Danette Paul

Moving beyond the Moment Reception Studies in the Rhetoric of Science

Studies in the rhetoric of science have tended to focus on classic scientific texts and on the history of drafts and the interaction surrounding them up until the moment when the drafts are accepted for publication by a journal. Similarly, research on disasters resulting from failed communication has tended to focus on the history of drafts and the interaction surrounding them up until the moment of the disaster. The authors argue that overattention to the moment skews understanding of what makes scientific discourse successful and neglects other valuable sources of evidence. After reviewing the promises and limitations of studies from historical, observational, and text-analytic approaches, the authors call for studies of responses to research articles from disciplinary readers and argue for studies using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that will explore the real-time responses of readers to scientific texts, test the effects of rhetorical strategies on readers, and track the course of acceptance or rejection over time.

Spreading Chaos: The Role of Popularizations in the Diffusion of Scientific Ideas.

Scientific popularizations are generally considered translations (often dubious ones) of scientific research for a lay audience. This study explores the role popularizations play within scientific discourse, specifically in the development of chaos theory. The methods included a review of the popular and the semipopular books on chaos theory from 1975 to 1995, interviews with key figures, and an analysis of the citations in scientific research journals to Gleick’s well-known popularization, Chaos: Making a New Science. The results indicate that popularizations take different forms as a scientific revolution develops into normal science. At various points, popularizations are used by scientists to find a broad, interdisciplinary, scientific audience, to show interest in the field, to disseminate lines of inquiry, and to help establish the author’s priority claim.

Book Review: Gross, Alan G. (2006). Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 240 pages

Crombie, W., & Samujh, H. (1999). Negative message as strategic communication: A case study of a New Zealand company’s annual executive letter. Journal of Business Communication, 36, 229-239. David, C. (2001). Mythmaking in annual reports. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 15, 195-222. Hyland, K. (1998). Exploring corporate rhetoric: Metadiscourse in the CEO’s letter. Journal of Business Communication, 35, 224-244. Kohut, G. F., & Segars, A. H. (1992). The president’s letter to stockholders: An examination of corporate communication strategy. The Journal of Business Communication, 29, 7-21. Prasad, A., & Mir, R. (2002). Digging deep for meaning: A critical hermeneutic analysis of CEO letters to shareholders in the oil industry. Journal of Business Communication, 39, 92-116.

Book Review: Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing

If a good book disrupts popular and scientific misconceptions, forces more careful attention to discourse, challenges gendered assumptions, and encourages a greater precision in arguments about risk, J. Blake Scott’s Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is a good book. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a contributor to a collection of essays on the uses of cultural rhetoric in technical writing edited by Scott, Longo, and Wills (in press). I also like books that examine the taken-for-granted disciplinary and cultural assumptions that affect risk decision making. Not all readers will agree with my assessment. Scott’s radical politics will threaten and offend many readers, gay and straight, as he reexamines the role of rhetorical commonplaces, identity politics, urban myths, and culturally loaded assumptions in health policy risk management and assessment. Risky Rhetoric provides a good case study in risk communication, but the book must be read in context to give students a more complete understanding of the realpolitik of HIV and AIDS in southern Africa and the limits of American identity theory in a global context. Readers not familiar with cultural theory will find this book difficult and challenging. Because it tests so many assumptions, Risky Rhetoric also demands a more nuanced review than do less deliberatively provocative books. As its title playfully suggests, the book takes risks in applying cultural theory (more specifically, queer theory) to understand the discourses of risk. Scott’s initial three-part framework verbally acknowledges his debt to the major players in both cultural theory and the social studies of science: Latour, Haraway, and cultural critic Vincent Leitch. Part 3, “Critiquing and Intervening in Effects,” recalls Fuller’s (1988) notion of the social epistemologist as well as more general disciplinary debates about the application of socialtheoretical work in the social study of science. But Scott’s “rhetorical-cultural mapping” is “not a neutral exercise” (p. 28). Scott himself intervenes as researcher and HIV educator and test counselor who “help[s] other educa-

Book Review: Content and Complexity:

pedagogy from the bottom-up because it examines how visual rhetors must deal with the “grip of visual convention” when they set out to create visual information. Although the authors did not intend to write a textbook, this chapter makes compelling reading for any rhetor (writer or designer) wishing to think carefully through the benefits and costs of convention’s grip on any immediate rhetorical act. The sixth and final chapter exposes the soft underbelly of convention’s grip by showing how conventions are themselves objects of individual interpretation, filtered differently through different minds. When conventions must pass through different minds, what keeps them social? Answering this question gives the authors the context to provide the clearest exposition of James Gibson’s theory of ecological perception I have ever read. According to Gibson, or the authors’ interpretation of Gibson, we are more likely to bridge the individual and the social when we think of designing for the whole environment, an environment engaging a viewer’s body as well as mind. By thinking of the viewer’s body as well as mind, we transform effectiveness into affordance, the accommodations that adjust the social to the individual and the individual to the social. Kostelnick and Hassett have written a sound and much needed book. Their framework for visual convention not only organizes unexplored territory in visual theory but also provides a theoretical system and structure of convention that can be used by theorists of writing. Their book makes a satisfying and thoroughly convincing case for the rhetorical basis of visual design.

Book Review: Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science

on the other. Chapter 2 focuses on the fundamental differences between virtual peer review and face-to-face peer review in terms of time, space, and interaction. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the complexities and challenges of theorizing and implementing virtual peer review. Chapter 5 then introduces strategies and guidelines for teachers and students, emphasizing that virtual peer review strategies and guidelines can be adapted to other online collaborative writing contexts. Virtual Peer Review is more than a valuable addition to scholarship in the field of computers and composition. Business and technical communicators can benefit from Breuch’s examination and conceptualization of virtual peer review. Breuch directs our attention away from a good-versus-bad mentality by focusing not on whether or how computer technologies can help us do better work but on what we can do in a virtual environment that we do not typically do or even think of doing. In other words, she is not interested in a mere comparison of face-to-face communication versus virtual interaction between peer writers; rather, she argues for and offers an example of the rich potential of virtual peer review. She points out directions for further research; the list of questions she provides at the end of the book can be viewed as an invitation to scholars in writing-related fields, business and technical communication certainly being a prominent one of them, who are interested in deepening their understanding of virtual peer review in their own contexts.

Book Review: Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication:

ings are as typical of mines in these three countries as her authoritative narrative makes it sound. A description of what she did to increase the generalizability of her findings would have been appropriate. Sauer also could have extended her sentence-level linguistic analysis to supplement her contextual analysis. As Flowerdew (2003) argued, new rhetorical approaches tell us much about the situation (which Sauer has expertly done), and linguistic approaches tell us much about the text (p. 92); by balancing the two approaches, he concluded, we are in a better position to understand the genre. Because Sauer mentions the importance of a linguistic approach, more balance between the two approaches might have strengthened her analysis. Overall, the book is an excellent scholarly monograph in rhetoric and technical communication that provides fresh insight into many current theoretical issues with memorable examples. In addition, Sauer’s discussions on rhetoric and its implications for social change remind us, in a dramatic way, why rhetoric really matters.

Book Review: The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments

At first glance, Beverly Sauer’s award-winning book The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments examines a particular kind of rhetoric: rhetoric in a hazardous environment. In this context, rhetoric is closely associated with risk management, and each rhetorical move can potentially have a consequence of great magnitude, including the life or death of miners. But the book appeals to a much wider audience than specialists in the rhetoric of risk because Sauer’s general discussion focuses on contemporary and recurrent theoretical and practical problems in rhetoric and technical communication. In particular, she emphasizes the inventional and epistemological aspects of rhetoric, the problematization of the expert, and, subsequently, rhetoric’s potential to achieve greater social justice. Sauer’s first point (i.e., rhetoric as inventional and epistemological) emerges from what she calls “the cycle of technical documentation in large regulatory industries” (p. 17), which consists of six stages of documentation: (1) local documentation, (2) accident reports, (3) statistical reports, (4) policy and regulations, (5) practices and procedures, and (6) training and instruction. In discussing this model, she argues that a “critical transformation” occurs at each of the in-between stages as documentation shapes the content of the subsequent document. For example, when an accident occurs at a mine, the investigator must write a coherent accident report based on the many different, and often contradictory, narratives of the miners (stages 1 and 2 in the cycle). Consequently, in writing an accident report, the investigator must construct a narrative that fits most of the miners’ accounts but does not completely agree with any one miner’s account. To complicate this process, the investigator must also come up with a cause of the accident that is acceptable in the genre of accident reports yet sensitive to the current political climate. Thus, an accident report is not simply a conduit of a witness’s tale but is rather