Professional communication scholars have defined the decorative narrowly and subordinated it to informational text. Yet, current psychological research indicates that decorative elements elicit emotion-laden reactions that may precede cognitive awareness and influence interpretation of images. We conceive the decorative in design, and specifically color, as a complex rhetorical phenomenon. Applying decorative and color theory and analyzing design examples illustrating aesthetic, ethical, and logical appeals, we present a range of potential uses for color in electronic media.

Recent scandals in the business community have alerted professional writing teachers to the importance of highlighting ethics in the curriculum. From former experiences in teaching courses emphasizing ethics, the authors have adapted the curriculum to include a limited discussion of ethical approaches and terms and assigned group writing projects that consider the effects of business on the broader community. As a result of the integration of this ethical component into the entire course, students learn major ethical approaches; gain a vocabulary of ethical terms they can apply in the business world; interrogate the larger questions of business and its interactions with the local, national, and international community; and engage in the kind of dialectical discussions that require critical thinking.

Annual reports produced today increasingly include elaborate photographs and graphics in the narrative section. Financial analysts and many scholars have judged these reports on their clarity, accuracy, and honesty. Because the narrative invites interpretations, such criteria are not sufficient, and additional standards need to be constructed. A semiological analysis of the textual and visual elements allows for the discovery of the techniques used by document designers to promote their companies’ values. Artistic images may encourage positive readings of annual reports, which, combined with similar messages in other media and repeated over time, invoke cultural myths. By definition, myths are broadly accepted commonplaces that conceal details of their subject, and communicators must expose the missing details and judge the myths within a specific context. This kind of analysis, acknowledging the constraints of the rhetorical situation of a single report, can identify effective criteria for judging the narrative's ethics.

As women take part in the workforce in greater numbers and in higher positions, they need representation in visual images that will signify their achievements. Because portraits of women have for centuries highlighted their beauty and passivity, the poses, expressions, and props chosen in the past elicit similar readings in current professional women's photographs, readings in opposition to the typical power and authority awarded to male portraits. Women's portrait features may signify a more friendly and open personality than the formal male portrait shows and often represent women's interests and professional affiliations. Currently working women choose a wide variety of poses and props, and cultural readings of the features of portraits have begun to change. A trend towards more informal poses has allowed men's and women's portraits to use some of the same features. Communicators can help to change the conventionalized readings of women's portraits through careful document design that highlights women and their achievements.

Institutions familiar to the public are defined by master narratives that describe their activities and imply who is invited to take part. For art museums in this country, a master narrative of elitism was established in the last century, when museums organized and began building their collections. Because art museums were designed by the rich and subsequently forced to depend on the rich for financial support, the stories of elitism and exclusion have been perpetuated over the years. Whereas little narratives, or local stories, defining the daily operations of museums do not receive attention, stories of exclusive social events and obscure art exhibitions take prominence and discourage the participation of the general public. With diminished funding for museums and fewer courses devoted to art appreciation in public schools, museums will likely be unable to attract wider audiences to support them, and the master narrative will continue to define museums' image.

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

This article analyzes a CEO's use of extended epic metaphor in building corporate culture. Whereas much of the research on management's use of narrative has examined shorter stories and anecdotes, here the authors analyze the text of a speech written by a newly hired CEO for his upper management team. The speech, which was never delivered but was instead sent out in a leadership manual to managers in the conglomerate, begins with a narrative history of the CEO's first five months in office. In his description of events, the metaphoric language suggesting heroes and competition contradicts the principles of team management that the CEO intends to implement throughout the company. These heroic metaphors valorize individual achievement, agency, and action—values more likely to be familiar to the business culture than the cooperative values of teams. Drawn from war and sports metaphors common in the language of the popular American lexicon, the images generate more excitement and appeal than those of cooperative planning inherent in team management systems.

In addition to reflecting the social and power relationships between the writer and the reader as well as the degree of imposition, politeness strategies in administrative writing also reflect the values of the organization. Operating in the egalitarian climate perpetuated in a university setting, administrators obscured their legitimate power when they wrote nonroutine memos to faculty. Hiding and de-emphasizing their empowerment by using indirectness, tentativeness, indebtedness, and personalization, academic administrators achieved a high level of politeness. This intensified politeness contrasts with the moderated politeness used in a corporation that openly accepts hierarchy and promotes efficiency. This study, therefore, offers a context-based approach to analyzing administrative writing, an approach that can be used to uncover discourse strategies in other organizational sites.

Power, determined by rank, can be a primary determinant of how communication acts are structured by the writer and perceived by the reader. The sales model underpinning traditional business communication principles does not consider the effect of such power in memos written by managers to subordinates. Three rhetorical and linguistic strategies that reflect the construct of power in managerial communication are projecting leadership, assuming commonality, and controlling information. These strategies, which have not been sufficiently considered in theoretical and applied research, suggest the need to consider new ways of articulating principles for management communication.