Amidst the panic, fear, and uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Wenhong Zhang emerges as a go-to source for the Chinese public to seek information to protect themselves and find hope and order in their distress. Focusing on Dr. Zhang's 39 WeChat posts from January 2020 to March 2022, this case study reveals that he employs a constructed ethos and leverages WeChat as a powerful social media to craft the kairotic responses to the pandemic.

This article explores the extent to which Global North mHealth apps are designed for user empowerment and persuasion in the Global South healthcare context. Findings from a case study underscore the need for decolonizing digital technology to promote more inclusive and equitable access to the digital ecosystem. The article suggests that deploying rhetorically nuanced, justice-driven decolonial design approaches can help stamp out digital colonialism and build a just future by bridging the North-South divide.

Black mentorship is key to the professional development of Black scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) and writing studies. Blending narrative ethnography and grounded theory, this article extends existing investigations into mentorship among Black professionals, by exploring how mentorship and rhetorical kinship among Black TPC and writing professors enrich their professional development. With implications for both academia and industry, this article highlights how Black TPC scholars develop, negotiate, and sustain Black professional ethos.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

Black mother activists play a pivotal role in redressing community inequities. To address the work of these activists, I turn to technical and professional communication and reproductive justice to explore how ethos is central to their work.

"Women physicians and professional ethos in nineteenth-century America." Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(3), pp. 290–291

During 2010 and 2011, debate ensued over funding for National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This article uses stasis theory to analyze reports and statements produced by NASA, politicians, and scientists. The analysis reveals that an official report addresses stasis questions and guides further action. Additionally, varying perspectives on the telescope suggest that definitions play a crucial role in technology funding debates. This analysis demonstrates that stasis theory provides a productive tool for analyzing technology policy debates.

Over the past two decades, scientific editors have attempted to correct “mistaken” assumptions about scientific images and to curb unethical image-manipulation practices. Reactions to the advent and abuse of image-adjustment software (such as Adobe Photoshop) reveal the complex relations among visual representations, scientific credibility, and epistemic rhetoric. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's model of argumentation provides a flexible system for understanding these relations and for teaching students to use scientific images ethically and effectively.

Abstract The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media. Keywords: crowd sourcingpedagogyreachsocial media ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article. Notes Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, Citation2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, Citation2013, para 1). In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing. We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElise Verzosa Hurley Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos. Amy C. Kimme Hea Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.

The expanding use of social media such as Twitter has raised the stakes for teaching our students about individual and organizational ethoi. This article considers the role of organizations' Twitter feeds during emergency situations, particularly Hurricane Irene in 2011, to argue for a pedagogical model for helping students collaboratively code tweets to assess their rhetorical effects and to improve their own awareness and use of microblogging as a communication tool.

This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008 Bacey , J. , & Barry , T. ( 2008 ). A comparison study of the proper use of Hester-Dendy® samplers to achieve maximum diversity and population size of benthic macroinvertebrates Sacramento Valley, California (Report No. EH08-2) . Sarcramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]; Levine et al., 2005 Levine , J. , Kim , D. , Goh , K. S. , Ganapathy , C. , Hsu , J. , Feng , H. , & Lee , P. ( 2005 ). Surface and ground water monitoring of pesticides used in the Red Imported Fire Ant Control Program (Report EH05-02) . Sacramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010 Kuhn , V. , Johnson , D. J. , & Lopez , D. ( 2010 ). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy . Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 14 ( 2 ). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html [Google Scholar]) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

This article reports my classroom-based qualitative research, conducted at a midwestern university, on the role of World Englishes in the ethos transformation of U.S. native English-speaking students. The 30 participants completed assignments that enhanced their understanding of how the English language affects discursive tasks in international audience adaptation. Efforts at internationalizing technical communication can benefit immensely from the inclusion of the World Englishes paradigm in training programs to account for students' language attitudes.

“The study of activity ceases to be the psychology of an individual, but instead focuses on the interaction between an individual, systems of artifacts, and other individuals in historically developing institutional settings” (Miettinen, 1997). As teaching technical writing online becomes more widespread, teachers and scholars are identifying ways to increase teaching/learning efficacy. One way of accomplishing this goal is by continually reflecting on different types of student ethos being constructed in an online course. The changes that occur in the ethos development process can be contextualized through activity theory, which emphasizes the dynamic, evolving nature of social environments. Activity theory's focus on cultural history and tools makes it ideal for exploring active communication among multiple participants in an online technical communication environment. The triangle of human activity adapted and developed by Engeström (1987) Engeström, Y. 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental research., Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy. [Google Scholar] provides a framework for exploring ethos as an object within an online course's activity system.

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.

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.

Availability of online Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations is contributing to a shift in medical writers' organizational role from a peripheral to a central role where their responsibilities for the persuasiveness of documents and compliance with evolving regulations have increased dramatically. Therefore, curricula for medical writers should include instruction in persuasion, collaboration, strategic and project management, the drug development process, and the location and interpretation of FDA regulations.

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.

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.

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.

The debate over certification of technical and professional communicators has occurred with periods of relative intensity and quiescence for more than twenty years. This article surveys the historical developments of the debate; describes the arguments for and against certification; surveys technical communication curricula and theoretical arguments for literacies, standards, and competencies; and examines various efforts to study certification, including a description of published documents regarding certification.

In this article, a biochemist and a rhetorician collaborate to define "junk science." They apply that definition as they rhetorically analyze a book that makes strong claims about endocrine disruption (Our Stolen Future) and a website developed to embarrass those claims (Our Swollen Future). This article argues that junk science and accusations of junk science evince ideologicaVeconomic motives and pronounced efforts to construct, or assail, scientific ethos.

Abstract The focus of workplace communication research on visual rhetoric has tended to be the efficient and unproblematically "effective" functioning of visual texts. By suggesting ways in which the visual representations of science are construed by expert readers, this article responds to a call within our discipline for more critically focused contributions to the study of visual literacy. A former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Botany was asked to explain his interpretation of visuals appearing over an 80-year period in that journal; his responses illustrate how visual explanations testify to their creators' authority and how, once established, such authority actuates the rational arguments of science. Rhetorical appeals within and arrangement of visual texts are considered, as is the persuasive power of legends and captions.

Abstract Focusing on an environmental debate that took place in southeastern Louisiana, this study analyzes the experiences of several women who were identified as the debate's domestic, virtuous women: nurturing caretakers who entered public space to speak out as conservators of home and family. While acknowledging how powerful this public stance can be, this study also highlights the limitations of an identity that enables women to access political spheres traditionally closed to them but ultimately dismisses these voices when decisions about the environment must be made.

Critical thinking pedagogy offers a supportive environment for teaching ethics in the professional communication classroom. Four important aspects of critical thinking which particularly encourage ethical thought and behavior are identifying and questioning assumptions, seeking a multiplicity of voices and alternatives on a subject, making connections, and fostering active involvement. Focusing on these behaviors allows an ongoing incorporation of ethics into many different aspects of the classroom.

Visual metadiscourse can provide design criteria for authors when considering the needs and expectations of readers. The linguistic concept of metadiscourse is expanded from the textual realm to the visual realm, where authors have many necessary design considerations as they attempt to help readers navigate through and understand documents. These considerations, both textual and visual, also help construct the ethos of authors, as design features reveal awareness of visual literacy and of the communication context. Visual metadiscourse complements textual metadiscourse in emphasizing the necessity of rhetoric in technical communication.

Abstract This article investigates the quantitative and qualitative evolution of debate‐creating (DEB) vs. accounting (ACC) references in 90 French medical articles published between 1810 and 1995. My findings suggest that nineteenth‐century French academic writing tends to be more polemical or oppositional than cooperative by contrast to its twentieth‐century counterpart. These results suggest that the debate‐creating vs. accounting opposition could be a rhetorical universal of referential behavior in medical literature.

Abstract Critical thinking has led teachers of service courses and their user departments into common pedagogies. Motivated by calls from industry for students with problem‐solving abilities, both service courses and their user departments have incorporated higher‐level thinking modes into their assignments. Applying the interpretive mode of rationality posited by Habermas, innovative teachers are changing their pedagogical methods from the simple transference of information from teacher to student to assignments requiring team projects where students grapple with parametric problem solving that demands interpreting complex data. Applying the emancipatory mode of rationality, some assignments involve outside clients and working with community‐based social and political issues.

Rather than acting as training departments for students’ future employers (a mission reflected in most textbooks and journal scholarship), technical writing programs should be teaching skepticism, critical thinking, and paradigm‐breaking. They should be highlighting the agendas and “narratives” inherent in any text, rather than sustaining a positivist faith in neutrality and objectivity, because students who understand the power of language to shape the workplace (not simply to transmit information) turn out to be the most effective, most successful professionals. This article questions the widespread, largely uncritical importing of corporate paradigms into the technical writing classroom and calls for the university to remain separate from the corporation in its purpose. The article goes on to describe a recently developed senior seminar that challenges students’ assumptions about scientific and technical writing, including their own. Through courses like this, it is hoped that students will enter their professions as savvy, questioning thinkers rather than simply as efficient, problem‐solving doers.

Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Johndan Johnson‐Eilola. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 272 pages. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. Laura J. Gurak. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pages. Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology. A. D. Van Nostrand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. 241 pages. Rhetoric and Pedagogy, Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 337 pages. Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language. Michel Meyer. Trans. David Jamison, in collaboration with Allan Hart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 310 pages.

This article looks at the commentary's role in scientific disputation by analyzing the rhetoric in two scientific papers. First, it considers each author's explanation as to why disagreement exists among scientists. Second, it investigates one author's accusation that "cultural norms" have foreclosed research avenues in evolutionary studies. Third, it examines each author's appeal to values. These values cohere with their explanations as to why disagreements exist and their particular recommendations for administrating the Endangered Species Act.

This article claims that the debate over research in professional communication is grounded in ideology. The article discusses the ideologies of two research perspectives: a functionalist perspective, common in much social scientific research, and a critical interpretive perspective, currently emerging in disciplines other than our own. The article sets recent discussions of research in professional communication within a functionalist framework, then posits that a critical interpretive ideology provides an alternative. The interests advanced by both perspectives are discussed, and the viability of critical interpretive research in professional communication is supported.

In critiquing the sexually loaded metaphors in James Paradis' analysis of the problem of expert knowledge in technical operator's manuals, this essay demonstrates how professional discourse formally embodies images of violence and domination that may also interfere with the responsible control of a dangerous technology. Describing the relationship between logos and ethos in professional discourse, this essay demonstrates how a feminist perspective can help technical communicators understand the pragmatic consequences of unarticulated sexual codes in scientific and technical discourse.

Because technical communicators are expected increasingly to participate in environmental communication, technical communication practitioners, researchers, and teachers should be aware of current practices in public environmental debate and related reform movements. This essay uses a controversial case in which a Mohawk community clashes with the Environmental Protection Agency 1) to explore how alternative worldviews affect environmental remediation efforts; and 2) to serve as a template for the development of a feminist perspective on how communicative practices in environmental policy making should be reformed.

Public policy issues in professional writing may be understood, in part, by revisiting our understanding of the writing process and of the way character, or ethos, is shaped in the writing and reading of a text. This paper suggests a method for modeling the characters of writers, readers, and sponsoring organizations as they are shaped in the process of writing about public policy issues. The model is then used to examine the classroom oral presentations of four professionals who were involved in different ways with the same controversial public policy issue. The goal is to integrate classroom considerations of the writing process and of audience analysis, of personal and professional ethics, and of relevant workplace controversies.

This essay develops a conception of science as a complex series of cultural practices mediated in and through discourse. This conception requires attention to discourses typically considered non‐scientific, such as those resulting in funding decisions. A case study of the cold fusion controversy demonstrates that internal scientific practices cannot explain adequately the eventual closure of the debate, and that we must look to the rhetorical practices of Congressional committees and government agencies for those explanations.

When writers communicate risks about hazardous technologies, they need to realize that their persuasive purposes cannot be to resolve debate but rather to evoke consensus and to encourage new ways of talking about risk issues. To gain insight into achieving such purposes, rhetoricians can learn from theories in the social science subdisciplines of risk perception and communication. Theorists in these fields identify various psychological, social, political, and cultural dynamics that risk communicators must address in order to generate new processes of debate. I apply many of these theoretical principles to a sample risk communication on nuclear energy to determine realistic expectations for persuasive risk communications. My conclusions stress that rhetorical researchers need to explore and test the extent to which written rhetorical forms can facilitate consensus.

The early stages of the cold fusion controversy are reviewed. It is shown how ideas in the sociology of scientific knowledge such as “symmetry,”; “interpretative flexibility,”; and “experimenter's regress”; are applicable to the controversy. It is argued that there is nothing exceptional about the dynamics of the debate, apart from the media attention. In cold fusion we see scientific controversy as normal.

This essay reports on the relationship between persuasion techniques used by collaborators and possible gender influences. To examine this relationship, the authors observed four proposal developers (two males and two females) as they collaborated with several groups at Southwestern Bell Telephone company. The authors examined preconceptions about three factors: effective and ineffective collaboration, gender's effect on collaboration, and gender's effect on persuasion. They also examined persuasion techniques used by the proposal developers.