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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) offers treatment to sex offenders civilly confined after they complete their prison sentences. In this article, we enhance the notion of kairos in rhetorical situations with the perceptions of risk and the sociological concept of moral panic by tracing three kairotic moments involving MSOP: the 1992 Dennis Linehan civil commitment case; the 2003 murder of college student Dru Sjodin; and the 2012 provisional discharge of Clarence Opheim. We examine the political, public, and media response to these events and provide the results of 21 interviews with stakeholders. In doing so, we hope to illustrate how moral panic and risk perception can so influence what seems the right choice at the right time that stakeholders may get caught in what we call kairotic cycles, where solutions to a problem are stymied by competing perceptions and by entrenched positions that reoccur over time and without resolution.

This article considers why users of popular software packages choose to find answers to their task problems on user forums rather than in official documentation. The author concludes that traditional documentation is developed around an antiquated notion of “task,” which leads to restrictive ways of thinking about problems that users encounter and the solutions that might be appropriate. The author argues, instead, that tasks and problems arise from networked rhetorical situations and networked contexts for rhetorical action. The influence of networks requires a redefinition of rhetorical situation and context, from which we derive a networked picture of tasks and problems as emergent and uncertain phenomenon, best addressed in the uncertain and sometimes-chaotic setting of user forums. Forum threads are studied using discourse analytic techniques to determine what they can reveal about qualities making tasks and problems uncertain.

This study examines the global-local interplay of genre features in a select sample of nonprofit grant proposals from two particular sites—Nepal and the United States. Critically analyzing the carefully selected samples from both the sites on their own terms first and then in clusters (of Nepalese and American proposals) by exploiting the genre and discourse analysis theories and techniques published in genre, genre analysis, and grant proposal scholarship, this study attempts to examine the genre of nonprofit grant proposal in both comparative and non-comparative terms. While the study acknowledges that each instance of nonprofit grant proposal is unique, complex, and therefore non-generalizable, it does draw some broad generalizations about the similarities and differences in the rhetorical “moves,” organization, and/or composition strategies of grant writers from these two different geopolitical locations. The study finds that variations observed across samples and grant writers reflect the unique rhetorical situations of these writers, whereas uniformities have to do with the global circulation of Western genre forms in the rest of the world via global organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund—which are also the major donors in developing countries like Nepal. And finally, the study reaffirms the fact that constraints like funding agencies' guidelines and reviewers' preferences have a considerable influence on genre features and forms. That has been the case with both the Nepalese and American proposals sampled in this study.

Stalin's government received information about the political and economic situation in the countryside through the reports prepared by the security service VChK-OGPU-NKVD. This article reveals that these reports ( svodkas in Russian) strain to rhetorically construct a social classification of the peasantry by dividing it into the kulaks (wealthy peasants hostile to Soviet power), the bednyaks (poor peasants supporting Soviet power), and the serednyaks (peasants of average means with uncertain attitudes to the regime). The svodkas persuaded their audience—the secret police and the governments—of the reality of this tripartite classification. This persuasion derived from their massiveness, secretiveness, and mixture of ideological and technical language. Since these conditions inhere in modern governmental, technical, and scientific discourse, the writers for these fields should be aware that when they engage in constructing order through classification, they face temptations of what Kenneth Burke calls rhetoric of hierarchy with its scapegoat principle.

While scholars have begun to write a history of reports and instructions, little scholarship exists on the history of proposals. To fill this gap, I analyze proposals written by Dorothy Wordsworth and Anne Macvicar Grant, ca. 1800. My analysis uses contemporary rhetorical theory to determine how they structured their writing and incorporated rhetorical appeals to achieve their goals. My findings show that their texts should be placed on a continuum of the history and development of the proposal genre. Further findings suggest that their use of contemporary rhetorical theories authorized Wordsworth's and Grant's discourse to successfully affect change.

This article questions how professional communication genres already well established in print form have been changing as they are transplanted into digital media like the Web. Whereas some technology-oriented genre research has sought how a new medium provides genres with new technological features, this article argues that a more insightful approach would seek how a new medium, together with its users, provides genres with new rhetorical situations. To operationally define rhetorical situations, I adapt Lloyd Bitzer's three situational dimensions of exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, to illustrate how the new rhetorical situations of the Web can influence a genre, I explore the genre of the résumé. Drawing on a survey of 100 Web résumé authors and an analysis of their sites, I show that as each of the three dimensions of the résumé's traditional rhetorical situation has opened itself to greater diversity on the Web, the Web version of the résumé genre has correspondingly reoriented itself. Hence, genres change in response not just to the new medium's technology per se but to the new rhetorical situations that the medium hosts.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.

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.

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.

This article draws on the principles of linguistic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to analyze and explain discursive diversity in organizational Web pages. Organizational Web sites must typically appeal to multiple audiences, a condition that often results in different discourses being juxtaposed within the same interface. To analyze and explain the effects of such juxtapositions, this article adapts to the Web the principles that Bakhtin developed to conceptualize discursive diversity in the novel, in particular his concept of dialogism. To illustrate their efficacy, the article applies these principles to analyze a pair of government Web sites about forests, the forest industry, and the environment. Whereas the homepages of the two sites project divergent approaches to the discourses of their diverse audiences, a dialogic analysis of the new site's deeper levels reveals how the government's discursive strategy appears to favor one audience at the expense of others. Drawing on this case study, this article discusses how an approach informed by Bakhtin's principles can illuminate our analysis of organizational Web discourse.

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.

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.

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.

Elderly people seem to encounter more problems than people from other age groups do, when using consumer electronics products and their accompanying manuals. This may be due to the absence of some kinds of information. In this study the effects of the absence of different information types in instructions on action performance were explored for different age groups. Younger (aged 20–30 y.) and elderly (aged 60–70 y.) participants installed a VCR with the help of the manual, while working aloud. The absence of goal information, consequence information and identification information in the instructions proved to have a negative effect on task performance, especially for the elderly participants. When one of these information types was missing in the instructions, the elderly performed more actions incorrectly than when the information was stated explicitly.

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.

Classical rhetorical theory has been used for relatively discrete, practice-oriented purposes in its application to teaching Scientific and Technical Communication. However effective these appropriations are, they isolate these resources from a comprehensive framework and from that framework's role in shaping disciplinary practice. Because these theoretical assets are integral to each student's preparation to be an effective, responsible practitioner, I have developed and taught an upper level rhetorical theory course for STC majors that is grounded in Aristotle's On Rhetoric and in his understanding that effective communication is a systematic tekhne/art.

The role of literary and rhetorical tropes in scientific discourse is frequently overlooked, largely because “rhetoric” and “science” seem to be incompatible modes of expression. However, if we look closely at scientific explanations—especially those designed to inform a general public—we find that they are as reliant on, if not more so, than more “subjective” forms of public discourse. In A Grammar of Motive, Kenneth Burke posits that all forms of discourse rely heavily on the “four master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony to express ideas, and science is not an exception. This article outlines the processes behind the four master tropes and demonstrates instances where these tropes occur in the expression of scientific concepts found in such fields as biology, physics, and even mathematics. The purpose is to show that, contrary to what many members of the scientific (and lay) community suppose, rhetorical and literary tropes are necessary components to a linguistic understanding of complex scientific concepts; that such tropes do not hinder our understanding, but are in fact necessary to it.

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning, especially when they read scientific and technical texts. Many studies have explored how this “silent speech” affects the reading process. As a follow-up to a previous article about applying a phonological reading model to technical communication, this article proposes that educators and practitioners of technical communication would benefit greatly from a thorough understanding of the speech instinct. Therefore, the author explores the speech instinct, how humans developed it, and how it has been and still is fostered by reading behavior and pedagogy.

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning. This article examines that phenomenon—known as silent speech—based upon the published research of cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists. The author develops a phonological model of reading based upon published results of experimental investigators to determine the relationship between cognition and silent speech. The author then applies the model to technical communication. The applications include the use of punctuation, pronouns, and abbreviations, as well as introducing new words, writing to satisfy the speech instinct, cultivating a human voice, and revising technical documents.

Can technical writing still be taught credibly by teachers with only academic experience? This article draws a distinction between courses designed for students expecting to be full-time technical communicators and general-purpose service courses designed for students in a variety of fields. The article then argues that teachers of service courses can teach credibly without having worked as writers in nonacademic workplaces if they fulfill these conditions: they should have a critical command of research into nonacademic writing, rhetorical theory, and reading theory; they should define technical writing broadly enough to see themselves as technical writers; they should seek and take advantage of everyday opportunities to practice technical writing and reading; and they should carefully consider the sense in which their courses reflect reality.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that using a restricted language called Simplified English (SE) to write procedural documents is the best method to accommodate specific audiences. Providing empirical data to prove or disprove this hypothesis is the point of the experiment reported here. This study examined the effect of document type (SE versus non-SE), passage (Procedure A versus Procedure B), and native language (native versus non-native English speakers) on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion time of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. This research suggests that using SE significantly improves the comprehensibility of more complex documents. Further, readers of more complex SE documents can more easily locate and identify information within the document. For the documents tested in this experiment, the SE and non-SE documents took essentially the same amount of time for subjects to read and complete the test. Finally, while the difference between native and non-native English speakers could not be tested statistically because of extremely different cell sizes, the comprehensibility and content location scores for the native and non-native speakers appear to be quite different, with the non-native speakers benefiting from SE more than the native speakers.

Public relations writing has been neglected as a research topic in professional communication. This article uses rhetorical theory from a number of fields to examine a topic of recent concern—shared, or negotiated, meaning—in relation to two very different samples of public relations writing: the public relations texts produced by political-advocacy organizations involved in the midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s and an entry from an organizational newsletter. More specifically, the article studies the role of four rhetorical elements—exophoric and intertextual references, metaphors, and narratives—in generating a shared meaning. In doing so, the article develops the thesis that narratives were particularly important to this public relations writing because they provided a comprehensive, compelling framework for belief and thus contributed greatly to the shared meaning created by writers and readers.

This article tests the value of Kenneth Burke's methodology of placing screens before seemingly unproblematic objects to reveal their complex and often contradictory natures. The scientific article reporting experimental results is explored through three such “terministic screens”—the sermon, the playscript, and the blueprint. The result tells as much about Burke as a thinker as it does about the ways of thinking about the experimental article.

Sales activities have been understood by some to be negative, one-sided rhetorical encounters. Teachers of technical communication will find it more helpful to view sales proposals as aimed toward the construction and maintenance of long-term relationships, a view held by far-thinking sales professionals. Hermeneutic theory, by offering a different conceptual relationship between means and ends than even new rhetoric suggests, can help clarify the process by which ethical know-how intersects with persuasion. Consequently, it can offer technical communication instructors a valuable perspective from which to teach sales proposal writing.

Research on newsletters, a major form of organizational communication, has largely been practical rather than theoretical. Certain theories, such as those in organizational theory and mass communication, can be applied to newsletters as forms of organizational communication and as media. Rhetorical theory, however, has not been used to understand how newsletter writing achieves its effects. This study applies rhetorical theory to newsletters produced by two political-activist organizations. The newsletters and the organizations are described, as background for the study. Three aspects of rhetorical theory (schema theory, social construction, and theories about audience) are presented, and their application to the newsletters is illustrated with sample passages. An agenda is suggested for further research on rhetorical theory and newsletter writing.

In their searches for examples of rhetorical strategies, students of modern rhetoric frequently overlook writers from the past. In his huge six-book work on the “Art of Falconry” written about 1247–1249, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, a remarkably versatile ruler, an early renaissance man, an empirical researcher, provided numerous excellent examples of rhetorical practices from which students and practicing writers well could learn. This article offers extended examples of definition, contrast, partition, causal analysis, classification, and description, to name but a few.

Amplification is the set of rhetorical techniques by which a discourse is elaborated and extended to enhance its appeal and information value. Even in the manual, long considered the most laconic of the genres of technical communication, amplification has its place. Drawing on the theory of classical and modern rhetoric, this article shows how amplification tends to increase and improve the coverage, rationale, warnings, behavioral alternatives, examples, previews, reviews, and general emphasis of technical manuals.

Based upon several years of research on proposal writing in large management consulting firms, this article attempts to define the proposal genre and argue the importance of the background section, especially in the management consulting environment. Because the background is the first major section in these proposals, it offers writers the opportunity to demonstrate implicitly their qualifications as problem solvers long before a qualifications section does so explicitly. That demonstration, the projection of image and ethos, can occur logically—through an argument that responds to the generic requirements of proposals, and psychologically—through the incorporation of themes that respond to the rhetorical situation.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.

Writing good computer manuals for beginners is a demanding job. Recently, rhetoricians have advised manual writers who want to write better manuals to consider the audience (computer users) carefully. However, my rhetorical analysis of several computer manuals shows that writers should also consider genre, subject, and writer's purpose. I also found that, while some writers accommodate their rhetorical situation, they may do it unconsciously, given the inconsistency of their rhetorical choices. In conclusion, by paying attention to the overall rhetorical situation, manual writers will surely produce better manuals.

Much has been written on and about technical communication. Most of this writing focuses on specific advice for practitioners (e.g., how to write better, typographical guidelines, proposed standards, how to produce more effective manuals, and the like). Also, considerable literature deals with the field theoretically. Often, this second category of literature is difficult to find because so much is buried under the welter of pragmatically oriented material and is interwoven with literature from related fields. Assemblage of this hard-to-find material reveals that within the context of the considerably broader area of human communication, generally technical communication occupies a unique position. Schematic models of related human communication disciplines are used to construct an overall theoretical model which locates this specialized niche occupied by technical communication. Contributions to the overall model come from such areas as empirical social research, general semantics, learning theory, and modern rhetoric. The overall model represents an attempt to provide a catalogue of perspectives from which technical communication might be studied profitably. It also is intended to provide a useful guide to specific actions in various pragmatic and occupational technical communication situations.

We may discover the basis for a humanistic rhetoric of technical writing by examining managerial theories of human behavior. Complaints about the deficiencies of writers and their work correspond remarkably to complaints about the deficiencies of employees and their work. And both sets of complaints may actually be related to the traditional Theory X of human behavior, held by managers and teachers of writing. An alternative managerial theory proposed by Douglas McGregor, Theory Y, suggests ways to encourage an individual's initiative and to satisfy the organization's goals simultaneously. Since technical writing weds the worlds of writing and working, this managerial theory can provide a sound basis for a rhetorical theory that encourages a writer's initiative and satisfies the goals of writing simultaneously. The letter of application for employment illustrates how Theory Y works.

A long-term relationship between a technical writing program and a single non-university organization can have rewards as significant as short-term relationships with several such organizations. Four specific programs of interaction now in effect at Battelle Memorial Institute and Ohio State University provide Battelle personnel ready access to information on the state-of-the-art of rhetorical theory and assure them of a large pool of well trained writers as potential employees. The technical writing faculty gains confidence and a better understanding of the tasks typically performed by technical writers over long periods of time. Description of these particular programs of interaction suggests ways to foster similar programs elsewhere, even in the absence of nearby research foundations.

Liberal arts colleges that elect to introduce technical writing courses or programs into their curriculum face the dilemma of vocationalism vs. liberal education. This paper examines the philosophical differences between the two as well as their practical compatibility or incompatibility, and then argues for the union of technical writing and the liberal arts school while admitting certain reservations. The technical writing course at a liberal arts school should use a wider range of books and periodicals than should a technical school, should stress rhetorical theory and strategy, and should confront the moral issues resulting from technology.

The traditional view of rhetoric and science as sharply distinct has helped reduce the technical writing course to mere vocational training. Current thinking in rhetorical theory and philosophy of science supports the contrasting view that science is rhetorical. Salient aspects of the rhetoric of science are illustrated by Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA, as recorded in Watson's The Double Helix [1]. Analysis of the rhetoric of science suggests that the study of technical writing could be central to liberal education for a technological society.

The schism between theory and practice is reflected in English studies. British technological universities have attempted to meet the needs of industry in technical fields. Economic and academic pressures often make this difficult. A degree in modern English studies is planned which attempts to combine traditional academic values and functional needs. A new approach to rhetoric combining linguistic and critical disciplines with practical skills in communication can combine liberal and vocational needs. The course content of the degree and the teaching approach is related to the ethos of a technological university.

Systems design consists of a tremendously complex series of choices in which no decision point is completely independent of other decisions which have already been made or have yet to be made. A systems approach to the design of document-handling information systems would require a detailed examination of the choices to be made in the design process and the ramifications of possible choices in terms of the capabilities, performance, cost, and other characteristics of the system. The authors advocate a systematic procedure involving six steps: 1) identification of fixed parameters, 2) identification of variable parameters, 3) identification of available options for each variable parameter, 4) identification of factors affecting a choice among available options, 5) identification of factors affected by a choice among available options, and 6) logical analysis of the picture thus presented to determine the optimum sequence in which decisions should be made during the design process and the nature of the decision process itself.