Tactical Technical Communication looks at how companies construct recognizable voices and reasoning styles and how those patterns influence engineering decisions, product narratives, and everyday workplace communication. In this course, “tactical” means the practical, creative moves people make when they have to work around constraints, negotiate power, or get things done inside complex systems. You'll practice rhetorical invention (the process of identifying the audiences, constraints, and persuasive resources available in a situation) by analyzing a single company's "signature" approach to evidence, risk, design, and decision-making, and by creating WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, Nonverbal) artifacts that reflect those patterns. You’ll also conduct an ethnography of a real discourse community to observe how tactical technical communication works on the ground. During the semester, you’ll also practice practical workplace skills such as document design, accessibility compliance, procedures writing, heuristic evaluation and usability testing, code review, conflict resolution, and more.