Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan, Reviewed by Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Green, edited by Brooke Rollins and Lee Bauknight, Reviewed by Beverly Faxon, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vols. 1 and 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Reviewed by Rebecca Powell, Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, edited by David M. Sheridan and James A. Inman, Reviewed by Vincent D. Robles

By offering an annotated image of a half-dozen two-year college writing “programs,” this essay seeks to raise awareness of the challenges facing those who promote, work in, work toward, or participate in the development of two-year college writing programs and to consider how the “idea” of a writing program plays out in shaping those challenges.

Abstract Formerly a synonym for oratory and elocution, "public speaking" after 1900 signaled, instead, a paradigm shift whereby extemporaneous-conversational speechmaking replaced declamation and oratorical composition. This study of more than 200 key titles published between 1730 and 1930 demonstrates that the modern public-speaking book emerged, not as an innovation in whole cloth, but rather from a generation-long process of selectively recombining materials extracted from preceding text genres. As a practical revolution, the new public speaking contributed to democratic, argument-rich public affairs and, as an intellectual movement, furthered the emergence of speech as a separate academic discipline.

AbstractHyperbole is an easily misunderstood and misused trope, and it is largely unexplored in current rhetorical studies. Yet, at moments within thought and discourse, the excessiveness of hyperbole elicits a constructive, transformative ambiguity that can reveal alternative epistemological and ontological insights. Indeed, hyperbole is often the most effective way of trying to express seemingly impossible and inexpressible positions. I argue for the reexploration and critical examination of hyperbole, and I offer a theoretical framework from which to view texts and discourse from a hyperbolic perspective. I identify the metafunction of hyperbole, and I offer two specific functions of hyperbole. Hyperbole is more than simply an obvious and intentional exaggeration and thus can benefit from an exploration that considers it beyond its traditional tropological limits. It can be engaged as a mode of inquiry in order to delve into the complexities and paradoxes of theo-philosophical discourse, and it can also be appropriated as a critical position from which one might, for example, propose interpretations of various textual expressions that differ from their more normative interpretations.

AbstractOratorical practice may be viewed as the material enactment of a philosophy of class struggle. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I propose “orator-machine” as a concept-term to describe speech making in the context of the open exterior of interconnected human and nonhuman machinic assemblages in capitalist modernity. My argument is based on a reconsideration of a single address, delivered by William D. “Big Bill” Haywood in 1911 at the Cooper Union in New York City. Reading Haywood against the grain—as a conceptual innovator—allows me to demonstrate a mode of analysis that affirms the philosophical quality and ontological politics of oratorical performance.

This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by manythousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. Weseek to understand more clearly through this conversation how culture and rhetorical tradition help shape the way we teach writing.

Early status reports on WAC call for engagement with the disciplines, robust research about writing, and a transformation from missionary work to a more wide-ranging model. A Taxonomy of WAC describes common characteristics of WAC programs as well as organizing those characteristics into a progression from initiation to change agency.

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text—a YouTube video on globalization and business—was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor’s and her students’ meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this particular video and present my own reading of it. In addressing the instructor’s and students’ engagements with this video, I adopt a mediated discourse analysis approach to examine their classroom discourses that interact with the social circulation of a globalization discourse featured in this multimodal text. A conversation with the participating instructor, who articulates several issues including concerns about the possible politicization of her classroom if certain approaches to texts are used, is also presented and used to examine her subsequent approach with her students in the second class. I discuss the ways in which social actors take up discourses differently, and conclude by exploring the possible classroom practices that can address an increasingly multimodal curriculum.

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

“Ultrasound provisions specifically exploit the cultural significance of the iconic fetal image in order to dissuade a patient from terminating her pregnancy.”

“Wellness has become pathologized in Western culture, mapped conceptually onto a medically oriented illness model through processes that are fundamentally discursive in nature, centered on persuasion.”

Introduction Computers & Writing 2012, ArchiTEXTure Meagan Kittle Autry , North Carolina State University Ashley R. Kelly , North Carolina State University Articles To Preserve, Digitize, and Project: On the Process of Composing Other People’s Lives Jody Shipka , University of Maryland, Baltimore County Attaining the Ninth Square: Cybertextuality, Gamification, and Institutional Memory on 4chan Vyshali Manivannan , Rutgers University Expanding the Available Means of Composing: Three Sites of Inquiry Matthew Davis , University of Massachussetts Boston Kevin Brock , North Carolina State University Stephen McElroy , Florida State University The Role of Computational Literacy in Computers and Writing Alexandria Lockett , Pennsylvania State University Elizabeth Losh , University of California, San Diego David M Rieder , North Carolina State University Mark Sample , George Mason University Karl Stolley , Illinois Institute of Technology Annette Vee , University of Pittsburgh Composing in the Dark: The Texture of Light Painting Jennifer Ware , University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Designing Digital Texts in/for the Classroom Sarah C. Spring , Winthrop University Keynotes Composing Objects: Prospects for a Digital Rhetoric Alex Reid , SUNY Buffalo Knowledge Cartels versus Knowledge Rights David Parry , University of Texas at Dallas Performance Silent Beacon Thomas Stanley, George Mason University and Erica Benay Fallin, George Mason University Reviews The Insect Technics of Rhetoric: Review of Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media Jeremy Cushman , Purdue University Remaking the Future of Multimodal Composing by Examining its Past Jenna Pack , University of Arizona Losing the Heart: Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together Bradford Hincher , Georgia State University (A Much Needed) Spotlight on Delivery: A Review of Ben McCorkle's Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse Mariana Grohowski , Bowling Green State University

This article argues for a more complex understanding of interdisciplinary pedagogy in English studies. Drawing on the authors’ experience designing and coteaching a graduate-level interdisciplinary course in “statistical literacy,” the article forwards a view of interdisciplinary pedagogy as a complex relational process of faculty and student learning.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

The author uses game theoretical models to identify technical communication breakdowns encountered during the notoriously confusing Texas Two-Step voting and caucusing process. Specifically, the author uses narrative theory and game theory to highlight areas where caucus participants needed instructions to better understand the rules of the game and user analysis to better anticipate participants' motives and strategies. As a central tool of analysis, the author uses Nobel Laureate John C. Harsanyi's work on “incomplete game” or Bayesian games. The article demonstrates opportunities for technical communication scholars and teachers to use interdisciplinary approaches to discover layers of technical communication in small group negotiations and to evaluate the layers of instructions and technologies needed to facilitate effective and ethical decision making in political caucusing.

This article makes the argument that material evidence for many of the most valuable contributions that contemporary technical communicators make to their organizations is often found not in the traditional documentation that they produce but, rather, in the more fragmentary and provisional documents they create as daily participants in their work teams. To make this argument, the article presents data from a case study of a technical communicator at a software firm, showing how a reminder note he carried to a meeting helped him achieve an important design change. The article unpacks the concept of immutable mobiles from actor network theory to derive a framework that helps us interpret the multiple functions of this note in helping the technical communicator warrant and win a design argument with software developers.

Several government agencies are seeking quality improvement in environmental policy documents by asking for the implementation of Plain Language (PL) guidelines. Our mixed-methods research examines whether the application of certain PL guidelines affects the comprehension and perceptions of readers of environmental policy documents. Results show that the presence of pronouns affects inferential comprehension of environmental impact statement summaries (EIS summaries), but that the effect varies with the reader's education level. Further, headings in question phrasing affect a reader's perception of familiarity and reliability of EIS summaries. A reader's perceptions of EIS summaries and attitudes toward the organizations creating the documents are also affected by overall design features. PL guidelines on the use of pronouns and question headings are not fully supported by our research and need further validation with regard to comprehension. This article ends with a call for further research.

Although scholars have acknowledged technical texts written during the Middle-Ages, there is no mention of “technical writer” as a profession except for Geoffrey Chaucer, and historically absent is the accreditation of medieval female writers who pioneered the field of medical-technical communication. In an era dominated by identifiable medieval male technical writers, this article analyzes the medical texts of Hildegard von Bingen, which should be recognized as significant scientific and medical contributions to the field of medical-technical writing. Because the term “technical writing” or “technical writer” did not exist during the Middle Ages, accrediting female medieval scientific and medical writers as technical writers requires the application of modern thought and definition. Primarily known as a mystic and writer of poetry and music, Hildegard's technological and medical texts have slowly gained interest within the medical community. Her texts Physica and Causae Curae, written in the style of modern-day patient history and physicals, outline patient symptoms, causes and effects, preceded by a treatment plan. This article examines Hildegard von Bingen's medical works, identifying her as a scientific or medical technical writer within the same context from which scholars assign Chaucer the same title, and from which all medical and scientific writers of medical texts can be professionally accredited as technical communicator or writer.

This study examines the corporate environmental reports of 100 companies listed in the 2009 Fortune 1000 in order to illustrate how this type of genre communicates a green corporate ethos to audience members who are trying to distinguish between greenwashing tactics and true environmental concerns. The authors analyze how corporate environmental reports are constructed at macro and micro discursive levels to promote a socially responsible image to in-group (e.g., employees and stockholders) and out-group (e.g., consumers) members. The results of the analysis show how these reports use ideological persuasion to influence or change audience members’ opinions about corporate environmental sustainability.

This article uses research in cultural–historic activity theory, exploring patients' use of technical health care texts to produce knowledge and design their choices related to their bodies and health. Drawing on a case study of Meagan, who dealt with colitis and complications due to pregnancy, the author argues that we should consider reception and use as multisemiotic acts of repurposing, inscription, and reproduction alongside the research of the production of texts by professionals.

In the 1870s and ‘80s, more women discussed sex to promote free love and sex education in speeches, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. Some of these women inspired the 1873 “Comstock law,” which banned materials deemed obscene. This essay uses the fictional figure of Audacia Dangyereyes to illustrate the constraints on women discussing sex in public forums. It identifies the rhetorical moves necessary to accommodate constraining audiences through close readings of the works of Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, and Angela Heywood, all women deemed immodest by public standards and obscene by Anthony Comstock. To allay such charges, these women worked to redefine appropriate speech for women.

Recent scholarship in genre studies has extended its focus from studying single genres to multiple genres, as well as how these genres interact with one another. This essay seeks to contribute to this growing scholarship by adding a new concept, intermediary genre. That is, a genre that facilitates the “uptake” of a genre by another genre. This concept is designed to reveal a particular aspect of multiple genres: that one genre can be used to connect and mobilize two otherwise unconnected genres to make uptake possible. The concept is illustrated in case study of knowledge mobilization, an instance in which scientific research was used in the judicial system to inform public policies on eyewitness handling and police-lineup procedures. The case study shows how intermediary genres emerge, how they connect other genres, and how knowledge circulates as a result of such connections and affects policy decisions.

The aim of this study was to analyze the consequences of emotion during narrative writing in accordance with Hayes’s model. In this model, motivation and affect have an important role during the writing process. Moreover, according to the emotion-cognition literature, emotions are thought to create interferences in working memory, resulting in an increase of cognitive load. Following Cuisinier and colleagues, fourth and fifth graders were instructed to write autobiographical narratives with neutral emotional content, positive emotional content, and negative emotional content. The results did not indicate an effect of emotional instructions on the proportion of spelling errors, but they did reveal an effect on the text length. However, a simple regression analysis showed a correlation between working memory capacity and the number of spelling errors in the neutral condition only. The potential influence of cognitive load created by emotion on the writing process is discussed.

Devin Garofalo , Vanessa Lauber , Laura Perry , and Peter Ribic , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/our-narcotic-modernity ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) The following project, designed in the spring of 2011 as an exhibit proposal for an envisioned Museum of the Humanities, addresses both visually and textually the addictive undercurrents in cultural history. The proposal begins with an introduction to Avital Ronell's Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania , then moves to a sketch of a museum exhibit based on her text. The exhibit is intended to implicitly evoke the experience of grappling with such an experimental text as Crack Wars as well as explicitly respond to the theoretical and juridical challenges raised by Ronell. The accompanying video attempts to translate the experience of the proposed museum installation into the visual and aural. The video’s arrangement imitates the fluid structure of Ronell's book, wherein an alternative history of drug innovation and criminalization emerges with references to the criminalization of Madame Bovary and pivotal events in the history of narcotics. Viewers should come to realize that literature itself is a drug that induces various kinds of addiction, some forms of which are culturally accepted and others that are especially dangerous to normative social agendas and thus monitored and controlled. "Our Narcotic Modernity," a description of a proposed museum exhibit space [PDF] master Download video: Ogg format | MP4 format

Steel Wagstaff , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/essays-into-silence-noise-and-john-cage ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) I present here the results of "The {Silence} Project," a multi-part creative research project that engages with ideas of chance, silence, and noise through the work of John Cage, the American avant-garde composer. The project began with an experimental prose essay that borrowed the formal structure of Cage's famous 'silent' composition 4’33” to examine the importance of silence and noise in Cage’s thought and speculate about the poetic implications of Cage’s use of constraints and chance operations in his composition practice. As part of a graduate seminar taught by Jon McKenzie, over the next four months I submitted this essay to two substantial remediations which drastically altered the form, content, and argumentative thrust of the original essay. I converted the prose piece first into “{Sile / nce},” a graphic essay produced with Adobe InDesign that attempted to imitate the look and feel of a large, visually rich, and typographically varied glossy magazine. Next, I remediated the piece a further time, creating “The Silence Film: Essays into Noise, Silence, and John Cage,” a short film loosely structured around the conventions of Pecha Kucha, a fixed-duration presentation format that features twenty images shown for 20 seconds each. In each case, the project underwent significant revisions, changing shape and adopting radically different content in order to explore the properties of the media in which it was composed and the software tools I was just beginning to use (primarily Adobe InDesign, Audacity, and iMovie). In each specific case of remediation, the structural properties and representative capabilities of the selected forms and formats offered both interesting opportunities and significant challenges, especially when it came to depicting the implications of Cage’s subversion of common…

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/the-revelations-of-drKx4l3ndj3r ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) In March, 2011, I was invited by Austrian artist Ralo Mayer to write an essay for an exhibition catalogue to accompany his first major solo show, Obviously a Major Malfunction/KAGO KAGO KAGO BE . Mayer’s interest in experimental, performative research had led him to my book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance , especially its eccentric second half, whose trajectory begins with the NASA Challenger disaster. This event had had a profound effect on the artist, as it had on me, and he asked if I could reprise some of my book for the catalogue. I soon discovered that Mayer had already remediated certain disastronautic elements of Perform or Else into his multi-medium conceptual art. As his research borders on speculative fiction, I decided to compose a gay sci-fi text remixing his work back with my own, while also stirring in a reading of certain passages from Nietzsche’s Nachlass. The result was the cosmographic text “The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r,” bilingually published in German and English in Obviously A Major Malfunction by Ralo Mayer (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Linz, Austria). As I had recently been invited to give a keynote presentation at a Performance Design conference in Santiago, I decided to create a multimedia version based on “Revelations.” I narrated the text into my iPhone, imported it into GarageBand, and began mixing in music and sound effects to create the audio. I also invited Mayer to contribute by recording some of his own texts and emails, which would allow me to slice in his voice as well as his imagery. As I completed each audio section, I began designing with visuals, starting in Keynote and finishing in Final Cut Pro. Since my Santiago audience would be overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking, I also had the text translated and the entire video subtitled. I presented a full, though…

Alexis Brown , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/the-algo-numeric-daughter ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) Click this image to read Alexis Brown's "Algo-Numeric Daughter" This comic attempts to allegorize the relationship between myself and my algo-numeric double. I examined the effects of orality, literacy, and numeracy in the context of familial relations, with each character drawn directly from the results of my signature, or the results that a Google search of my name generated. I wanted to examine whether my parents could legitimately connect with me through my algo-numeric double. For instance, what is the relation between me and my algo-numeric double, and how much control over it do I have? Does it represent some facet of me, or has it been so abstracted by numeracy that the information connected to my name now bears almost no connection to me at all? And in an age where information now exists in a realm of its own, could my algo-numeric double in some sense replace me? Could it be manipulated by others through algorithms to create some better version of myself? This project appealed to me in part because it was very different than my usual work in the English department. Instead of implementing theoretical concepts to analyze literature, I used them to provide framework for what might almost be termed creative writing. At the same time, this project also made the theories of Scott McCloud, Eric Havelock, and others more personal—I found myself examining the connections between these theories and my life.

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/smart-media ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) This special section of Enculturation features four sets of experimental media projects produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, three by English students enrolled in different courses I have taught over the past several years and one recent experiment of my own. As indicated in the short descriptions provided by their producers, these projects vary in content, form, medium, and function, but all can be understood as emerging scholarly genres—or what we’re calling at UW-Madison smart media . At a time when bookstores are closing, when the MLA is questioning the monograph as the dominant model for dissertations, a time when academic publishers are grappling with the many challenges posed by the web, it is little wonder that smart media such as TED talks, theory comix, video essays, and interactive installations have emerged. Smart media supplement the traditional scholarly genres of book, article, and conference paper, adding elements closely identified with new media: digital images, video, and sound, as well as interactivity. These emerging scholarly genres mix ideas and affects, logos and graphe . If, as Jacques Derrida, Gregory Ulmer, and others have long argued, logocentric writing marginalizes graphe , smart media turns on the high-res display, cranks up the volume, and plays with the inputs and outputs. Writing in no way disappears: it remains a crucial though reinscribed track in a multimedia composition—or rather, design . For design is to digital media what composition is to writing: a craft that can be learned and taught, one that has a long history yet still produces surprises, amazement, and, admittedly, at times clichés and boredom. At UW-Madison, I direct DesignLab , a new design support center for student media projects that works closely with the Libraries (where it is institutionally situated), our central IT…

This article reviews various frameworks for defining second-language learner groups, as described in the literature, and summarizes relevant empirical studies based on these frameworks.

This article describes the design and implementation of a cross-cultural composition coursewhich was designed to provide opportunities for ESL students and native English-speaking students to learn about cross-cultural literacy practices from each other in a first-year writing context at a community college in the Southwest.

Book Review| September 01 2012 The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought. Paul Turpin. Josh Hanan Josh Hanan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (3): 549–552. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940616 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Josh Hanan; The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2012; 15 (3): 549–552. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940616 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Air-age glob alism was a discursive phenomenon throughout the development of World War II that accounted for the rapid "shrinking" of the world through air technologies and the internationalization of American interests. Cartography became air-age globalism’s primary popular expression, and journalistic cartographers such as Richard Edes Harrison at Fortune magazine introduced new mapping projections and perspectives in response to these global changes. This essay argues that Harrisons mapping innovations mediate a geopolitical shift in America toward a modern, image-based internationalism. Through recastings of "vision" and "strategy," Harrison’s work offers an opportunity to assess the rhetorical tensions between idealism and realism in midcentury cartographic forms and the larger spatial and perceptual challenges facing U.S. foreign policy during its rise to superpower status.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

This article provides an overview of the ways in which data and text mining have potentialas research methodologies in composition studies. It introduces data mining in thecontext of the field of composition studies and discusses ways in which this methodologycan complement and extend our existing research practices by blending the best of whattechnology and researchers have to offer. The authors examine a process model for datamining, discuss benefits and liabilities, and link to increased calls for accountability.

This article summarizes various applications of oral history interviews at local sites to represent the writing of underrepresented groups. The coauthors (a rhetorician andan archivist) discuss the important disciplinary implications for tending to the local, especially at sites where formal archives are hard to come by, offering three principlesfor sustaining the local by combining research design with archival development.

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The concept of voice has long attracted the attention of teachers, but more recently has also been the focus of a growing body of research aiming to understand voice as self-representation in writing. Adopting a socio-cultural orientation to voice, studies have revealed much about how textual choices are used by readers to build images of text-authors; however, such research has been limited to contexts in which the author’s actual identity is unknown by the reader. Research has offered limited insight into how an author’s embodied self figures into readers’ voice construction, or how voice construction is connected to readers’ assessments of text—with or without knowledge of the author’s identity apart from the text. This article takes up these issues by exploring how readers’ exposure to videos of two second language (L2) student-authors influenced voice construction and evaluation of the students’ papers. Through primarily qualitative and intertextual analysis, the study concludes that voice construction, extra-textual identity, and assessment are related and interacting constructs, though these relationships are neither straightforward nor predictable. Methodological, pedagogical, and theoretical implications of this conclusion are discussed

This article argues for the establishment of a usability process that incorporates the study of “words” and “word phrases.” It demonstrates how semantically mapping a navigational taxonomy can help the developers of digital environments establish a more focused sense of functional meaning for the users of their digital designs.

The present article describes and evaluates collaborative interdisciplinary group projects initiated by content lecturers and an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instructor for the purpose of teaching technical writing skills in an aeronautical engineering degree program. The proposed technical writing model is assessed against the results of a learner survey and refined accordingly. The survey showed that learners appreciated the cross-disciplinary collaboration in projects, and it delivered important insights into learning effects and student progress in both language and content matters. The article concludes with a list of recommendations for the implementation of project-based collaborative technical writing instruction, which may support or complement academic writing courses in similar contexts. The proposed model considers the circumstances of students in workload-intensive tertiary settings and synthesizes approaches such as problem-based learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, a guided product approach to collaborative writing, and learner autonomy.

This article engages disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) conversations at the intersections of race, rhetoric, technology, and technical communication and offers a case study of curriculum development that supports disciplinary inquiry at these complex interstices. Specifically, informed by a decolonial framework, this article discusses the status of cultural and critical race studies in technical communication scholarship; tentative definitions of race, rhetoric, and technology; the cultural usability research conducted and located accountability in the process of designing a graduate course that studies rhetorics of race and technology; and the implications of this inquiry for the discipline, field, and practices of technical communication.

In 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commemorated its 50th anniversary by launching an anniversary Web site, which includes links to a photographic timeline, videos, and documents that the agency views as important in telling its history. This article uses concepts from narrative theory and visual rhetoric to analyze the images used in the NASA History Timeline, paying special attention to why certain images were selected as historical markers over other photographs that are more widely published and televised. Specifically, the author uses arguments from Sontag’s On Photography and Barbatsis’s “Narrative Theory” to explain how NASA’s photographic narrative provides a story with a plot that spans from triumphs and tragedies in space exploration to pioneering efforts in racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.

In 1885, William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, printed an exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This incendiary article helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment bill, but also garnered accusations of pornography against the “Maiden Tribute.” Using Stead's four-part article as a case study, I develop a rhetorical understanding of pornography to account for the dynamic political energy and outrage generated by this text. I argue that the pornography of the “Maiden Tribute” managed to create a particular ignorance, one in which sexuality was isolated from material economic realities. Ultimately, Stead's mission proved politically deleterious to the very women he professed to help.