Since the late 1970s, technical communication scholars and teachers have largely agreed that technical communication’s humanistic character can be found in the field’s rhetorical nature and the social nature of discourse. Building on Patrick Moore’s efforts to rehabilitate “instrumental discourse” in the face of such general consensus, this essay argues that such notions of technical communication’s humanistic character, although unquestionably groundbreaking and crucial to the field’s sense of self and mission, remain too deeply indebted to traditional academic humanities’ and English studies’ constructions of humanistic purview, which largely refuse to accommodate technology, especially physical technology artifacts. Considering alternatives that recast the technology-humanities relationship and situate technology within a humanistic framework can yield benefits for both technical communication and English studies broadly construed.

Two versions of a biological opinion written by different teams in the U.S. Fish and Wild-life Service illuminate how different rhetorical strategies reflect different values. The historical narrative in the earlier biological opinion, which is used to argue for vigorous action to protect endangered species along the Missouri River, is largely erased in the later opinion that privileges human uses of the river system. This analysis emphasizes the problematic nature of authorship when the concept is applied to a document produced in an organization or agency. Moreover, examining how authors control information reveals the power technical writers have to influence meaning making.

Building on Herndl’s concept of critical practice, this article presents a case study of attempts to change the discourse practices surrounding breast-feeding in today’s medical environment. To complicate readers’ understanding of rhetorical agency, resistance, and discursive change, the author considers the rhetorical efforts of two high-profile physicians alongside those of the nonphysician breast-feeding advocates she interviewed. Ultimately, this dual perspective shows that discursive efforts to change medical practices can fail, even when supported by powerful figures within the medical establishment, if the new ideas communicated in such efforts conflict with long-established material conditions.

Genetic medicine, which consists mostly of screening tests for certain heritable diseases but may soon include treatment for heritable diseases based on molecular genetics, is made possible by two critical junctures in the textual representation of medical subjects. The first is the transformation of organic human genetic material into computationally sophisticated data, and the second is the subsequent conversion of these vast quantities of genetic data into intellectual property through gene patenting and screening-test marketing. This article examines these representational changes in medical subjects through an intertextual and rhetorical analysis of the documentation surrounding the discovery, patenting, and marketing of the breast cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1 by the biotechnology company Myriad Genetics. It identifies the impact of these changes on the analysis of the risks and benefits associated with screening for heritable diseases.

This article explores the value of rhetorical genre theory for health care and professional communication researchers. The authors outline the conceptual resources emerging from genre theory, specifically ways to conceptualize social context, professional identity formation, and genres as functioning but hierarchical networks, and discuss the way they have used these resources in two separate but complementary health-care studies: a project that documents the ways regulated and regularized resources of the genre of case presentations shape the professional identity formation of medical students and a project that extends this theoretical work to observe that genres, especially policy genres, function to regularize or control other genres and shape the identity formation of midwives in Ontario, Canada. The authors also observe that the implications of rhetorical genre theory have impelled both of these studies to develop an interdisciplinary trajectory that includes members of health-care communities as participating researchers.

In this study, six focus groups comprising technical communicators and technical communication instructors evaluated and discussed two versions of an instructional manual and two versions of a memo. Findings reveal that the practitioners and academics relied on similar metaphors (including the Conduit Metaphor), metonymies, and constructed scenarios. Although their ways of evaluating texts were broadly similar, practitioners exhibited greater awareness of task-related rhetorical variables whereas academics were more likely to be concerned with textual features and general principles that apply to technical writing tasks. Differences between the groups were particularly evident in discussions of the memo.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

This article focuses on information architecture as a site for developing critical practice for technical communication. Such a focus suggests methods for rhetorical intervention aimed at democratizing the process of technocultural development. As a site of intervention, information architecture invites practitioners and academics to develop plans for action based on the analysis generated in descriptive research, completing the circuit from analysis to informed action.

Subject matter experts, under the influence of modernist notions of authorship, often view technical writers as mere grammar and punctuation specialists and marginalize them as their ignorant “other. ” Technical writers, on the other hand, as rhetoricians occupying a liminal space between different disciplines, can understand different disciplinary rhetorics. If subject matter experts, instead of marginalizing technical writers, would view them as liminal subjects who are knowledgeable in different disciplinary rhetorics, then technical writers, through liminal practice, may be able to use their knowledge of audience and rhetoric to improve the quality of documentation.

This research provides a framework identifying dynamic tensions that occur as subordinates try to maintain a sufficient degree of politeness while reporting to superiors on workplace tasks. Building on politeness theory, the framework suggests how conventional politeness dimensions, such as deference, solidarity, and non-imposition are challenged by organizational obligations and workplace tasks requiring confidence, direction, and individuality. The framework evolved from a series of analyses of two samples: one consisting of e-mail between international project teams and their domestically located supervisors, the other of Asian and U.S. business undergraduates' responses to two workplace scenarios involving critiquing a superior's work. Analyses revealed competing communicative dimensions relevant to subordinate-to-superior interactions, including dimensions that are underdeveloped in politeness literature. Examples from these data suggest that managing a sufficient equilibrium between these dimensions requires a substantial knowledge of rhetorical and linguistic alternatives.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 turns to the concept of interdisciplinarity as a framework for the design and development of observational studies investigating the discourse of medicine in language-based fields such as linguistics, rhetoric, composition, and professional communication. It argues that observational studies be designed as disciplined interdisciplinary studies, defined as research that makes an acknowledged contribution to both medicine and language studies. It proposes two guiding principles for the design of observational studies in medicine, both of which focus on issues of prospective design.

Studies in the rhetoric of science have tended to focus on classic scientific texts and on the history of drafts and the interaction surrounding them up until the moment when the drafts are accepted for publication by a journal. Similarly, research on disasters resulting from failed communication has tended to focus on the history of drafts and the interaction surrounding them up until the moment of the disaster. The authors argue that overattention to the moment skews understanding of what makes scientific discourse successful and neglects other valuable sources of evidence. After reviewing the promises and limitations of studies from historical, observational, and text-analytic approaches, the authors call for studies of responses to research articles from disciplinary readers and argue for studies using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that will explore the real-time responses of readers to scientific texts, test the effects of rhetorical strategies on readers, and track the course of acceptance or rejection over time.

Annual reports produced today increasingly include elaborate photographs and graphics in the narrative section. Financial analysts and many scholars have judged these reports on their clarity, accuracy, and honesty. Because the narrative invites interpretations, such criteria are not sufficient, and additional standards need to be constructed. A semiological analysis of the textual and visual elements allows for the discovery of the techniques used by document designers to promote their companies’ values. Artistic images may encourage positive readings of annual reports, which, combined with similar messages in other media and repeated over time, invoke cultural myths. By definition, myths are broadly accepted commonplaces that conceal details of their subject, and communicators must expose the missing details and judge the myths within a specific context. This kind of analysis, acknowledging the constraints of the rhetorical situation of a single report, can identify effective criteria for judging the narrative's ethics.

Research on citations has generally examined citations as part of a system of rewards or as a rhetorical tool for strengthening arguments. This study examines the role of citations both as reward and as rhetoric. The reward system was examined by tracing over time the citation patterns of 13 research articles by two groups of scientists in chaos theory. The rhetorical practices were examined by determining how these articles were cited, by reviewing 609 citations of the 13 research articles. The analysis revealed that scientists consistently used five rhetorical practices: (1) using citations in the introduction, (2) using authors' names in the citation, (3) using the citation in a statement that asserts a high level of certainty, (4) using citations to create a research space, and (5) combining the use of the authors' names with placement in the introduction. These features indicated the articles' centrality in scientific discourse.

This article extends current thinking about the rhetoric of technology by making a preliminary inquiry into what a feminist rhetoric of technology might look like. On the basis of feminist critiques of technology in various disciplines, the author suggests three ways in which feminist approaches to building a rhetoric of technology might differ from current nonfeminist approaches to this task. First, feminist scholars should adopt a more expansive definition of technology than that which informs current rhetoric of technology research. Second, feminist scholars should ask research questions different from those being asked by current rhetoric of technology researchers. Third, feminist scholars should move beyond the design and development phases of technology, which most of the current research on the rhetoric of technology emphasizes.

Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary-policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.

This article calls for a rhetorical perspective on the relationship of gender, communication, and power in the workplace. In doing so, the author uses narrative in two ways. First, narratives gathered in an ethnographic study of an actual workplace, a plastics manufacturer, are used as a primary source of data, and second, the findings of this study are presented by telling the story of two women in this workplace. Arguing that gender in the workplace, like all social identities, is locally constructed through the micro practices of everyday life, the author questions some of the prevailing assumptions about gender at work and cautions professional communication teachers, researchers, and practitioners against unintentionally perpetuating global, decontextualized assumptions about gender and language, and their relationship to the distribution and exercise of power at work.

The work for hire doctrine in intellectual property law is important to academics in rhetoric and technical communication. In this article, the author explains the doctrine and the way in which it works, explicates related case law, and suggests treatment of work for hire by instructors and administrators in rhetoric and technical communication.

The increasing importance of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) to the US economy makes understanding Mexico important. Because the histories and cultures of the United States and Mexico differ significantly, written communications also differ. Rhetorical strategies for written business communication in Mexico reflect the country's bloody, cyclical history and its resulting culture characterized by collectivism, high power distances, fatalism, and emphasis on building trust and relationships. Despite Mexico's economic problems, it is a country in transition. Because of the increasing presence of US business entities in Mexico, communication protocols are changing as US technology and ways of doing business infuse the traditional Mexican culture. Understanding how to communicate effectively in Mexico requires understanding its history and culture as well as changes occurring there. US writers must know where any Mexican company is situated along this changing cultural continuum and how the continuum shapes the design of written business communication.

Hypertext, in its most available manifestation, the World Wide Web, is being sold as a force for liberation. One must differentiate the varieties of freedom to better understand how different interests manipulate the freedom mythology to achieve different ends. This study examines the scholars who have framed the hypertext debate and the rhetoric employed by the companies that want to sell it to locate a more complex picture of how these interests use the freedom myth. Such consideration leads to discussion of what might shape hypertext's emergence as more than an information-dispersal system.

Although many excellent histories of photography and its invention exist, few focus on the rhetoric employed in debates over scientific priority and the romantic construct of nature as the active agent in photographic processes. This article surveys the range and complexity of rhetorical claims made for the first practical photographic process, daguerreotypy. It presents a rereading of the standard and romanticized history of the invention, defines the daguerreotype as a made object and cultural artifact with its own supratextual rhetoric, and presents examples from the discourse of 1839-1860 that show how daguerreotypes were argued to be simultaneously equal to, superior to, and inferior to natural human perceptions and representations.

This article suggests a perspective on rhetoric of technology as discursive exploitation of the margins of indeterminacy affecting the development of technologies and technical artifacts. It examines such margins by examining the development of an aircraft auxiliary engine in a California aerospace company, focusing especially on how engines are tested. It examines technical documents associated with testing as arenas for rhetorical transactions involving various factors and interests vested in a technology and as residua of compliance and negotiation. It suggests that margins of indeterminacy in technology development provide critical rhetorical spaces for agency and decision making, spaces that engineers and technical communicators must be trained to appreciate and exploit appropriately.

Rhetorical study of technology will benefit from a broad view of technology that considers it as a cultural phenomenon, including epistemic, artifactual, technical, economic, aesthetic, and political aspects. To understand twentieth-century American technology this way, it is useful to gain some historical perspective on its development, particularly in the past 50 years. Many accounts mark World War II as a turning point in the role of technology in our culture and in the relations of technology with government, science, and industry. This article synthesizes some of these accounts and concludes with four ways that technology should prove to be rhetorically distinct from science.

Engineers' use of rhetoric differs from that of scientists because of the material objects engineers work with and the material conditions under which they act. For engineers, “publication” takes the form of releasing a marketable object, not a refereed article. Thus, they have less need than scientists do to create written theoretical work and can instead build knowledge by group discussion of instrument traces that they tie directly to the object. The fact that they usually work in hierarchical, for-profit organizations also affects their rhetorical practices, as they must shape the actions of those both below and above them in the corporate hierarchy.

This article proposes a model of organizational change by describing change as a discursive process, sparked by a conflict in an organization's narratives and images. As such, change is the process of realigning an organization's discordant narratives and images. Several implications that the model has for organizational communication and for the study of organizational change are presented.

Carolyn Miller's definition of genre as “social action” has become widely accepted in writing studies; this acceptance has prompted troubling questions about the teaching of professional genres. Because current research emphasizes Miller's reconceptualization of “exigence” as a socially construed need for particular kinds of writing and talk (155-58), some researchers now suggest that unless a genre's social exigence can be fully replicated in the classroom, the genre cannot be taught effectively. Genres, however, entail several kinds of exigence: social exigence that prompts generic writing; social exigence that is reflected in the generic text; textual exigence that shapes the rhetorical situation; and what I call educational exigence, an exigence that prompts writers to learn explicitly how to compose generic texts. Educational exigence was evident in the writing processes of two technical translators who composed in a variety of genres, both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The translators not only responded to educational exigence but also followed a well-considered strategy for gathering information about generic texts.

This inquiry explores the practical implications of constructivist theory for documentation that is targeted to complex tasks and experienced users (users who are less than experts but more than novices). It argues that current task-oriented documentation falls short in addressing these tasks and users and examines the contributions that constructivism can make, contributions that will lead to documentation that differs in kind not just degree from conventional task-oriented manuals and help systems. This inquiry synthesizes the following four themes from constructivist theory and analyzes their relevance to documentation development: (1) changing the object of instruction to “activity in context,” (2) shaping instruction around problems experienced by users in work contexts, (3) highlighting users' social stock of knowledge, and (4) adopting a rhetoric of problem-based instruction expressed through cases. Examples are given from current efforts in interface and instructional design that writers may adapt to documentation design.

This article uses the cross-cultural concepts of context and time to examine the rhetoric of German university students in an English business writing course. This participant-observer account, which includes numerous student examples and observations, provides a fresh perspective for American teachers in increasingly multinational, multicultural classrooms. It also suggests how Aristotle's concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos together with the case method and group work can help teachers respond to the challenges in such classrooms. The article concludes by suggesting that understanding the rhetoric of culture is an important step in accepting and negotiating cultural differences.

Is understanding that transcends language and cultural barriers at all possible? How can we account for the different sorts of failure in achieving intercultural understanding and cooperation? What theory would describe how we can go beyond cross-cultural differences and reach some mutual agreement on business principles and practices? This article explores the relevance of Donald Davidson's philosophy of externalism and Thomas Kent's rhetorical theory of paralogic hermeneutics to these pressing issues in intercultural communication. Using a cultural perspective based on the Taoist yin/yang principle, it explains how an understanding of the externalist conception of truth and the world, and paralogic rhetoric as a theory of communicative interaction, can better enable us to deal with the radical changes taking place in the nature of intercultural relations and communication.

The international strategies of an organization—ethnocentric, polycentric, geocentric, heterarchic—are reflected in its international communication. The discussion presented here, based on Hedlund's application of Perlmutter's categorization of management strategies, focuses on the alignment of an organization's goals and market positions with its international communication approaches. The categorization implies that an organization's global management strategies should be aligned with its international communication practices. As such, an organization that seeks a larger role in the international market yet takes an ethnocentric stance in its communication strategies may be less successful than one with a more polycentric, geocentric, or heterarchic approach to international communication. Thinking about international communication within such a framework enhances not only consulting practice but teaching as well.

Carolyn Miller's “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing” serves as an example of text that has influenced the knowledge-making activities within technical communication. The 68 references, or intertextual connections, to “Humanistic Rationale” between 1979 and 1995 demonstrate its influence and show the evolution of technical communication and the issues important to technical communication professionals. The authors respond to questions of the purpose of technical communication, the influence of the canons of rhetoric, the importance of audience, and the impact of social constructionism on technical communication. This analysis of the academic prose surrounding “Humanistic Rationale” reveals part of the discipline's discussions and the “communal rationality” (617) that shapes the activities of its members.