This article employs neoclassic and feminist rhetorical perspectives to investigate the persuasive strategies in two scientific articles written in the late nineteenth century by Ellen Swallow Richards. One of the first credentialed female scientists in the United States, Richards wrote about nutrition research she conducted in her experimental food laboratory, the New England Kitchen, to persuade two separate audiences—one predominantly male and the other predominantly female—of the scientific value of nutrition studies. The article adds complexity to our historical underpinnings by querying how gender—of the writer, of the audiences, and in the nature of the topic—contributed to the writer’s rhetorical burdens and provides evidence that women historically have been active knowers and users of science and technology.

Writers often address letters to people with whom they have few if any personal connections. To increase understanding of rhetorical decision making in such noninterpersonal settings, this article analyzes letters to a United States senator. The analysis draws from three bodies of research on persuasion: situational context, persuade package, and personal constructs. On the basis of that theoretical grounding—and using deliberative democracy theory and the strategic-choice model—the authors develop hypotheses linking situation attributes and writer attributes to letter attributes. The results show that topic, position, sex, and technology are significantly related to the writer’s choice of appeals, argumentative complexity, and structural directness. They also demonstrate a strong link between technology and message length. These results raise several possibilities for further study, such as whether advocates sometimes address messages to an accessible person while aiming their argumentation at an archetypal authority figure.

An environmental impact statement (EIS) is supposed to ensure that a government agency thoroughly evaluates a project's impacts, studies feasible alternatives, and gives all stakeholders an active role in project-related decisions. Previous rhetorical studies of the EIS describe a failed or subversive genre routinely used to advance the strategic aims of an agency seeking to implement a project despite significant opposition. This article contends that an EIS motivated by a genuinely persuasive purpose can serve as the discursive focus of democratic decision making about major projects and substantially achieve Habermas's norms of communicative action. This may happen, for example, when a local transportation agency develops an EIS for a federal transportation agency. To illustrate this possibility, two EISs involving distinct federal-local relationships in Puerto Rico are evaluated using criteria proposed by John Forester for investigating the degree to which public decision-making processes fulfill Habermas's norms of communicative action.

This article explores approaches to crisis communication and the application of those approaches by organizations responding to a disaster. The authors conducted a survey of 107 state government agencies to learn about government efforts in situations requiring crisis communication. Generally, the survey results suggest that although state agencies enjoy a positive relationship with the media, they have little proactive communication with the media, and less than half have a written crisis communication plan. Significant associations were found between the variables under study, including size of the organization, roles in crisis situations, media relationships, and preparation of a crisis communication plan. Case studies and additional evaluations of communication resources are needed to help determine the ability of the public sector to respond effectively to crises. This article considers the needs of state agencies and proposes a conceptual approach that synthesizes a crisis communication process designed for the public sector.

This study extends the corpus of an earlier qualitative content analysis about women and feminism and identifies the knowledge claims and themes in the 20 articles that discuss gender differences. Knowledge claims are reflected in expressions such as androgyny; natural collaborators; hierarchical, dialogic, and asymmetrical modes; web; connected knowers; different voice; ethic of care; ethic of objectivity; continuous with others; connected to the world; the cultural divide; visual metaphor; andgender-free science. Built from knowledge claims, the themes in the 20 articles include gender differences in language use, learning, and knowledge construction; gender differences in collaboration; and reviews of research about gender differences and political calls for action. Although the 20 articles provide little support for the existence of gender differences, by introducing, discussing, testing, and revising new ideas about women and feminism, they serve as an example of the process of knowledge accumulation and remodeling in technical communication.

This article compares three rhetorical approaches to accident analysis: materialist, classical, and constructivist. The focal points for comparison are the two accident reports issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)—reports that attempted (and failed) to persuade the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to change a problematic policy about rail communication alongside its technology for rail communication. The central question the article asks is, How can rhetorical theory help explain the CTA”s inaction, which ultimately led to property damage, injury, and death? Classical and constructivist approaches, emphasizing rational deliberation between equals, on one hand, and the social construction of technical knowledge between professionals, on the other, offer plausible explanations for what went wrong. But only the materialist approach appears capable of discerning the ideological nature of the CTA”s resistance to the NTSB”s recommendations.

This article investigates the ways in which a subset of technical communicators acquired electronic literacy from 1978 to 2000, a period during which personal computers became increasingly ubiquitous in the United States in educational settings, homes, communities, and workplaces. It describes the literacy autobiographies gathered from 55 professional communicators participating on the Techwr-l listserv, focusing on the large-scale trends that these autobiographies reveal. To supplement the findings from these autobiographies, the authors conducted face-to-face interviews with four case-study participants: a faculty member, a professional communicator, and two students of different backgrounds majoring in technical communication. The article concludes with observations about the development of technical communication instruction in the twenty-first century.

Professional communication is a growing component of English departments and other communication programs. Yet, in most cases, the term professional communication is used as a catchall term for various types of workplace and occupational writing. As such, professional communication, as it is currently framed, seems to have little to do with professionals or the process of professionalization. This article calls for a more thorough examination of the concept of professional communication by reviewing (1) the ways in which researchers have used this term to describe the rhetoric of professionals who communicate, (2) the democratic and knowledge-based contradictions between rhetorical scholarship and professional powers, and (3) the current challenges facing professional workers, including deprofessionalization and proletarianization. The author argues that if professional communication research and teaching are to remain prominent parts of academic programs, researchers, theorists, teachers, and students must become more aware of conceptual issues that inform and define professional work.

Professional communication is a growing component of English departments and other communication programs. Yet, in most cases, the term professional communication is used as a catchall term for various types of workplace and occupational writing. As such, professional communication, as it is currently framed, seems to have little to do with professionals or the process of professionalization. This article calls for a more thorough examination of the concept of professional communication by reviewing (1) the ways in which researchers have used this term to describe the rhetoric of professionals who communicate, (2) the democratic and knowledge-based contradictions between rhetorical scholarship and professional powers, and (3) the current challenges facing professional workers, including deprofessionalization and proletarianization. The author argues that if professional communication research and teaching are to remain prominent parts of academic programs, researchers, theorists, teachers, and students must become more aware of conceptual issues that inform and define professional work.

This article proposes ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach for resolving the structure-agency binary and for treating the activities of writers in organizations as simultaneously embedded in and constitutive of organizational context. Structure is defined as those elements of social circumstances that writers orient to as relevant to their immediate writing task. In orienting to these elements, writers reproduce them as external and constraining social facts. The value of ethnomethodology is illustrated with data from a study examining the social practices that surrounded the writing of an evaluation report by two managers in an educational institution.

This article shows how user-centered design can be applied to documentation and reports the results of a two-year contextual design study. The article (1) demonstrates how contextual design can be applied to information and (2) reports some of the study's results, outlining key insights gleaned about users. The study found that users vary widely in their information needs and preferences. Users employ a variety of learning strategies in learning new software and in overcoming problems encountered within applications. Documentation can better meet variances in learning styles and user preferences when tightly integrated into applications, accessible in the user's own language. Additionally, documentation is most beneficial when several assistance options exist for users to choose among, varying according to context, task, and user need. Finally, the article discusses the constraints that affect the implementation of design ideas and explores implications for practice and additional research.

Online communication technology makes intercultural communication faster and more direct than was ever before possible, but, in doing so, it may also amplify cultural rhetorical differences. Communication scholars, therefore, need to begin examining potential areas of conflict in international cyberspace to anticipate and to resolve potential cross-cultural misunderstandings related to online exchanges. This commentary proposes that researchers need to compare the communication patterns noted in the computermediated communication (CMC) literature and in the intercultural communication literature to see where these communication patterns collide.

Within an increasingly global marketplace, discussions of intercultural communication are important in business and technical communication classrooms. Although many business and technical communication textbooks integrate discussions of intercultural communication, they do not go far enough in engaging the complicated nature of this issue. This article summarizes recent literature about the importance of paying attention to intercultural communication and analyzes the productive approaches in popular business and technical communication textbooks. It presents five challenges for business and technical communication teachers to consider and includes teaching modules that address these challenges. Although the article focuses on classroom practice, such intercultural explorations are also of value to authors of business and technical communication textbooks, who might consider integrating modules such as these into their textbooks.

Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication.

Research suggests that men and women have different communicative styles that contribute to women's lack of acceptance in male-dominated fields. However, this perspective can lead to stereotypes that limit the range of interactional strategies open to individuals. This article profiles two women from student engineering teams who participated in a study on collaboration and the role of gender. The study, which used a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, showed that men and women alike displayed both gender-linked and non-gender-linked behavior. It also showed that successful collaboration was influenced less by gender and more by such factors as a strong work ethic, team commitment, and effective leadership.

Although scarcely explored to date, US patent records provide numerous opportunities for research in technical and scientific communication. This article reviews disciplinary research that taps this rich archive of information, describes ways in which patents act as moral and social barometers to technological change, and provides readers with a brief guide to basic information needed to initiate research using patent records.

This article explores three ways to design US empirical methods to be more valid and ethical in cross-cultural studies. First, intercultural researchers need to distinguish broad rhetorical and cultural patterns from regional, organizational, and personal patterns, a process that requires balancing the fact of difference with the need for generalization. Second, US researchers need to distinguish not only the differences in rhetorical patterns in a form of communication but also in the ways that form is used rhetorically. Third, researchers need to construct researcher-participant relationships that are sensitive to the values of organizational relationships in both cultures.

This article explores the role of embodied knowledge and embodied representation in the joint revision of a small section of a large technical document by personnel from two organizations: a city government and a consulting engineering firm. The article points to differences between the knowledge and the representation practices of personnel from the two organizations as manifested in their words and gestures during the revision task, and it points to the gestures of the city personnel as a principal means by which their greater embodied knowledge of channel easements becomes distributed across the group as a whole. The article concludes by pointing to some advantages of considering acts of writing as embodied practices and by indicating a number of related questions that should be pursued in subsequent investigations of literacy in modern workplaces.

Most people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in text-centered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we create and refer to the appointments and notes in our personal digital assistants, we use texts. Texts are deeply embedded in cultural, cognitive, and material arrangements that go back thousands of years. Information technologies with texts at their core are, by contrast, a relatively recent development. To participate with other information researchers in shaping the evolution of these ITexts, researchers and scholars must build on a knowledge base and articulate issues, a task undertaken in this article. The authors begin by reviewing the existing foundations for a research program in IText and then scope out issues for research over the next five to seven years. They direct particular attention to the evolving character of ITexts and to their impact on society. By undertaking this research, the authors urge the continuing evolution of technologies of text.