North Carolina State University

Creating Effective Poster Presentations: An Effective Poster

An effective poster is not just a standard research paper stuck to a board. A poster uses a different, visual grammar. It shows, not tells.

Expertise and Agency: Transformations of Ethos in Human-Computer Interaction

The cases of expert systems and intelligent agents illuminate two dimensions of the dwelling-place we have built for ourselves with our technologies.

Rhetorical Criticism: Theory and Practice

This course covers the twentieth-century development of methods and practice in rhetorical criticism. We will examine the assumptions, achievements, and limitations of a variety of perspectives (for example, neo-Aristotelian, generic, metaphoric, dramatistic, narrative, feminist, sociological, ideological) and survey their application to a variety of discourses (political, institutional, scientific, legal, educational, religious, and the like) and modes (for example, visual and material, as well as oral and written). We will also consider the relationships between rhetorical criticism and literary and other forms of cultural criticism.

Technologies for Texts

Among the many effects of computer technology are dramatic changes in the ways we produce and disseminate written texts. These changes affect everyday uses of writing, in the classroom and the workplace, as well as the professions that focus on written language—print journalism, technical communication, and other areas of publishing and the media. New technologies affect the ways we read and permit new ways of manipulating and linking the written word.

Cooperative Learning in Technical Courses: Procedures, Pitfalls, and Payoffs

As part of the longitudinal study, Dr. Felder and Dr. Rebecca Brent, a professor of education at East Carolina University, adapted or devised procedures for implementing cooperative learning in courses that stress quantitative problem solving. These procedures are summarized in this report. The objectives of the report are to offer some ideas for using cooperative learning effectively in technical courses, to give advance warning of the problems that might arise when CL is implemented, and to provide assurances that the eventual benefits to both instructors and students amply justify the perseverance required to confront and overcome the problems.

Genre as Social Action

Although rhetorical criticism has recently provided a profusion of claims that certain discourses constitute a distinctive class, or genre, rhetorical theory has not provided firm guidance on what constitutes a genre.

Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science

If there is a canonical text in this still-early period of the rhetorical criticism of science, it is the 1953 Nature paper in which James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick proposed the double helix structure for DNA.

Reading Darwin, Reading Nature; or, On the Ethos of Historical Science

Darwin must be read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted. We find this attention to a body of work that is well over a hundred years old to be highly unusual and worth investigating.

The Rhetoric of Decision Science, or Herbert A. Simon Says

The tools of decision science are widely used and accepted in industrial and governmental decision making. But...

Special Topics of Argument in Engineering Reports

As a discussion of writing-across-the-curriculum programs in universities, his essay focuses on disciplinary discourse within academic settings. Nonacademic discourse also occurs with particular conventions, purposes and institutions; such discourse can be subjected to similar study.

Technical Writing and Publication Ethics

A discussion of what one must and must not do in peer-reviewed publishing.

Communication in the 21st Century: The Original Liberal Art in an Age of Science and Technology

Communication is dramatically changed by new technologies. In the 20th century, we have seen the effects of the telephone, radio and television, film, high-speed printing, xerography, desk-top publishing, electronic mail. These communication technologies have changed our national political life, corporate management styles, family connections, individual work habits. Additional change in the next century is inevitable, as we adopt video conferencing, multimedia, and internet technologies. Many of the effects of new technologies are unpredictable: the predicted 'paperless office' has failed to materialize, for example, and word-processing software has transformed the labor of writing in a way that was never anticipated (and later was resisted) by computer developers. But some aspects of communication, both oral and written, have not changed. Communication is still the social glue that holds together nations, corporations, scientific disciplines, and families.

Online Support Systems: Tutorials, Documentation, and Help

Online support systems help computer users achieve goals and accomplish tasks within the contexts of their primary work. Although this definition is extremely broad and includes a wide range of digital forms—from low-end interface elements to high-end hypermedia applications, in this chapter we generally focus on planning, designing, and testing mid-range systems: tutorials, documentation, and help, regardless of their virtual instantiation. We discuss electronic rather than print-based forms because organizations increasingly deliver user support online for a variety of reasons: to reduce development and production costs; to anticipate distributed computing systems and other environments in which users rarely have easy access to print-based materials; and to benefit from the sophisticated searching and interactive capabilities that online environments can provide. In cases where print-based support is still necessary (for example, in packing instructions and in some troubleshooting areas), processes for constructing these documents can be extrapolated from the discussion that follows.

A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing

A discussion of how to argue that technical writing has humanistic value. Reviewing the common belief (at least in 1979) that tech writing was of necessity a 'skills' course, this article counters the traditional 'plain style' rhetorical theory by suggesting possibilities for professional and theoretical alternatives for the field.

Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre

Our understanding of genre as social action afflicts the typical first-year college writing program in the United States. It turns what should be a practical art of achieving social ends into a productive art of making texts that fit certain formal requirements.

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.

Rubrics and Evaluation Resources

Midlink's rubrics site offers documents about educational technique.