Arguments manifest in scientific visuals through graphic representation, content placement, and overall document structure. These arguments, designed to influence public perception, change over time in relation to sociopolitical climate. Analysis of a series of documents constructed deliberately to influence perception can help to determine patterns of argumentation and perceived exigencies. In this article, four self-guided tour brochures produced for distribution to visitors to the Glen Canyon Dam in 1977, 1984, 1990, and 1993 are analyzed in order to identify rhetorical strategies designed to influence public perceptions of the dam site, and examine how public perception of the dam, and related argumentation, is structured by sociopolitical climate.

This pilot study obtained baseline information on verbal and visual rhetorics to teach microscopy techniques to college biology majors. We presented cell images to students in cell biology and biology writing classes and then asked them to identify textual, verbal, and visual cues that support microscopy learning. Survey responses suggest that these students recognized some of the rhetorical strategies used and conflated others, revealing intriguing questions for further research in undergraduate microscopy education.

This article presents a qualitative text analysis of persuasive documents written by a major U.S. airline in a 2004 counter-campaign against the Teamsters union. The methodology for this study is based on Stephen Toulmin's argument model, including his “double triad” and his interpretation of artistic proofs, which parallel the three classical rhetorical appeals. Actual corporate documents are featured in this article, supported by content from management conference calls that were attended by the researchers. The article concludes with implications for teaching and research in the field of technical and professional communication.

Americans contribute $240 billion dollars to charities each year, raised in part by writing letters to potential donors. While it is debatable what the reasons are for donors to give so much money, most donors seem to be moved to contribute by pathos, particularly pity. The concept of pathos as a rhetorical appeal has become more complex over the years, growing from a simple strategy to a complicated set of parameters requiring careful delineation. Beginning with the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, pathos was defined with greater clarity (especially the concept of enargia), with Aristotle's formal definitions of the emotions, and with the use of an image upon which to direct the audience's pity. Cicero adds to the theory by calling for the use of pathos in the peroration and reinforcing Aristotle's emphasis on careful audience analysis. St. Augustine and those who follow, including Renaissance, 18th-century rhetoricians, and 20th-century scholars like Kenneth Burke, argue that style can also be an effective persuasive strategy for a pathetic appeal. Accordingly, the charity letters examined illustrate not only Aristotle's and Cicero's tenets but also show that elements of style, particularly rhetorical figures and schemes, are common rhetorical strategies used in these charity letters. While at first the rhetoric of charity letters seems simple and straight-forward, to raise billions of dollars every year charity letters use sophisticated appeals to pity that have a long and interesting history.

While the importance of “expressive writing,” or informal, self-directed writing, has been well established, teachers underutilize it, particularly in technical writing courses. We introduce the term expressive/exploratory technical writing (XTW), which is the use of informal, self-directed writing to problem-solve in technical fields. We describe how engineering students resist writing, despite decades of research showing its importance to their careers, and we suggest that such resistance may be because most students only see writing as an audience-driven performance and thus incompletely understand the link between writing and thinking. The treatment of invention in rhetorical history supports their view. We describe two examples of using XTW in software engineering to plan programming tasks. We conclude by discussing how a systematic use of XTW could shift the technical writing curriculum, imbuing the curriculum with writing and helping students see how to problem-solve using natural language.

In this article, I examine a historical information graphic—Charles Booth's maps of London poverty (1889–1902)—to analyze the cultural basis of ideas of transparency and clarity in information graphics. I argue that Booth's maps derive their rhetorical power from contemporary visual culture as much as from their scientific authority. The visual rhetoric of the maps depended upon an ironic inversion of visual culture to make poverty seem a problem that could be addressed, rather than an insurmountable crisis. This visual rhetoric led directly to significant features of and concepts in western societies, including the poverty line and universal old-age pensions (social security).

One way to resolve some of the conflict in English studies and technical communication over their diminishing cultural capital is to recognize the place of instrumental discourse in communication studies. Instrumental discourse is individually verified social agreements to coordinate and control physical actions. One purpose of literary works is to voice new concerns about social inequities. A purpose of rhetoric is to persuade others of the validity of those concerns. Instrumental discourse registers agreements about those concerns and brings them to temporary closure in laws, instructions, contracts, and constitutions. Instrumental discourse is the culmination of a process that often begins with a literary monolog, is continued in many rhetorical dialogs, and ends, for a while, in a chorus of approval. Each phase of this communication process—monolog, dialog, and chorus—has a place in English studies. If more English studies faculty would recognize the need to study the communications that promote dissensus and consensus, then they might contribute more to global discussions about social justice, cooperation, and sustainability, and they might gain more cultural capital and social influence.

Carolyn Miller's oft-cited “Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” published in 1979, tries to give technical communication faculty more cultural capital in English departments controlled by literature professors. Miller replaces a positivistic emphasis in technical communication pedagogy with rhetoric. She shows how technical knowledge is produced by individual activity and social affirmation and not by objective descriptions of sensory impressions. Her “Rationale” is an attempt to change institutional and discursive structures by persuading literature professors that technical communication can have as much distinction in the academy as literature.

In this article, I present findings from a discourse analysis of an often-overlooked genre of technical communication, regulatory writing. The study focuses on post-bellum regulations that disproportionately affected African Americans and the historical contexts in which the regulations were written. Historically, African Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have maintained an implicit mistrust of government regulations and the government officials who write them. The justification for this mistrust is deeply rooted in the fact that for decades regulations were not written to protect the rights of African Americans nor was their input considered in regulatory writing. In Communicating Across Cultures, Stella Ting-Toomey argues, “if conflict parties do not trust each other, they tend to move away (cognitively, affectively and physically) from each other rather than struggle side by side in negotiation” [1, p. 222]. This study reveals rhetorical strategies used in historical regulatory writing that may still impact the ethos of regulatory writers.

In my 1992 College English article “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust” [1], I looked at the implications of a Nazi memo whose sole purpose was to improve the efficiency of the gassing vans, in order to begin to try to understand and discuss the negative uses and ethical abuses to which technical communication, and deliberative rhetoric generally, could be taken by the powerful and unscrupulous. In “Questioning the Motives of Technical Communication and Rhetoric: Steven Katz's ‘Ethic of Expediency’” [2], Patrick Moore accuses me of ignoring alternate translations, citing out of context, and focusing on the negative meaning of words to make my case. The point at issue in these charges, I believe, is whether (and to what degree) Aristotle meant to base deliberative discourse on “expediency.” I will take each of these charges up one at a time to explore them more thoroughly, discuss their interrelations, and then conclude with a few observations of my own.

The successful communicator is expected to provide communications that are not only complete but also representative of effective thinking (i.e., original). Creating complete and creative communications begins with a disciplined process of discovery—identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and integrating the articulated and embedded purposes. Expanding on the work of Linda Flower and John Hayes, this article first explores a means to promote a thorough examination of purpose. It then provides tools for capturing and integrating these insights into communications that are complete, capable of satisfying the rhetorical challenges, and compelling reflections of the student's creative problem solving abilities.

This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

The recent trend of incorporating more visuals into communication challenges technical communicators, who must now possess both verbal and visual literacy. Despite all the recent scholarship on visual aspects of technical communication, technical communicators lack thorough guidelines for selecting and composing effective images that convey thematic and conceptual information, or what Schriver calls “stage-setting” images. This article reviews existing literature in visual communication and reports results of a study that assessed readers' opinions of themes conveyed by specific example images. It then suggests that the rhetorical tropes of metonymy and synecdoche can be used to identify images for conveying certain themes, and that successful stage-setting images will show intrinsic, not extrinsic, relationships to their thematic subject matter.

A significant problem in technical communication is persuading the user that the information is accurate, valid, and useful. All too often, technical communicators treat users as members of their own culture. When authors do consider cultural issues, they often focus on matters such as vocabulary, visuals, and organization. Other strategies, however, can be useful in gaining acceptance of technical information in cross-cultural situations. For example, the communication theory of compliance-gaining offers suggestions for how the technical communicators can adapt the text to enhance user acceptance when communicating to members of their own culture as well as when communicating across cultures. Communicators can use promises, threats, demonstrate positive and negative outcomes, extend friendliness, etc., to develop the text. In this article, I will explain several compliance-gaining strategies authors can use, identify rhetorical strategies they can combine with compliance-gaining strategies, show how these strategies can be effective in a cross-cultural environment by comparing the strategies in two sample cultures, and analyze a brief sample.

My article traces the development, chronicles the impact, and explains the essence of Herbert Spencer's “The Philosophy of Style” (1852). Spencer's essay has had a significant influence on stylistics, especially in scientific and technical communication. Although in our generation Spencer's contribution to stylistics is not widely remembered, it ought to be. His single essay on this subject was seminal to modern theories about effective communication, not because it introduced new knowledge but because it was such a rhetorically astute synthesis of stylistic lore, designed to connect traditional rhetorical theory with 19th-century ideas about science, technology, and evolution. It was also influential because it was part of Spencer's grand “synthetic philosophy,” a prodigious body of books and essays that made him one of the most prominent thinkers of his time. Spencer's “Philosophy of Style” carried the day, and many following decades, with its description of the human mind as a symbol-processing machine, with its description of cognitive and affective dimensions of communication, and with its scientifically considered distillation of the fundamental components of effective style. We should read Spencer's essay and understand its impact not so much because we expect it to teach us new things about good style, but precisely because: 1) it's at the root of some very important concepts now familiar to us; 2) it synthesizes these concepts so impressively; 3) we can use it heuristically as we continue thinking about style; and 4) it provides a compact, accessible touchstone for exploring—with students, clients, and colleagues—the techniques of effective style for scientific and technical communication.

After World War II, the United States government and citizenry were concerned with truth, propaganda, democracy, and national security as they entered the Cold War era. This was a time when technocrats, engineers, and scientists could lead our free-world government through the perils of our tense relationships with Russia, Red China, and Korea. In the early 1940s, Rudolf Flesch began developing what he termed a “scientific rhetoric” to help writers of functional documents more effectively communicate technical information to a general public. He came up with a readability formula to help writers evaluate whether their writing was effective and this readability formula has profoundly shaped notions of “clear writing” for the last 60 years. This article explores Flesch's development of this readability formula, placing his work in a historical context, as well as discussing how the readability formula fit into a larger project to make effective writing more of a science than an art.

This article suggests ways of writing a truly effective cover letter, an extremely important document in the search for a job. First, features gleaned from 13 model letters in technical writing textbooks yield figures on the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs per letter, plus the average number of words per sentence and paragraph, information helpful to those with little or no knowledge of how to write a strong cover letter. Second, the article surveys what the textbook writers offer as advice about the rhetorical principles that should be employed in composing cover letters. One piece of advice given by almost all of the experts is that writers should try to exude an energetic attitude, yet these same authorities do not delineate just how to display such a posture in the letters themselves. Third, examination of the letters reveals that one way that experts insert verve into cover letters is to use verbals, particularly gerunds, participles, and infinitives. In fact, 92.58% of the sentences in the 13 model letters have some type of verbal in them. The advantage of employing verbals is that while they are used for other parts of speech, they still retain the residue of action in their meaning. Fourth, the article describes the results of a survey to determine the acceptance of such constructions in the minds of two sets of readers: first-year writing students and third-year technical writing students. In both groups, more than 75% of the students preferred a paragraph with verbals in it over a paragraph devoid of verbals. Finally, the article suggests “sentence combining” as a procedure for teaching technical writing students how to combine basic sentences into verbals to garner variety and economy, one of the hallmarks of technical writing.

By emphasizing the negative meanings of words, ignoring variations in translations, and quoting out of context, Steven B. Katz has argued in an influential article that an “ethic of expediency … underlies technical communication and deliberative rhetoric, and by extension writing pedagogy and practice based on it.” Katz's assertion misrepresents the motive of technical communication and its pedagogy, and it brings discredit to the professions of technical communication and the teaching of technical communication. His attempt to discredit the motive of technical communication is part of a two-millennia-long contest for status between intellectuals and the working classes, and it creates unnecessary mistrust at a time in history when people must focus even more on cooperating socially in order to sustain democratic cultures and our physical environment for future generations.

Typeface personality impacts the rhetorical effect of students' documents, yet it receives little attention in textbooks. Technical writing students should stand the definition of “appropriate” in relation to typeface selection, the difference between type's functional and semantic properties, the difference between type family and personality, the effect of a typeface's history, and the contribution of a typeface's anatomy to its personality. Understanding these, students can make informed decisions about typeface appropriateness.

Scientific and technical jargon—specialized vocabulary, usually Latinate—plays a vital role in scientific and technical communication. But its proper use continues to be a point of discussion because of our concern with audience adaptation, rhetorical exigence, rhetorical purpose, and ethics. We've focused on teaching students—and on convincing scientists, engineers, and other writers/speakers—to gear their specialized language to the recipients of their communication, to the occasion calling for their communication, to what they wish to accomplish through their communication, and to the ethical goals of safety, helpfulness, empowerment, and truth. These are exactly the sorts of things we should be doing. My contribution to this conversation is a reinforce ment and, I hope, an extension of the argument that we should also be teaching and convincing students and professionals: 1) to fully appreciate what makes jargon either good or bad; 2) to carefully distinguish jargon usage from other aspects of scientific and technical style; and 3) to recognize that in every context, even in communication among experts, jargon should be used judiciously—that is, in the most helpful, least taxing way.

Since the collapse of Enron Corporation in November 2001, annual reports and corporate financial disclosures have been the focus of government, corporate, and public attention. This article examines the literature written about annual reports between 1989 and 2001 to identify trends in research and determine areas of future study. Articles were categorized as related to SEC regulations and guidelines, summary annual reports, online annual reports, rhetorical analysis of annual reports, readability and accessibility of annual reports, methods of conveying negative information in annual reports, effective annual report writing, use and importance of annual reports, or use of annual reports in business writing classes. Post-Enron, it is likely that the number of articles in this area will dramatically increase over the next five to ten years.

This article argues that leadership and rhetoric are intimately connected; therefore, rhetoric should include the explicit examination of all aspects of leadership (that is, including but not limited to rhetorical criticism of the speeches and writings of leaders), both as an area of research and an area of pedagogy. This is particularly important when helping students become active members of the citizenry is seen a central goal of what teachers are doing in the English or Communication class. The interconnections between leadership and the concept of the polis, the active assembly of citizens empowered to discuss and make public policy, is useful here, even though the polis may no longer exist in its original form. In particular, leadership through identification with the polis appears to be an approach with great potential.

This article uses Chaim Perelman's theories of argumentation to examine a recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, Promoting Health: Intervention Strategies from Social and Behavioral Research (2000). The IOM's text explores social and behavioral research to devise multipronged intervention strategies; it focuses on social, economic, behavioral, and political health as a means of assuring population health—and thereby expands the conventional boundaries of public health. Since Chaim Perelman's rhetoric is seldom applied in the field of health communication, employing his ideas to consider the role of style, arrangement, and argument in such a cutting-edge document can illuminate public health writing, as well as shed new light on Perelmanian rhetoric.

XML is a recent Web design language that will enable technical communicators to produce documentation that can reuse information and present it across multiple types of media for diverse audiences. However, little is understood about how XML will impact technical communication in terms of theory, academic research, and pedagogy. In this article, I argue that XML requires more interdisciplinary approaches toward the teaching and research of technical communication, particularly with respect to the integration of technical and rhetorical knowledge.

The connection between language and empiricism is a central issue in technical writing and communication, more so than in other fields. Our field deals with technical and scientific knowledge which is oftentimes very definite and objective, yet there has been increasing recognition over the past few decades that this knowledge is socially constructed and rhetorically negotiated. Debates have ensued over the rhetoricity of technical communication in contrast to its empirical and instrumental aspects. W. V Quine, one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, however, rejected the distinction between empirical knowledge and knowledge stemming from language and social negotiation. Understanding technical writing and communication through the lens of Quine's theory ameliorates the tension between instrumental and rhetorical/humanistic views of technical discourse by recognizing the validity of both views and integrating the two. This understanding in turn will facilitate our pedagogical interactions with technical and scientific majors.

This article begins by arguing that the infinitive phrase has not been taken seriously in writing because writers have been too concerned with Bishop Robert Lowth's proscription against the split infinitive. However, careful examination of three types of technical prose (instructions, annual reports, and “junk mail”) reveals that more than one sentence in four contains an infinitive phrase. The article then argues that two linguistic theories do not adequately explain the overwhelming presence of infinitives in the three types of prose. The reason for the presence of infinitives seems to be that they fulfill several rhetorical purposes, including vigor, symmetry, emphasis, variety, economy, and depersonalization. Implications for writing and teaching are also discussed.

For too long, journal articles and textbooks on scientific and technical discourse have adopted a positivistic approach to visuals. Unfortunately, this approach is problematic. It ignores that visuals are constructions that are products of a writer's interpretation with its own power-laden agenda. For example, in representing a tamed and dominated nature, visuals become instruments of patriarchy. Reading them responsibly requires that we uncover some of the values attached to the strategies of creating visuals and to the objects created. This article reviews the current approach taken by composition scholars, surveys richer interdisciplinary work on visuals, and—by using visuals connected with the Human Genome Project—models an analysis of visuals as rhetoric.

To determine the metaphor that represents cloning, a contemporary scientific revolution, this study examines articles published in Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Science, and Time that describe the cloning of the sheep Dolly. A plethora of figurative language may be garnered from these articles, and this study describes a number of them: metaphor (dead, natural, and technical), simile, hyperbole, personification, irony, cliché, paronomasia, antithesis, metonymy, anthimera, oxymoron, the rhetorical question, and analogy. The significance and relationship to cloning are explicated. The article concludes that the figures do not support a central metaphor. Further research is suggested to determine if the lack of a metaphor is a fluke or a trend in the development of scientific research and what the difference may be between scientific and technical metaphor.

Rhetoric of science reveals the role of rhetoric in the complex social enterprise that is standard science. Rhetoric plays a role in non-standard science too. The recent elucidation of the human genetic code calls to mind an earlier, tragic episode in the history of genetics, Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia. It involved the repudiation of standard science in favor of an insular, intuitive, and anti-intellectual “science” called agrobiology which supposedly could shape agricultural productivity to political will. The tragedy is that careers were ruined and millions suffered starvation as the new “science” failed to bear its predicted fruit. Whether seen as a debased rhetoric of science or as a rhetoric of debased science, it assumed that language is plastic and can support a plastically reconceived “science” that reflected the plasticity of nature itself. This plastic rhetoric is strikingly similar to Plato's view of sophism, which of course differs considerably from contemporary views of sophism.

In their macroscopic approach to analogy, rhetorical studies project the latent assumption that sound analogical reasoning is a universal property of human consciousness rather than a socioculturally inherited practice that varies over time and place. After drawing briefly from landmark work in the social sciences to show notable cases of cultural variation in analogical reasoning, I present Lev Vygotsky's concept of internalization and Dedre Gentner's structure mapping theory of analogy as fruitful theoretical and methodological avenues through which to detect sociocultural variation in analogical reasoning practices in science.

Although rhetoricians have studied the discourse practices of engineers, little is known about the production workers who must assemble engineering knowledge into functional products. This case study examines what happens when a production worker tried to improve manufacturing documentation, and how her success depended upon both her craft knowledge and the rhetorical skills she attributes to a Writing Across the Curriculum program she experienced in college. … although the goal of engineering may be to produce useful objects, engineers do not construct such objects themselves. Rather, they aim to generate knowledge that will allow such objects to be built [1, p. 5].

Teachers at all levels of college instruction use service learning, a popular pedagogical tool since the mid-eighties, to teach students both social consciousness and pragmatic, real-world writing skills. This article explores the concept of service learning as rhetorical action in the field of technical communication in general, and the question of whether service learning is appropriate in beginning level technical writing courses. Using my experience through two years of service learning instruction in community college classes, I respond to the charge that students in lower-division courses may lack the maturity to successfully enact service learning assignments. I also analyze the appropriateness of the community college as a catalyst for community-based writing projects.

This article aims to expound the importance of a knowledge of linguistics and the theories of human language to a technical author. Linguistics is often seen as a specialised branch of language for language experts. When technical authors communicate, they do need the tools of linguistics to handle the rhetorical grammar and patterns of technical prose. The linguistic features and semanics involved in technical writing also become relevant, as is visual and graphic representation.

The syntactic aspect of semiotic theory, especially its “aesthetic principle,” is very influential in document design theories and practices. It has its roots in Burke's and Lessing's gender-related theories of images. Thus, it is laden with ideologies: it embodies our patriarchal attitudes and our iconophobia. Employing the semiotic theory in document design, we are making choices to reinforce the gender-related ideology in Burke's and Lessing's theories. It is time for us to re-conceive the “aesthetic principle” by de-emphasizing it and to adopt the reconciliation approach to design effective documents targeted at various rhetorical situations.

This article supplements existing rhetorical scholarship by returning to the notion of invention as general preparation of the communicator. Although much scholarship about invention in technical communication exists, it consists mainly of heuristics, checklists, ethical considerations, and audience awareness. Part of invention is using basic strategies to prepare the communicator to assess any communication situation and its context and to generate the appropriate discourse. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke's theories of dialectic and rhetoric are a twentieth-century version of this; this article explains important Burkean strategies such as etymological extension, limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, translation or alembication, the four master tropes, and the pentad, and it shows how to apply these in technical communication. The article closes with a classroom assignment that uses Burkean invention strategies.

Ethics as a topic in technical communication has grown in interest in the past quarter century as the field itself has matured. We now understand technical communication as involved in communicating not only technical information but also values, ethics, and tacit assumptions represented in goals. It also is involved in accommodating the values and ethics of its many audiences. This understanding is linked to an awareness of the social nature of all discourse and the root interconnectedness of rhetoric and ethics. This article presents an introduction and annotated bibliography of articles from technical writing and communication journals over this period, arranged in categories of professional, academic, and systematic approaches. Ethics is broadly conceived to include not only particular theories but also systems of values and principles.

Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.

The redefinition of logos as an appeal to logic is a mistaken association found all too often in the technical communication classroom. Logic inheres in all three proofs of persuasion; moreover, Aristotle used logos within the context of classical rhetoric to refer to the argument or speech itself. In this light, the proofs of persuasion represent the set of all logical means whereby the speaker can lead a “right-thinking” audience to infer something. If that something is an emotion, the appeal is to pathos; if it is about the character of the speaker, the appeal is to ethos; and if it is about the argument or speech itself, the appeal is to logos. This interpretation reinstates all three proofs of persuasion as legitimate, logical means to different proximate ends and provides a coherent definition of logos, consonant with Aristotle's Rhetoric, to the next generation of technical communicators.

This study attempts to show how the purpose of three types of business and technical documents (instructions, annual reports, and sales promotional letters) affects the syntactical and rhetorical choices authors make in writing these documents. While the results of the examination rendered some predictable results, there were some surprises in the absence of many rhetorical schemes in sales promotional letters. Another value of this study is that it provides partial syntactical and rhetorical “fingerprints” of three important documents in business and technical writing to offer students norms they can go by in constructing such documents.