The rhetoric of reach: Preparing students for technical communication in the age of social media

The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media.