Medical documentation--i.e., charting--is widely known to be crucial for patient care, billing, and legal protection, but it is simultaneously largely viewed as tedious, time-consuming busywork that takes clinicians away from patients, especially in the era of electronic health records (EHRs). There has been excellent but limited research on how writing skills (and thus, explicit writing instruction) influence both the charting experience and charting outcomes (Schryer, 1993; Opel & Hart-Davidson, 2019). In this project, I investigate how progress notes within EHRs could be improved if medical providers had more training in rhetoric and technical writing. Specifically, I focus on primary care, as primary-care providers have been shown to spend the most time on EHRs (Rotenstein et al, 2023). I draw upon a corpus of de-identified primary-care progress notes and the insights of primary-care providers, both sourced from clinics in rural Oregon. My major conclusions are that primary-care providers would benefit from being taught how to write with attention to audience and purpose and that rhetoricians of health and medicine have an opportunity to help improve patient charting.

Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of information disorders which have permeated the internet. Scholars have made significant progress in defining and theorizing information literacy and its various aspects, as well as in designing programs to help students acquire the relevant skills for evaluating information. Nevertheless, further exploration is needed, for example to understand the roles of criteria in information evaluation. The present study draws on scholarship in discourse and rhetoric studies to suggest how discursive strategies, a key concept in these convergent areas, can inform approaches to information evaluation. To illustrate this improved approach, this study explores the case of a recent piece of fake news that involves both text and image and has circulated widely as a digital flyer on social media.

How do material and discursive arrangements, technologies and rhetoric, shape the subjects and objects of medical discourse (Scott & Melonçon, 2017; Selzer & Crowley, 1999)? How are the affordances of material and discursive arrangements seized by political actors? Tackling these and similar questions has been a growing preoccupation in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, where researchers have sought better ways of understanding the entanglements of the symbolic and material (Booher & Jung, 2018; Graham, 2009; Jack, 2019; Propen, 2018). A perspicuous case for this research is the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (UICA), an amendment to the Public Health Service Act mandating that women receive an ultrasound and have its images described to them before having abortions. Three US states have a version of this law, with over twenty others having laws similar to the UICA (Guttmacher Institute, 2019, n.d.). Through this law, antiabortionists are able to construct a kairotic situation through the mediating capacity of ultrasound where they can use the actual state of affairs (a woman seeking an abortion) to argue through images for a possible future (a woman foregoing abortion). This article analyzes the UICA to understand how the political speech of antiabortionists enrolls the moralizing capacity of ultrasound to construct a kairotic situation to intervene in women’s pregnancies. Starting from studies of actor-networks (Latour, 1983;1999a) and technological mediation (Verbeek, 2011; 2015), and departing to feminist rhetorical science studies (Booher & Jung, 2018; Frost & Haas, 2017) and rhetorical approaches to imagery and visualization (Propen, 2018; Roby, 2016; Webb, 2009), I argue that not only do translation processes and technical mediation distribute agencies; they construct the very situations where agencies are constituted. This study can widen our understanding of how political entities appropriate the rhetorical capacities of technology and discourse to translate their politics into legislature.

In “Flowers for Marjorie” and “The Wide Net,” Welty adopts masculine vantage points from which she explores denials of feminized civility. The similarities of these stories allow for a discussion of three major elements: First, the gendered eating related to a pregnancy; second, the refusal to eat in the homespace in favor of eating in spaces of homosocial bonding; and third, the partaking of liquor and the gendered alignment that signifies. Leslie Fiedler’s landmark article “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!”—and many theorists who have come after him—suggests that male figures in American literature seek out spaces in which they can commune with other men and avoid the traditional responsibilities of the homespace (providing for a household, being responsible to a family, etc.). These male characters cannot avoid the home-space forever, though, and must eventually return to the realm they perceive to be primarily feminine. In light of such arguments, this article examines Welty’s male characters’ evasions of and returns to the homespace as they relate to Southern foodways.