Keywords

Technical communication, technical marketing, content marketing, autoethnography, technical writing, ethics

Abstract

This thesis presents an alternate career path for technical communicators in the area of content marketing and expands on the ethical and goal-related issues associated with a career change to a marketing-focused role. Many of the skills necessary for technical communication are transferable to marketing communication roles; however, a successful career change requires that technical communicators understand how the ethical values and goals of marketing professionals can differ from those of technical communicators. Through a detailed literature review and autoethnographic study, this thesis discusses the performance goals of marketing professionals to determine how these clash with those of technical communicators. This study also discusses the ethical values of technical communicators and marketing professionals, and how these values are shaped by their unique job functions. The overall goal is to determine how this affects the technical communicator working with content marketing. After combining the data available in the literature and the data gathered from the autoethnographic study, this study suggests that due to the differing job functions and training received by technical communicators and marketing professionals, ethically charged situations and ethically questionable practices are likely to be viewed under different perspectives by each professional. This can lead to vastly different perspectives on a particular situation and result in the two groups having vastly different ideas in regard to how ethical-decision making should proceed.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2014

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Dombrowski, Paul

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

English

Degree Program

English; Technical Communications

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0005570

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005570

Language

English

Release Date

February 2018

Length of Campus-only Access

3 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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