Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Scholars of rhetoric and writing have long recognized the mediated nature of rhetorical action. From Plato’s early indictments of writing as enemy of memoria to Burke’s recognition of instrumental causes to recent analyses of digital mediation, the study of meaning-making refuses one-to-one, transparent theories of communication, instead recognizing that there is more to rhetorical action than humans. This article follows the trail of Haas, Swarts, and others arguing that analyses of mediation uncover much about human motives, digital communities, and rhetorical action. I argue that technologies often function as rhetorical genres, providing what Miller characterizes as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” that occur in uniquely digital spaces. Working from sites of participatory archival creation and curation, I argue that invisible rhetorical genres operating at macroscopic levels of scale are central to shaping individual and communal activity in sites of distributed social production. To support this claim, I investigate two applications—a content management system called Gazelle and a bittorrent tracker called Ocelot—to demonstrate how largely invisible server-side software shapes rhetorical action, circumscribes individual agency, and cultivates community identity in sites of participatory archival curation. By articulating content management systems and other macroscopic software as rhetorical genres, I hope to extend nascent investigations into the medial capacities of digital tools that shape our collective digital experience.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

The controversy about vaccines and autism presents an opportunity to explore how science is constructed in public debates about health and medicine. Rhetors who argue against a connection between vaccines and autism insist that their opponents are irrational, while rhetors arguing for a link insist that their fears are rational indeed. This analysis poses an alternative way of understanding the vaccines-autism controversy, suggesting that it is partly fueled by differing perceptions of the boundary between science and non-science. Using the concept of boundary work as a lens, this article uses generative rhetorical criticism to examine artifacts within the controversy and explores rhetorical constructions of scientific evidence, the forum of scientific discourse, scientific expertise, and the scientific capability. The findings suggest that rhetors’ awareness of disciplinary boundaries is just as important in the construction and reception of their arguments as their knowledge of scientific facts and principles.

Aristotle’s science writing serves as an instance of a classical science writer at work. Applying his theory of writing found in his Rhetoric, Poetics, Posterior Analytics, and Categories treatises to his History of Animals illustrates his work as a writer of life science. As rhetorical tools, his theory of tropes and figures and his theory of the model as developed in his theory of definitions and the enthymeme work as epistemic strategies. The essay concludes that further study should examine other rhetorical dimensions of his science writing.

Because of the globalized use of the Internet, companies of most countries rely heavily on websites for the sale of their products and services internationally. However, a company’s website, no matter how nicely designed in terms of graphics used and information provided, may still fail to achieve the expected result if it fails to consider the relevant business cultural values and conventions of the target country. This article, in light of American business values and Chinese business values and through case analyses, identifies the possible problems on those websites aiming at international business. Using specific company websites of both the United States and China and through comparison and contrast, the author analyzes problems in aspects of content, graphics, and layout in attempt to improve designers’ cultural awareness in these aspects and improve their skills for the localization of their international business websites.

This article introduces Speculative Usability. Whereas traditional models of usability rely on the salient features of an object–user relationship focused around the uses for which the object was designed, the goal of Speculative Usability is to notice an object as it interacts with other objects (in addition to but including human users) and to be vulnerable to an object’s unintended effects. The payoff of this speculative approach is an increased inventional capacity for usability testing.