This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

This study investigates the role of stasis, an ancient rhetorical tool with both heuristic and analytic capabilities, in entrepreneurial rhetoric, specifically in pitching and question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from a multiyear sample of Shark Tank pitches, the author found that funders expect entrepreneurs to account for stases of being, quality, quantity, and place. The findings suggest a series of associated questions within each stasis. When these questions are answered unsuccessfully, standstills occur within the funding argument; when they are successfully addressed, the stasis passes, and ventures are more likely to receive funding. The author discusses the implications of this study for entrepreneurship and professional communication.

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) plays a significant role in the application process for many professional positions, offering descriptive rather than quantitative information from a third party about an individual’s potential fit within the hiring organization. Such letters, however, increasingly appear online, emphasizing existing problems within the genre and creating others involving trust, reliability, and confidentiality. Typically, the response has been that such digitization of the LOR minimizes its significance or standardizes it. This article analyzes the digital LOR genre as an exemplar of epideictic rhetoric situated within a Perelmanian framework and demonstrates how the digital LOR operates rhetorically, enhancing the adherence between candidate, writer, audience, and institutional values and providing a means of evaluating candidate fit. The article also offers a rhetorical heuristic that captures how audiences can more fruitfully read the epideictic, digital LOR, thereby demonstrating how to optimize the digital platform’s benefits and still use the LOR to its best rhetorical advantage.

One of the most distinctive stylistic virtues of speechwriting is characterization, the art of capturing a client’s voice in a believable and engaging manner. This article examines characterization in the context of corporate communication, interweaving an interview with veteran executive speechwriter Alan Perlman with accounts from the ancient rhetorical tradition. As the analysis shows, Perlman’s approach to characterization confirms long-standing rhetorical wisdom yet incorporates insights that reflect the contemporary corporate context in which he has worked. The analysis also calls attention to enduring tensions in characterization—tensions between imitation and representation, effectiveness and ethics, and dramatic character and trustworthy ethos.

This article explores the nature of epideictic rhetoric in science through a close textual analysis of three Nobel lectures. It examines the effects of the genre shift from original research reports to ceremonial speeches, revealing significant differences from Fahnestock's analysis of the genre shift from forensic research reports to epideictic articles in the popular press, especially a move toward greater candidness about the research process. Epideictic scientific rhetoric, therefore, can be said to celebrate the scientific method in general as much as it does the particular line of research at hand.

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.

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.

This review of the relationship of law and art in the litigative context explores ways in which the methodologies of the novelist and other artists can be invoked by the lawyer in structuring and developing a case and presenting it to a court. To the litigators who transcend the form books and stereotypes and see their cases with a fresh eye, neither the law nor the facts are fixed in stone but rather created to meet the deepest realities of the case within the context of our most fundamental values and beliefs. Litigators, by the way they define and project the issues, can affect, even determine, what law and facts are legally relevant and dispositive. They must devise and write the story that threads the client's way out of the labyrinth. Mastery of the formal requirements of litigative writing is only a necessary first step. Freewriting; Hemingwayesque choice of words and syntax; harnessing the symbolic, often hidden, power of language; achieving the dramatic potential of case presentation—all these and more from the creative artist's repertoire empower litigators to win their cases. Resort is made not only to the applicable statutory, regulatory, and case law but also to the processes of the like of Cezanne, Conrad, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Aristotle, and Faulkner.

This study explores the relationship between forensic, deliberative, and epideictic modes of rhetoric in the cold fusion controversy. The purpose of this exploration is threefold: (a) to show the interactions between these three modes of rhetoric more comprehensively than they have been shown in previous case studies of scientific controversies; (b) to examine the ways in which all three modes have shaped the emerging scientific consensus and, further, through a close analysis of key experimental reports, to reveal how forensic rhetoric in the cold fusion controversy has come to occupy pride of place; and (c) to suggest how the events in this controversy support Robert Sanders's contention that rhetorical practices interact with scientific practices to allow diverse researchers to arrive at constructive agreements—not merely political ones—on both research findings and ways to resolve competing interpretations.

The report for decision making shares some common ground with the proposal, the report of scientific experiment, and even the persuasive essay, yet these genres differ. Recognizing these differences is necessary for effective inquiry, pedagogy, and decision making. The genres are means of solving different types of problems: practical, empirical, and theoretical. They serve different aims: action, demonstration, and conviction. The proposal, like the report, may solve practical problems, but the proposal advocates, whereas the report inquires. These genres all embody assumptions about problem solving and inquiry in their forms. Applying the problem-solving goals and methods of the proposal, experimental report, or essay to the report for decision making compromises the quality of the inquiry and of the resulting decision. Complex problems for decision making require a rhetorical method of inquiry based on Aristotle's special topics. The report genre reflects the invention heuristics and analysis in its form.

Technical-professional communication as praxis, or social action, is extended beyond skill or amoral art into the realm of phronesis, concerned with reasoning about ends rather than means. However, praxis and phronesis are sociologically constructed and, like social-epistemic rhetoric, ideologically defined in the political context by the ethic of expediency enabling deliberative rhetoric. Hitler's use of propaganda to construct praxis and define phronesis in Nazi Germany is examined in terms of the rational but open-ended nature of Aristotle's political-ethical thought, and the implications for our understanding of Aristotelian praxis is discussed. Finally, the failure of professional discourse surrounding the siting of a low-level nuclear waste facility to create a persuasive reality and yet ideologically construct praxis is examined, raising questions concerning the possibility of a deliberative technical rhetoric in U.S. democracy.

If science is conducted within a scientific culture, then the classical concept of epideictic rhetoric should be applicable to internal scientific discourse. A theory of epideictic rhetoric as the “rhetoric of orthodoxies” is presented, along with its five rhetorical functions: education, legitimation, demonstration, celebration, and criticism. Suggestions as to how these concepts might be applied to internal scientific discourse are given, with special attention given to studies of science already completed by philosophers, sociologists, and rhetoricians.

This essay analyzes business communication in order to generate an ap proach to ethics based in the rhetorical process of corporate life. Through a study of the role of language in creating and disseminating values, the essay first extends the Aristotelian paradigm for ethical communication to the rhet oric of business. Two case studies then show how this model works in practice, while a third case poses questions of ethics and communication for the read er's consideration.