This paper introduces the concept of transactional design---integrating Druschke's "transactional" model of rhetoric and science and Kinsella's model of "public expertise"---to demonstrate how technical communication and user experience (UX) designers and researchers can play an essential role in helping scientists cultivate meaningful relationships with members of the public toward the goal of making scientific content more accessible and actionable. This paper reports on the challenges that arose when a water modeling system built for experts was adapted for a public museum audience. It discusses specific issues the UX team had in contending with outdated "deficit" and "conduit" models of communication when working with scientists to adapt the system; it provides a checklist for steps that technical communication and UX designers and researchers---as those who best understand audiences and work directly with users---can champion the idea of transactional design to setup knowledge-making partnerships toward the co-construction of public-facing scientific communication projects.

Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are potentially overlapping disciplines with open disciplinary questions. A comparative topical analysis of research topics can identify similarities and differences between them, addressing intellectual and physical concerns for each. Literature review: Recent topical analyses have been done for technical communication. Historical topical analyses have been done for business communication. Few professional communication topical analyses exist. Some studies were done 15 or more years ago, and one related comparative study exists. Research questions: 1. What research topics are unique to each of the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963-2017? 2. What topics are shared among the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963-2017? Research methodology: I used collocation analysis on the target phrases technical communication, business communication, and professional communication from a 4822-abstract corpus. I compared words collocated with target phrases to find words unique to a single term, those shared with two terms, or those shared with all three terms. Results/discussion: Findings identified science communication as a technical communication topic; other findings corroborated previous research. Business communication findings corroborated previous research and identified an emphasis on global communication. Findings show professional communication as a rhetorically flexible term that creates a space for emerging concepts and expands disciplinary boundaries. The three shared communication, pedagogy, international, and disciplinary concerns. Conclusions: The disciplines feature some overlap but maintain distinct research foci. Professional communication is a distinctive discipline that assists technical communication and business communication by incubation of emerging concepts.

Teaching the craft of written science communication is an arduous task that requires familiarity with disciplinary writing conventions. With the burgeoning of technological advancements, practitioners preparing novice research writers can begin to augment teaching and learning with activities in digital writing environments attuned to the conventions of scientific writing in the disciplines. The Research Writing Tutor (RWT) is one such technology. Grounded in an integrative theoretical framework, it was designed to help students acquire knowledge about the research article genre and develop research writing competence. One of its modules was designed to facilitate revision by providing different forms of automated feedback and scaffolding that are genre-based and discipline-specific. This study explores whether and how the features of the RWT may impact revision while using this module of the tool. Drawing from cognitive writing modeling, this study investigates the behaviors of a multidisciplinary group of 11 graduate-student writers by exploring how they interacted with the RWT's features and how this interaction may create conditions for enhanced revision processes and text modifications. Findings demonstrate promising potential for the use of this automated feedback tool in fostering writers' metacognitive processing during revision. This research adds to theory on cognitive writing models by acknowledging the evolving role of digital environments in writing practices and offering insights into future development of automated tools for genre-based writing instruction.

On behalf of SIGDOC and CDQ, we wanted to reach out to all of you and thank you for all you do in this difficult time. Our organization's greatest strength is in its members, and we hope you are all staying as safe and sane as possible while COVID-19 changes the way we work and play. SIGDOC has yet to reach an official decision on the viability or nature of our 2020 Conference in Denton, TX, but the Executive Committee along with this year's Conference Committee, lead by Stacey Pigg, are in consistent contact and weighing options. Above all else, our decision will be informed by the values that we have articulated as an organization, which are: valuing human well-being; engaging in financial stewardship; respecting labor; foregrounding accessibility; supporting early-career scholars; establishing continuity; managing community and networkbuilding; supporting innovation; valuing industry practices; and maintaining and facilitating interorganizational and international relationships. The option for SIGDOC 2020 that best addresses these core values will be the option we select. For now, we have confirmation that the proceedings publications will be moving forward and supported by ACM and included in the Digital Library regardless of the decision we make on the conference. This is great news, and fulfills our values in supporting scholarship and valuing the labor done by our authors, reviewers, and our program cochairs, Josephine Walwema and Daniel Hocutt, who have worked diligently in the midst of the pandemic. CDQ will continue to publish as often as we are able. We understand that our workflows have changed, dramatically for some of us. So while it may be that extra time is occasionally needed for a review, we remain committed to providing you as rapid turnaround as we can, and publishing cutting-edge research on communication design through our original articles, experience reports, and book reviews. In this issue, for example, we are pleased to share with you Sonia Stephens and Dan Richards' "Story mapping and sea level rise: Listening to global risks at street level," and Jennifer Roth Miller, Brandy Dieterle, Jennifer deWinter, and Stephanie Vie's "Social media in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs: A heuristic to guide future use." These two excellent articles are accompanied by reviews of Jonanna Boehnert's Design, ecology politics: Towards the ecocene, reviewed by Ryan Cheek, and Christa Teston's Bodies in flux: Scientific methods for negotiating medical uncertainty, reviewed by Ella Browning.

This article reports on the results of a research study supported by a CPTSC research grant that analyzed programmatic use of social media in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs (TPCs). This mixed-methods study included a survey of TPC program administrators (n = 29), an inventory of TPCs' social media account use (n = 70), and an inventory of TPCs' course offerings that included social media (n = 27). Results showed that programmatic use of social media requires strategic consideration, particularly in order to generate two-way communication, a goal of many of the TPCs studied. To that end, our article generates questions and guiding suggestions (drawn from our three-part study) to guide administrators who wish to include social media in their TPC.

Background: The lab report is a commonly assigned genre in engineering lab courses; however, students often have difficulties meeting the expectations of writing in engineering labs. At the same time, it is challenging for engineering faculty to instruct lab report writing because they are often under-supported in writing pedagogies and usually unfamiliar with the extent of students' prior writing knowledge. Literature review: Literature on technical communication in engineering addresses the importance of a rhetorical approach to writing instruction, as well as an emphasis on genre. Extending this literature, research into writing transfer provides valuable insight for better understanding how undergraduates negotiate the engineering lab report as a new genre within this distinct rhetorical context. Research questions: 1. How effective is a transfer-focused writing pedagogy in supporting students' understanding of the genre conventions of engineering lab reports? 2. How does the transfer-focused writing pedagogy impact students' writing quality in five categories (rhetorical knowledge, organization, evidence, critical thinking, and disciplinary conventions)? 3. What are the rhetorical features that engineering students improve or struggle with the most with lab report writing? Research methodology: Four engineering instructors and two English instructors participated in this study to design and develop the lab report writing instructional module, and implemented the module materials into their engineering lab courses. The module, consisting of lab report writing instruction and assessment resources, shares a rhetorical approach and foundational writing terms with first-year composition courses to emphasize a writing-transfer pedagogy. We collected and analyzed undergraduates' lab report samples to evaluate the impact of the module on students' writing performance. Two sets of lab reports were collected for analysis: the sample sets before (control), during the 2015-2016 academic year; and after (experimental) implementation of the module, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results and conclusions: Data collected via pre- and post-implementation writing artifacts show that a rhetorical approach to teaching lab reports helped students better understand the expectations of the lab report as a discipline-specific genre, and it developed students' understanding of the rhetorical features of engineering writing. The pilot module positively impacted the quality of students' lab reports, a finding that suggests that using a transfer-focused writing pedagogy can successfully support the transfer and adaptation of writing knowledge into gateway or entry-level engineering laboratory courses.

Scientists and writing studies scholars agree that students need to be able to repurpose scientific knowledge across audiences, goals, and genres. This article offers a much-needed, practical example of an assignment that allows students to work towards these goals. Working collaboratively, a faculty member from biology, a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) administrator, and an Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA) editor redesigned a conservation biology course assignment around communication with multiple audiences. The assignment required students to produce a webpage about a rare species in Alabama that fulfills the technical, scientific writing component of the course and then repurpose that webpage into an entry for EOA aimed at a non-expert audience. We elaborate on the context in which the repackaging assignment developed, explain how it fits with student learning outcomes in biology, and share themes we noticed in students' reflections on the practice of repurposing their writing.

Background: This study adopted a corpus-linguistics approach to investigate the gender effects in students' technical and scientific writing. Specifically, we analyzed whether gender influenced how males and females used adverbs (e.g., very, really, and definitely) and passive voice (e.g., the article was published in the journal). The overuse of both adverbs and passive voice has been associated with poor writing clarity and concision. Literature review: Previous research works on gender effects in language have been mixed. Since these are all the essential elements of effective technical communication, teachers need to know what gender effects might exist. Research questions are as follows: 1. Does gender influence the student writers' use of adverbs? 2. Does gender influence the student writers' use of passive voice? Methodology: The sample included 87 writers (46 females and 41 males) who contributed to a 757,533-word corpus. Researchers analyzed 12,111 instances of adverbs and 4,732 instances of passive voice within a variety of technical texts. Results/discussion: Female writers used significantly more adverbs as well as more additive/restrictive, degree, and stance adverbs than expected. Male writers used more linking and manner adverbs than expected. Female writers also used significantly more passives, particularly passive verbs associated with reporting findings and interpretation. In contrast, male writers associated with passive verbs used to describe methods and analyses. Overall, the results suggested that females and males used the same style markers to fulfill different rhetorical functions.

Engineering laboratory courses often contain laboratory reports as writing assignments to be used as an assessment and grading tool for the course. While laboratory report writing is a useful skill, this article discusses an assignment which was used as an alternative to a traditional laboratory report within a dynamic systems laboratory course. This writing assignment is framed within the context of a hypothetical scenario involving a supervisor requesting a laboratory experiment to compare the effectiveness of two different designs for controlling the speed of a gearbox unit. Performance goals are specified by the ``customer'' so that students have a reference with which to frame their responses. Despite the shortened length of the writing assignment, students are forced to apply critical thinking and use evidence from their experiments to answer the posed question with a clear conclusion.

The edited collection Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies will be interesting for scholars, educators, and for practicing communicators in the field of scientific communic...

In this article the authors envision a more durable and portable model of scholarship on public engagement with science through partnerships between rhetoricians of science and quantitative social scientists. The authors consider a number of barriers and limitations that make such partnerships difficult, with an eye toward discovering ways that researchers may overcome them. The authors conclude by articulating guidelines for reciprocal transdisciplinary work as well as specific recommended practices for such collaborations.

This article reports findings from a month-long research project in Vietnam working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). The authors found that VAVA did not always abide Western prescriptions for “good” technical and scientific communication yet were extremely effective technical communicators among victims and families. This article reports findings that call for an expanded definition of what it means to practice good technical communication, especially in understudied cultural contexts.

This study investigates the added burden Mexican and Taiwanese non-native English speaker (NNES) researchers perceive when writing research articles in English as a second language (L2) compared with their experience of first language (L1) science writing. 148 Mexican and 236 Taiwanese researchers completed an established survey of science writing burden. Results revealed significant differences between L1 and L2 science writing with an increased burden for L2 science writing consisting of an average increase of 24% in difficulty, 10% in dissatisfaction and 22% in anxiety. No significant differences between the Mexican and Taiwanese researchers were found. Regression analyses established that the variables of science writing burden contribute to a sense that English is a barrier to writing science. We maintain that the additional burden of L2 science writing constitutes a linguistic injustice and a barrier to science that should be addressed by relevant constituents.

Graduate students often encounter obstacles related to written science communication that can set them back in their path towards degree completion. Efforts to support these students should be informed by what they actually need or desire; yet oftentimes, programs are developed based on assumptions or intuitions. In other cases, proven models from literature are used to develop programs; however, due to a lack of justification for approaches and vague descriptions of daily teaching and learning activities, the intricacies of design are relatively unknown. Thus, in institutes looking to establish research writing resources or build on existing infrastructure, more research is needed to demonstrate how needs assessment can directly transfer to program development. In this paper, I describe how findings from a campus-wide needs assessment of graduate students (N = 310) and faculty (N = 111) informed the development of design principles for a week-long dissertation writing workshop. The complete description of the intervention, including how main elements and content align with socio-cognitive perspectives to writing, can facilitate replication; theory building; and communication about effective writing instruction. This work also offers a springboard for future research and program development and establishes a blueprint.

This book consists of a collection of narratives on the subject of scientific writing skill needs compiled by the author through more than 100 interviews with senior scientists, emerging (early career) scientists, and recent Ph.D. graduates, all of whom would be appropriate audiences of the book. It is an interesting amalgam of opinions from the scientific community about technical writing, its importance, the breadth of writing opportunities, and the authors’ enjoyment—or lack thereof. While oriented toward science, it could easily be expanded to the entire spectrum of STEM fields. Through her informal approach, the author achieves her purpose of exposing diverse opinions on the need for and acceptance of technical writing within the scientific community. While the book might not fit nicely into a technical writing course, it can provide valuable insight into technical writing needs beyond university undergraduate and graduate students. The author, through the use of interviews and narrative summaries, has provided a view of technical writing as accomplished by three levels of scientists, where personal opinions of the scientists are supported by the level of success achieved by the individual respondent. This book could be used for a course in technical writing in a number of ways, especially at the undergraduate level, either as a reference text or as the primary text for the course. To begin with, the material in the book is based upon the contributors’ years of experience. In some cases, that could mean many years of technical writing not only within a particular field of interest, but in other genres or subject matters, based upon the individual’s experiences. A professor teaching the technical writing class may have limited experience in the world of publishing papers, books, or other technical matter. An assignment for a class could be to pick one of the respondents in the book, and develop a detailed description of his or her beliefs and approaches to technical writing. Such an assignment could then lead into a class discussion on the importance of technical writing in one’s career as supported by the text.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> This study investigates linguistic characterizations in the form of linguistic co-occurrence patterns in discussion sections of English research articles (RAs) in an engineering discipline (i.e., chemical engineering) and linguistic variations that distinguish discussion sections of high-impact articles from those in low-impact articles. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What underlying linguistic characterizations are salient in RA discussions in chemical engineering? 2. Are there any differences in the identified linguistic characterizations of discussion sections between high- and low-impact RAs? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> In the process of composing RAs, the discussion section is a difficult and challenging part-genre to write. The rhetorical organization of RA discussions has been examined extensively through Swales's English for Specific Purposes genre analysis. However, the linguistic characterizations of RA discussion sections remain unclear and the question of whether discernible differences exist between discussions of high- and low-impact RAs in a specialized engineering discipline remains unanswered. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> This study used Biber's multidimensional (MD) analysis method. In response to the first research question, factor analysis (in this study, principal component analysis) was adopted to identify the linguistic characterizations in the form of linguistic co-occurrence patterns (“dimensions”) in 213 RA discussion sections extracted from chemical engineering RAs. To answer the second question, the independent t-test was implemented to compare the high- and low-impact RA discussion sections in the identified dimensions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusions:</b> Six linguistic characterizations in the form of linguistic co-occurrence patterns were identified in RA discussion sections: 1. involvement and interactivity, 2. non-narration versus narration, 3. evaluative statements with further explanations and elaborations, 4. informational density, 5. stating results/claims, and 6. expression of denial relationships toward statement or experimental findings. The results suggest the linguistic characterizations in RA discussion sections and interesting differences in the high- and low-impact RA discussion sections, especially in Dimensions 1, 3, and 5. Reasons for the linguistic variations in the identified dimensions are discussed, followed by the pedagogical implications for reading or writing RAs for international scientific communication.

While scholars in the field of writing studies have examined scientific writing from multiple perspectives, interest in its thematic structure has been modest. Recent studies suggest that the themes in scientific writing tend to be anchored on one or a few points of departure. There has also been an attempt at quantification using the thematic-density index (TDI), although this has only been tested on abstracts. In this study, we investigated the thematic structure and TDIs of 30 research articles in biology. The results revealed a progressive thematic pattern in the introduction section, followed by an anchored development in the subsequent sections. The anchoring was realized by the pervasive use of the first-person pronoun “we.” The mean TDI was lowest in the introduction section (2.593) and highest in the results section (7.095). The results were consistent across the articles in the corpus, underscoring the uniform way in which the articles were thematically structured, and in turn suggesting a core thematic pattern for scientific research writing in general. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that future studies compare the thematic structure of the introduction section vis-à-vis the other sections, and investigate the possible factors resulting in such a structure.

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Although Alan Turing has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rhetoric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

Background: Employing natural language processing and latent semantic analysis, the current work was completed as a constituent part of a larger research project for designing and launching artificial intelligence in the form of deep artificial neural networks. The models were evaluated on a proprietary corpus retrieved from a data warehouse, where it was extracted from MyReviewers, a sophisticated web application purposed for peer review in written communication, which was actively used in several higher education institutions. The corpus of laboratory reports in STEM annotated by instructors and students was used to train the models. Under the Common Rule, research ethics were ensured by protecting the privacy of subjects and maintaining the confidentiality of data, which mandated corpus de-identification.Literature Review: De-identification and pseudonymization of textual data remains an actively studied research question for several decades. Its importance is stipulated by numerous laws and regulations in the United States and internationally with HIPAA Privacy Rule and FERPA.Research Question: Text de-identification requires a significant amount of manual post-processing for eliminating faculty and student names.  This work investigated automated and semi-automated methods for de-identifying student and faculty entities while preserving author names in cited sources and reference lists. It was hypothesized that a natural language processing toolkit and an artificial neural network model with named entity recognition capabilities would facilitate text processing and reduce the amount of manual labor required for post-processing after matching essays to a list of users’ names. The suggested techniques were applied with supplied pre-trained models without additional tagging and training. The goal of the study was to evaluate three approaches and find the most efficient one among those using a users’ list, a named entity recognition toolkit, and an artificial neural network.Research Methodology: The current work studied de-identification of STEM laboratory reports and evaluated the performance of the three techniques: brute forth search with a user lists, named entity recognition with the OpenNLP machine learning toolkit, and NeuroNER, an artificial neural network for named entity recognition built on the TensorFlow platform. The complexity of the given task was determined by the dilemma, where names belonging to students, instructors, or teaching assistants must be removed, while the rest of the names (e.g., authors of referenced papers) must be preserved.Results: The evaluation of the three selected methods demonstrated that automating de-identification of STEM lab reports is not possible in the setting, when named entity recognition methods are employed with pre-trained models. The highest results were achieved by the users’ list technique with 0.79 precision, 0.75 recall, and 0.77 F1 measure, which significantly outweighed OpenNLP with 0.06 precision, 0.14 recall, and 0.09 F1, and NeuroNER with 0.14 precision, 0.56 recall, and 0.23 F1.Discussion: Low performance of OpenNLP and NeuroNER toolkits was explained by the complexity of the task and unattainability of customized models due to imposed time constraints. An approach for masking possible de-identification errors is suggested.Conclusion: Unlike multiple cases described in the related work, de-identification of laboratory reports in STEM remained a non-trivial labor-intensive task. Applied out of the box, a machine learning toolkit and an artificial neural network technique did not enhance performance of the brute forth approach based on user list matching.Directions for Future Research: Customized tagging and training on the STEM corpus were presumed to advance outcomes of machine learning and predominantly artificial intelligence methods. Application of other natural language toolkits may lead to deducing a more effective solution.

118 RHETORICA modello humboldtiano del seminario, e dalla sua attivitá di organizzatore di seminari al Warburg Institute di Londra (1967-1983). Da quei seminari e da altri, tenuti da Momigliano in tutto il mondo, nascono la serie dei suoi Contributi (1955-1992) e la maggior parte delle sue pubblicazioni, che conservano lo stile órale e discorsivo delEoccasione in cui videro la luce non per pigrizia del suo autore, ma per una precisa scelta ideológica sullo strumento con cui comunicare il proprio pensiero. Nel suo contributo Giorgio Colli. Lo stile come laboratorio ermeneutico (pp. 92-108), l'altro curatore, Angelo Giavatto, si dedica alio stile, personalissimo , con cui Colli ha trasmesso il suo sapere sulla filosofía presocratica e platónica: lo studio é partito dalla tesi di laurea di Colli (1939), di cui sono stati recentemente pubblicati dal figlio Enrico il capitolo su Platone politico (Milano: Adelphi, 2007) e quello sui presocratici (Filosofi sovrumani, Milano: Adelphi, 2009). Tra la stesura del capitolo platónico e quello sui Presocratici si inserisce la lettura de La nascita della tragedia di F. Nietzsche, avvenuta intorno al 1937: un evento che avrebbe radicalmente influenzato sia gli inte_ V ressi di Colli, spostandoli da Platone ai Presocratici, sia lo stile. E noto che Colli proponeva una lettura dei Presocratici in termini di tensione tra misti­ cismo (tendenza al ritiro, all'ineffabilitá e all'incomunicabilitá) e politica (la volontá di dare forma pubblica al pensiero per renderlo fruttifero nelle realtá politiche in cui i Presocratici vissero). Nel linguaggio, questo dualismo si manifesta nelle forme delYenigma, proprio di un sapere ineffabile, e del problema, che é alia base del dialogo, la forma di trasmissione "politica" della sapienza filosófica. Questo approccio produce conseguenze anche sullo stile di Colli, che dal Platone politico, in cui ancora persegue una chiarezza espositiva , giunge nei Filosofi sovrumani a due forme espressive, una piú posata per le parti "politiche" e una che riprende aspetti dello stile di Nietzsche, lapida­ rio e aforistico, per descrivere la mistica. Chiude il volume, generalmente ben curato a parte qualche refuso di troppo nel lavoro di Mucignat (brutto "un unitá" a p. 74), un utile indice dei personaggi e degli episodi citati. Giancarlo Abbamonte, University Federico II of Naples Lynda Walsh, Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. 264. ISBN: 978-01-99-85709-8 (HB) We all know the old truism that art is best when the artist is not seen. This poses a particularly steep challenge for rhetoric since it moves in public spaces where personal motives abound. Scientists, by contrast, since they deal with the world of things rather than persons, wear nature as a kind of rhetorical camouflage. Customarily we attribute this to their abiding positivism, but Walsh sees in it a role identity that emulates and in fact descends from the prophetic traditions of old. Superficiallv this mav seem Reviews 119 fanciful, but not when we consider the kind of ethos science needs in order to thrive. Its appropriation of a prophetic identity created within its modern host cultures (p. 4) "a coherent set of expectations" and thus a role and iden­ tity that drew it out from the margins. That fell into place four centuries ago as the Reformation gave opportunity to various extensions of the prophetic role, but similar symbolic patterns persist due to the mimetic character of cultural development and to a persisting set of situational constraints or kairoi. Like its ancestral counterparts, science's prophetic ethos enables it to manufacture certainty" (p. 2) for polities, the certainty of conviction that powers action. This perspective explains the persistent failure of what Walsh calls the "deficit model" of scientific communication. Scientists struggle against pub­ lic ignorance and resistance, but the obvious solution, more and better sci­ entific education, never seems to help. The deficit models cannot account for the "upward pull of stases" (pp. 88-9). Consumers of science and cer­ tainly many scientific practitioners (at least when they are not speaking ex officio) are spontaneous!}' drawn off the technical backroads of fact and def­ inition and onto the highways of value and action. This "upward pull" can­ not be explained either bv scientific understanding...

As a scholar who works at the intersections of technical communication and rhetoric of science, I like to think I know a little bit about effective approaches to communicating technical information. For over a decade, I've been a happy member of a seemingly productive research discipline devoted to understanding how best to communicate scientific and technical information to clients, stakeholders, employers, funders, and the general public. I am, of course, not alone in these endeavors and my work benefits substantially from the efforts of my many colleagues in the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Now, given this background, imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues forwarded me a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine decrying the state of science communication research in America. Indeed, I was shocked and saddened to see the report call for "building a coherent science communication research enterprise" with the obvious implication that no such enterprise currently exists (p. 74).

Crowdfunding is a novel mechanism for garnering monetary support from the online public, and increasingly it is being used to fund science. This article reports a small-scale study examining science-focused crowdfunding proposals from Kickstarter.com. By exploring the rhetoric of these proposals with respect to traditional grant funding proposals in the sciences, this study aims to understand how the language of science may be imported into this popular genre.

This paper argues that a SWOT analysis (Dyson, 2004; Helms & Nixon, 2010; Holtzhausen & Zerfass, 2015; Houben, Lenie, & Vanhoof, 1999; Noble & Bestley, 2011) and a multi-sectorial approach (Okware, Opio, Musingizi, & Waibale, 2001; The World Bank, 2000; Uganda AIDS Commission & UNAIDS, 2000) to strategic communication can provide communication designers with a conceptual framework for localizing climate prediction and risk management information. The overarching idea is to use a multi-way communication model, such as suggested by McQuail (1987), to downscale climate data in a way that better addresses the communication expectations of the public in different locales. Such approaches can reduce barriers that often inhibit the international transfer of technical and scientific data for public consumption in different global contexts. To examine these issues, this paper uses a SWOT analysis for considering strategic communication planning in international settings. In so doing, the paper examines the work of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGARD) Climate Predictions and Applications Centre (ICPAC) in its efforts to respond to climate extremes and ensure disaster risk management in the Greater Horn of Africa.

Objective: We report on a comparative study of the language used by middle school students in their answers to a constructed response test of science inquiry knowledge. Background: Text analyses using statistical models have been conducted across a number of disciplines to identify topics in a journal, to extract topics in Twitter messages, and to investigate political preferences. In education, relatively few studies have analyzed the text of students’ written answers to investigate topics underlying the answers. Methodology: Two types of linguistic analysis were compared to investigate their utility in understanding students’ learning of scientific investigation practices. A statistical method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used to extract topics from the texts of student responses. In the LDA model, topics are viewed as multinomial distributions over the vocabulary of documents. These topics were examined for content and used to characterize student responses on the constructed response items. The change from pre-test to post-test in proportions of use of each of the topics was related to students’ learning. Next, a qualitative method, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis, was used to analyze the text of student responses on the same test of science inquiry knowledge. Student assessments were analyzed for two linguistic features that are important for convincing scientific communication: technical vocabulary usage and high lexical density. In this way, we investigated whether human judgement regarding the changes observed from texts based on the SFL framework agreed with the inference regarding the changes observed from the texts through LDA. Research questions: Two research questions were investigated in this study: (1) What do the LDA and SFL analyses tell us about students’ answers? (2) What are the similarities and differences of the two analyses? Data: The data for this study were taken from an NSF-funded host study on teaching science inquiry skills to middle school students who were a mix of both native English speakers and English-language learners. The primary objective was to enable participants to learn to take ownership of scientific language through the use of language-rich science investigation practices. The LDA analysis used a sample of 252 students’ pre-and post-assessments. The SFL analysis used a second sample of 90 students’ pre- and post-assessments. Results: In the LDA analysis, three topics were detected in student responses: “preponderance of everyday language (Topic 1),” “preponderance of general academic language (Topic 2),” and “preponderance of discipline-specific language (Topic 3).” Students’ use of topics changed from pre-test to post-test. Students on the post-test tended to have higher proportions of Topic 3 than students on the pre-test. In the SFL analysis, students tended to use more technical vocabulary and have higher lexical density in their written responses on the post-test than on the pre-test. Discussion: Results from the LDA and SFL analyses suggest that students responded using more discipline-specific language on the post-test than on the pre-test. In addition, the results of the two linguistic features from the SFL analysis, technical vocabulary usage and lexical density, were compared with the results from the LDA analysis. • Conclusion: Results of the LDA and SFL analyses were consistent with each other and clearly showed that students improved in their ability to use the discipline-specific and academic terminology of the language of scientific communication.

Engaged public science communication can support community resilience as policymakers, resource managers, and citizens come to terms with the effects of environmental disturbances, natural disasters, and climate change. Drawing upon field-based ethnographic research of public-facing outreach and education at Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), the researcher considers how, in the wake of a catastrophic storm, the evolving ethical science communication and public engagement strategies of park rangers might contribute to and strengthen community resilience. A rhetorical analysis of science communication and interpretive practices at FIIS illuminates some affordances and constraints of rhetorical models of science communication and of pedagogies of play for community-based work.

This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four topoi that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned topos: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their topos. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.

Even as deficit model science communication falls out of favor, few studies question how written science communication constructs relationships between science and industry. Here, I investigate how textual microprocesses relate scientific research to industry practice in the Washington State wine industry, helping (or hindering) winemakers and wine grape growers in making research relevant to their work. Critical discourse analysis of a corpus of wine science texts suggests that textual microprocesses continue to enact a deficit paradigm: scientists as knowledge producers and the industry public as knowledge deficient. Through its extension of features of scientific discourse, the industry-oriented literature abstracts research practices from context which could aid in drawing relationships with industry practices. In aggregate, these texts suggest an opportunity to increase research relevance to industry practice by writing the research–industry relationship differently, recontextualizing research in practice.

Aristotle’s science writing serves as an instance of a classical science writer at work. Applying his theory of writing found in his Rhetoric, Poetics, Posterior Analytics, and Categories treatises to his History of Animals illustrates his work as a writer of life science. As rhetorical tools, his theory of tropes and figures and his theory of the model as developed in his theory of definitions and the enthymeme work as epistemic strategies. The essay concludes that further study should examine other rhetorical dimensions of his science writing.

Research problem: Our study focuses on how students collaborate online to produce specific written genres, using particular collaborative technologies to work together productively, and how instructor feedback and student perspectives on collaborative work influence those activities in online classrooms. Research questions: When composing using collaborative web-based writing applications, do students focus primarily on the interface or the text space? What kinds of expectations about collaborative writing do students bring to the interface and text space? To what extent can we characterize students' acknowledgement of a third space, what we have identified as “communicative interaction?” Literature review: Workplace collaboration is important because organizations increasingly demand effective collaborators, team members, and team leaders, and technologies for sharing, cobuilding, and feedback are readily available to support these activities. Student preparation for workplace collaboration is important because students struggle when they are asked to write together, particularly when the collaborative process involves new technologies, and yet knowledge of collaborative writing strategies and experience with collaborative technologies, such as Google Docs, are the very competencies that organizations expect of them. Methodology: Thirteen groups of 3 to 4 technical writing students and science communication students enrolled in online professional writing courses at a major research university wrote feature specifications and reports on the globalization of the sciences, respectively, using Google Docs within Google Drive. Sixteen of 37 students responded to a set of questions asking them to reflect on their experiences working collaboratively, learning new genres, using the collaborative environment, and revising with instructor feedback. Results and conclusions: We found that students struggled most with adapting their already established collaborative strategies grounded in face-to-face learning situations to an online learning environment, where they felt their means of communication and expression were limited. The results suggest that effective collaborative experiences, properly executed, represent a repertoire of competencies that go well beyond only technical considerations, such as being able to effectively assign roles, set milestones, and navigate the numerous tasks and processes of writing as a team. The small number of students and the single instructor with her own particular feedback style limit the study. Future research includes looking at how different feedback styles influence student collaborative writing.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

Rare are the instances wherein scientific communication occurs only in words. Pages of scientific research are littered with images, tables, figures, and data displays. From the anatomical drawings...

This article analyzes a proposal submitted to a funding unit in Michigan Technological University by a PhD Forestry student. A rhetorical-cultural approach of the text provides evidence to argue that scientific writing is rooted in a cultural practice that valorizes certain kinds of thought, practices, rituals, and symbols; that a scientist’s work is grounded and shaped by an ideological paradigm; hence, scientific texts have material existence. We find out that science writing is kairotic, selective, and persuasive. The results of the analysis provide enough insights for technical communicators to think about the role that institutions and disciplines play in knowledge production. Thus, technical communicators will not only think about rhetorical moves when they are composing, they will also think about the articulations between contexts and ideological practices and how they shape the identity of writers and communicators.

Novice writers and writing instructors in academic and professional settings often pine for guides that will deliver definitive rules which offer certitude. Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century does so – to a large extent. That The Sense of Style cannot find rules in reason for everything is perhaps its most important – though unintended – message. For as it demonstrates, style remains haunted by the residues of taste and authority. With considerable social and symbolic capital at his command, Pinker can draw on many sources that give him the standing to act as arbiter of style. As an Ivy League professor, he has been involved in writing instruction at MIT and Harvard for several decades. He also chairs the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD); is a recognised scholar in cognitive psychology with a focus on language; has edited considerable amounts of science writing; and is a prolific author whose books have a readership beyond the academy. For those who view style primarily as a matter of taste, such authority suffices. In an age, however, where blunt authority is challenged and calls for an evidence base are expanding across the disciplines, others require that style guides also disclose the principles that inform their advice. This Pinker does. In a companion piece on Edge.org he couches his fundamental commitments carefully though, in the interrogative: ‘The question I'm currently asking myself is how our scientific understanding of language can be put into practice to improve the way that we communicate anything, including science? In particular, can you use linguistics, cognitive science, and psycholinguistics to come up with a better style manual’ (Pinker 2014). The tentative form of the question is presumably overridden by the 359-page book, which is a yes of sorts. It is, however, a commitment to quite a different type of science of language than the descriptive quantitative corpus linguistics that has become increasingly influential in the training of academic writing over the last three decades. Alas, as writing instructors and novice writers either fear or hope, science has its limits, also when it comes to style. Which is why Pinker calls upon additional principles to reasoning rooted in theoretical and empirical cognitive linguistics. These include ‘the backing of data from the AHD Usage Panel’; ‘historical analyses from several dictionaries’; and those elusive characters that still haunt the pages of style guides – elegance and grace – and which operate behind the scenes of a suggestion that a specific formulation just ‘sounds better’ (224). With such an assortment of principles, clashes can be expected. At times a stylistic suggestion is justified with historical precedent from centuries ago, at other times the same fact makes it jaded, stuffy and outdated. When writers waver between the conflicting choices enshrined in style manuals, Pinker leads them out of the panic with ‘a pinch of my own judgment’ (263) or advice to respond to sticklers and mavens with quips such as, ‘tell them that Jane Austen and I think it’s fine’ (261).

Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the ways writing may engage adolescents in higher levels of epistemic complexity (i.e., postulating causes, reasons and other relations or theories related to scientific phenomena), yet in secondary science classrooms, writing has primarily been used for assessing students' content knowledge. Embedded in a larger national study of secondary writing in the United States, this study investigated the qualities of science writing samples collected from 33 adolescents attending schools identified for exemplary writing performance. We asked: How is epistemic complexity reflected in adolescents' writing?; How does the level of epistemic complexity differ by adolescents' language background, grade level, and school context?; What is the nature of the relationship of types of writing and higher or lower levels of epistemic complexity? We found the majority of writing adolescents produced did not show evidence of high levels of epistemic complexity. Notable exceptions were reading reflections and lab reports. Implications for adolescent science writing instruction are discussed in light of higher standards for disciplinary writing in secondary schools.

This research aims to analyse the situation of the multiliteracy of natural sciences students in their academic writing in the German university context and to identify students' awareness and applications of their multilingual writing competence as well as how they make use or not of it in their academic writing process. English has the status of lingua franca in this context and German is used in informal settings. Minutes, reports, reviews, Bachelor or Master theses have to be written either in English or German, depending on the study programme. As Canagarajah (2013) has pointed out, multilingual scholarship offers huge resources in terms of diversity of thinking because language carries with it a system of knowledge and thinking from which both their representatives and the writing scientific community can benefit. The empirical, qualitative study of this paper is based on interviews conducted with participants of the course 'Akademisches Schreiben fur Naturwissenschaftler/innen' (Academic Writing for Natural Sciences Students) offered by the International Writing Centre at Göttingen University. The qualitative content analysis is based on portfolio activities and interviews conducted with students. This paper presents the first results of our data analysis.

“Sarah Tinker Perrault examines popular science writing to highlight how communication between science and civic society has inhibited the formation of a democratic process of communication between these two populations.”

This multimedia project employs and performs the full etymology of articulation—the linguistic, visual, embodied, and mechanical—to describe an advanced undergraduate course in science writing, which focused exclusively on new media storytelling....Each element, produced by a participant in the course, performs the mechanics of new media and can be viewed or heard in any order as they each attempt to stand alone while joining with the others. By design, this webtext can be employed in ways specific to new media science writing specifically or to new media writing more generally.

In contemporary science outside purely theoretical physics collaboration is a way of life.An article with a dozen authors is the rule, not the exception.In scholarship within the humanities, by contrast, seldom does one encounter journal articles or rese monographs with more than one author.My scholarly collaboration with Alan Gross is thus somewhat unusual.It is even more unusual in that within the span of two decades, it has yielded four books published by university presses, with a fifth nearing a sixth in the planning stages.The books we have written together differ significantly, for the better, from what either of us could have produced alone.

This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing style. To accomplish this, it draws on theoretical approaches to style from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as analyses of drafts of coauthored texts and video-recorded literacy history and discourse-based interviews. This study finds that metaphor and embodied actions such as gestures are valuable sites for comparing writers’ stylistic understandings and practices. The three writers expressed broad agreement when describing the qualities of good scientific writing, using similar verbal and gestural metaphors, such as Communication as Journey and entailments of the Conduit Metaphor. Yet in discourse-based interviews, specific stylistic choices provoked conflicting preferences not only between writers but even within them over time, as they sometimes changed their minds about what they had preferred over a year earlier. These conflicting and changing views, and the writers’ arguments for them, complicate popular notions of writing style: that a particular discipline has a style uniformly shared among experts and that experts’ mastery of their own style is stable and absolute. The finding that stylistic disagreements are undergirded by similar metaphors in language and gesture highlights the ways our stylistic understandings are tied to life histories and are also deeply embodied. Working from a sociocultural perspective, I provide a richer, more complex empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to command a particular disciplinary style.

This study examines the effects of a one-to-one laptop program on the scientific writing of 5th and 6th grade students. A total of 538 native English-speaking, fluent English-proficient, and limited English-proficient students from four laptop schools and three control schools were prompted to write scientific essays at the start and end of the school year. Essays were examined along three dimensions: word use, text complexity, and writing quality. Overall, students who used laptops wrote longer, better structured essays that included more paragraphs and sentences. Students in the laptop condition also wrote higher quality prose that contained richer details and better addressed the prompts. Students in the laptop condition additionally showed greater gains from the beginning to the end of the year in the number of sentences per paragraph and the number of words per sentence than students in control classrooms. Finally, we found that although students’ writing varied as a function of proficiency in English, the effects of writing with laptops, in terms of both modality effects and gains associated with the treatment, were comparable for students with limited English proficiency, language minority students who were considered to have fluent English proficiency, and native English speakers. Thus, the benefits of including individual laptops in writing instruction may be enjoyed by elementary school students with varying levels of English proficiency.

We report on the Teaching Responsible Communication of Science project at Iowa State University. This NSF-supported work will produce nine case studies focusing on the ethical challenges that arise when scientists communicate with the public. These case studies promise to add a normative dimension to the practical communication training offered to scientists, while at the same time contributing a rhetorical perspective to the interdisciplinary scholarship on science communication.

Contemporary concerns about public engagement in science communication collaboratives are a pressing area of praxis in rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. This short paper describes the rhetorical engagements in a science and environmental communication program at the University of Arizona called the Carson Scholars Program. I argue an applied research program on the rhetorical properties of scientific uncertainties is one angle of inquiry where rhetoricians can make valuable contributions in these outreach efforts.

Over the last seven years, I have spent time across three continents talking to scientists and mathematicians about their beliefs and attitudes and experiences related to writing in their respective disciplines.I have been impressed by the passion and insight with which most have talked about writing and its relationship to critical thinking, and I have often been surprised by how they engage in these practices.For example, rather than working from an a priori hypothesis, many researchers in the STEM disciplines compose backwards, from the results to the introduction.And when reading, many seem to move from the middle of a paper outwards, beginning with the results and method, using an extremely critical eye, and then perhaps scanning out to the introduction and the discussion, or dispensing with these sections altogether.Over and over again, I heard this same story from different scientists, as if it were a secret each alone had stumbled upon.In addition, collaboration, conversation and peer review are very much part of the language of composition that takes place in the sciences (co-authorship, the hierarchies of disciplinary or interdisciplinary teams, the drafting process and the use of technology), but we who work in WID (writing in the disciplines) and WAC (writing across the curriculum) programs are constantly challenged: "How do we teach process in ways that are disciplinarily appropriate?"Historically, we haven't done this well.As Burton and Morgan observed on the training of mathematicians as writers,

Over the last seven years, I have spent time across three continents talking to scientists and mathematicians about their beliefs and attitudes and experiences related to writing in their respective disciplines.I have been impressed by the passion and insight with which most have talked about writing and its relationship to critical thinking, and I have often been surprised by how they engage in these practices.For example, rather than working from an a priori hypothesis, many researchers in the STEM disciplines compose backwards, from the results to the introduction.And when reading, many seem to move from the middle of a paper outwards, beginning with the results and method, using an extremely critical eye, and then perhaps scanning out to the introduction and the discussion, or dispensing with these sections altogether.Over and over again, I heard this same story from different scientists, as if it were a secret each alone had stumbled upon.In addition, collaboration, conversation and peer review are very much part of the language of composition that takes place in the sciences (co-authorship, the hierarchies of disciplinary or interdisciplinary teams, the drafting process and the use of technology), but we who work in WID (writing in the disciplines) and WAC (writing across the curriculum) programs are constantly challenged: "How do we teach process in ways that are disciplinarily appropriate?"Historically, we haven't done this well.As Burton and Morgan observed on the training of mathematicians as writers,

Writing centers can be staffed wholly or partially by tutors with little training in science writing. This article suggests that an emphasis on scientific rhetoric, not content, may be most useful for training tutors and developing handouts and checklists to aid novice science writers in invention and revision. The article also suggests that a training program in science writing can be informed by local science faculty’s major concerns. However, these faculty discussions toward tutor training should be supplemented through WAC-WID and genre research to retain a training focus on the connection between scientific thought and scientific writing, science writings’ primary genre families, and the delivery of scientific writing to different audiences.

Many science students believe that scientific writing is most impressive (and most professionally acceptable) when impersonal, dense, complex, and packed with jargon. In particular, they have the idea that legitimate scientific writing must suppress the subjectivity of the human voice. But science students can mature into excellent writers whose voices are clear, interesting, unburdensome, efficient, and accurate. To do this, they must abandon their ponderous scientific voices and use techniques that produce good style. When I teach for the Science Communication Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I focus on helping students improve their scientific voice. I use workshop-style instruction, review of student writing, tutorial staff, and free online tutorials that I have developed. This article meditates upon the nature of good scientific voice as it analyzes examples of student writing to show improvements made through specific stylistic techniques.