Toward an Expanded Concept of Rhetorical Delivery: The Uses of Reports in Public Policy Debates    

Preparing students for civic engagement requires new knowledge about the uses of documents for advocacy and social change. Substantial social change results from repeated rather than from single rhetorical acts. Reconsideration of the rhetorical canon of delivery suggests expanding the concept beyond its present connection to publication (visual design, medium) to a rhetorical situation comprehensively defined. Delivery may take place over time and embrace a web of activities including field work, updates, and interconnections with other publications.

Rude, Carolyn D. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>TC>Reports>Rhetoric

Writers and Their Maps: The Construction of a GAO Report on Sexual Harassment      

This article examines a 1994 General Accounting Office (GAO) report on sexual harassment at U.S. service academies to determine how power structures affected the report writers’ rhetorical choices. Employing postmodern mapping theories, the article identifies what is valued and devalued in the report’s contents. Then it describes Congress’s reaction to the report and speculates on the report’s impact on public discourse and subsequent social action. It offers postmapping theory as a way of understanding the relationship between discourse and power in policy reports.

Cargile Cook, Kelli. Technical Communication Quarterly (2000). Articles>Rhetoric>Reports>Sexual Harassment

The Writing Consultant as Cultural Interpreter: Bridging Cultural Perspectives on the Genre of the Periodic Engineering Report      

The periodic engineering report can become a source of conflict and frustration when North American engineers collaborate with colleagues abroad. To overcome such difficulties, technical companies may hire writing consultants, who then take on the additional role of cultural interpreters, helping the partners bridge differences in both the practice of engineering and the language and culture of each country. As such a writing consultant, I worked with a Canadian engineering company, its Russian contractors, and a Russian translator to analyze the sources of difficulties in their reports. The language of the reports was English, but differences in tone as well as reader expectations about organization, format, and appropriate content caused misunderstandings among the collaborators. Contrastive rhetorical analysis helped to identify problems in both the conception of the report as a document and the translation of particular text.

Artemeva, Natasha. Technical Communication Quarterly (1998). Articles>Rhetoric>Reports

"Sort of Set My Goal to Come to Class": Evoking Expressive Content in Policy Reports    

This article documents a novel yet theory-informed process of preparing research reports designed for government officials who are concerned with creating adult-literacy policy. The authors use cartoons that include verbatim dialogue from the transcripts of interviews with research participants with low functional literacy. This dialogue, which depicts positive messages about the participants’ moral character, strengths, and resilience, is set against photographic backdrops of the participants’ lived environment to give a sense of real people in a real place. Inclusion of such images is an attempt to change policy-report readers’ thinking about adult literacy because creative visual communication offers ways to approach this challenge that text alone cannot.

Sligo, Frank and Elspeth Tilley. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2009). Articles>Writing>Reports>Rhetoric