This article reconstructs a writing theory on which Fred Newton Scott and John Dewey collaborated in the 1890s. Drawing on technology theorists’ discussions of “technological determinism,” this article critiques the deterministic aspects of Scott’s and Dewey’s thinking, and it suggests that their errors can illuminate determinism’s dangers for contemporary writing theory. The article also discusses some questions that Scott’s and Dewey’s theory raise for study of their later ideas.

This article describes the development of visual rhetoric in a historically significant museum exhibit. The study documents rhetorical change in the museum's displays, specifically in visual series depicting the horse's evolutionary development. The study also exposes the purpose of series patterning in the renovated display and the multiple views on scientific visualization this display implies. Such an analysis suggests the broad range of strategies in visual rhetoric available to science communicators working in the area of science popularization.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

This study of the “cyberspace incrementum” adapts Jeanne Fahnestock's argument-oriented theory of rhetorical figuration, applying it to a case in technology development. It identifies a key series argument in the development of a failed cyberspace technology, namely VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). The analysis describes how differing forms of argumentation helped advance VRML as a project. Interpreting the figure, this article suggests “communicative abundance” as the problematic situation to which VRML responded.

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Researchers studying technology development often examine how rhetorical activity contributes to technologies' design, implementation, and stabilization. This article offers a possible methodology for studying one role of rhetorical activity in technology development: knowledge consolidation analysis. Applying this method to an exemplar case, the author describes how explanations of Project Essay Grade (PEG), the first initiative to computerize student essay assessment, made knowledge available about this technology project. More specifically, technologist Ellis Page and his coauthors reworked a key explanatory argument, a justification of PEG's functioning, during the course of several decades, refining and clarifying its key contrasts and strengthening its presentation for generalist educators in particular. Analysis suggests that late presentations of the argument reveal that knowledge was successfully consolidated about a technical procedure Page and his coauthors called “rating simulation.” The conclusion discusses the key advantages and limitations of the method.