This article connects work on emotion, rhetoric, and entrepreneurial experience as it reports findings from a questionnaire issued to 80 entrepreneurs who belong to the global entrepreneur community Startup Grind. The findings from this study offer researchers a more robust representation of the rhetorical theories that guide entrepreneurs’ professional communication practices. In particular, the authors report on the distribution and dependency between two variables: operative rhetorical theory (indicated by one of four choices) and entrepreneurial experience (indicated by number of ventures and total years of experience).

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

Victor W. Pagé was either the first or one of the first to make a living primarily as a technical communicator in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. His 33 automotive and aviation books published by the Norman W. Henley Company were popular with both the public and critics because they contained timely, comprehensive coverage of novel technology; profuse illustrations; occasional analogies; easy-to-access information; well-established expertise; and sophisticated employment of task orientation. Pagé was able to publish many books quickly because he reused manufacturers' and his own material and methods of organization. He was also able to communicate his novel information effectively because he had both extensive firsthand experience with early automobiles and planes and because he was continually involved in teaching. Victor Pagé's early twentieth-century work demonstrates both what have become mainstream techniques in technical communication and a number of unique rhetorical strategies.

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 uses qualitative content analysis to discuss current perspectives in technical communication pedagogy. It examines the 1990-94 issues of five major scholarly journals—a collection of 563 articles—to identify 98 articles mentioning teaching in undergraduate technical communication courses. Influenced by differing theoretical and practical approaches, the 98 articles were classified according to four pedagogical perspectives: (1) the functional perspective, based on empirical research and workplace experience; (2) the rhetorical perspective, based on scholarship in the humanities and influenced by rhetorical theory; (3) the ideological perspective, also based on scholarship in the humanities but influenced by critical theory; and (4) the intercultural and feminist perspective, a bridging perspective based on both empirical research and critical theory. This article discusses the four perspectives in terms of the educational goals of communicative competence (the ability to use language to succeed in the workplace) and social critique (the ability to question existing social structures and to envision cultural change).

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.

A survey of English accounting, its origin, its development, and its first books (1553-1680) provides another insight into the shift from orality to textuality in English society. The shift to sophisticated textual expression of accounting occurred as a result of the confluence of the rising English Renaissance trade economy, increasing literacy, and improving typography—all of which made the need for extensive financial records necessary and possible. The shift to a highly sophisticated textual/spatial presentation was nurtured by Ramism, Renaissance Italian art, and the rise of capitalism. Ultimately, this spatial presentation destroyed the oral-aural aspect of accounting. Spatial presentation was essential to the development of accounting techniques for an expanding economy, but spatial, rather than verbal, display led to abstraction in presentation that today makes accounting difficult for the nonaccounting reader to understand and for the expert accountant to verbalize.

Business and technical communication have conventionally been separated in academe—a separation that formalist rhetorical theory has supported. Epistemic rhetorical theory, however, suggests that this separation does not reflect the profession's current understanding of workplace discourse. This article demonstrates that the labels business and technical communication are not helpful in understanding two workplace documents: a memorandum and a report. The article then explores the increased explanatory power in two epistemic theoretical approaches, social construction and paralogic hermeneutics, after which the article discusses the radical implications of these approaches for a curricular dialogue concerning workplace writing. Finally, the article describes interests inside and outside academe that preserve the status quo and thus mitigate against curricular change, positing that such change would be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve.

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.

Business communicators today risk legal liability as courts are increasingly holding writers and their employing organizations responsible for reasonable—although often unintended—interpretations of their routine writing. Research and pedagogy have not kept abreast of this change. Rhetorical theory, particularly a social perspective, provides a useful foundation for understanding judicial resolution of claims arising out of writing; however, theory must also account for factors not encompassed within extended audience analysis. Current texts offer general descriptions of the laws most likely to affect business writers; in addition, writing pedagogy must provide specific strategies for avoiding liability-prone prose.

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.

While writing teachers view the résumé as a sophisticated rhetorical chal lenge, students tend to see it as a "technical specification"of their employment qualifications. This study investigated the reader's perspective by examining how writing features influence recruiters' assessments of résumés. Eighteen recruiters rated 72 résumés describing fictitious mechanical-engineering stu dents. Four résumé features were systematically varied: relevance of previous work experience, elaboration ofindependent coursework, stylistic quality, and mechanical correctness. The major result suggests that technical work experi ence is important but not sufficient: If the résumés of technically well- qualified applicants contained grammatical errors, recruiters rated these résumés lower than résumés listing less experience but containing more accu rate writing.1