Journal of Business and Technical Communication current issue

Assertions of Expertise in Online Product Reviews

Mackiewicz, J. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:16:04 PST

In online consumer reviews on Web sites such as Epinions, laypeople write and post their evaluations of technical products. But how do they get readers to take their opinions seriously? One way that online reviewers establish credibility is to assert expertise. This article describes 10 types of assertions that online reviewers used (along with the three broader categories of these types), explaining the method used to test the types for reliability. This testing revealed that the types are reliable. This study lays the groundwork for understanding how reviewers construct expertise and, therefore, credibility and for gauging readers' perceptions of reviews that contain these assertions.

The Resources of Ambiguity: Context, Narrative, and Metaphor in Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene

Journet, D. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:16:04 PST

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene illustrates the power of ambiguity in scientific discourse. The rhetorical and epistemic resources that ambiguity provide are most apparent at the level of metaphor but are also central to the exigency for Dawkins’s argument and to the narrative form that the argument takes. Using ratios derived from Burke’s dramatistic pentad, I analyze how ambiguous language helped Dawkins to link different theoretical conceptions of the gene and consequently posit connections between genes and organisms that had not yet been empirically established. I thus demonstrate at a conceptual and textual level how ambiguity contributes to the construction of novel scientific arguments. For Dawkins, ambiguity provided a discursive space in which he could speculate on connections and developments for which he did not yet have evidence, data, or terminology. Despite his insistence that his use of figurative motive language was simply a ‘‘convenient shorthand’’ for more technical language, The Selfish Gene demonstrates the powerful epistemological and rhetorical role that ambiguous metaphors play in biological discourse.

The Ethic of Exigence: Information Design, Postmodern Ethics, and the Holocaust

Ward, M. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:16:04 PST

Compared to ethics in technical writing, ethics in design has received less attention. This lack of attention grows more apparent as document design becomes ‘‘information design.’’ Since Katz discerned an ‘‘ethic of expediency’’ in Nazi technical writing, scholars have often framed technical communication ethics in categorical terms. Yet analyses of information design must consider why arrangements of text and graphics have symbolic potency for given cultures. An ‘‘ethic of exigence’’ can be seen in an example of Nazi information design, a 1935 racial-education poster that illustrates how designers and users co-constructed a communally validated meaning. This example supports the postmodern view that ethics must account for naturalized authority as well as individual actions.

Convergence in the Rhetorical Pattern of Directness and Indirectness in Chinese and U.S. Business Letters

Wang, J. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:16:04 PST

This article examines rhetorical patterns in claim letters from two universities, one in China and one in the United States, to see whether these patterns are convergent. A genre-based textual analysis of the claim letters, written by two different cultural groups of participants, found that both groups of letters display a similar rhetorical preference for directness and indirectness. The author explores how local contextual factors have contributed to these groups of participants’ preference for similar rhetorical patterns and calls for the integration of contextual factors in intercultural rhetoric research, practice, and pedagogy.

Special Issue of JBTC: Revisiting the IText Revolution

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:16:04 PST