The purpose of this formative intervention was to design a professional and technical communications course around rhetorical inquiry. The participants, undergraduate health sciences majors (N=22 for section A, N=20 section B), were observed throughout the fall semester of the 2014-2015 academic year. A rhetorical inquiry framework was applied via activity systems, and data were collected using several methodologies including participant observations, research questionnaires, as well as participant deliverables, and were transcribed using Daisy Mwanza's Eight-Step Model. Results demonstrated students successfully used activity systems as a means of approaching rhetorical inquiry. Furthermore, students indicated a high level of engagement in the course. This study demonstrates how rhetorical inquiry can be utilized in Professional and Technical Communication for Health Sciences as a means of advancing student agency and participatory learning environments. The study also suggests rhetorical inquiry should be part of the professional and technical communication curriculum and other academic disciplines as well as utilized in the workplace.

This project, Toward a Pedagogy of Visual Communication as Critical Practice in Professional and Technical Communication, examines the teaching of visual communication in undergraduate professional and technical communication courses. Through an analysis of scholarship, textbooks, and a service-learning project as a case study, I argue that a situated visual communication pedagogy that integrates both analysis and reflection throughout the visual production and design process can better allow students to understand the ways in which the visual participates within larger social and cultural contexts. This understanding helps students develop abilities to potentially transform visual discourses emphasizing that all visual documents and texts, including the ones they produce, participate in shaping the ways in which meaning is made. By integrating visual communication and design into service-learning and other civic engagement pedagogies in the professional and technical communication classroom, instructors and students can begin to interrogate the view that professional and technical communication is a neutral, objective practice concerned only with prescriptive adherence to forms, conventions, workplace efficiency, and corporate success. Thus, in addition to helping students develop as communicators and thinkers, integrating visual communication into service-learning and throughout the duration of a course allows students to explore the civic dimensions of professional and technical communication, situating them as engaged designers and active members of their communities.

Rhetoricians have long been interested in public policy discourse. However, studies have yet to apply the micro-lens of writing process to this context. One consequence is that, while studies of policy discourse point to the complexity of this area, they do not investigate the writing behaviors this complexity inspires. Secondly, while studies of writing process in other areas of rhetoric allow us to theorize process, our theories are typically based on more structured writing environments—such as the classroom, academic discipline, and professional workplace. As a consequence, we know less about invention and other writing processes in more unpredictable, explicitly contested settings. To address these gaps, this dissertation presents a process-based case study of collaborative writing within the context of policy and legal discourse. The case study tracks the year-long work of a group of advocates who attempted to establish Domestic Partner Benefits (DPB) at a large public university. Due to legal restrictions, the writers could not assume a clear authority as they attempted to write a policy proposal together. In meetings in which they invented ideas, a prominent behavior emerged in their talk, what this dissertation refers to as role-play work. Role-play work is a theory of rhetorical invention in which writers propose roles for themselves and their audiences, develop arguments from within those roles, and try to identify how they might be recognized or misrecognized as a consequence of assuming roles. Tracing patterns in the writers’ talk, this dissertation describes role-play work at three critical junctures: in the early stages, when the group lacks legal resources, during a tumultuous hunger strike in which the institution delivers its interpretation of the law, and during the group’s later writing process, when the group has a working understanding of a legal argument they can propose. This dissertation analyzes how writers use role-play to engage authoritative discourse that manifests at each stage: first, to imaginatively co-construct what might be authoritative, next, to confront authority-as-articulated, and finally, to understand the nuance of a potentially authoritative argument. Findings presented in this dissertation may be relevant to scholarship in professional and technical communication, collaborative writing and invention, writing process research, policy discourse, discourse analysis, and queer studies. / text

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