration. The study ends by exploring how migrants use all of their language resources, not just English, to fit into their new homes once they have arrived in the UK.

Learn the secrets of effective communication from the most popular book in the world for teaching conversation skills - almost one million copies sold! Fully updated for the 2020s, Conversationally Speaking provides proven communication strategies, based on hundreds of research studies, as well as the authors' own experience teaching conversation workshops. Now you can use this expertise to get more out of your everyday interactions with family, friends, and coworkers. Everybody thinks that some people are born with the "gift of gab" and some people aren't. But the truth is there is no "gift of gab." People who are good at conversation just know a few simple skills that anyone can learn. This book will teach you those skills. With Conversationally Speaking, you will learn how to: Ask the kind of questions that promote conversation Interest people in what you have to say Achieve deeper levels of understanding and intimacy Handle criticism constructively Overcome shyness and become more confident Listen so others will be encouraged to talk to you Find out why Toastmaster Magazine calls Conversationally Speaking "the classic how-to book in social communication" and why Dr. Aaron Beck, whose work has had a major influence on thousands of psychologists, calls it "of great value for people who want to sharpen their skills in interpersonal relations."

Ethos, Logos, and Perspective represents the first comprehensive study of late Byzantine court rhetorical praise as a general phenomenon surfacing in many types of rhetorical epideictic compositions dating from the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries: panegyrics, encomia, city descriptions, encomiastic verses, or letters. The aim of this book is to reconstruct the two perspectives, idealism and pragmatism, that shaped authorial choices in matters of rhetorical style and composition. This study uncovers a little-known period in the history of Byzantine rhetoric. Proceeding from a nuanced understanding of the ancient concepts of ethos and logos, it analyzes the rhetoric of Byzantine praise in a modern theoretical framework. Unlike other previous studies of Byzantine rhetoric, the present research traces the structures and meanings that ultimately influenced the political attitudes and values circulating in the last century of Byzantine history. Another feature of this book is that it offers translations and discussions of important passages from the late Byzantine rhetoric, a corpus of texts that only recently has started to receive attention. This book is addressed to both a specialized audience who is interested in a new approach to Byzantine literary culture as well as to students who readers will become acquainted with and how various praise techniques and themes permeated other aspects of Byzantine literary culture like moral and spiritual advice. In addition, readers will also find informative approaches on the main authors and genres of late Byzantine rhetoric.

This book brings into dialogue approaches from anthropology, sociology, visual art, theatre, and literature to question what kinds of relations, frames and politics constitute pain across disciplines and methodologies. Each chapter offers a unique window onto the notoriously difficult problem of how pain is defined and communicated. The contributors reimagine the value of images and photography, poetry, history, drama, stories and interviews, not as 'better' representations of the pain experience, but as devices to navigate the complexity of pain across different physical, social, and intersubjective domains. This innovative collection provides a new access point to the phenomenon of pain and the materialities, affects, structures and institutions that constitute it. This book will appeal to readers seeking to better understand pain's complexity and the social and affective ecologies through which pain is known, communicated and lived.

In the rapidly-changing world of the Internet and the Web, theory and research struggle to keep up with technological, social, and economic developments. In education in particular, a proliferation of novel practices, applications, and forms -- from bulletin boards to Webcasts, from online educational games to open educational resources -- have come to be addressed under the rubric of «e-learning. In response to these phenomena, Re-thinking E-Learning Research introduces a number of research frameworks and methodologies relevant to e-learning. The book outlines methods for the analysis of content, narrative, genre, discourse, hermeneutic-phenomenological investigation, and critical and historical inquiry. It provides examples of pairings of method and subject matter that include narrative research into the adaptation of blogs in a classroom setting; the discursive-psychological analysis of student conversations with artificially intelligent agents; a genre analysis of an online discussion; and a phenomeno-logical study of online mathematics puzzles. Introducing practical applications and spanning a wide range of the possibilities for e-learning, this book will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers in e-learning.

This open access book discusses how cultural literacy can be taught and learned through creative practices. It approaches cultural literacy as a dialogic social process based on learning and gaining knowledge through emphatic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction. The book focuses on meaning-making in children and young people's visual and multimodal artefacts created by students aged 5-15 as an outcome of the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme implemented in schools in Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, and the UK. The lessons in the program address different social and cultural themes, ranging from one's cultural attachments to being part of a community and engaging more broadly in society. The artefacts are explored through data-driven content analysis and self-reflexive and collaborative interpretation and discussed through multimodality and a sociocultural approach to children's visual expression. This interdisciplinary volume draws on cultural studies, communication studies, art education, and educational sciences.

Knowing what to say in certain situations is important. But how we say things is important, too. This book introduces young learners to the concept of communication. Engage students in reading as they develop their comprehension and literacy skills and learn basic concepts. Featuring exciting TIME For Kids content, this full-color book will keep students reading from cover to cover. Aligned to state and national standards, this text introduces students to simple informational text features including a glossary, vocabulary list, and bold font.

Surfing, Street Skateboarding, Performance, and Space: On Board Motility draws from critical cultural studies, political philosophy, postcolonial studies, urban sociology, and poststructuralist theory in the context of human communication and performance to construct an epistemology of riding boards. This book ponders why we move the way we do and examines the ways in which movements communicate, developing, as a result, a theoretical perspective or board motility that is gestural and fluid, moving in relation to shifting social and physical landscapes. By combining the discourses and practices of critical theory and physical movement, this text presents a sustained analysis of radical political philosophy. In the book the symbolic narratives associated with each physical practice are deconstructed as their theoretical counterparts are thoroughly established. Then, through performance, the author narrows the divide between these two forms of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, outlining and embodying an ontological and epistemological stoke in the process that emerges from riding boards, on both waves and streets.

Academia can be a lonely place, especially for those people who are members of marginalized communities. Although at its core institutions of higher education are supposed to be places for knowledge production, exchange and transformation, they can also be the source of anxiety, confusion, and hurt. Effective mentoring helps to provide guidance and support and can ease the transition to and success in higher education. In this book the authors conceptualize mentoring in the context of critical communication pedagogy and intercultural communication pedagogy. Each chapter employs a critical and cultural lens to mentoring and offers discussions about how our cultural identities or intercultural communication experiences impact our mentoring. It is separated into two major sections. The chapters in "Mentoring and International Experiences" analyze unique situations that international students face in higher education and how effective mentoring can guide these students through academic and life challenges. The second section, "Mentoring and Cultural Contexts," focuses on diverse cultural settings within the higher educational system in the United States and on historically marginalized students and/or faculty. This edited book will be helpful for various audiences. First, it provides guidance for graduate students, faculty and staff members who are asked to mentor others of diverse backgrounds. Second, it also helps diverse students and faculty to better understand the role of mentoring. And third, it gives ideas on what to do in successful international/intercultural mentor-mentee relationships. "Mentoring in Intercultural and International Contexts provides compelling examples of critical mentoring partnerships and programs that successfully assist vulnerable students to navigate systemic disadvantages withing the academy. This book is vital reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of mentorship in complex and contradictory environments." Alberto Gonzalez, Bowling Green State University

Academia can be a lonely place, especially for those people who are members of marginalized communities. Although at its core institutions of higher education are supposed to be places for knowledge production, exchange and transformation, they can also be the source of anxiety, confusion, and hurt. Effective mentoring helps to provide guidance and support and can ease the transition to and success in higher education. In this book the authors conceptualize mentoring in the context of critical communication pedagogy and intercultural communication pedagogy. Each chapter employs a critical and cultural lens to mentoring and offers discussions about how our cultural identities or intercultural communication experiences impact our mentoring. It is separated into two major sections. The chapters in "Mentoring and International Experiences" analyze unique situations that international students face in higher education and how effective mentoring can guide these students through academic and life challenges. The second section, "Mentoring and Cultural Contexts," focuses on diverse cultural settings within the higher educational system in the United States and on historically marginalized students and/or faculty. This edited book will be helpful for various audiences. First, it provides guidance for graduate students, faculty and staff members who are asked to mentor others of diverse backgrounds. Second, it also helps diverse students and faculty to better understand the role of mentoring. And third, it gives ideas on what to do in successful international/intercultural mentor-mentee relationships. "Mentoring in Intercultural and International Contexts provides compelling examples of critical mentoring partnerships and programs that successfully assist vulnerable students to navigate systemic disadvantages withing the academy. This book is vital reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of mentorship in complex and contradictory environments." Alberto Gonzalez, Bowling Green State University

This book explores themes in the rhetoric of vegetarian discourse. A vegan practice may help mitigate crises such as climate change, global health challenges, and sharpening socioeconomic disparities, by ensuring both fairness in the treatment of animals and food justice for marginalized populations. How the message is spread is crucial for these aims. Vegan practices thus uncover tensions between individual dietary choices and social justice activism, between ego and eco, between human and animal, between capitalism and environmentalism, and within the larger universe of theoretical and practical ethics. The chapters apply rhetorical methodologies to understand vegan/vegetarian discourse, emphasizing, for example, vegan/vegetarian rhetoric through the lens of polyphony, the role of intersectional rhetoric in becoming vegan, as well as ecofeminist, semiotic, and discourse theory approaches to veganism. The book aims to show that a rhetorical understanding of vegetarian and vegan discourse is crucial for the goals of movements promoting veganism. The book is intended for a wide interdisciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, and individuals interested in veganism, food and media studies, rhetorical studies, human-animal studies, cultural studies and related disciplines. It urges readers to examine vegan discourses seriously, not just as a matter of personal choice or taste but as one vital for intersectional justice and our planetary survival.

This book details how the processes of communication are affected by the presence of a pandemic and establishes a research agenda of those effects across the broad field of communication studies. Through contributions from experts in communication subdisciplines such as crisis, organizational, interpersonal, health, intergroup, and intercultural, this book provides the reader with a comprehensive view of the emerging field of study "pandemic communication." Each chapter has four primary objectives: to 1) define critical issues of consideration for pandemic communication from its subdiscipline's perspective, 2) examine how communication varies during pandemic(s), 3) provide examples of how pandemic(s) have affected communication, and 4) propose a research agenda to build pandemic communication theory. This book is suited to undergraduate or post-graduate courses or modules in communication studies across a variety of subdisciplines as well as a reference for researchers in the subject.

This book details how the processes of communication are affected by the presence of a pandemic and establishes a research agenda of those effects across the broad field of communication studies. Through contributions from experts in communication subdisciplines such as crisis, organizational, interpersonal, health, intergroup, and intercultural, this book provides the reader with a comprehensive view of the emerging field of study "pandemic communication." Each chapter has four primary objectives: to 1) define critical issues of consideration for pandemic communication from its subdiscipline's perspective, 2) examine how communication varies during pandemic(s), 3) provide examples of how pandemic(s) have affected communication, and 4) propose a research agenda to build pandemic communication theory. This book is suited to undergraduate or post-graduate courses or modules in communication studies across a variety of subdisciplines as well as a reference for researchers in the subject.

Brings needed focus diversity and inclusion to the discipline of family communication. Suitable for advanced courses in family communication and family studies.

This book brings together a diverse, international array of contributors to explore the topics of news "quality" in the online age and the relationships between news organizations and enormously influential digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Covering topics ranging from internet incivility, crowdsourcing, and YouTube politics to regulations, algorithms, and AI, this book draws the key distinction between the news that facilitates democracy from news that undermines it. For students and scholars as well as journalists, policymakers, and media commentators, this important work engages a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives to define the key concept of "quality" in the news media.

This book brings together a diverse, international array of contributors to explore the topics of news "quality" in the online age and the relationships between news organizations and enormously influential digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Covering topics ranging from internet incivility, crowdsourcing, and YouTube politics to regulations, algorithms, and AI, this book draws the key distinction between the news that facilitates democracy from news that undermines it. For students and scholars as well as journalists, policymakers, and media commentators, this important work engages a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives to define the key concept of "quality" in the news media.

How do contemporary critical thinkers find a way to work between the doubt that grounds their thinking and the knowing needed to ground emancipatory political struggles? In this overview of four contemporary thinkers'-Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Zizek, and Bruno Latour-approaches to critique and climate change, communication scholar Murdoch Stephens discusses and analyses the fissures, elisions, and paradoxes that inform critical theory. This book delves into how critical theory offers important insights for those interested in climate change, but also how critical theory faces challenges to its constitution when faced with issues that are both urgent and yet require a scientific rigour that is not the specialty of critique. Written from the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of environmental communication, Critical Environmental Communication: How Does Critique Respond to the Urgency of Climate Change? argues for re-orienting the field towards the tensions and possibilities drawn from these four authors.

This handbook on Mediatization of Communication uncovers the interrelation between media changes and changes in culture and society. This is essential to understand contemporary trends and transformations. "Mediatization" characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves. This volume offers 31 contributions by leading media and communication scholars from the humanities and social sciences, with different approaches to mediatization of communication. The chapters span from how mediatization meets climate change and contribute to globalization to questions on life and death in mediatized settings. The book deals with mass media as well as communication with networked, digital media. The topic of this volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook provides the reader with the most current state of mediatization research.

This lively and engaging text introduces readers to the core interpersonal and organizational skills needed to effectively collaborate on group projects in the classroom and the workplace. Group projects are critical in preparing students for the realities of today's workplace, but many college students despise group work-often because they have not been prepared with the necessary skills to effectively collaborate. This guide teaches core collaboration skills such as active listening, interviewing, empathy, and conflict resolution. It examines the research and theory behind these skills, and provides tangible ways to practice these skills both alone and in groups. This guide can be used a supplementary text for any courses involving group projects, and will also be of interest to professionals in communication, business, and many other fields.

i) Its primary audience will likely be scholars and postgraduate students researching or interested in social psychology and public opinion in China. ii) Another key fact to remember is that the book will be of interest to those scrutinizing Chinese society and Chinese media. iii) This book anticipates that both North American and European scholars and students interested in new media and social change will also be interested. iv) Scholarly groups throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia have an interest in such works. v) This book will be relevant for university courses in social psychology and public opinion, as well as seminars on social psychology, media, and online public opinion.

Brings needed focus diversity and inclusion to the discipline of family communication. Suitable for advanced courses in family communication and family studies.

Managing Public Relations, 2e introduces students to the key concepts and practices involved in the day-to-day running of a PR operation, whether it is a company department, an independent agency, or any organized group focused on PR. The book's unique approach places the PR function within the broader context of an organization, equipping students with the essential business knowledge, perspective, and skills needed when starting out in their careers. This second edition has been fully updated throughout and includes: * Current examples and testimonials from across the globe, as well as updated "Executive Viewpoints" * Expanded content on strategic planning, budgeting, and financial statements * Detailed commentary on topics relevant to the modern workplace, including remote management * Consideration of diversity, inclusion, equity, and access within PR * Additional content on the use of analytics and measuring ROI * Updated online material, including an Instructor's Manual that incorporates problem-based questions, example assignments, and activities A highly practical and comprehensive guide, this textbook should be essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Public Relations Management, Strategic Communications and Marketing Management.

Political Management lays out the core tools to manage government, campaigns and parties. The first book to combine management concepts with politics and government, it provides core theories for what Political Planning, Political HR, Political Organising, Political Leadership and Political Reviewing involve, illustrated with high level political practitioner interviews, examples and political documents. The text presents the 4 Ds of Political Management - Deliberating, Designing, Doing and Dancing - to convey that Political Management is more of a dance than a march. Even presidents and prime ministers do not have enough formal authority to control the myriad of practitioners, players, processes and policies involved in 21st century governance. In this book, the author demonstrates why political practitioners in campaign teams, parties, government departments and political offices need political management tools to utilise the resources they have available and overcome multiple obstacles that practical politics presents. By offering a clear sense of what political management involves and providing the theoretical frameworks to be used in empirical research, this book will stimulate significant future study. It will be invaluable to practitioners, scholars and students in politics, government, policy, leadership, management, public administration, and political management.

* New volume in a seminal sequence of books providing a thorough foundation in the theories shaping the public relations discipline * Covers both the history of public relations theory, current developments, and anticipated future avenues of research * Features top scholars writing in their areas of expertise within public relations theory