Abstract Drawing from the critical cultural theory of Arjun Appadurai, this article interrogates the concept of culture underpinning much intercultural technical communication research. Appadurai suggested that intertextual connections between the cultural and the economic, political, demographic, and historical aspects of the globalizing world are essential for understanding cross-cultural communication. The cultural theory offered in this article opens the way for further cultural studies research to be of use in intercultural technical communication theory, research, and pedagogy.

An economistic version of cultural studies is important to technical writing scholarship presently because capitalism's broad trends find manifestation in and are affected by local practices like scientific and professional communication. By examining their own field against the backdrop of macroeconomic eras and pressures, technical writing theorists can obtain a better understanding of the sociocultural context in which their discipline is situated, and they can better map methods of effective political action for technical communicators.

Abstract Drawing on interviews from a qualitative study, this article extends theorizing about rhetorical agency and resistance by analyzing how breastfeeding advocates and their clients resist medical regulatory rhetoric. The resistant acts that interviewees describe begin with a negotiation of discursive alternatives and subject positions framed by the grid of disciplinary rhetoric about breastfeeding. But in some acts of resistance, breastfeeding women use both discursive and bodily actions to disrupt the intelligibility of this grid and what it deems possible. When such disruption occurs, the results are unpredictable and so must be understood as more than the occupation of preexisting subject positions.

Abstract This article explores the ways that the discourse of usability might support a socially oriented pedagogy within technical communication. Specifically, it explores two approaches to usability—user-centered design and distributed usability—and suggests that the conversation between these approaches can ground socially responsive discussions of technology and technical communication. As such, the discourse of usability provides a field-specific means to address increasing calls for socially situated pedagogies within the field of technical communication.

Much genre research focuses on genre as typified, recurring discursive actions used by members of discourse communities. This article discusses the role of genre in a project that includes participants from different discourse communities. The participants created a single text to assist multiple audiences to ensure that buildings and facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. The author proposes a functional framework for considering the role of genre knowledge on the cross-disciplinary project.

Research techniques are sometimes seen as the atoms or essential building blocks of research projects: invariant, inviolable steps that are applied the same way, no matter what the socioeconomic characteristics of the environments in which they are deployed. That is, they are often seen as arhetorical, and rhetorical choice and agency play a role only in how they are arranged and implemented. In this article, I draw on the notion of translation to provide an alternate account, one that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of research techniques without overdetermining the influence of the environments in which they developed. To illustrate, I examine how one research technique—prototyping—has been translated to fit four different socioeconomic environments, undergoing significant changes in claims and implementation while maintaining enough coherence to be seen as a unitary technique. Finally, I argue that the notion of translation provides us with an account that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of research and our agency as researchers while still acknowledging how techniques constrain our work.

This essay sketches a theoretical rationale for a revived pedagogy and research program in environmental studies within the field of professional communication. The first wave of such studies drew upon themes established by environmental rhetoric and ecocriticism within the Cold War context of political environmentalism. The second wave might well look to ecocomposition and ecopoetics in developing a new kind of ecologically sensitive workplace study and a renewed interest in the language of space and place and the concepts of local and global in teaching and research.

(2005). An Interview With Donald A. Norman. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 469-487.

The authors respond to the charge that reading for intentionality necessarily leads critics into a naive conception of agency. They argue for methods that hold authors, texts, and audiences in productive tension. Genetic criticism is offered as a perspective in which the author may be integrated within this tension. Using Di Gregorio and Gill's study of Darwin's marginalia and Campbell's examination of Darwin's notebooks, the authors apply genetic criticism to Darwin's writings to demonstrate that intentionalist readings offer scholars a useful critical resource.

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.

This study traces the reception of rhetoric of science work in book reviews by science studies scholars, focusing particularly on critiques of the author's own book by historians of science, to ground recommendations for improving our status in the interdisciplinary conversation. In describing the work of other science studies scholars, rhetoricians of science should acknowledge the rhetorical contributions of nonrhetoricians and negotiate a shared space rather than attempt to fill perceived lacunae in the literature.

This article surveys the literature on digital rhetoric, which encompasses a wide range of issues, including novel strategies of self-expression and collaboration, the characteristics, affordances, and constraints of the new digital media, and the formation of identities and communities in digital spaces. It notes the current disparate nature of the field and calls for an integrated theory of digital rhetoric that charts new directions for rhetorical studies in general and the rhetoric of science and technology in particular.

This article encourages the increased attention to issues of reception in rhetoric of science, according with the sentiment but not the argument of Paul, Charney, and Kendall's "Moving beyond the Moment." In particular, it offers two works as exemplary of the disciplinary maturity that has occasioned this focus on reception, Ceccarelli's monograph, Shaping Science with Rhetoric, and Harris's collection, Rhetoric and Incommensurability.

This essay presents analyses of two of the ten site visits of computer classrooms (CCRs) conducted between 1998 and 2003. The two sites are located institutionally within departments of English of two U.S. university campuses. The two CCRs examined here were: (1) observed on site by the author in 2000 and 2001; (2) analyzed according to a set of criteria established before the on-site analyses; and (3) photographed. In addition, a digital writing-rhetoric and/or technical writing faculty member was interviewed in person during each site visit. The analysis, part of a book-length project, provides partial data for determining some kinds of physical and architectural/design issues that existed in selected CCRs in the early 2000s and in a number of similar digital environments today

This essay argues that to an unprecedented degree the practices of contemporary science and technology are embedded within complex institutional systems. This embeddedness problematizes received views of rhetorical action and agency, which must be reformulated to locate these principles within larger systems of power/ knowledge. Three sets of resources are identified for this reformulation: theories of organizational rhetoric, Foucauldian studies of knowledge-intensive organizations, and Foucauldian approaches to the philosophy of science.

Meta-cognitive work and consideration of relevant philosophical issues are widely recognized as vital for evolving fields of study. This article suggests that a number of common research practices (over-reliance on case studies and contextualization, in addition to the globalization of rhetoric) have delayed real contemplation of larger issues in RST. The author calls for closer scrutiny of philosophies underlying the practice of RST and a negotiation of social and philosophical vision for the discipline.

Since the initial appearance of rhetorical analysis of text-based and hypertext communication, the rhetoric of technology has evolved along with the new media forms it studies. This essay reviews critical consensus that calls for a move away from printcentric criticism. It advocates innovative methods for criticism of electronic texts, such as emphasis on comparative media analysis, visual representation, and attention to the programming and codification of electronic texts.

Abstract This article calls for close attention to the current moment when many technologies are becoming routine, occupying a space between "unknown and unnoticed," and for formation of a digital rhetoric that addresses software's liminality, ubiquity, and exteriority. It briefly examines the emerging discourse of the Free and Open Source Software movements and suggests that a closer alignment with software studies in coming years will be mutually beneficial to both fields.

The author discusses how pursuing a rhetoric of science has consequences for both our understanding of science and our practice of rhetorical analysis. From a rhetorical perspective, science becomes a persuasive enterprise continuous with other persuasive practices in a culture. And rhetoric itself requires enrichment in three areas to become a better instrument of analysis for scientific texts; it needs to incorporate early modern dialectic, a more flexible stylistics, and an appreciation of the role of visualization in scientific argument.

This essay examines the current state of rhetoric of health and medicine as a subfield strongly dependent on interdisciplinary contributions. While some of the field's research comes from scholars trained in rhetorical history and theory, much of it consists of "rhetorical" commentary by nonrhetoricians in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and cultural criticism. The author examines questions of the relation of rhetorical research to discourse research in other fields, and considers what might count, especially in graduate student training, as rhetorical study of health and medicine.

In light of growing interest in technical communication around the world, cross-cultural teaching opportunities may challenge basic assumptions about teaching and learning for both teachers and students. A faculty-development project in the People's Republic of China illustrates various ways facilities, educational practices, and worldviews from each side of the exchange require significant compromise. A negotiated, student-centered classroom environment may be a significant strategy for instruction in such settings.

Instructors in multi-major professional communication courses are asked to teach students a variety of workplace genres. However, teaching genres apart from their contexts may not result in transfer of knowledge from school to workplace settings. We propose teaching students to research genre use via activity theory as a way of encouraging transfer. We outline theory and research relevant to teaching genre and provide results from a study using activity theory to teach genre in two different professional communication courses.

U.S. businesses wish to continue to profit by collecting personal information from their website visitors, yet they fear that the practice both alienates visitors and exposes them both to legal problems from U.S. authorities and business sanctions from data-privacy authorities in Europe and Canada. This dilemma is reflected in the typical corporate privacy-policy statement, which is full of misleading and deceptive rhetoric intended to cover up the gap between the company's privacy policy and the image it wishes to project.

(2005). Figures of Speech as Persuasive Strategies in Early Commercial Communication: The Use of Dominant Figures in the Raleigh Reports About Virginia in the 1580s. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 183-196.

Florence Nightingale is usually pictured as an angelic nurse tending to British soldiers in military hospitals during the Crimean War. Although Nightingale was indeed a tender of soldiers, she was also an administrator, advocate for the common soldier, and proponent of the use of statistics and information design. This article examines Nightingale's rose diagrams, which she designed following her service as the director of nurses at a field hospital in the Crimean War. When the war ended, Nightingale was asked by the queen to write a report on the poor sanitary conditions and make recommendations for reform. When, after six months, the government did not act on the reforms, Nightingale decided to write an annex to the report, in which she would include her invention, the rose diagrams. Nightingale's ultimate success in persuading the government to institute reforms is an illustration of the power of visual rhetoric, as well as an example of Nightingale's own passionate resolve to right what she saw as a grievous wrong.

Professional communication scholars have defined the decorative narrowly and subordinated it to informational text. Yet, current psychological research indicates that decorative elements elicit emotion-laden reactions that may precede cognitive awareness and influence interpretation of images. We conceive the decorative in design, and specifically color, as a complex rhetorical phenomenon. Applying decorative and color theory and analyzing design examples illustrating aesthetic, ethical, and logical appeals, we present a range of potential uses for color in electronic media.

The structure of print and on-screen documents is made explicit through headings and links. Three important concepts for understanding explicit structure are (1) the display-unit properties of each document medium, (2) the flexible relationship between explicit and implicit structure, and (3) the distinction between populated and unpopulated locations in a hierarchy. These concepts help us better understand standard print documents, structured writing, websites, help systems, and PowerPoint, as well as the potential effects of content management systems on how documents are created.

Abstract As global online access grows, Web site designers find themselves creating materials for an increasing international audience. Cultural groups, however, can have different expectations of what constitutes acceptable Web site design. This article examines how prototype theory can serve as a methodology for analyzing Web sites designed for users from different cultures. Such analyses, in turn, can help individuals create more effective online materials for international audiences.

Composing hypertext documents can be an enriching path into the world of technical communication. In learning to produce hypertext, students are introduced to an important form of written composition that encompasses not only text generation, but also visual communication and information architecture. In this article, I provide a rationale for teaching hypertext composition and then some specific curricular suggestions in two parts, one for teaching beginners, and one for teaching more advanced students.

(2004). An Interview with Edward R. Tufte. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 447-462.

This article examines the concept of techne in relation to situatedness. Techn� is conceived as techniques for situating bodies in contexts. Although many theorists and practitioners in technical communication are working from ecological and posthuman perspectives with regard to interface designs, this article argues for extending those perspectives to workplace and classroom situations. Starting from a Heideggerian reading of techne, the article moves toward the concept of post-techne, which remakes pedagogical techniques for writing and inventing in institutional contexts.

Abstract With demographic and social trends in mind, technical communicators should be examining the online communication needs of elderly people who may share certain characteristics with other Internet users, particularly the disabled community. Although education, universal design, and accessibility initiatives help us address many of the developmental and cultural barriers elderly Internet users face, this article examines some current offerings, analyzing the growing elderly audience to better incorporate usability into Web design.

Although the rhetoric of relatively stable scientific disciplines has been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to discourse formation in young disciplines. The author extends recent theories of genre and disciplinary discourse in a close rhetorical analysis of early papers in ethnological science. Practitioners apply extant rhetorical resources to new disciplinary problems as they learn to identify themselves as participants in a collective project. The young discipline "learns" its discourse from its practitioners.

Abstract This article argues that engaged "action research" can help professional writing researchers both develop new and interesting collaborative models and help our profession develop a greater relevance to those not reading our journals and attending our conferences. I outline one particular, localized approach in the hope that our troubles, struggles, and failures at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee can help others to develop their own programs and can further our discussion of community engagement.

This article encourages technical and professional communication programs to take on the challenge of educating students to become "community intellectuals." The notion of educating future professionals for a career needs to be reconsidered in light of both current research concerning civic rhetoric and past practices in moral humanism courses. The triumvirate of rhetoric, ethics, and moral philosophy provides an effective foundation for reconfiguring existing pedagogy in the field and offers insights for nurturing community intellectuals.