Recent agency scholarship has provided compelling accounts of how individuals can strategically occupy authoritative positions, in order to instantiate change. This article explores the discursive mechanisms of this type of agency in the legitimization of disease. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article investigates how a non-human agent (brain scans) contributed to fibromyalgia's acceptance within the highly regulated discourses of western biomedicine.

Despite the prominent role of application forms in the process of composing grant proposals, little attention has been given to the rhetorical and ethical implications of their prompts and instructions. This article analyzes classification systems reified within the cognitive properties of online forms that faculty members use to submit grant proposals. Results suggest that the historicity of proposal forms adds to the complexity of developing models that accurately represent proposal writing in multiple contexts.

This article presents data from a long-term, qualitative study of writers appropriating new software tools for note taking. Instead of asking whether a writer knows how to use the discrete features specific to a software program, I argue that we might more profitably ask about the properties of functional systems that allow writers to flexibly meet the demands of their literate activity.

This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines 1 specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space.

Abstract As the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control embraced new policies, technologies, and rhetorical strategies, they simultaneously moved through Lukensmeyer and Torres's "four levels of public involvement," which include the information, consultation, engagement, and collaboration levels (Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006 Lukensmeyer, C. J., & Torres, L. H. (2006). Public deliberation: A manager's guide to citizen engagement. IBM Center for the Business of Government Collaboration Series. Retrieved November 2007 from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/LukensmeyerReport.pdf [Google Scholar]). Because of the technical and scientific nature of air quality inspections, increasing public involvement, especially the involvement of those in a predominantly African American and a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, has been a challenge. This article describes the Bureau's journey through the information level, where the Bureau opens public access and participation in the investigation and reporting process; the consultation level, where Bureau staff go door-to-door in poor and minority neighborhoods collecting citizen feedback regarding perceived environmental hazards; the engagement level, where the Bureau conducts monthly environmental meetings with neighborhood residents; and the collaboration level, where citizens are taught to collect evidence of environmental violations.

In this interesting argument for the reintroduction of metaphor as a rhetorical strategy for technical communicators, Timothy Giles emphasizes the importance of the metaphor to convey complex conce...

Writing in the Health Professions is one of the latest books in the very popular Allyn and Bacon Series in Technical Communication published by Pearson/Longman and is the first one in the series to...

Working from the premise that public input is essential to science policy deliberations, we analyze how two recent works of public communication about climate change (An Inconvenient Truth and Climate Change Show) draw on the rhetorical resource of apocalyptic narrative explanation to promote scientific fluency and inspire citizen engagement in the issues. By weaving together the proofs of ethos, logos, and pathos within a framework of cultural rationality, these narratives illustrate available means of persuasion for stimulating the public's informed participation in science policy discussions.

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.

Pedagogical and scholarly discussions of the process of usability tend to focus more on methods than on practices, or specific, tactical performances of and adjustments to these methods. Yet such practices shape students' learning and determine the success of their usability efforts. A teacher research study tracking students' understanding and enactment of usability and user-centered design over the course of a service-learning project illustrates the importance of practice-level struggles—and the thoughtful preparation for and facilitation of these struggles—to the development of students' flexible intelligence (metis) and rhetorical translation skills. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional identities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two midwifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional consumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwifery's recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework.

Each year, more people search the Internet for health information. Through a case study conducted at a prominent health-information company, I will show that technical communicators are well-suited to contribute to the development of online health information. Like other technical communicators, online health-information developers must make rhetorical choices based on audience needs, function within specific social contexts, and work through challenges of writing, editing, and project management.

Analogical reasoning has long been an important tool in the production of scientific knowledge, yet many scientists remain hesitant to fully endorse (or even admit) its use. As the teachers of scientific and technical writers, we have an opportunity and responsibility to teach them to use analogy without their writing becoming “overly inductive,” as Aristotle warned. To that end, I here offer an analysis of an example of the effective use of analogy in Rodney Brooks's “Intelligence Without Representation.” In this article, Brooks provides a model for incorporating these tools into an argument by building four of them into an enthymeme that clearly organizes his argument. This combination of inductive and deductive reasoning helped the article become a very influential piece of scholarship in artificial intelligence research, and it can help our students learn to use analogy in their own writing. Every one who effects persuasion through proof does in fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way. (Aristotle, 1984b Aristotle. 1984b. The rhetoric and the poetics of Aristotle, Edited by: Roberts, W. R. and Bywater, I. New York: The Modern Library. [Google Scholar], p. 26)

To date, most of the research on usability and content management systems has focused on the end-user products of such systems rather than on the usability for technical communicators of the single-source authoring tools offered within these systems. While this latter research is undeniably important, attention needs to be paid to the plight of technical communicators attempting to use single-sourcing tools. Otherwise, technical communicators in workplaces risk becoming semi-skilled contingent labor rather than empowered knowledge workers. This essay, therefore, attempts to open a debate about the design of content management systems by turning to the rhetorical canon of memory as an appropriate source for insights into how stored information can be flexibly retrieved and used during composing activities.

This article lays out some of the key issues driving organizations' increasing interest in enterprise content management (ECM). It then problematizes both the rhetoric that technology developers are using to sell ECM technologies to business leaders and the assumptions on which business leaders are basing critical technology implementation decisions. Finally, it argues why technical communicators must take action—through direct participation in the ECM discourse—to shift the rhetoric that is structuring the ECM debate and thus shaping the potential of the field of technical communication.

Abstract In the field of conservation, the distinction between academic research and advocacy appears to be undergoing a shift as the number of PhD-level researchers at conservation advocacy organizations grows. Drawing on my case study of one researcher at a prominent conservation nongovernmental organization (NGO), I have shown how this shift is manifested in the communication of NGO research. My study includes a discourse analysis of this researcher's publications from the forums of both scholarship and advocacy including, as a representation of discourse in the latter forum, gray literature (reports, books, and other texts produced and distributed outside the channels of the academic and publishing industry). I have also drawn on my interviews with this researcher about her publications. My study highlights specific features typical of her rhetoric that result from her occupying a hybridized cultural and professional space where research and advocacy overlap. Notes 1My study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the university where I completed this work. 2All quotes from Brandon are taken from an interview I conducted with her on March 5, 2005. 3Further examples illustrating my points here and elsewhere can be found in CitationLindeman (2006), the larger study that is the basis for this article.

Abstract This article presents findings from a recent study of mediated writing in a technical writing firm to examine distributed work conditions and how they affect the practices of individual technical writers. Distribution of labor, texts, and technologies for producing documentation creates complex information environments that writers must negotiate. In doing so, they practice two kinds of expertise central to technical writing as a profession—technological and rhetorical skill. This article examines how those skills are affected by distributed work.

Abstract This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Abstract This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Discussions of service learning emphasize opportunities for students to gain real world experience through work in community contexts. Less attention, however, has been given to the role of technology in these projects. Incorporating critical reflection on the rhetorical and social dimensions of technology throughout students' collaborations with clients can help to situate their practices within larger public contexts. This sort of reflection can encourage student engagement on a variety of levels: professional, rhetorical, intellectual, personal, and civic.

Discussions of service learning emphasize opportunities for students to gain real world experience through work in community contexts. Less attention, however, has been given to the role of technology in these projects. Incorporating critical reflection on the rhetorical and social dimensions of technology throughout students' collaborations with clients can help to situate their practices within larger public contexts. This sort of reflection can encourage student engagement on a variety of levels: professional, rhetorical, intellectual, personal, and civic.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBeth L. HewettBeth Hewett is Coeditor of the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy and a consultant with the NCTE Professional Development Consultant Network. She recently coedited Technology and English Studies: Innovative Professional Paths with James A. Inman. Her current research includes online writing instruction, instant messaging, and the rhetoric of the eulogy.Christa Ehmann PowersChrista Ehmann Powers is Vice President of Education for Smarthinking, Inc., an online learning company. She recently coauthored Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes with Beth L. Hewett. Christa's current research focuses on online teaching and learning, empirical research methods for online settings, and distance management strategies.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBeth L. HewettBeth Hewett is Coeditor of the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy and a consultant with the NCTE Professional Development Consultant Network. She recently coedited Technology and English Studies: Innovative Professional Paths with James A. Inman. Her current research includes online writing instruction, instant messaging, and the rhetoric of the eulogy.Christa Ehmann PowersChrista Ehmann Powers is Vice President of Education for Smarthinking, Inc., an online learning company. She recently coauthored Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes with Beth L. Hewett. Christa's current research focuses on online teaching and learning, empirical research methods for online settings, and distance management strategies.

A recent technique called single-sourcing has evolved to handle complex documents that involve content replication. Current rhetorical theories are insufficient to analyze this technique. This essay offers a background rooted in the poetic movements of Anglo-American Imagism and Russian Acmeism. Through developing an intertextuality of induction, rhetorical structure, and emphasis on craft, the poetic traditions inform examples of how these concepts apply to pedagogical and paradigmatic approaches to single-sourcing.

A recent technique called single-sourcing has evolved to handle complex documents that involve content replication. Current rhetorical theories are insufficient to analyze this technique. This essay offers a background rooted in the poetic movements of Anglo-American Imagism and Russian Acmeism. Through developing an intertextuality of induction, rhetorical structure, and emphasis on craft, the poetic traditions inform examples of how these concepts apply to pedagogical and paradigmatic approaches to single-sourcing.

This article explores the transfer of U.S. technologies to three maquilas, or joint U.S.–Mexican manufacturing facilities in northern Mexico. Drawing on case study methods, it focuses on the rhetorical strategies that Mexican engineers and manufacturing personnel used to translate U.S. technologies and corresponding documentation for their Mexican contexts. It also suggests ways U.S. technical communicators can adapt their documentation to be more effective for these U.S.–Mexican intercultural rhetorical contexts.

This study examines the representations of nanoscale science and technology in written popular media from 1986 to 1999. Nanoscale science is an emergent field that examines the principles of matter at a molecular level. This article presents the representations through which nanoscale science and technology was initially introduced to the public. Written popular media influences the ways stakeholder groups perceive, support, and fund science and technology. From 1986 to 1999 this field was introduced to the general public through articles in newspapers, magazines, and other general interest publications. During this period, nanoscale science and technology had a fragmented public image as proponents of various representations of the field competed for legitimacy. The study demonstrates that the emergence of nanoscience and technology in the popular media occurred as a competitive and transitional social–rhetorical process in which the new emerged within existing and established understandings of science but was mediated by biographical and other social accounts of the research.

Charettes offer a productive way of combining theory and practice to address some of the difficult matters of getting students to see and perform technical communication as students, professionals, servers, and citizens. This collaborative activity helps students prepare for an increasingly modular professional world by revealing the contingent rhetoricity of professional autonomy. Charettes can help technical writing programs and students integrate service and civic learning into the curriculum by using indigenous professional genres that actively demand stakeholder participation. The intensity and pragmatic force of charettes can assist students in building their ethos while working with fellow stakeholders. The wide range of possible documents involved in the process associated with charettes can help technical communication students and teachers explore the connections between rhetorical exigencies and genre and put their skills to good use in a culture where many are looking for new ways to build critical citizenship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.