Journal of Technical Writing and Communication Jul 2025

Risk Revisited: The Role of Technical Communication in Negotiating Barriers to Effective Health Risk Messaging

Kathryn Lambrecht Arizona State University

Abstract

Social media, the pandemic, and environmental hazards have all played a role in shifting the landscape of risk communication. This paper takes a retroactive risk approach to study how COVID-19 messaging was shaped in the first 2 years of the pandemic. Using a corpus of 764 news releases from five health departments, I combine corpus analysis with coding based on government capacities to show that health departments highlighted public health data (surveillance) and risk guidance (governance), while downplaying enforcement (coercion). This process of revisiting communication from an acute risk phase can help us recalibrate how public health roles are constituted through language to prepare for future events.

Journal
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Published
2025-07-01
DOI
10.1177/00472816241262237
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Topics
technical communication quantitative research social media
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Kenzie et al. (2025)
    Don’t Read the Comments: Discourse About COVID-19 Vaccines in a State Health De…
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

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