Lynda Walsh

Constructive Interference: Wikis And Service Learning In The Technical Communication Classroom

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.

The Common Topoi of STEM Discourse: An Apologia and Methodological Proposal, With Pilot Survey

In this article, the author proposes a methodology for the rhetorical analysis of scientific, technical, mathematical, and engineering (STEM) discourse based on the common topics (topoi) of this discourse. Beginning with work by Miller, Prelli, and other rhetoricians of STEM discourse—but factoring in related studies in cognitive linguistics—she argues for a reimagining of topoi as basic schema that interrelate texts, objects, and writers in STEM communities. Then, she proposes a topical method as a stable, broadly applicable heuristic that may help fit the rhetorical dynamics of the much-studied research article (RA) into the wider context of written technical discourse—exactly the type of improvement that Gross, Fahnestock, and others have proposed. Finally, as an illustration of this argument, the author performs a pilot topical survey of 18 RAs representing six STEM disciplines. This survey yields a set of 30 topoi used samplewide that can form a starting point for future surveys. She answers challenges to the significance and relevance of a topical method and finishes by sketching some future applications of the method that can move rhetoric of science beyond the RA.

“No One Yet Knows What the Ultimate Consequences May Be” How Rachel Carson Transformed Scientific Uncertainty Into a Site for Public Participation in Silent Spring

This article examines Rachel Carson’s assimilation and revision of scientific uncertainty in her sources, annotations, and drafts for Silent Spring. It argues that Carson’s emphasis on the special topos of uncertainty was not an original invention but instead was Carson’s contribution to an ongoing scientific and political conversation about uncertainty in 1962. Carson transformed this topos into a bridge across the is–ought divide in science-related policy making, using the uncertainty topos to invite the public to participate by supplying fears and values that would warrant proposals for limiting pesticide use. Carson’s adaptation of scientific uncertainty to environmental policy making provides a historical precedent for contemporary invocations of scientific uncertainty in debates surrounding global warming, nuclear power, cancer studies, and Gulf oil drilling. The methods that the authors use to trace the development of this special topos can also serve as a pattern for excavating the histories of other pivotal topoi in the rhetoric of American science and environmental policy.

A Rhetorical Perspective on the Sokal Hoax: Genre, Style, and Context

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal’s hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19th-century American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text’s editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal’s hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

Resistance and Common Ground as Functions of Mis/Aligned Attitudes: A Filter-Theory Analysis of Ranchers' Writings about the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project.

Writing scholars interested in stakeholder attitudes need ways to reconstruct them from archives because (a) interview/survey studies are not always feasible (particularly in historical work) and (b) the question/answer format of these studies may exclude key attitudes that emerge in unprompted expressions of opinion. Accordingly, this article argues for filter theory—a pragmatic model of interpretive attitudes—as an effective hermeneutic for archival reception studies. Complementing a previous study of administrative attitudes about the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project, the present study applies filter theory to a sample of ranchers’ written opinions about the Project. The main findings are as follows: Ranchers and administrators differentially value resident rights versus Project goals; ranchers warrant resistance to the Project based on these misaligned attitudes; nonetheless, both groups value the ideal of a balanced environment and evidence collected on the ground. These findings suggest the need to redefine rhetorical resistance and common ground as arguments warranted by mis/alignments between groups’ interpretive attitudes. They also indicate revisions to initial recommendations for extending rhetorical common ground in the Project.

Perspectives on Uncertainty for Technical Communication Scholars

ABSTRACT Technical communication scholars have tended to treat uncertainty as a lack of certainty rather than as a diverse range of strategies for talking about risk. This review employs Goodnight’s argument spheres to comprehend treatments of uncertainty in technical communication and closely related fields. The advantages of such an approach are demonstrated via a reanalysis of a recent risk communication study. The review finishes by identifying hybrid forums as productive sites for future research.

The Visual Invention Practices of STEM Researchers: An Exploratory Topology

This article presents results from a qualitative pilot survey of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) researchers concerning techniques used to create graphics for research articles. The survey aimed to induce a methodological vocabulary for a larger project designed to describe and improve STEM visual literacy for nonexperts. However, the survey also revealed interesting problems for investigation—chief among them a mismatch between STEM visual pedagogy and praxis. In addition, participants supplied a handlist of STEM visual communication texts that have informed their praxis. Survey results are presented in the form of a topology—a frequency-based representation of the topics framing participants’ discussion of STEM visual invention.

The Double-Edged Sword of Popularization The Role of Science Communication Research in the Popsci.com Comment Shutoff

The decision by Popsci.com editors to shut off public comments in 2013 surprised many scholars of science journalism—particularly since the decision was justified in large part by reference to science communication scholarship. This commentary engages in a rhetorical analysis of the events surrounding the decision—in particular, the popularization of Anderson et al. (2014), the editorial stance at Popsci.com, and the content of blog comments leading up to the shutoff—to better appreciate what led to the foreclosure of a significant forum for protodeliberation on science research and policy.

Visual Invention and the Composition of Scientific Research Graphics: A Topological Approach

This report details the second phase of an ongoing research project investigating the visual invention and composition processes of scientific researchers. In this phase, four academic researchers completed think-aloud protocols as they composed graphics for research presentations; they also answered follow-up questions about their visual education, pedagogy, genres of practice, and interactions with publics. Results are presented first as narratives and then as topologies—visualizations of the communal beliefs, values, and norms (topoi) that connect the individual narratives to wider community practices. Results point toward an ecological model of visual invention and composition strategies in the crafting of research graphics. They also suggest that these strategies may be underrepresented in scientists’ education. More explicit attention to them may help improve STEM visual literacy for nonexperts.

Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric

It used to be that only rhetoricians of science and technology read Bruno Latour. However, Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers’s 2015 collection Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition demonstrates how widely the appeal of his work has spread in recent years. I read this influence not as a fad for one scholar’s work but rather as an indication that we have all sensed a change in the temperature of late-modern argumentation and persuasion. Arguing in the anthropocene is qualitatively and quantitatively different than arguing in the Classical agora. Now, no matter which direction we turn, we find the forum crowded not only with human speakers of all stripes but also with an awesome flotsam of nonhumans: computer models, polar bears, FitBits, genes, Tweets, YouTube videos, viruses, cookbooks, nebulae, and iPhones. Whatever our area of research, things whine, clamor, and jostle us. And weary of squinting around them to try to make out the dim, dotted outline of the public sphere, we have finally started to look right at them. There is no doubt that Latour constitutes a major pivot in the materialist, postcritical, and post-humanist turns—for reasons amply explained in the Lynch and Rivers volume. My purpose in this introduction is not to rehearse that genealogy but rather to explain to readers who do not consider themselves invested in the material turn why they, too, may wish to attend to Latour’s most recent work and his thoughts on rhetoric. My argument lies in a symmetry half-revealed by the influence of Latour on new rhetorics: because even as rhetoricians are coming around to post-critical theory, those theorists (Latour among them) are coming around toward rhetoric. This rapprochement presents rhetoricians with an unprecedented opportunity to enter and shape the intellectual conversation about how best to live together in the anthropocene. To best demonstrate this meeting of minds, we should begin at the end, with Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME; modesofexistence.org), in part because Latour himself presents AIME as the culmination of his scholarly endeavors. In AIME he subsumes anthropology, sociology, and even philosophy under a new, prospective discipline he calls “diplomacy.” He does so, he says, because of the exigence of facing Gaia—his name, borrowed from James Lovelock, for our threatening and threatened anthropocene. Gaia, our hybrid terrestrial cyborg, “the Möbius strip of which we form both the inside and the outside” (AIME 9), has both exceeded the paradigm of cause and effect—the founding myth of academic