Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
26,559
result(s) for
"Technical communication"
Sort by:
Communicating Science Effectively
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations.
Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences - psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related - on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.
eBook
The Origins of the Art and Practice of Professional Writing
The Origins of the Art and Practice of Professional
Writing addresses the classic divide in teaching written
skills between rhetoric/composition and technical/professional
communication (TPC). It explores a body of texts that were created
earlier than any yet identified by either field: ancient
Mesopotamian documents, produced in the eighth century BCE. The
book debunks two myths: it shows that rhetoric was practiced
consciously and taught systematically long before the Greek
civilization existed; and because a large swathe of the public,
while not fully literate, had access to the services of scribes,
not just men, but women, merchants, and even slaves utilized
writing as a tool for social justice. From their earliest writings,
humans consciously applied principles of persuasion to the
documents that they produced. Rather than being two distinct
fields, rhetoric and professional communication are intertwined in
their histories.
eBook
Getting to the Heart of Science Communication
At a community fire day in a northern California town several years ago, author Faith Kearns gave a talk on building fire-safe houses able to withstand increasingly common wildfires.Much to her surprise, Kearns was confronted by an audience member whose house had recently burned.
eBook
The Art of Visual Design: The Rhetoric of Aesthetics in Technical Communication
Purpose: By recognizing the importance of aesthetics, which have infused technical communication for centuries, designers can more effectively meet audience expectations and achieve key rhetorical goals, including heightening audience engagement, arousing emotion, and enhancing
credibility and persuasiveness. Designers can integrate aesthetics into technical communications by deploying visual conventions generated by larger cultural forces, by applying design principles that foster beauty, and by inventing novel forms.
Methods: Aesthetic theory,
both ancient and modern, and insights from practitioners create a foundation for defining beauty; research and usability studies examining audience preferences provide empirical evidence about the functional value of aesthetics; and aesthetic developments in the nineteenth century and the
subsequent shift to Modernism serve to illustrate the cultural influences on design. The Design Methods Movement affords a springboard for exploring the design process and the nature of creativity.
Results: Although theorists and practitioners hold conflicting views on the
role of aesthetics in functional design, many consider it an important factor that makes designs attractive and engaging to audiences. The pursuit of beauty continues today through the application of culturally based conventions and design principles associated with beauty.
Conclusion:
The cultural knowledge embedded in visual aesthetics operates silently, even imperceptibly, as technical communicators deploy aesthetic conventions to meet audience expectations and to streamline their design processes. At the same time, technical communicators need leeway for creativity
and novelty as they adapt visual elements to specific rhetorical situations, often seeking audience feedback about their aesthetic preferences to create engaging, persuasive, and usable designs.
Journal Article
Global Rhetorics of Science
With this volume, the field of rhetoric of science joins its sister disciplines in history and philosophy in challenging the dominance of Euro-American science as a global epistemology. The discipline of rhetoric understands world-making and community-building as interdependent activities: that is, if we practice science differently, we do politics differently, and vice versa. This wider aperture seems crucial at a time when we are confronted with the limitations of Euro-American science and politics in managing global risks such as pandemics and climate change—particularly in our most vulnerable communities. The contributors to this volume draw on their familiarity with a wide range of global scientific traditions—from Australian Aboriginal ecology to West African medicine to Polynesian navigation science—to suggest possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between science and politics to better manage global risks. These possibilities should not only inspire scholars in rhetoric and technical communication but should also introduce readers from science and technology studies to some useful new approaches to the problem of decolonizing scenes of scientific practice around the world.
eBook