Mary L Schuster

Understanding Genre through the Lens of Advocacy: The Rhetorical Work of the Victim Impact Statement

Through interviews with judges and victim advocates, courtroom observations, and rhetorical analyses of victims’ reactions to proposed sentences, the authors examine the features that judges and advocates think make victims’ arguments persuasive.The authors conclude that this genre, recently imposed upon the court, functions as a mediating device through which advocates push for collective change, particularly for judicial acceptance of personal and emotional appeals. This study understands genres as responsive to changes within the activity systems in which they work and extends knowledge about genres that function as advocacy tools within internal institutional systems.

Degrees of Emotion: Judicial Responses to Victim Impact Statements

Emotional standards and hierarchies in the courtroom may affect judicial reactions to victim impact statements. Based on judicial conversations and courtroom observations in two judicial districts in Minnesota, we suggest that judges contrast emotion with reason in order to maintain control of their courtrooms; when faced with emotional expressions in victim impact statements, judges appreciate expressions of compassion and tolerate expressions of grief but are uncomfortable with expressions of anger. These judicial responses to emotional expression, however, must be contextualized; for example, the judges we spoke with often articulated different reactions to impact statements given by victims of sexual assault, those who are strangers to the perpetrator, and impact statements given by victims of domestic violence, those who are in a relationship with the perpetrator.

Making Academic Work Advocacy Work: Technologies of Power in the Public Arena

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

A Different Place to Birth: A Material Rhetoric Analysis of Baby Haven, a Free-Standing Birth Center

Clients at a free-standing birth center resist the medical hegemonic construction of their pregnant bodies as risky entities through the spatial organization and material objects of the center. The center displays partisan messages about birth as a safe and private event. Therefore, when clients realize the physical and psychological consequences of structures and objects, they reconnect with their physical bodies, associate mental attitudes with physical sensations, and sustain a counterdiscourse about birth.

“Standing in Terri Schiavo's Shoes”: The Role of Genre in End-of-Life Decision Making

This article reports the findings from analysis of end-of-life court cases and case files from one state public guardianship administrator as well as interviews with guardians or surrogates to identify how language and principles of the courts are operationalized in end-of-life decisions for those who are unable to make decisions for themselves. We found that physicians and guardians worked well within the requirements of the genre to ensure the best interests for those whom they represent.

My Career and the "Rhetoric of" Technical Writing and Communication.

My career in technical writing and communication began in 1968 when I took a position in the Publications Department at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). At the time, IEEE was housed “kitty-corner” from the United Nations Building and across the street from Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on East 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues in New York City. I had just graduated from Pacific University in tiny Forest Grove, OR, so the transition was intense. I did both production and editing at IEEE, which meant that I edited manuscripts to conform to the organization’s style and cut up and pasted paper galleys into mock page proofs, scaling spaces for illustrations and avoiding “widow lines.” I worked on a number of publications, including IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, but I knew next to nothing about the technical content of these publications. The Publications Department was staffed by about 20 young women just out of college, and for most of us, this was a first job and just a job. Many of us had to take home overtime to pay rent, buy food, and meet expenses. I had three good friends there—Carolyn, who always loaned me

Guest Editors' Introduction: Technical Communication and the Law

20 when I came up short before the next paycheck, and Barrett and Janet, who were willing to lead me astray. Barrett, Janet, and I spent lunchtime on the roof of the building. Binoculars in hand, we used to spy into the apartment of a certain late night talk show host who lived on 1st Avenue. In turn, he had a telescope trained on a nearby building rooftop where women flight attendants sunbathed sans clothes. When I look back at my career and the changes in the field of technical writing and communication, those days in the 1960s seem like a completely different world. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 2015, Vol. 45(4) 381–391 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0047281615585754 jtw.sagepub.com

Emotional Appeals and Moral Standards: Rhetorical Arguments in Court Cases

This special issue features articles that address legal issues as they relate to technical communication research, pedagogy, and practice. The articles will assist instructors who wish to engage classes in activities that allow students to understand, analyze, and respond to legal dilemmas related to workplace activities. The articles will also highlight contemporary subjects for research inquiry in technical communication, including the relationship between technical communication and civic engagement, which often depends on the study of legal processes. It is our hope that this special issue will generate interest in the intersection of technical communication and the law and that it will provide readers of TCQ with a valuable and unique foundation for teaching and research in this area.

Expanding Our Understanding of Kairos: Tracing Moral Panic and Risk Perception in the Debate over the Minnesota Sex Offender Program

In this article, I analyze 73 circuit court opinions in which due process rights are weighed according to a little-known legal test called shocks the conscience. I also offer my observations of a federal trial in the U.S. district court in 2015 upon which the test was imposed. I reveal how requiring the shocks-the-conscience test confirms the authority of the state and silences those who have been singled out as individuals or as groups to be deprived of constitutional rights. In particular, professional communication scholars who examine emotional appeals as rhetorical strategies should find this article of interest.

Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases

The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) offers treatment to sex offenders civilly confined after they complete their prison sentences. In this article, we enhance the notion of kairos in rhetorical situations with the perceptions of risk and the sociological concept of moral panic by tracing three kairotic moments involving MSOP: the 1992 Dennis Linehan civil commitment case; the 2003 murder of college student Dru Sjodin; and the 2012 provisional discharge of Clarence Opheim. We examine the political, public, and media response to these events and provide the results of 21 interviews with stakeholders. In doing so, we hope to illustrate how moral panic and risk perception can so influence what seems the right choice at the right time that stakeholders may get caught in what we call kairotic cycles, where solutions to a problem are stymied by competing perceptions and by entrenched positions that reoccur over time and without resolution.