Comprising a five-year study, this text examines four engineering students as they write at work. Primarily concerned with whether engineers see their writing as rhetorical or persuasive, the study aims to describe the students' changing understanding of what it is they do when they write.

This textbook describes the field of radio and television in the United States, presents the material in a manner the reader can grasp and enjoy, and makes the book useful for the classroom teacher.
Written for adaptation to individual teaching situations, the book is divided by subject matter into logical chapter divisions that can be assigned in the order appropriate for specific course students. Each chapter stands by itself, but the book is also an integrated whole. It is easy to understand at first reading, by beginning radio-television majors or nonmajor elective students alike. To...

This volume explores knowledge production in defence technology from the Cold War to the 1990s, highlighting technology development and technology transfer. It also includes cited documents pertaining to the transactions that engage customers and vendors in the process of knowledge production.

This work provides an examination of the relationship between written communication in academic and workplace contexts. It is aimed at writing researchers, teachers, programme designers, and others concerned with writing in academic and business arenas.

This book differs from other introductions to pragmatics in approaching the problems of interpreting language use in terms of interpersonal modelling of beliefs and intentions. It is intended to make issues involved in language understanding, such as speech, text, and discourse, accessible to the widest group possible -- not just specialists in linguistics or communication theorists -- but all scholars and researchers whose enterprises depend on having a useful model of how communicative agents understand utterances and expect their own utterances to be understood.
Based on feedback from...

This volume provides an overview of a relatively neglected branch of connectionism known as localist connectionism. The singling out of localist connectionism is motivated by the fact that some critical modeling strategies have been more readily applied in the development and testing of localist as opposed to distributed connectionist models (models using distributed hidden-unit representations and trained with a particular learning algorithm, typically back-propagation). One major theme emerging from this book is that localist connectionism currently provides an interesting means of evolving...

The crash of an Amtrak train near Baltimore, the collapse of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, the incident at Three Mile Island, and other large-scale technological disasters have provided powerful examples of the ways that communication practices influence the events and decisions that precipitate a disaster. These examples have raised ethical questions about the responsibility of writers within agencies, epistemological questions about the nature of representation in science, and rhetorical questions about the nature of expertise and experience as grounds for judgments about risk.
In...

This work examines rhetorical practice relating to situations of risk and how documents and communication succeed or fail in these contexts. It should be of use to scholars in technical communication, rhetoric, and related areas.

Over the past century, the explosive growth of scientific, technical, and cultural disciplines has profoundly affected our daily lives. However, processes of enculturation in sites such as graduate education that have helped to form these disciplines have received very limited research attention. In those sites, graduate students write diverse documents, including course papers, departmental examinations, theses and dissertations, grant and fellowship applications, and disciplinary publications. Thus, writing is one of the central domains of enculturation--an activity through which graduate...