Describes computer-software programs that “read” and score college-placement essays. Argues they may impress administrators, but they also (1) marginalize students by disregarding what they have to say; (2) disregard decades of research on the writing process; and (3) ignore faculty’s professional expertise. Argues assessment practices should be guided by theoretical soundness and sensitivity to issues affecting real people.

Argues that networked classrooms offer a number of opportunities for effective writing instruction. Argues that shared discourse in the networked-computer classroom has three levels forming a continuum of interactivity: students sending messages “at,” “to,” and “between” each other. Offers classroom examples of each level of discourse.

While some models of computer writing environments have emerged in the literature on writing, most of them are done with the purpose of helping writers in an academic context and very few, if any, with the aim of facilitating the work of professional writers or students in professional writing. We think, however, that we can learn from the previous models to build a multi-purpose computer writing environment that will take into account the needs of the professional writers as well as those of the students learning to write. We will begin by looking at some models of writing proposed by Hayes and Flower in 1980 and also at the model of White and Arndt. Afterwards, we will review the model of professional writers developed by Clerc and link it with the previous models. We will then have to look at some computer writing environments described in the literature and see how these environments take into account the process and tasks identified in writing. Finally, we will suggest our model.

Beginning Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students often have difficulty learning the genre of lab report writing. This difficulty can be alleviated through genre theory strategies and research, which writing center consultants, for example, can use to focus on the specific form and content of engineering writing, which then can be taught to students in a writing center environment. Genre theory provides a means (1) for humanities writing center consultants to learn specific characteristics about engineering writing, (2) for interdisciplinary collaboration between writing professionals and engineers to take place, and (3) for students to have increased opportunities to learn the discourse of their field. All of these benefits are enhanced by discipline-specific writing programs that support and facilitate them. In addition, the collaboration provides a stimulating, fluid, creative environment in which to discuss engineering writing, an environment which reflects the changing needs of engineering education as a result of technological advancements. As technology continues to influence engineering education, prompting evolutions in both technical and communication skills and knowledge, genre theory and interdisciplinary collaboration will continue to gain importance as strategies for initiating students into the communication demands of their field. The discussion focuses on the integration of genre theory with writing instruction in the ECE Department at the University of South Carolina. This integration stimulated interaction among ECE faculty, composition and rhetoric faculty and students, and ECE students.

Based on a study of nearly 200 international faculty in the field of computer science and computer engineering, roughly 90 written genres in the computing discipline are identified and organized according to five central aims in the profession: generation, procuration, dissemination, evaluation, and regulation. The importance of writing in the field is discussed, and recommendations for further research follow to encourage greater breadth and depth in the identification and study of generic corpora characteristic of specific professional communities. Benefits of such research assist students preparing to enter a profession, working professionals wishing to improve their writing in a profession, and writing specialists who offer training or editorial services for a profession.

Some years before electronic mail and Web-based hypertext became important features of professional communication, Robert Pirsig observed that information has always had higher value if it was organized in small chunks that could be accessed and sequenced at random. The paper discusses dynamic and static communication in electronic media.

The range of roles performed by technical communicators during the systems development process was identified and published from a 1997 survey of Australian technical communicators. Follow-up case study research investigated the development of 20 information systems. The research sought to quantify the technical communicator's contribution from the external viewpoint of developers and users. The paper describes the major findings from this research. The results support the 1997 survey findings that technical communicators do contribute positively to information systems development. The results quantitatively demonstrate that users are significantly more satisfied with computer systems where technical communicators are involved in the development process.

This article provides technical training managers with an overview of the range of Web‐based training solutions available to their organizations. The solutions range from individual drill and practice opportunities to live collaborative group learning. This article defines four broad categories and characterizes each. The most popular type, Web/computer based (W/CBT), is analyzed and four levels of W/CBT programs are presented. Included are tables summarizing considerations for selecting a development approach.

Teaching through the Web requires instructors to reconsider their previous assumptions about the nature of teaching, lecture, testing, and student/teacher interaction. Teaching technical writing online, however, raises additional issues. How can a technical writing instructor create an online workplace in which professional‐level collaboration can occur, while also allowing for purely academic instruction and discussion of theoretical issues? This article will address these issues in relation to the author's design and development of his Digital Rhetorics and the Modern Dialectic, specifically, how instructors must assume different roles as designers and then as teachers of online courses; how useful dialectical exchange on the Web that mimics (and sometimes surpasses) face‐to‐face, in‐classroom discussion can be created; and how technical writing instructors can foster productive online collaboration. This article will be a mixture of theory and practice—leaning a little more toward the practice, making it of immediate use to someone who has just been asked to teach a class online for the first time and is seeking help.

This paper discusses Industrial and Digital Age educational paradigms, needs, and expectations of adult and traditional learners for Internet‐based education; knowledge management and its impact on technical communication; the Universal Campus Network and the nature of Web‐based education in the near future; elements for success for Web‐based distance education in technical communication; and future directions in electronic communication.

Describes two ways that teaching and responding to student writing are being pressured by rapidly developing technologies now being introduced into educational institutions. Discusses (1) the increasing replacement of face-to-face contact by “virtual” interaction via multimedia technology, e-mail communication systems, and the recently expanded capabilities of the World Wide Web; and (2) distance education.

Sion some three thousand feet below, watching tiny airplanes take off from the airstrip and disappear over the shimmering ridge of alps to the north. Just below us is another chalet, the home of a Swiss family. At this time of day, they gather at the large wooden table on the slate patio behind their home to have a long, meandering lunch in the French Swiss tradition. Madame is setting the table, opening a bottle of Valais wine, which grandpere ritually pours out for the family and any friends who join them. As they sit to eat, the scene becomes for me a vision of all that is most deeply social in human affairs. They could not survive without this interconnectedness, this entwining of selves, the stories passed around, problems discussed, identities shared and nourished. For weeks, away from phones, TVs, computers, and electronic mail, a dot on the rugged landscape of the southern Alps, I have a profound sense of my own familial belonging, of how the four of us are made one by this closeness of being. Just now Bernard, the little boy who lives on the switchback above, has run down with his dog Sucrette to see if the kids can play. He is here, standing before us, his face smudged with dirt, holding out a toy truck to entice the boys. For now, it is his only way to communicate with them, poised here in all his Bernard-ness, his whole being telling his story.

1. Foreword 2. Introduction 3. I. Linguistic Perspectives 4. Electronic Language: A new variety of English (by Collot, Milena) 5. Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing (by Yates, Simeon J.) 6. Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat (by Werry, Christopher C.) 7. Functional comparisons of face-to-face and computer-mediated decision making interactions (by Condon, Sherri L.) 8. Two variants of an electronic message schema (by Herring, Susan C.) 9. II. Social and Ethical Perspectives 10. Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities (by Kollock, Peter) 11. Our passionate response to virtual reality (by Deuel, Nancy R.) 12. Cyberfeminism (by Hall, Kira) 13. III. Cross-Cultural Perspectives 14. Computer-mediated conversations as a new dimension of intercultural communication between East Asian and North American college students (by Ma, Ringo) 15. Perceptions of American culture: The impact of an electronically-mediated cultural exchange program on Mexican high school students (by Meagher, Mary Elaine) 16. Visible conversation and academic inquiry: CMC in a culturally diverse classroom (by Golomb, Gregory G.) 17. IV. CMC and group Interaction 18. Group dynamics in an e-mail forum (by Korenman, Joan) 19. Writing to work: How using e-mail can reflect technological and organizational change (by Ziv, Oren) 20. The rhetorical dynamics of a community protest in cyberspace: What happened with Lotus Marketplace (by Gurak, Laura J.) 21. References 22. Index of names 23. Index of subjects

This study explored the relationships among communication technologies, communication apprehension, writing apprehension, and computer anxiety. The results indicate that significant relationships exist between computer anxiety, and computer/wordprocessing, between computer anxiety, and computer electronic discussion group, between computer anxiety and online computer service, between computer anxiety and CD-RAM, as well as other types of technology. Other results reveal that students are least experienced with programming computers, computerized electronic discussion group, computer conferencing and Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDA). Significant differences occurred between gender groups on cellular phone scores, writing stories/poetry scores, computerized electronic discussion group scores, satellite TV scores, electronic videogames scores, and computer/video conferencing scores, as well as communication apprehension scores, writing apprehension scores, and computer anxiety scores. The specifics of these results and other significant differences are reported and discussed in this article.

Hypertext, in its most available manifestation, the World Wide Web, is being sold as a force for liberation. One must differentiate the varieties of freedom to better understand how different interests manipulate the freedom mythology to achieve different ends. This study examines the scholars who have framed the hypertext debate and the rhetoric employed by the companies that want to sell it to locate a more complex picture of how these interests use the freedom myth. Such consideration leads to discussion of what might shape hypertext's emergence as more than an information-dispersal system.

Presents eight separate short descriptions of teaching tips or classroom activities for composition classes submitted by teachers, including tips on writing exchanges, grammar problems, peer evaluation, revision, mock quizzes, critical thinking regarding television news, computer–assisted commenting, and an educational and entertaining end–of–term review activity period.

The Internet and access to it have grown exponentially in the past three years. Georgia Tech's Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center reports that, since January 1994 when its first survey of Internet users was conducted, the Internet has grown from 1250 servers to over one million servers. There are over thirty million users of the Internet in the United States alone (Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center). The versatility of the medium has increased along with its size, as the addition of Java technology and other features has increased the dynamism and interactivity of Web sites and as conveyance via television has increased access. Mass communications scholars and our colleagues in interpersonal, organizational, and small group communication have been studying computer-mediated communication [CMC] for some time. Mass communications researchers have been concerned with a number of questions-how First Amendment protections and intellectual and property rights transfer from print to CMC; what factors play a role in attracting audiences to Internet sites; what strategies can be used to determine accuracy of information on the Internet; and so forth (McChesney; Morris and Ogan; Reeves and Nass). Interpersonal communication researchers have studied the development and maintenance of relationships online (Walther; Parks and Floyd), while small group researchers have examined the dynamics of group process in computer-mediated environments (Savicki, Lingenfelter, and Kelley; Rafaeli and Sudweeks). In addition to these, there have been many other forms of communication research studying Internet discourse and interaction. But rhetorical critics and theorists are latecomers to the scene. There are many possible reasons for this. Many humanists have been slow to take up interest in discourse in electronic environments, perhaps because they suspect that critical work and critical theory will need to be changed to suit the new communication environments, and this is true because in a hypertext environment, author, audience, and text are dispersed. While such dispersion can and does occur in other modalities, computer-mediated discourse is particularly prone to it. The function of the author as originator of a message can be suppressed in groupauthored, disguised, or anonymous Internet postings. As I will show later, identifying the nature and reactions of audiences is made more difficult in computer-mediated environments. And when text becomes hypertext, the text itself is dispersed and assimilated and loses its stability. As Ted Friedman (73) noted,

Introduction PART I: PUBLISHING AS SOCIAL ACTION What is Publishing? The Continuum of Publishers Evaluation and the Role of Visible Text PART II: The Technologies of Publishing Publishing Before Computers The Computerization of Publishing From the Page to the Screen PART III: Publishing, Technology, and the Classroom Technology and Pedagogy Publishing in the Classroom: From Letterpress to the Web and Beyond References List of Figures Author Index Subject Index

This study examines theoretical conceptions of community and how current communitarian theories either explain or are challenged by the emergence of electronic discussion groups in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) medium. It is a study of the power to monitor what is said, to authorize who may speak, and even to determine what is and is not knowable within the context of discourse communities and, furthermore, seeks to test the claim that CMC may serve as an agency for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities. A poststructuralist analysis of approaches to "community" is used to show how communitarian theories are often caught in a binary between subjectivities which are able to resist interpellation into a community by appealing to universals outside the community versus subjectivities which are forced to accommodate the discursive practices of the community because they are constituted by it. In order to better understand the process of subject formation within communities, the discursive practices of an electronic discussion group known as PURTOPOI are examined. Utilizing observations based on the examination of PURTOPOI and using insights from feminist standpoint theory, this project ultimately argues for a revised view of subjectivity within discourse communities. It is impossible to avoid the discursive practices of particular communities; yet, resistance and conflict are, paradoxically, required to maintain group unity. Thus, communities are both unified and sites of struggle. Communities are never unities because as soon as they become unified, as soon as they realize total consensus, they cease to function as communities; there's no communication within them any longer so that the forces which bind their members together into a community are gone. Thus, there can never be a community which is completely successful in forcing its members to accommodate its discursive practices, nor can there ever be a community which is completely without hegemony. Both resistance and accommodation must be present in order for there to be a community. This calls into question the claim that CMC may serve as an agency for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities because it suggests that CMC is too indebted to the discursive practices of other established media to produce radical new subjectivities.

This article demonstrates the advantage of having students create their own Web pages (hypertexts) to enhance their awareness of the importance of rhetorical organization. Hypertexts utilize a method of linking pages to each other. This “linking function” of hypertexts causes writers of hypertexts an increased need for more attractive pages and effective presentation of information. Compared with writers of regular writing, hypertext writers also have much more choices in showing information. By letting students exploit these choices and possibilities, instructors of writing can force students to analyze the relationships both within and between pieces of information. Thus, instructors can increase students' awareness of the importance of rhetorical organization, which is mainly responsible for indicating structures and relationships of information in regular writing.

For researchers, a key issue in developing electronic mail as a survey method is to understand what factors are at play as a potential respondent chooses to open or delete a mail message. This research investigated the process by which individuals make decisions about opening and reading versus deleting electronic mail and also assessed attitudes toward electronic mail surveys. The sample received an electronic mail message followed by a telephone interview. Results indicated that individuals delete mail when the subject line does not interest them or when they do not recognize the name of the individual sending the e-mail. Those interviewed reacted favorably to e-mail surveys for scientific research despite issues of anonymity. However, respondents overwhelmingly described a dislike for commercially based electronic mail surveys.

Hypertext is presented and understood as an intricate, open web of interrelated information, both intertextual and interactive, as reader and writer work together to create the text. However, it may be driven by an organizational metaphor that limits the users' access and may not be open to the free associations it implies. Organization is important in hypertext, just as it is in print documents, both rhetorically and practically. Metaphors, links, and buttons aid users in identifying the organizational patterns, allow users to access information successfully, and provide connections that users may not make on their own.

Media choice is an important topic in the field of organizational communication. With a plethora of media choices (e.g., letter, e-mail, voice mail, telephone, face-to-face meetings), the question of how and why individuals choose which medium to use in what situation takes on additional importance. This concern is also shared in professional communication. I present a summary of a paper (Kinney and Watson) that tests the applicability of a prominent theory of media choice, media richness theory (MRT), to both traditional and new electronic forms of communication. I summarize the findings and present some implications for professional communication.

Dynamics in Document Design. Karen A. Schriver. New York: Wiley, 1997. 559 pages. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Edward R. Tufte. Cheshire, CT: Graphics P, 1997. 156 pages. The Computer and the Page: Publishing, Technology, and the Classroom. James R. Kalmbach. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 145 pages. The Communication Theory Reader. Ed. Paul Cobley. New York: Routledge, 1996. 506 pages. International Dimensions of Technical Communication. Ed. Deborah C. Andrews. Arlington, VA: STC, 1996. 135 pages.

In the future, more and more technical writers across the discipline are likely to become involved in designing and developing multimedia products. Entering this new, challenging, and rewarding field requires retooling current skills used in the production of text-based information products to add knowledge of a wider range of media, including audio, video, computer graphics, digital photography, and authoring systems. This article presents an overview of the process of bringing a multimedia product to the point of sale.

Style guides, the primary tool of technical editors, are as important as ever; actually, their increased uses and benefits can redefine the activities of editors. Specifically, style guides can be used to train new employees, to generate buy-in of subject-matter experts, and to define the process flow of document and product generation. Additionally, because they have the potential to control many style decisions and to integrate a variety of skills, computer-driven styles and Web style guides reinforce these increased uses and benefits and suggest the emergence of even more. Thus technical editors' roles may be expanded to include additional training functions, new marketing dimensions, and innovative research in multimedia design and development.

In this article I intend to share my experiences of teaching writingintensive courses at a large state university with the use of computers.' I want to present my positive experiences to the reader in such a way that will make you want to join me in exploring the myriad of possibilities of teaching with technology: ways that will free us, not constrict us-ways that will enhance learning and dialogue, not provide new ways of shutting down the inquisitive minds of students, but rather of expanding and enhancing all their possibilities and ours. Let me explain at the outset that the technologies I am advocating for teaching writing in writing-intensive literature and folklore courses are largely electronic mail formats and web sites for the distribution of assignments, for syllabi, for student writing, written assignments and peer reviews, and for the position of hypertext archives for class listservs.2 E-mail discussion listserv formats provide an easy way for everyone in the class to communicate automatically with every other member of the class, as well as with the instructor(s).3 Teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and students can all be subscribed to the discussion listserv; whenever anyone on the list posts a memo addressed to the listserv, all persons subscribed to the list receive a copy of the entry. The listserv owner (generally, the teacher) controls who can be subscribed to the discussion list and who can participate in this electronic forum and how the discussion will operate. For example, in my descriptions below, I will illustrate how every student journal entry or writing assignment goes automatically to the computers of all the other students and myself. However, when I wish to communicate privately with a student or send her or him a graded paper, I can send that message only to that particular student simply by addressing the note to the individual student rather than to the entire list; similarly, when students are doing peer reviews of other students' papers, for privacy, they can post their comments only to the author of a paper, rather than to the entire class. In this paper I am advocating the use of the e-mail discussion list format because I believe in its capacity to better enable students to write well

Assignments appear in every chapter. I. EXPLORING CONCEPTS. 1. Seeing Rhetoric Through Media. Overview - Key Terms: Rhetoric, Media, Text. Keeping a Journal. Issues. Genres - Observing and Classifying Texts. Texts as Myths - Reading Takes Place From Within Belief Systems. Jennifer Ditri, Cheerleaders are Athletes, Too! Reading News and Popular Texts - Practice of Critical Reading. 2. Reading Media. Overview - Reading Interactively. Issues. What's a Medium? - Definition and Background of the Term. Learning From the Media. Being a Raymond Williams, Keyword: Consumer. Doing Without Media. Journal Entries: Marci Nowak, Jennifer Ditri, Mark Maxson, Stacey McAfee, Michael Halstead, Meredith Roedel. Clutter and Context - Ways to Deal with Overload. Strategies for Reading S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter, Who Are the Elite? Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Real Elite. Conventions - Noticing What is Taken for Granted. Conventions in Writing and Writing Classes. Bill McKibben, 7:00 a.m. II. MEDIA AND PURPOSES FOR WRITING. 3. Making Use of Observations - From Prewriting to Drafting. Overview - What Critical Reading of Can Add to the Writing Issues. Writing as Your Medium - Genres and Conventions in Speech and Writing. William Stafford, A Way of Writing. Writing Essays as a Conventional Act - Crossover Between Conventions in Texts and in Writing. Broadcast News, Tom Gives Aaron Some Tips on Reading the Journal Entries: Teri Hurst. How Writers Write - Myth of the Born Writer. George Plimpton, Interview with Ernest Hemingway Karen Kurt Tiel, Note About The Loop Writing Process. Prewriting - Devices for Exploring What You and Your Readers Know. Drafting - Pulling it All Together. Readers' Roles - Text Invites Us to Play Along. Cassandra Amesley, How to Watch Star Trek. Readers' Roles in Essays: Linda Weltner, Joys of Mediocrity Kirkpatrick Sale, Fighting the Darkness Danielle Smith, Publishers' Clearing House. 4. Gathering and Evaluating News and Information. Overview - Confirming Our Basis for Judgment. Issues. Stories in the News - Narratives Which Guide Our Interpretation. Midland County Review, Barcia Joins Conservatives in Fight Against Unfunded Mandates. Sabrina Cantu, It's O.K. to Make Fun of Jesus, If He's Black. How to Search for Information - Search Strategies for News and Information. Stacey Cole, Negativity in the Media. What Counts as News? - Problems with Definitions and Reception. News as Rhetorical. Forms of News. News as Commercial. James Amend, A Spicier, More Racey New Medium. News and Entertainment. Reading the News Comparatively - Earthquake in Japan, as Treated in Several News Media. Problems in News. Keeping Informed - Health Care Reform. Bill Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Great Health Care Debate. Propaganda. Objectivity and Fairness. Appendix: Transcripts of News Reports on Kobe Earthquake. CBS Evening News. CNN Report. All Things Considered. NPR Morning Edition. 5. Close Attention to Detail: Regarding the Commercial. Overview - Value in Analyzing Unvalued Texts. Issues. Why Ads? - Effective Rhetoric in the Face of Audience Resistance. Collecting Ads - Categories as Part of Making Meaning. How to Read a Commercial - Rhetorical Devices in Print Ads. Tara L. Prainito, Advertising's Enhancements. Analyzing a TV Commercial - Technical Events in Television Commercials. Transcript and Analysis of Midol Commercial. Aaron Kukla, Analysis of a Chevrolet Camaro Ad. Categorizing Commercials. Problems. Ads as Propaganda. Ads and Effects. Dirt - Ambiguities in Boundaries Between Texts. Leslie Savan, Don't Inhale: Tobacco Industry's Attitude-Delivery System. 6. Reading Pictures. Overview - Connections Between Visual and Verbal. Issues. Appeal of Seeing - Reliance on Sight. Pictures and Narratives. How to Read a Picture. Signs, Codes, and Conventions. Visual Images and Descriptive Writing. Problem: Gaze. 7. Entertainment as Information. Overview - What Entertainment Texts Tell Us. Issues. What's Entertainment? - Business or Cultural Context. Entertainment as Play - Reactions to Popular Culture. More Dirt - Transgressions in Entertainment Texts. Why Do They Want You To Play? - Entertainment and Hegemony. Arthur Asa Berger, Genre Migration. Audience's View - Dominant, Resisting, and Negotiating Positions. Problems. Taste. Popular Music. Roches, Mr. Sellack. Violence. Carl M. Cannon, Honey, I Warped the Kids. John Leonard, Why Blame TV? Todd Gitlin, Imagebusters: Hollow Crusade Against TV Violence. Children's Entertainment. David Foster, Sexist? Racist? Violent? Terrence Rafferty, No Pussycat. Science-Fiction. Race and Entertainment Media. Stereotypes. Todd Gitlin, From Inside Prime Time. III. RECONSIDERATIONS. 8. Discovering Contexts and Deeper Purposes. Overview - Critical Thinking About Writing. Issues. Representation and the Natural - Denaturing Natural. Labeling - Cues for Interpretation. Appellation and Ideology. Ideology: Definitions and Illustrations - Three Paradigms: False Consciousness, Any Set of Values and Assumptions, and Specifically Values and Assumptions. Reading Die Hard - Ideology as Reflected in a Popular Text Dominant Ideologies. Reading Texts for Ideology. Lisa Straney, Analysis: Nike Ad. Ideology and Metaphor. Problems. Example of PC - Who Gets to Complain About Political Correctness? Brian E. Albrecht, Team Names Still Stir Controversy. Candy Hamilton, Where a Tomahawk Chop Feels Like a Slur. John K. Wilson, Myth of Correctness. Nostalgia. Further Reading. Bob Garfield, Pizza Hut Has the Crust to Roll Out Incorrect Celebs. 9. Revision: Bringing Drafts to Completion. Overview. Issues. Why Revise? - Raising Your Game. Writing as Conversation. Strategies and Tactics for Revising. Computers and Revision. A Few Tactics for Revision - Leave It Alone Nutshelling Bombing: Impersonation. Shannon Peacock, From Dais-ed and Confused. Eric Nelson, From Words Mean Things and Integrity Matters. Sample Revision: Media in the Courts. Collections of Writing. Portfolios - Draft and Exhibition. Class Publications. 10. Developing Style and Audience Awareness. Overview - Style as Product of Interaction Between Persona, Subject, and Audience. Issues. Some Bad Advice About Style. Style as Ornament. Style as Clarity - E.B. White's Disappearing Author. Reducing Unnecessary Difficulty - Some Practical Advice. Style as Constitutive Or Would You Rather Be a Dog? - Audience as Appellated by the Text. Hegemony and Style. Daniel Zwerdling, Interview with Leslie Savan. Ira Teinowitz, From The Marketing 100: Rich Lalley, Red Dog. Style and Audience. Words, Words, Words. Beverly Gross, What a Bitch! Bad Rhetoric - Some Deceptive or Sloppy Devices. Rush Limbaugh and Rhetoric. Recognizing and Correcting Bad Rhetoric. William Lutz, Doublespeak. 11. Expanding Resources. Overview - Dynamic Media. Issues. Collections as a Basis for Your Own System - Adding Other Media. What to Expect - Electronic Media: Hopeful and Pessimistic Assessments. Electronic - Rhetorical Implications. Search Procedures. Hypertext - Implications of a New Form. Internet as Source of Information: A Test Case - Reactions to Oklahoma City Bombing on the Internet. Cyberporn - Circulation Through of Sloppy Research. Library Material - Searching for More. Some Reservations about the Internet. Herbert J. Gans, Electronic Shut Ins: Some Social Flaws of the Information Superhighway. M. Kadi, Q: How Tall is the Internet? A: Four Inches Tall.

Does language reflect psychological reality, or does it form psychological reality? In other words, does the language we use to discuss something determine our attitudes toward that thing? Feminist literature has made much of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which asserts that linguistic bias is a cause rather than a symptom of social bias (F.W. Frank and P.A. Tretchler, 1989; F.J. Newmayer, 1986). However, conflicting views do exist on the direction of influence. The article discusses a recent study published by M.A. Dyrud illustrating a clear gender bias in computer clip art (see Business Commun. Quart., vol.60, no.4, p.30-51, 1997). Dyrud argues that if language, as a symbol system, both reflects and invents our reality, the same can be said of another symbol system, that of visual images. If the images are predominantly one gender, they may reflect cultural mores, but at the same time they help to sustain those beliefs by shaping our concept of what is real. Her study examines more than 14000 images in Windows based programs. She found that gender bias does exist in available visuals. In addition to a bias in presentation, clip art is also a man's world in terms of sheer numbers of images. Of 14108 images, there were three times as many male as female. The attitude of available images also differs: male figures-often of athletic build with full heads of hair-are usually in motion; female figures are usually standing, waiting, or even posing fashion-model style.

This study focuses on people's choices between electronic mail and voice mail. We found that users generally preferred electronic mail over voice mail for most communication purposes. These results do not support a hypothesis derived from media richness theory that voice mail would be preferred to e-mail for ambiguous situations. A more important finding is that other medium features besides richness influence individuals' media choices, specifically, medium features useful for retrieving and preparing messages and for working In group settings. From this and other evidence, we conclude that a complex set of social factors governs organizational media use in ways that neither theory can fully explain. Our findings have some interesting implications for designers of multimedia communication systems and for people like human resources specialists who are concerned with improving the effectiveness of professional work and the quality of working life.

Looks at the application of minimalist principles in technical documentation.