Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly marketed to knowledge workers as productivity tools for focused, immersive work. Yet little empirical research examines the lived experience of sustained VR use for complex academic writing tasks. This study presents a 10-week diary study of a doctoral candidate using VR to compose her dissertation during summer 2025. Through weekly reflective entries, screen recordings, and artifact analysis, we examine the user experience dimensions of immersive academic writing. Our thematic analysis reveals six major findings: (1) technical infrastructure constraints dominated the writing experience; (2) embodied discomfort consistently limited sessions to 30–50 min; (3) affective dimensions shaped productivity; (4) learning curves remained steep throughout the study; (5) task type significantly influenced success, with structured administrative writing outperforming open-ended academic drafting; and (6) technical disruptions fragmented flow and made momentum recovery difficult. We argue that VR writing tools require task-appropriate design, realistic session expectations, and user agency to discontinue when needs are not met. These findings contribute user-centered evidence to technical communication scholarship on emerging composing technologies and offer practical guidance for graduate writing programs.

This article proposes the Canon to Code (C2C) Auditing Framework for evaluating generative (artificial intelligence) AI output through classical rhetoric, arguing that AI's characteristic failures—guessing instead of knowing, politeness instead of credibility, and confidence instead of judgment—revisit problems that rhetoric has addressed since antiquity. Developed using a rulemaking methodology and drawing on classical rhetorical theory, this framework presents 10 auditing rules that operationalize rhetorical principles into evaluation criteria for AI-generated content, focusing on accuracy, transparency, and accountability. It offers content auditors, technical communicators, and compliance professionals a theoretically grounded method for distinguishing AI output that meets audience needs from output that simulates credibility through pattern matching.

The CIA's Operation PBSuccess represents a pivotal moment in Cold War securitization that illuminates technical communication's role in security contexts. We use Haas and Frost's apparent decolonial feminist (ADF) rhetoric of risk to trace how communicators mediated security logics across cultures and networks while exploiting technological asymmetries between the US and Guatemala. Building on theories of risk and (in)security framing, we demonstrate how the scriptwriters and hosts of Radio Liberación , as technical communicators, functioned as security actors complicit in the decades-long aftermath. We conclude by calling on technical communicators to approach risk communication through continued decolonial praxis.

This article examines United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID's) maternal health (MH) success stories as transnational assemblages that deploy security logics to justify external governance while appearing to celebrate local agency. Through rhetorical-cultural analysis of 25 narratives, I identify three recurring strategies—crisis amplification, representational homogenization, and paratextual techniques—that frame MH as requiring urgent intervention. These stories obscure local expertise and align care with donor-defined metrics and narrative arcs. Findings show that security logics circulate through genre conventions and design templates that normalize intervention as technical and humanitarian. I argue TPC scholars must examine assemblage mechanisms’ role in shaping representation, risk, and care transnationally.

This article the Doomsday Clock and the Nuclear Football as interconnected technical communication artifacts that function as two sides of a “spurious coin” in the securitization of nuclear deterrence. While the Clock externalizes existential risk through apocalyptic rhetoric, the Football internalizes it within exclusive military command structures—together legitimizing perpetual nuclear crisis. Drawing on technical communication scholarship and critical security studies, the analysis argues that both artifacts sustain nuclearist ideology by reinforcing deterrence as common sense. The Clock's ominous countdown and the Football's ever-present launch capability are mutually validating and together normalize nuclear brinkmanship as the price of global security.

This study explores technical and professional communication (TPC) students’ design of multimodal career portfolios, focusing on their strategies amid technological advancements and shifting workplace dynamics. The study analyzed 155 artifacts from 31 students, including resumes, video resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and rhetorical and modal analyses, using MAXQDA for discourse analysis. The results highlight the importance of research synthesis, intertextuality, audience awareness, personal branding, and adaptability in portfolio development. TPC students effectively create portfolios that meet company expectations across boundaries. A multimodal approach in TPC curricula is recommended, along with further research on emerging technologies’ impact on portfolios.

The relationship between democracy and literacy is a longstanding topic of interest both to contemporary communication scholars as well as historians of rhetoric. Democracy and literacy are both social activities. Focusing on the Classical Period of Athens ( ca. 480–323 BCE) as a specific site of study, this essay argues that the dynamic interaction of these two activities was facilitated by the development and application of technological equipment. That is, technology, in this case, refers to the equipment and machinery ancient Athenians utilized that enhanced their literate skills in order to facilitate the performance of democratic activities. Archaeological excavations over the last century, especially at the Agora, have yielded artifacts that provide evidence of the technological implements used in democratic activities. This study offers an analysis of recently excavated artifacts arguing that Athenians developed and employed equipment that utilized literacy in order to enhance the civic processes of democracy. This field study advances the conclusion that the relationship between democracy and literacy in classical Athens requires an understanding of a third factor: the impact of technology.

This article examines the subject of persuasion in technical and professional communications (TPC) with a specific focus on proposals in U.S. Government contracting. It demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between the intent of proposals, which is to persuade, and the rhetorical traditions and professional boundaries of technical writers. The analysis draws on the existing rhetorical- and genre-based TPC literature and borrows from theory in other disciplines—management, organizational theory, sociology, and psychology among others. To advance the scholarship on proposals, this analysis is framed within the overall context of a structural analogy to U.S. military Information Operations (IO). Through use of analogy, it is suggested that the IO community's approach to the concepts of “influence,” “narrative,” “target audience,” and “unity of effort” may offer useful insight for State and Federal contractors to consider in their efforts to write persuasive proposals. This analysis is then used to develop a research agenda for the study of proposals. Areas for future research include the science of persuasion and the use of narrative as it relates to proposals, improved rigor in the use of target audience research, and organizational constructs to improve collaborative writing in proposals.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

This article analyzes the speeches of two U.S. politicians—President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden—to present how they make their arguments about climate change using various frames. While frames are rhetorical acts, they are also a form of persuasion. In particular, the author demonstrates how Trump foregrounded negative frames with fear-inducing elements. He presented job losses and economic harm as consequences of joining the Paris Climate Accord, putting him on the defensive. In contrast, Biden utilized positive frames to strengthen his arguments and aligned more closely with the environmental justice framework. Inspired by the rhetoric of the framing strategies employed by these two speakers, the study suggests that technical communicators should focus on using language that constructs new frames to enhance the success of their argumentations.

To examine the impact of cultural factors on business responses to negative online reviews, we first examined rhetorical moves in business responses to negative online reviews on Chinese B2C e-commerce platforms. Then, we conducted a comparative analysis of the rhetorical moves in this research and those identified in Wang’s research on rhetorical moves identified in business responses to negative online reviews on Amazon.com. Following the framework of social-cognitive system theory, we explained how cultural factors may shape businesses’ responses to negative online reviews and concluded the research by discussing the implications of the research in the context of cross-border e-commerce.

We ask, “What genre conventions are shared in 18th- and 21st-century midwifery manuals?” The article responds to this question by situating manuals as cultural arbiters and defining genre in a cultural context. The article identifies parallels between 18th-century and 21st-century midwifery manuals that focus on the rhetorical situation (via front matter, including title pages and prefaces) and accessibility of information (via design, definitions, and step-by-step procedures). Midwifery practices have changed drastically in the modern era, but the underlying goals—safety and health for the birthing person and child—remain constant. Increased publication of manuals dedicated to midwifery in the 18th century suggests a heightened focus on practices leading to successful outcomes in childbirth that highlight the value of examining manuals as a genre reflecting humanistic elements in technical documents. We argue that midwifery manuals emphasize underlying ideologies in the production and reproduction of socio-cultural consciousness still present today.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational—a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

This study explores how prompting techniques, especially those integrated with rhetorical analysis results, may improve the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated business communication messages. I conducted an experiment to assess the effectiveness of these prompting techniques in the context of crafting a negative message generated with ChatGPT 3.5 ( n = 85). A multiple regression was calculated to explore prompting techniques’ impact on the negative message grades and how each technique influences the message grade. The results ( F(4, 80) = 31.84, p < .001), with an adjusted R2 = .595, indicate a positive relationship between prompting techniques and the effectiveness of AI-generated messages. This study also identified challenges related to students’ AI literacy. I conclude the study by recommending practical measures on how to incorporate AI into business and professional writing classrooms.

Using the technical and professional communication service course as the site for research, and student learning outcomes (SLOs) as the specific focus, we gathered, coded, and analyzed 503 SLOs from 93 institutions. Our results show the top outcomes are rhetoric, genre, writing, design, and collaboration. We discuss these outcomes and then we offer programmatic implications drawn from the data that encourage technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty to use common SLOs, to improve outcome development, and to reconsider the purpose of the service course for students.

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

This article combines historical research with demographic analysis and neoliberal/rhetorical critique to put forth the concept of slow civic violence—indirect injuries on civic process, particularly within marginalized communities. The author ties the United States Postal Service's (USPS) rationale for removing mail sorting machines during the 2020 election year to systemic moves that damage democratic participation. The author conducts an empirical analysis of where the USPS mail sorting machines were removed to show how neoliberal arguments in favor of cost cutting make voting by mail a more precarious and uncertain act primarily for those who reside in communities of color.

The American Psychological Association notes that approximately one in seven women will experience postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth. Finding support can help lead to better outcomes for those suffering from PPD. This article examines cover photos of PPD support groups on Facebook. By arguing that these photos construct rhetorical boundaries that support-seekers must cross to access PPD resources, the article expands our current understandings of rhetorical boundaries and calls for increased attention to visual selection in high-stakes health contexts. This article emphasizes the idea that we might transform visual boundaries, like the Facebook cover photos studied here, into rhetorical boundary objects that promote inclusivity through more thoughtful and representative image selection.

Telemedicine is an alternative healthcare delivery system whereby patients access digital technology to consult with a physician virtually. Patients first interact with telemedicine via a consumer-facing website. Telemedicine promises numerous benefits to patients, such as increased access to healthcare, yet poor usability of the telemedicine user interface (UI) may hinder patient acceptance and adoption of the service. The telemedicine UI moderates patients’ ability to utilize telemedicine, and therefore it must be usable, but it must also be rhetorical to motivate patients to perform certain actions. Digital rhetoric refers to UI elements that influence user actions and knowledge and is tied to usability because of these same human–computer interaction (HCI) factors. This study examined the usability of three telemedicine provider UIs and by identifying usability problems, reveals digital rhetoric that is significant to telemedicine UIs. The article concludes by offering heuristics of digital rhetoric that lead to optimal usability.

In technical and professional communication, the social justice turn calls on us to interrogate sites of positionality, privilege, and power to help foreground strategies that can empower marginalized groups. I propose that mainstream media coverage of the opioid epidemic represents such a site because addiction to these drugs, which initially primarily affected White people, has been positioned as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. I explore the strategies that were used to create this positioning by investigating themes in the visual rhetoric as conveyed through data visualizations and in the text of the articles in which these graphics were published. My results align with two previous studies that confirmed this public health framing. I also observed an emphasis on mortality, which contributes to our understanding of rhetorical strategies that can be used to engender support rather than condemnation for those suffering from drug addiction.

The architecture of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), set up under Her Highness Sheikha Moza Al-Misnedd and the Qatar Foundation, spatially embodies new possibilities because AIA Gold Medal award-winning architect Ricardo Legorreta designed buildings that both challenge and encompass Gulf Arabian tradition. The buildings exemplify, enact, and embody new ways of experiencing gendered educational identity that also honors traditional local values. This architecture is important because TAMUQ is a U.S. institution that serves several different international student populations. This article emphasizes how TAMUQ functions as a heterotopia, one which creates embodied experiences of gender, education, and identity and requires what Rogoff termed “a curious eye” to discern how these educational spaces reflect changing identities in the Gulf states.

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

This study analyzes the visualization of census data in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to 1925. I examine how visual strategies were used to construct an American identity by contrasting the “native” population with the “other”—new immigrants and African Americans, which were visualized as undesirable counterparts. By defining the “other,” the Atlases created a pan ethnic identity of the “native white” population, established a racial hierarchy, and hardened the division between old and new immigrants. The study develops a rhetorical framework for understanding how data design is used to marginalize racially and ethnically minority groups.

This article examines visuals used in the reporting of the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in order to explore the use of different image forms and genres in communicating health information to distinct audiences. By tracing an informational report through several publication types, the use of different image forms and rhetorical genres are observed, as is the robustness and flexibility of these categorizations.

This essay argues that technical rhetoric in ancient Athens is neither well nor fully understood in its present historical characterization but rather is best realized as occupying a position on a spectrum of literate skills ranging from an art to a craft. The dismissive views of technical writing advanced by Plato and Aristotle should be reconsidered and specialized literate practices be recognized as an important feature of rhetoric in Athens’ classical period. A review of discursive and material (archaeological) evidence reveals that technical writing was evolving into a craft-skill in Athens as early as the archaic period and, by the classical period, would be regarded as a respected “rhetorical” profession of artistic expression. This essay urges readers to reconsider the restrictive characterization of rhetoric advanced by some historians of rhetoric and include the specialist craft-skills of writing as a manifestation of technical rhetoric that both illustrates, and more accurately represents, the range of classical rhetoric in ancient Athens.

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems. Representation of the biometric technology, therefore, reflects ways that technical communication can become complicit in silencing, excluding, and marginalizing local voices. I call attention to how communication that focuses on dominant narratives obscures and delegitimizes the knowledge of disenfranchised and less privileged groups.

This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.

The rhetorical challenges and deliberations of scientific authors writing climate change assessment reports have received scant scholarly attention. As our interviews with 21 authors reveal, authors engage with multiple stakeholders who bring diverse scientific, political, economic, and cultural interests and perspectives. They must remain aware of politically motivated climate change denial and scientific illiteracy while remaining committed to producing policy relevant rather than policy prescriptive statements. These challenges lead to intense rhetorical negotiations over the lexical and visual features of a document they hope will deflect denial and contribute to meaningful policy solutions.

Rhetorical theory has frequently relied on metaphors of place and positioning as heuristics to build better arguments. This article utilizes one such metaphor, that of stasis theory, as a method by which we might change the terrain of the conversation surrounding the climate crisis. As an example, the author does a rhetorical analysis of a recent agricultural report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment and finds that, rather than using traditional questions of conjecture and quality, the authors of the report focus on questions of procedure and definition to reframe the discussion surrounding the climate crisis. Drawing from the rhetoric in this report, the author suggests that technical communicators might similarly produce more fruitful conversations around the climate crisis if they focus on what to do (procedure) and redefining the crisis as a local issue (definition).

Deploying a grounded theory approach, this case study examines 9 years of a nonrenewable energy company’s responses to a voluntary environmental disclosure questionnaire to discover how industrial discourse about climate change is used by industry writers. Through using the rhetorical strategies of emotions, affect, and mythic narrative within theory, balancing norm, and dominion frames, the company communicates climate change does not impact their secure economic future due to their proactive approach toward regulatory compliance with technological innovation and attentive internal and external policy oversight.

This article examines a targeted drought awareness campaign by the city of Cape Town in South Africa to prevent a looming water crisis dubbed Day Zero. Using rhetorical criticism and commonplaces, the article analyzes the design and (rhetorical)circulation of artifacts that heightened public awareness of the crisis, helped shape the public mindset, and galvanized collective action to prevent Day Zero. For one city in Africa to avert a water crisis through a rhetorically orchestrated set of technological, scientific, and civic interventions is significant for (among others) technical communicators who need to know not simply that it was done, but how rhetoric helped avert Day Zero.

The circulation of scientific and technical genres in online publics can shape both public opinion and policy deliberation about issues such as global warming. While rhetoric and professional writing scholarship has documented the myriad ways that genres are transformed as they circulate across discursive boundaries, few examine how argument shapes those transformation and circulations. Drawing on Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, this article analyzes arguments in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles about global warming to document how editors argue about genre as they deliberate over what counts as reliable sources of global warming knowledge. This analysis demonstrates how argument mediates genre uptake and circulation. In doing so, it helps account for how technical and scientific genres circulate in contemporary online publics.

Despite the recent surge in social justice and decolonial scholarship, technical and professional communication (TPC) research remains a potential site of oppression. This article is meant to be a call to action; it attempts to (re)ignite discussions about what we value and how we express what we value. It encourages the field of TPC to be more responsive to the experiences and struggles of research participants—those we engage during our knowledge production process. I explore what I call oppressive rhetoric in TPC research with a specific focus on the term subjects in institutional review board forms and in the reporting of some TPC research about research participants. I assert that in spite of our best efforts in advancing the goals of marginalized groups and despite the forward-looking trajectory of progressive research, more work needs to be done to address oppressive rhetoric in TPC scholarship.

Apocalypticism is a powerful brew of eschatological belief and political imagination that is extremely persuasive. This article addresses the intersections between apocalyptic rhetoric and the technical communication of risk, disease outbreak, and disaster preparedness by analyzing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign. Specifically, I argue that the framing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s campaign relies on and extends problematic iterations of apocalypticism and undermines the educational objectives of disaster preparedness and response. I conclude with suggestions for how technical communicators designing public awareness and outreach campaigns can use existential risk rhetoric for engagement without succumbing to the pernicious side effects of apocalypticism.

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss publishing scenarios and challenges facing such authors and offer guidelines for producing clear, effective, publishable articles, in English, for international discourse. My approach is based on traditional rhetorical principles, plain language studies, research pursued at nuclear security conferences, feedback from internationals at writing workshops, and my experience as editor of the International Journal of Nuclear Security.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

In this article, I analyze 73 circuit court opinions in which due process rights are weighed according to a little-known legal test called shocks the conscience. I also offer my observations of a federal trial in the U.S. district court in 2015 upon which the test was imposed. I reveal how requiring the shocks-the-conscience test confirms the authority of the state and silences those who have been singled out as individuals or as groups to be deprived of constitutional rights. In particular, professional communication scholars who examine emotional appeals as rhetorical strategies should find this article of interest.

In the field of intercultural business and technical communication, intercultural communication has been a regular topic in curriculum for decades; various teaching approaches exist for developing students’ cultural awareness and helping them achieve a theoretical understanding about the concept of culture, cultural differences, and cultural conflict. But quite often teaching and learning are limited in the classroom context, although it is true that study abroad programs are available for a small group of students. As a result, students do not have enough opportunities to interact with members of other cultures, which limits students’ potentials for gaining intercultural competence. This study explores the rhetorical nature of simulations, defines the perspective of using activity theory as a framework to understand the learning process occurring in simulations, and provides an intercultural simulation example to explain how instructors can incorporate simulations into the business and technical communication curriculum.

Online discussion forums for patients offer the benefits of community but the risks of misinformation. A physician-moderated forum may help to mitigate this tension. How do both the professional expertise of a physician moderator and the personal, experiential expertise of patients contribute to trust in a forum? A rhetorical analysis of a year of postings in an online Parkinson’s community reveals that both forms of expertise were trusted, demonstrating the possibility for them to complement each other. This study illustrates the broader ways trust is established in patient communities and offers implications for technical communicators as forum designers or moderators.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case study challenges technical writing students to consider complex cultural circuits, or networks, that comprise a specific controversy. The students analyze the rhetorical situation, create new content that contributes to the ongoing discussion, and learn about audience through usability testing their multimodal projects.

American economist Paul Krugman has become a highly influential public intellectual in the social sciences. The natural and physical sciences need a public intellectual like Krugman to make more effective arguments for the existence and urgency of climate change, the benefits of vaccine use, and other pressing issues. To demonstrate how such a goal can be achieved, this article presents a rhetorical analysis of Krugman’s public intellectual writing in The New York Times from 2013 to 2016. The substantial public impact of this body of work stems from Krugman’s use of rhetorical strategies that are both similar to and—more importantly—a departure from strategies used by other well-known public intellectuals in the sciences.

This research explores a presumed link between today’s use of digital media and an ever-increasing lack of rhetorical awareness in students. Specifically, the study pilots a method for measuring rhetorical awareness through students’ e-mail transactions with faculty in technical writing service courses, questioning whether rhetorical awareness has decreased in the preceding 10 years. The findings indicate that students might be more rhetorically aware today than they were 10 years ago, but levels remain below expectations.

In 2014, Rawlins and Wilson proposed a typology of agential interactions between users and designers of interactive data displays. This article tests that typology by studying 20 users working with three different types of interactive data displays and answering questions, which were coded by verb and actor and analyzed for themes. The authors show that rhetorical agency is marked by thoughts, actions, and language. Affordances by the designer open a shared rhetorical space where user and designer are coparticipants. As interactivity increases, participants see themselves as rhetorical agents in a community of rhetorical agents rather than as conduits of information.

We examine the rhetorical activity employed within software development communities in code texts. For technical communicators, the rhetoricity of code is crucial for the development of more effective code and documentation. When we understand that code is a collection of rhetorical decisions about how to engage those machinic processes, we can better attend to the significance and nuance of those decisions and their impact on potential user activities.

This essay expands Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model to bring more attention to the persuasive effects of using the self as a model. To illuminate this technique, I analyze the personal narratives of popular health coaches, who are championing a holistic health movement toward what I refer to as “do-it-yourself healthcare.” This case involves arguments regarding the efficacy of methods in evidence-based medicine and “alternative” or holistic health, as popular health coaches predicate their ability to heal themselves and others on abandoning traditional medicine. In brief, the purpose of this article is twofold: first, to characterize the rhetoric of the movement toward alternative or holistic health, and, second, to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model and address the implications of this expansion.

This article proposes a heuristic that teachers and students can use together to create a vocabulary for discussing the aesthetic aspects of color and typography in document design work. By using this framework, teachers and students can generate a collection of shared visual topoi or commonplaces for describing the aesthetic value of color and typography that they can then draw from to inform visual analysis and production work.

This article reports on an analysis of research questions in the emerging field of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM). The data set included 54 articles, published in 4 journals between the years 2000 and 2014. The articles were found to address five areas, including questions about (a) the identity of RHM, (b) disciplinarity, (c) ecological interaction, (d) maneuverability, and (e) process. Overall, this article argues that RHM tends to take a critical stance toward medicine, treating it as a monolithic profession and set of discourses. Given the conclusions of many of the articles in the data set, this stance may be unwarranted. The article concludes by suggesting future directions for scholarship in RHM.

“Cape Wind” is a proposed wind-energy project off the Massachusetts coast. Its environmental effects are detailed in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Writers of an EIS must address rhetorical challenges posed by the complexity of how the “environment” is characterized by many statutes and regulations. These requirements include guidance on the document’s style, and because the text is hundreds of pages long, they also include rules on its arrangement (its genre), and its online delivery. Partly as a result, the writer’s stance is that of an impersonal, corporate author. The EIS is required to address multiple audiences that include decision makers and elected officials; public participation in the process is encouraged. Evidence about the actual audience shows that the public finds out about the project through media reports, web sites, and press releases, rather than studying the EIS. Finally, sustained opposition by a fossil-fuel lobbying group has led to the project’s apparent demise.