About

Jason Swarts is a professor of technical communication and serves as the Head of the Department of English at North Carolina State University. His broad research areas include technical communication practice, genre, networks, and knowledge work. His specific research projects examine technical communication practices in the context of new and emerging technologies of communication production and distribution. He also works on issues of decision support, particularly on decisions requiring the clear and persuasive communication of data and other technical information. Swarts teaches courses on documentation practices, networks, and discourse analysis. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, earned in 2002.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Knowledge management
• Engineering
• Internet privacy
• Medical education
• Pedagogy
• Engineering ethics
• Psychology
• Public relations

Selected publications

• The Construction of Data Usability

  Technical Communication Quarterly · 2024-09-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Extended Abstract: Competencies and Connections: Toward Bridging the Academic-Industry Gap

  2024-07-14

  articleSenior author

  Bridging the gap between practitioners and academics of technical communication is crucial for ensuring that students are well-prepared for their careers as well as for advancing the field. Literature suggests some strategies that can help address this challenge. In this talk, Ranade and Swarts will discuss case studies from their respective institutions on how they used a combination of strategies to build bridges between their departments and industries in an attempt to close the gap. The case studies will provide practical insights and highlight challenges of implementing the strategies mentioned above along with opening discussions on how to tackle such challenges.

  PublisherDOI

• Knowledge

  The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado eBooks · 2023-08-03

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Infrastructural support of users' mediated potential

  Communication Design Quarterly · 2022-07-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  As one kind of designed communication, technical communication is created for readers we assume use the content for some situated purpose. Understanding users and their situations to be varied, communicators rely on simplified models of both to create usable content. In many cases, this approach works, but in some commercial sectors, companies are recognizing a need to engage with users directly and to include them in the production of communication. Including users in the production of communication may ease the burden of communicating in ways that are sufficiently detailed, accurate, inclusive, localized, and timely, but these ventures also create challenges of collaboration that direct attention to how users are situated in infrastructures that allow them to act as effective readers and collaborators. This article presents a model of users, situating them amid infrastructures that extend their ability to take rhetorical action. The authors explain and demonstrate a heuristic for analyzing infrastructure as an extension of a user's "mediated potential" for rhetorical action.

  PublisherDOI

• Signaling Context in Topic-Based Writing

  Technical Communication · 2022-02-08 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In topic-based writing delivered as web help or interactive PDF, readers are able to access topics non-linearly, reading only those topics they feel a need to read. Consequently, readers can easily lose a sense of a topic's broader context of related topics and concepts, which is knowledge presumed of a "qualified reader."<br/> Purpose : This paper investigates how relative "that" and "which" clauses are used to signal context in writing that is intended to be free of obligatory contextual connections to other topics in a documentation set.<br/> Method : This analysis relies on a computer-assisted, descriptive analysis of relative pronoun use in a corpus of published, topic-based documentation. The analysis focuses on "that" and "which," typically used in English to refer to and add information (e.g., a context) about an antecedent noun.<br/> Results : Relative "that" and "which" clauses are shown to be used in a variety of ways in topic-based writing to signal associations between topics, making it easier for readers who need context to find it.<br/> Conclusions : The author offers implications for writing practice that include deliberate, strategic use of "that" and "which" and complementary documentation design that enables readers to locate contextual information signaled by those pronouns.

  PublisherDOI

• Uses of Metadiscourse in Online Help

  Written Communication · 2022-08-11 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular, nonhierarchical, and nonlinear, which creates user experience issues related to attention as well as information selection, ordering, processing, and navigation. The patterns of language use in topic-based writing reveal how metadiscourse might help readers address these reader experience issues.

  PublisherDOI

• Addressing the Speculative “You”

  2020-09-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The poster presents a corpus analysis of a stylistic feature of topic-based documentation: the speculative “you.” The feature signals important information to help readers adapt the content for their situated uses. The feature is illustrated with examples and the author offers recommendations for amplifying this information.

  PublisherDOI

• Technical Communication is a Social Medium

  Technical Communication Quarterly · 2020 · 25 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Technical communicators can manage the content users share in online communities, but this is only feasible if the users act like a community with a shared understanding of what the software does. When they do not, users discuss technologies as unsettled objects and rely on technical communication to socially construct them. This research describes such uses of technical communication and argues how professional technical communicators can help.

  PublisherDOI

• Humanistic communication in information centric workplaces

  Communication Design Quarterly · 2020 · 8 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering ethics
  • Computer Science

  Professional writers adapt their skills to suit expanded professional roles that involve production and management of information, but preparation through mere skill-based training is problematic because that communication work is messy in ways that are not addressable through simple skills training. We must understand how skills "influence and shape the discursive activities surrounding their use" (Selber, 1994). This paper reports the results of a study of people trained in humanities disciplines like communication, English, writing studies, technical communication, etc., on how they have found means to employ their training in their workplace and keep what is humanistic about writing and communicating at the foreground of their interactions with information technologies. Instead of focusing on technology alone, this research encourages a unified approach to preparing students for the workplace.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing About Structure In Dita

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  This chapter is about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), which is an industry-standard data model and markup system that is used to create componentized content and to assemble that content into a variety of output documents. After first situating the development and appeal of DITA in the context of conversations about computer documentation and the rhetorical practices of technical communicators, I focus on two rhetorical affordances: translocational meaning and bilocational meaning. Translocational meaning is that which arises from users interpreting content across contexts. Bilocational meaning is that which arises from users interpreting content in multiple contexts simultaneously. In order for writers to take advantage of DITA’s efficiencies, the model challenges writers to think about their content as having structure as well as translocational and bilocational meaning. In negotiating these meanings, technical communicators will find new opportunities for rhetorical discernment. The chapter then considers, through assignments and sample texts, how teachers can prepare their students to learn the basics of DITA, and its conceptual framing of documentation, and through that work to realize DITA’s rhetorical potential.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nupoor Ranade

  George Mason University

  3 shared

• Rachel Thompson

  2 shared

• Lee Odell

  2 shared

• W. E. Leighton

  2 shared

• Sarah Read

  Portland State University

  1 shared

• Loel Kim

  University of Memphis

  1 shared

• Matt Morain

  North Carolina State University

  1 shared

• Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

  1 shared

Labs

• Research and EngagementPI

Education

• Ph.D. Communication and Rhetoric, Language Literature and Communication

  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

  2002