For too long, journal articles and textbooks on scientific and technical discourse have adopted a positivistic approach to visuals. Unfortunately, this approach is problematic. It ignores that visuals are constructions that are products of a writer's interpretation with its own power-laden agenda. For example, in representing a tamed and dominated nature, visuals become instruments of patriarchy. Reading them responsibly requires that we uncover some of the values attached to the strategies of creating visuals and to the objects created. This article reviews the current approach taken by composition scholars, surveys richer interdisciplinary work on visuals, and—by using visuals connected with the Human Genome Project—models an analysis of visuals as rhetoric.

To determine whether there are different technical styles, syntactic structures at three audience levels in the published writing of three disciplines were analyzed. Our analysis discloses that different disciplines rely primarily on different types of subordinate clauses, sentence openers, and sentence types. It also discloses that paragraph length varies with audience level, as do the number of subject sentence openers and the kinds of verb constructions. Next, we compare our findings with standard textbook treatments of style and advocate a more flexible approach to the teaching of technical style, one that accounts for variations in subject matter and audience.