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

Writers Who Love Words Too Much  

Cautions writers against a variety of linguistic sins.

Belding, Janet R. Intercom (2002). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

Writing a Successful Speech

At some point in your career, you will find it necessary to do a speech or presentation. Sound scary? Something you're not sure you can do? Let's take a look at how to write a successful speech that will get the results you want.

Turner, Gordon. STC Williamette Valley (2002). Articles>Rhetoric>Presentations

Writing and Designing for the Web (573G)

This class focuses on effective writing and design for online environments--with particular emphasis on the Web. While grounded in relevant theory, this course has a workshop format, with an emphasis on hands-on, collaborative learning.

Krause, Tim. Metropolitan State University (2005). Academic>Courses>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric

Writing and Presenting Your Thesis or Dissertation

A practical Guide to assist in the crafting, implementing and defending of a graduate school thesis or dissertation. Authored by S. Joseph Levine, Michigan State University (levine@msu.edu).

Levine, S. Joseph. Learner Associates (1998). Academic>Writing>Rhetoric

Writing Cinematically

Authors have long understood how to shift their focus to capture both landscape and character.

Clark, Roy Peter. Poynter Online (2004). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

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

Writing for Decisionmakers: Using Evidence and Structure to Persuade  

In approaching a writing task, we often write from the standpoint of writers, which is, of course, what we are. But if we want our writing to result in some kind of action on the part of our readers, we need to remember that how we present and structure the evidence that we have has a great deal to do with how persuasive our argument is— and what action, if any, results from it. The more oriented toward the reader our writing is, the more powerful it will be.

Fruitman, Michael P. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Writing>Proposals>Rhetoric

Writing for Non-Readers  

This paper shows how drawings, images and icons can be effectively used to help technical writers reach those readers who are often reluctant to read written instructions. It also describes some of the positive results of effective visual communications on documents undergoing translation. Finally, it gives background information on the importance of visual communication and lists some basic rules for producing effective instructional pictures.

Zanon, Michela. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>Rhetoric>Visual>Visual Rhetoric

Writing for Results  

All writing elicits some action or reaction—some result—from the reader. These results need not be arbitrary. You, as author, can greatly influence how your reader acts. Effective writing achieves your desired results. You can increase your chances of success by following the ten steps outlined in Writing for Results. Through these steps, you tailor your message so that it appeals to your reader’s needs and interests, thus enabling action that helps you get exactly what you want. This process works for both long and short communiqués.

Maggiani, Rich and Allison Brochu. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

Writing in a Culture of Simulation: Ethos Online    

The MUD Bot Julia and the Turing test can help us understand some things about writing in new technological environments. These environments belong to what Sherry Turkle has called our “culture of simulation” (Turkle, 1997). She takes the term simulation from postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard, who maintains that the proliferation of signs in contemporary society has “imploded” the distinction between the real and the simulated: the world of signs has become “hyperreal,” overwhelming the physical world and replacing it as our primary experience.

Miller, Carolyn R. North Carolina State University (2002). Articles>Rhetoric>Online

The Writing Instructor  

The Writing Instructor is a blind peer-reviewed journal, publishing in print since 1981 and on the Internet since June, 2001. Its distinguished editorial board consists of over 150 scholars- teachers- writers representing over 75 universities, community colleges, and K-12 schools.

TWI. Journals>Education>Writing>Rhetoric

Writing Persuasively  

Just what IS 'persuasive writing' and how does it differ from any other kind of writing? If you ever have to use the written word to convince someone of something, then you will need to know how to write persuasively.

Brochu, Allison G. and Mary O'Neill. STC Orange County (1998). Presentations>Rhetoric

Writing Processes

Our Writing Guides help you locate information quickly on specific topics. These guides focus on a range of composing processes as well as issues related to the situations in which writers find themselves.

Colorado State University. Articles>Style Guides>Writing>Rhetoric

Writing Reader-Friendly Documents  

The traditional way of writing government documents has not worked well. Too often, complicated and jargon filled documents have resulted in frustration, lawsuits, and a lack of trust between citizens and their government. To overcome this legacy, we have a great responsibility to communicate clearly.

PlainLanguage.gov (1995). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric>Minimalism

Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives  

This is the first in a series of online books sponsored by the WAC Clearinghouse. The chapters in this edited collection consider human activity and writing from three different perspectives: the role of writing in producing work and the economy; the role of writing in creating, maintaining, and transforming socially located selves and communities; and the role of writing formal education. The editors observe, 'The activity approaches to understanding writing presented in this volume give us ways to examine more closely how people do the work of the world and form the relations that give rise to the sense of selves and societies through writing, reading, and circulating texts. These essays provide major contributions to both writing research and activity theory as well as to the recently emerged but now robust research tradition that brings the two together.'

Bazerman, Charles and David R. Russell. Academic.Writing (2002). Books>Writing>Writing Across the Curriculum>Rhetoric

The Writing Student’s Guide to Successful Oral Presentations  

Graduates of technical writing programs often enter the workplace with poor oral communication skills due to lack of practice. The trainer or writing teacher can use several strategies to offer the students oral practice without expending a great deal of class time. Recommended classroom strategies include teaching the students basic preparation skills and presentational techniques, giving them brief as well as longer practice following strict time limits, and allowing them to receive immediate feedback from listeners. These efforts can aid writing students in giving oral presentations and in preparing them for the work setting.

Connors, Patricia E. STC Proceedings (1993). Presentations>Advice>Rhetoric

Writing to Inform, Convince, and Persuade

This course introduces the writing process and the types of academic writing you may be expected to complete in your college career such as research papers, argumentative papers, and literature reviews. The course is designed to help you develop a clear thesis in a written paper and support that thesis with appropriate sources. Time will be spent discussing rhetorical elements in writing such as audience, purpose, and argumentative structure. In addition, you will practice steps in the writing process such as invention, research, organization, drafting, revision, and editing. Your assignments will report, synthesize, and draw conclusions regarding the significance of what you read. Assignments may include 1) summary or abstract; 2) rhetorical analysis; (3) short thesis paper; (4) prospectus; (5) evaluation or review of literature; (6) research paper. Some courses are taught in a computer classroom and some in a traditional classroom.

Ratliff, Clancy. University of Minnesota (2003). Academic>Courses>Writing>Rhetoric

Writing, Editing and Designing: a Unified Process

What's in it for me? That's what magazine readers must see at first glance, or they will flip on by. Winning their attention requires thoughtful blending of words and design from the beginning of the publication process.

Writing that Works (2003). Articles>Writing>Editing>Visual Rhetoric

Writing, Literacy and Technology: Toward a Cyborg Writing  

Like Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Lyotard, and others, Haraway calls for a conception of writing (“cyborg writing,” in her terms) that resists authoritative, phallogocentric writing practices, that foregrounds the writer’s own situatedness in history and in his or her writing practice, and that makes visible the very “apparatus of the production of authority” that all writers tend to submerge in their discourse. This is not to say that writers must “eschew” authority, but that in a truly ethical and postmodern stance they must reveal how authority is implicated in discourse. And because writing is inseparable both from its own embodied situatedness and from systems of liberation and domination, “literacy” should be a central concern of us all.

Olson, Gary A. JAC (1996). Articles>Rhetoric>Technology

Written Communication    

In the last decade, research on the written word has grown out of the realization in linguistics, psychology and the cognitive sciences that discourse and language production represent cutting-edge issues in the these disciplines. Understanding the nature of written communication has defined an essential nexus of intellectual inquiry into these fields. Written Communication has contributed to and continues to shape this emerging area of inquiry. This scholarly journal bring you new research, ideas and theoretical concepts.

Written Communication. Journals>Writing>Rhetoric

XML and the New Design Regime: Disputes Between Designers, Application Developers, Authors and Readers in Changing Technological Conditions and Perceptions of Social and Professional Need    

This study attempts to: (a) to specify a theory that explains the historical character of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, and (b) use that theory to cast light on a particular instance of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, that of the Web, principally, the issue of structured markup and discussions about precisely what a structured Web should look like, the work it should do, and so forth. It attempts to identify, describe, and analyze, are the norms and conventions that govern the production of written discourse.

Wilkes, Gilbert Vanburen IV. Journal of Computer Documentation (2002). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Rhetoric

"You're a Guaranteed Winner": Composing "You" in a Consumer Culture    

This article explores the functional elegance of direct mail as it constructs its target audience. More specifically, it examines direct mailings included in a nationally publicized court case involving Publishers' Clearing House and articulates how the use of particular genre-based, rhetorical and linguistic strategies in these mailings construct reader identity. It argues that the documents use you-attitude to construct the identity of the reader as winner, implied reader devices to reinforce the reader's identity as winner and to establish the reader's identity as the writer's friend, and linguistic politeness strategies to build feelings of solidarity of the reader toward the writer. It concludes with the observation that the direct mail in our study, rather than being "junk," is really a skillfully written set of documents, successfully interweaving various discourse strategies and raising both ethical and professional issues in the process.

Ewald, Helen Rothschild and Roberta Vann. JBC (2003). Articles>Business Communication>Marketing>Rhetoric

Your About Page Is a Robot

An About page should provide context and necessary facts, but should also give the reader compelling reasons to do what you want them to do.

Kissane, Erin. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>Rhetoric