Tree-like visualizations have played a central role in taxonomic and evolutionary biology for centuries, and the idea of a “tree of life” has been a pervasive notion not only in biology but also in religion, philosophy, and literature for much longer. The tree of life is a central figure in Darwin’s Origin of Species in both verbal and visual forms. As one of the most powerful and pervasive images in biological thought, what conceptual and communicative work has it enabled? How have the visual qualities and elements of the tree form interacted with biological thinking over time? This paper examines the pre-Darwinian history of tree images, the significance of Darwin’s use of such images, and the development of tree diagrams after Darwin. This history shows evidence of four separate traditions of visualization: cosmological, logical-philosophical, genealogical, and materialist. Visual traditions serve as rhetorical contexts that provide enthymematic backing, or what Perelman calls “objects of agreement,” for interpretation of tree diagrams. They produce polysemic warrants for arguments in different fields. The combination of the genealogical tradition with the cosmological and the logical changed the framework for thinking about the natural world and made Darwin’s theory of evolution possible; the later materialist tradition represents the “modernization” of biology as a science.

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During the past 30 years, genre conceptualized as social action has been a generative framework for scholars, teachers, and rhetors alike. As a mid-level, mediating concept, genre balances stability and innovation, connecting theory and practice, agency and structure, form and substance. Genre is multimodal, providing an analytical and explanatory framework across semiotic modes and media and thus across communication technologies; multidisciplinary, of interest across traditions of rhetoric, as well as many other disciplines; multidimensional, incorporating many perspectives on situated, mediated, motivated communicative interaction; and multimethodological, yielding to multiple empirical and interpretive approaches. Because genre both shapes and is shaped by its communities, it provides insight into both ideological conformity and resistance, lends itself to multiple pedagogical agendas, and provokes questions about media, materiality, ethics, circulation, affect, and comparison.

It used to be that only rhetoricians of science and technology read Bruno Latour. However, Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers’s 2015 collection Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition d...

At the 2014 Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Tech pre-conference at the National Communication Association, the "Expertise and Data in the Articulation of Risk several papers concerned with how risk is and how publics respond to those articulations of risk.E provided different perspectives and cases that concerned why communication of complex scientific and medical information about risks seems to fail and some insights into how to better communicate risks.Here we provide a short overview of each paper's argument, central findings, and recommendations.We then

This response to papers by Leah Ceccarelli, Randy Harris, and Carl Herndl and Lauren Cutlip in the “Horizons of Possibility” panel at the 2012 ARST Vicentennial conference raises questions about each of the visions as they relate, respectively, to ARST audiences, brain science, and sustainable planets and programs. It also suggests renewed attention to communication technologies by scholars studying the rhetoric of science and technology, maintaining that rhetoricians need to come to terms with emerging twenty-first century communicative forms.

The idea of genre marks large-scale repeated patterns in human symbolic production and interaction, patterns that are taken to be meaningful. Genre thus can be defined by reference to pattern, or form, and by reference to theories of meaning and interaction. This report on a discussion of scientific and technical genres at the 2012 Vicentennial meeting of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) briefly considers the differences and difficulties with different ways of defining genres and their relevance to science and technology, explorations of the ways genres change or evolve, and pedagogical applications of genre analysis in scientific and technical discourse.

In 1974, the traffic-accident data archive maintained by the Department of Transportation for the state of Iowa was transferred from a primarily paper-based system to a mainframe computer. Data reg...

Computerized systems for automated assessment of writing and speaking create a situation in which Burkean symbolic action confronts nonsymbolic motion. What is at stake in such confrontations is rhetorical agency. In this article, an informal survey that asked teachers of writing and speaking about automated assessment informs an analysis of agency that contrasts writing and speaking along the dimensions of performance, audience, and interaction. The analysis suggests that agency can be understood as the kinetic energy of performance that is generated through a process of mutual attribution between rhetor and audience. Agency is thus a property of the rhetorical event, not of agents, and can best be located between the two traditional ways of defining agency: as rhetorical capacity and as rhetorical effectivity. Unwillingness to attribute agency to automated assessment systems makes them rhetorically ineffective and morally problematic.

Book Review| January 01 2006 The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective CommunicationBooth, Wayne C. Carolyn R. Miller Carolyn R. Miller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (3): 261–263. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697158 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Carolyn R. Miller; The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (3): 261–263. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697158 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 CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Technical writing instruction often operates in isolation from other components of students' communication education, partly as a consequence of assessment practices that lead to a narrow perspective. We argue for altering this isolation by moving writing instruction into a position of increased programmatic perspective, which may be attained through a means of assessment based on educational outcomes. Two models of technical writing instruction, centralized and diffused, are discussed, and we show how outcomes-based assessment provides for the change in perspective we seek.

Most people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in text-centered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we create and refer to the appointments and notes in our personal digital assistants, we use texts. Texts are deeply embedded in cultural, cognitive, and material arrangements that go back thousands of years. Information technologies with texts at their core are, by contrast, a relatively recent development. To participate with other information researchers in shaping the evolution of these ITexts, researchers and scholars must build on a knowledge base and articulate issues, a task undertaken in this article. The authors begin by reviewing the existing foundations for a research program in IText and then scope out issues for research over the next five to seven years. They direct particular attention to the evolving character of ITexts and to their impact on society. By undertaking this research, the authors urge the continuing evolution of technologies of text.

Rhetorical study of technology will benefit from a broad view of technology that considers it as a cultural phenomenon, including epistemic, artifactual, technical, economic, aesthetic, and political aspects. To understand twentieth-century American technology this way, it is useful to gain some historical perspective on its development, particularly in the past 50 years. Many accounts mark World War II as a turning point in the role of technology in our culture and in the relations of technology with government, science, and industry. This article synthesizes some of these accounts and concludes with four ways that technology should prove to be rhetorically distinct from science.

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Abstract: Although “community” has become an important critical concept in contemporary rhetoric, it is only implicit in ancient rhetorics. In the rhetorical thought of the sophists, Plato, and Aristotle, the polis stands as a presupposition that was both fundamental and troublesome. Various relationships between the faculty of speech and the social order are revealed in different tellings of the history of civilization by Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as in more formal discussions of rhetoric and politics. These ancient disagreements about the nature of community can help us reformulate the current debate between liberalism and communitarianism. A rhetorical community as a site of contention can be both pluralist and normative.

Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance by Nancy S. Struever.Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1992. xiv + 246 pp. The Rhetoric and Morality of Philosophy by Seth Benardete. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1991. 205 pp. Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication by M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Michael K. Gilbertson. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, 1992. 257 pp. Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers by Stephen Doheny‐Farina.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992; 279 pp. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens by Jacqueline de Romilly. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992. 260 pp. Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation by Richard H. Haswell. Dallas: Southern Methodist U P. 1991. 412 pp.

Research Article| February 01 1989 Special Review Essay: Some Perspectives on Rhetoric, Science, and History The Rhetoric of Economics, by Donald N. McCloskey. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. pp. xx + 209.The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. pp. xiii + 445.Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, by Charles Bazerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. pp. xi + 356. Carolyn R. Miller Carolyn R. Miller Department of English, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1989) 7 (1): 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.1.101 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Carolyn R. Miller; Special Review Essay: Some Perspectives on Rhetoric, Science, and History. Rhetorica 1 February 1989; 7 (1): 101–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.1.101 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1989 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

(1987). Aristotle's “special topics”; in rhetorical practice and pedagogy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 61-70.

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Occasionally, it's nice to be wrong. I opened this book reluctantly, fearing that it might be one of those collections by which a profession self-consciously asserts its coming of age and academic legitimacy. What I found instead was one of the best (i.e., stimulating) collections of essays about technical and scientific communication to appear so far.

The concept of “rule,” derived from linguistics and anthropology, provides a way of understanding the relationship between context, purpose, and message production and interpretation. “Rules” are shared expectations which structure situations and guide individual action. This paper reviews some of the concepts that have come out of rules theory in communication research and suggests their particular relevance and utility to understanding the problems and situations in technical communication.

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