Reporting guidelines have emerged in recent years as a critical site of deliberation and intervention for stakeholders in the biomedical community. These texts have historically been used to formulate standards for quality reporting and bring consistency to processes of writing and publication; they also operate as a space in which practitioners promote values, define expectations, and coordinate action in line with established standards and practices in the field. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric and genre studies, this article examines how reporting guidelines contribute to the standardization of writing and publishing activity in biomedicine, functioning both as semi-procedural documents that take part in the “genre-ing” of published research and as public displays of and arguments for accountability that can be used to regulate the work of knowledge making over time. I conclude by discussing how rhetoricians might use reporting guidelines as a strategic locus for conceptualizing and potentially shaping research and writing activity in different areas of health and medicine.

In the context of narcotic drug epidemics, racist logics can shape policy deliberation and delimit uptake. While critical public health scholars have situated the U.S. opioid epidemic as demonstrative of such logics, in rhetoric the opioid epidemic has failed to register as an important deliberative context for representational contestation regarding race and racism. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ (1985) steering mediums (steurungsmedium) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory, this essay analyzes the U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and Purdue Pharma executive J. David Haddox’s testimony before Congress to show the extent to which racial hegemony saturates juridical engagements at the federal level. Where wide-scale opioid use is concerned, this analysis demonstrates that disparate policy outcomes are largely a reflection of structural and representational inequality along racial lines. This essay thus invites scholars of health and medical rhetoric to consider how processes of controversy and medicalization function to preserve racial hegemony.

To ascertain the risk assessments parents use when making vaccine decisions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers of young children. Treating these interviews as texts, I rhetorically analyzed how parents talk about their chil­dren’s vaccination in order to better understand reasons for vaccine hesitancy. My analysis reveals that despite the difference in behavior between parents who vac­cinate and parents who hesitate, there is a commonality in discourse. Three topoi emerged within these mothers’ explanation of their vaccination decisions: percep­tions of diseases, perceptions of environmental threats, and assessment of their child’s vulnerability. Considering the common ground these topoi reflect, I explore possible alternative messaging about vaccines that might better encourage vaccine uptake. Ultimately, I argue a rhetorical approach to studying public and personal discourses about health issues can prove useful for identifying key topoi, which can generate communication strategies for addressing public concerns while potentially improving support for public health initiatives