This article explores rhetorical practices underlying productive deliberation about climate change. We analyze discussion of climate change on a Reddit subforum to demonstrate that good-faith deliberation---which is essential to deliberative democracy---exists online. Four rhetorical concepts describe variation among this subforum's comments: William Keith's distinction between 'discussion' and 'debate,' William Covino's distinction between good and bad magic, Kelly Oliver's notion of ethical response/ability, and Krista Ratcliffe's notion of rhetorical listening. Using a three-part taxonomy based on these concepts, we argue that collaborative climate change deliberation exists and that forum participation guidelines can promote productive styles of engagement.

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe founded the Sacred Stone Camp to protest Dakota Access Pipeline construction. The ensuing conflict was constructed both physically and digitally --- especially through maps. These maps made strategic inclusions and exclusions, which in turn offered differing concepts of civic, national, and historical identity. In this study, I trace some of these stories, inviting technical and professional communicators to rethink how they visualize systemic issues involving human and nonhuman ecologies. Finally, I suggest the idea of a 'folded rhetoric' to describe a strategic, ethical goal for technical communication in the age of environmental crisis.

Claims for America's potential for energy independence are substantiated largely thanks to advancements in an extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking." This article focuses on the negotiations among individual landowners and oil and gas companies as they enter into leasing agreements to permit fracking. The author draws on his own experiences as a landowner in the Marcellus and Utica shale region. Of primary concern is how landowners construct their own understanding of risk amidst a network of local, regional, and global actors. Landowner and oil and gas company relationships are analyzed using theories of rhetoric and risk communication.

This article explores what lip reading can teach us about interface design. First, I define lip reading. Second, I challenge the idea that people can "read" lips---an idea that is deeply imbedded in the literate tradition described by Walter Ong (1982) in Orality and Literacy. Third, I frame lip reading as a complex rhetorical activity of filling in the "gaps" of communication. Fourth, I present a lip reading heuristic that can challenge those of us in communication related fields to remember how the invisible "gaps" of communication are sometimes more important than the visible "interfaces." And finally, I conclude with some reflections about how lip reading might "reimagine" disability studies for technical and professional communicators.

This article explores whether amateur Web designs would deter Web users from engaging with a business after viewing a wWebsite---and if their expectations and value judgments are influenced by business size and scope. This topic is important to small business owners, practitioners, and educators because credibility judgments by Web visitors may be quick and detrimental to a small business if they do not yield a positive response and subsequent engagement with the small business. This study provides an opportunity to broaden our understanding of Web visitor credibility judgments about small businesses and introduces a new thread to the discussion about alignment of consumer expectations, Web design teaching, industry best practices, and the shaping of universal values as they relate to the rhetoric of the Internet.

This special issue contains proceedings from the 6 th Annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (SCCI), which ran from February 27 th through 28 th 2017 at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. The program chair was Michael Albers, who, as usual at SCCI, did a fantastic job at collecting and curating two days of stimulating conversations generated by speakers from a broad range of fields---rhetoric, technical communication, medical and regulatory writing, user experience, information science, and design---and a broad range or institutions and workspaces, including Duke's Network Analysis Center, The Medical University of South Carolina, Mälardalen University in Sweden, and Michigan State University, to name just a few. The keynote---titled "Faulty by Design: A Psychological Examination of User Decision-Making"---was given by Bill Gribbons, director of Bentley University's Graduate User Experience Program. Overall, the diversity and depth of the scholars and their research combined with the single-room presentation space facilitated conversation and networking in ways not typically found at other conferences.

Employing Royster and Kirsch's (2012) concept of critical imagination, the authors imagine strategies communication designers might use to intervene in and disrupt racial injustice and oppression. Using activity trackers as technologies that communicate data about health and death, the authors retell and re-envision the case of Eric Garner, a victim of police brutality, and argue that data from activity trackers can potentially be used to reframe narratives about public health and policing. Further, through an examination of the rhetorical frames of dehumanization, disbelief, and dissociation, the authors assert that activity trackers, as communicative agents, may become transformative wearable devices that are developed and deployed with socially just communication design in mind.

In this article, we explore connections among rhetoric, usability studies, user-centered design, and civic engagement as core concepts for developing a systemically aware Rhetoric of Advocacy for technical communicators. We propose a model for visualizing scenarios and stakeholders that is based on the structure of atoms. The Atomic Model for Technical Communication provides a visual model for mapping projects and for framing the kind of dialog that we associate with a Rhetoric of Advocacy.

As fitness trackers have proliferated, many now collect information about both physical and mental health indicators. Arguably, such capabilities promote the notion that achieving and maintaining health is holistic, pushing back against the mind/body divide that has long characterized how we tend to perceive health and disease in Western cultures (see Segal, 2005). In this article, the author argues that the visual (photographs and data visualizations) and language-based communication strategies used on Bellabeat Leaf's website, a smart jewelry device for women, employ a narrative of holisticism. Further, this narrative functions as a rhetorical trope that reinforces power relationships that align with a dominant underlying ideology of Western medicine---the notion that disease and illness can be controlled. The author proposes that future designs of the Leaf's smartphone application might allow users to visualize quantitative and select user-contributed qualitative, sensorial-based feedback to potentially provide a more balanced perspective of health.

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer's rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company's promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions in multiple hearing situations. Reliance on ubiquitous, familiar hardware such as smart phones and intuitive interface design can drive patient comfort and adoption rates of these complex technologies that influence cognitive health, social connectedness, and crucial information access.

Using the data generated by both consumer- and medically-oriented wearable devices to assess and improve fitness, wellbeing, and specific health outcomes demands attention to the user experiences of such devices as well as to the kinds of claims being made about their promise (cf. Gouge & Jones, 2016). This special issue participates in such work by presenting case studies situated at the intersections of wearables, communication design, and rhetorical analysis that explore the health, justice, and wellness-oriented promises of specific wearables. In this introduction, we briefly survey the research on wearables in the fields of rhetoric and technical communication, preview the essays in the collection, and propose some areas for future work that might be of interest to technical communication, communication design, and rhetoric scholars.

In the August 2015Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ)special issue on Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM), Lisa Meloncon and Erin Frost introduced readers to this "emerging field." Since aPoiroicommentary in 2013 written by Scott, Segal, and Keränen, numerous scholars that earlier identified our sub-discipline with the termsmedical rhetoric,have embraced this what might be seen as a more inclusive term, although I would argue that for some of us, the termrhetoricalready included at least every possible manifestation of health, medicine and language. However, RHM does indeed cast a wider net, as pointed out in the 2015 issue, including essays on architecture, social work, and psychology. While rhetoric per se is certainly found within all fields, if writing about such fields and especially from such fields is included in RHM, then such a transdisciplinary impulse takes us very much further indeed. While this particular issue can easily find itself under the RHM umbrella, these particular scholars writing here were invited because they had participated in 2016 as a very successful panel at SIGDOC annual conference. These five scholars have much to share and teach us, as well as move us forward in our thinking, research, writing and participation in health and medical settings.

As a scholar who works at the intersections of technical communication and rhetoric of science, I like to think I know a little bit about effective approaches to communicating technical information. For over a decade, I've been a happy member of a seemingly productive research discipline devoted to understanding how best to communicate scientific and technical information to clients, stakeholders, employers, funders, and the general public. I am, of course, not alone in these endeavors and my work benefits substantially from the efforts of my many colleagues in the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Now, given this background, imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues forwarded me a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine decrying the state of science communication research in America. Indeed, I was shocked and saddened to see the report call for "building a coherent science communication research enterprise" with the obvious implication that no such enterprise currently exists (p. 74).

Teaching user experience (UX) can be challenging due to the situated, complex, and messy nature of the work. However, the complexity of UX in practice is often invisible to students learning these methods and practices for the first time in class. In this article, we present findings from a study of rhetorical strategies of UX practitioners and pair them with strategies for teaching UX to students. While previous work on teaching UX reflects current practices in the classroom or reflections of practitioners, this study demonstrates the benefits of researching existing industry practices in order to inform pedagogy.

The word "access" means to enter into, participate in, and engage with, and captions for sounds are a way to provide access to video content for persons with disabilities. Trying to capture an absolute way for captioning sounds in video media texts is as illusive, impossible, and unethical as trying to establish or declare a single way to write or to read a text. Sean Zdenek's book Reading Sounds investigates the practices that create captions and examines captions as a rhetorical artifact related to the composition of video. This review will examine Reading Sounds from the perspective of a practitioner in the area of web, classroom, and information communication technology accessibility and an academic focused on communication design and disability, indicating points relevant to both practitioners and academics.

Humans are so enmeshed in mobility systems that they identify with themselves through those systems. InCommunicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation,Ehren Pflugfelder (2017) uses the term "automobility" to describe both "the specific kinds of mobility afforded by independent, automobile-related movement technologies" and "the complex cultural, bodily, technological, and ecological ramifications of our dependence on separate mobility technologies" (p. 4). Given identities enmeshed in ecologies of systems involving human and nonhuman actors through which transportation emerges, automobility is described as a "wicked problem" to be solved, in part, by technical communicators and communication designers naming and revealing the persuasive power of transportation systems. Understanding this persuasive power benefits practitioners by revealing the shared agency of automobility among the car-driver assemblage, and academics, by offering a framework for recognizing transportation as persuasive and therefore rhetorical.

research-article Share on Review of "Rhetorical memory: A study of technical communication and information management by S. Whittemore", University of Chicago Press 2015 Author: Benjamin Lauren Michigan State University Michigan State UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 4Issue 1November 2015 pp 77–80https://doi.org/10.1145/2875501.2875509Published:08 January 2016Publication History 0citation11DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads11Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

In this rhetorical analysis based on the Foucaultian constructs of power in medicine, specifically the docile body, the medical gaze, and health consumerism, the authors examine ways the pharmaceutical industry used web-based direct-to-consumer advertising, from 2007-2010, to craft interactions between U.S. consumers and physicians in ways that changed the traditional patient-physician relationship in order to drive sales of brand-name therapeutic drugs. We demonstrate how the pharmaceutical industry uses its websites to script power relationships between patients and physicians in order to undermined physician authority and empower patients to become healthcare consumers. We speculate that this shift minimizes or even erases dialogue, diagnosis, and consideration of medical expertise. We suggest that if it is important to uphold values of the modern version of the hippocratic oath, it may be necessary to provide physicians and patients additional parts in the script so that medical decisions are made based on sound science, knowledge, and experience.

Expectant parents use health communication messaging to make decisions about their childbirth plans. Recently, women have increasingly chosen to use doulas, or people who provide non-medical support during childbirth. This essay analyzes how a hospital designed public communication through promotional efforts regarding their no-cost, volunteer doula program. We use rhetorical analysis to analyze 19 promotional texts. By analyzing these materials through the rhetorical method of presence and absence, we found that the health discourse related to the doula program gave presence to expectant mothers. Additionally, the benefits of doulas, especially in relation to fathers or partners, remained absent in promoting the volunteer doula program. Through specific communication design recommendations, we focus on how to improve this communication to increase the use of doulas in our community, and in other communities. We conclude with implications and limitations of the study.

research-article Share on Review of "Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab. by T. Kenny Fountain" New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. Author: Molly Kessler University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee University of Wisconsin, MilwaukeeView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 4August 2015 pp 91–96https://doi.org/10.1145/2826972.2826982Published:17 September 2015Publication History 0citation20DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads20Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

This paper explores the potential for technical communicators to employ usability research with risk-based interactive geovisualization technologies as a method of cultivating "critical rhetorics of risk communication" for local communities. Through integrating theories from usability studies and risk communication, I offer some new directions for thinking about the productive usability of online, participatory technologies that promote citizen engagement in science. I argue that the key tenets of productive usability afford technical communicators the opportunity to build localized knowledge of risk in real, local users, which in turn improves the capacity for a community and its stakeholders to more effectively communicate risk.

This study examines an ethnographically-collected set of social media posts from 5 applications in order to understand the rhetorical functions of something we call "metacommunicative" hashtags (e.g., #PackersGottaWinThisOne, #thisweddingisawesome). Through a process of inductive analysis, we identified recurring genre functions that are both context-specific to applications' ecologies and, at the same time, "stabilized enough" (Schryer, 1993, p. 204) to warrant the use of rhetorical genre theory as a tool for understanding their communicative purposes

research-article Share on Book review: "Morse, T.A. (2014). Signs and wonders: Religious rhetoric and the preservation of sign language". Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Author: Janine M. Butler East Carolina University East Carolina UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 1November 2014 pp 50–53https://doi.org/10.1145/2721882.2721889Published:13 January 2015Publication History 0citation9DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads9Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Meloncon's Rhetorical Accessability explores the connections between critical work in disability studies and technical communication. The first collection of its kind, included essays combine theory and practice to emphasize the value of placing disability studies at the forefront of design, workplace practices, and pedagogies. Echoing the diversity of scholarship that has contributed to this emerging area of study---from disability studies, technical communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies--- the collection emphasizes technical communication as a crucial multidisciplinary ground for critical discourse regarding disability and accessibility. As a whole, Meloncon's collection initiates a broader scholarly conversation centered on issues of accessibility in various technical communication contexts.

Distinct from prose essays as cultural expression, we use technical communication for functional purposes, addressing questions of how people learn as we craft our communications. Aristotle set out psychological principles of how people learn -- or are persuaded to change their minds -- when he laid down his foundational advice for rhetors to cultivate "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us." Building on this foundational principle, technical communicators since World War II have studied how to achieve persuasion (or change) by making information accessible, formatting documents, writing at designated reading levels, and setting out instruction steps clearly. Recently, we have also become interested in how, through the concept of rhetoric, oral and written language acquires poignant social, ethical and technical dimensions, situating Aristotle's "faculties" of persuasion within specific cultural and political contexts.

The hype machine---media, corporate communications, and futurist prognosticators---are hard at work promoting Big Data. There are computing and storage resources that, like the "dark fiber" installed at the turn of the millennium that now carries streaming video, are looking for huge data sets that require the powerful processing and tremendous storage capacity of the new infrastructure. And there is no better confluence than that provided by the impetus to rearticulate Communication Design Quarterly in an age of Big Data. The New York Times has been running articles about Big Data for some time: "Big data is all about exploration without preconceived notions."