#29225
Florence Nightingale's Visual Rhetoric in the Rose Diagrams 
Florence Nightingale is usually pictured as an angelic nurse tending to British soldiers in military hospitals during the Crimean War. Although Nightingale was indeed a tender of soldiers, she was also an administrator, advocate for the common soldier, and proponent of the use of statistics and information design. This article examines Nightingale's rose diagrams, which she designed following her service as the director of nurses at a field hospital in the Crimean War. When the war ended, Nightingale was asked by the queen to write a report on the poor sanitary conditions and make recommendations for reform. When, after six months, the government did not act on the reforms, Nightingale decided to write an annex to the report, in which she would include her invention, the rose diagrams. Nightingale's ultimate success in persuading the government to institute reforms is an illustration of the power of visual rhetoric, as well as an example of Nightingale's own passionate resolve to right what she saw as a grievous wrong.
Brasseur, Lee. Technical Communication Quarterly (2005). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical>Technical Illustration
#29777
Graphic Barriers: Enhanced Comprehension of Patient Education Material 
In this paper, I will demonstrate that when choosing graphics for patient education material, document designers should consider empirical research on memory of pictures and mental processing of graphs. It has been shown that comprehension of patient education materials is often impeded by text written at reading levels too high for the patient population. Graphics have been used to aid in overcoming the deficits of complex text. However, graphics too can be too advanced for the client to understand if designers do not consider audience and cognitive processing of images.
Terrell Willis, Sharese. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Scientific Communication>Technical Illustration>Biomedical
#29530
Multimodal Analysis: An Integrative Approach for Scientific Visualizing on the Web 
The Multimodal approach offers technical communicators and science writers an analytical tool to synthesize the meaning made in the connections across communicative modes. This multimodal synthesis can help technical communicators better exploit the meaning-making potential of multimodal combinations and understand the needs of future generations shaped by their increasingly developed multimodal literacy.
Maier, Carmen Daniela, Constance Kampf and Peter Kastberg. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Scientific Communication>Technical Illustration>Biomedical
