This article examines visuals used in the reporting of the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in order to explore the use of different image forms and genres in communicating health information to distinct audiences. By tracing an informational report through several publication types, the use of different image forms and rhetorical genres are observed, as is the robustness and flexibility of these categorizations.

The authors examined a corpus of figure captions from technical and professional communication (TPC)-journal articles to test their sense that TPC captions do not fulfill their communicative potential as well as, they sensed, journals in science often do. The authors performed a content analysis on captions from biology-journal articles and iteratively tested a coding scheme of caption content. The resulting scheme can help in analyzing caption content, developing captions, and imparting a variety of TPC-related skills to students.