2018 Event Schedule
Friday, June 15, 2018
8:00 am Breakfast and Introductions
Utah Valley Convention Center Boardroom (3rd floor)
9:00 Design Thinking Activity
What Do We Want to Be?
Facilitators: Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Ashley Patriarca
Afternoon Presentations
1:00 - 1:30 Matthew R. Sharp, "I am a Sophist: Reclaiming Sophistry for Professional Communication"
Even though several projects have attempted to reclaim sophistry for a newer, more inclusive age, nobody proudly claims, “I am a Sophist” until now. This project argues that sophistry is alive and well, and there may be benefits to accepting that reality. By allowing ourselves to accept what professional communicators do as a modern-day sophistic‚ to proudly exclaim “We are Sophists‚” only then can we truly recover the Sophists and learn from them.
1:30 - 2:00 Rachel Wolford, "What is (Y)Our Applied Rhetoric? Promoting Environmental Change Through Story Maps"
Many of us are hybrid scholars in professional and technical communication who think about ideas and design and problem-solving rhetorically. To me, this is applied rhetoric. My research focuses on creating ArcGIS Story Maps for Landscape Architecture courses I am taking to broaden my research on rhetoric and the environment, particularly the scarcity of water in West Texas. My goal is to tangibly affect change through rhetoric and communication, not simply to write about it.
2:00 - 2:30 Greg Wilson, "Old Dog, New Theory"
In a career marked by praxis, what does it mean for a mid-career scholar to retool the theories he applies? This paper will address the need, the ethics, and the strategies for staying current with cutting-edge ideas in rhetoric and technical communication, with an eye toward addressing real-world problems and conducting research on technology and workplaces.
2:30 - 2:45 Break
2:45 - 3:15 Matt Baker, "The Information Answerers Need: A Content Analysis of Information Requested in How-To Comments"
Knowledge workers turn to social how-to questions to elicit information they need to complete their jobs. Because other users provide answers, knowledge workers are not guaranteed answers. Knowledge workers, therefore, must understand the information that those answering need to answer the questions. This presentation provides insight into the information that answerers need by reporting results of a content analysis of answerers' information requests in 690 t-units extracted from comments posted to 250 social how-to questions.
3:15 - 3:45 Andrew Famiglietti, "Sorting the Cruft: The Rhetoric of Wikipedia's AfD Process"
Wikipedia represents a potentially fruitful object of study for these seeking to understand applied rhetoric. As a very large, very active, very visible open-source community, Wikipedia gives researchers the opportunity to study a vast repository of debate and discussion. While the role of deliberation within the Wikipedia's process of self-governance is widely acknowledged (Reagle) but the rhetorical strategies employed by editors within these debates and discussions has been under-explored to date. In this poster, I present some preliminary results of a quantitative analysis of one important site of rhetoric within Wikipedia: the articles for deletion process.
3:45 - 4:15 Stephen Carradini, "Professional, Technical, and/or Business Communication: A Collocational Analysis of Field Terminology in Research Abstracts (Or, Professional Communication is Real, Spread the Word, Spread the Word)
Are the terms technical communication, business communication, and professional communication‚ distinct fields of study or interchangeable terms? Via collocation analysis of the three terms from a corpus of 4439 research article abstracts, I argue these domains are largely distinct but share some bonds. Technical communication focuses on the communication of technical information, business communication focuses on communications in organizations, and professional communication focuses on the individual as a professional trying to get work done.
4:15 - 4:30 Break
4:30 - 5:00 Stephen David Grover, "Ethos in Cook's Illustrated: An Examination of Rhetoric in Recipe Writing"
This presentation examines the working of ethos in a popular cooking magazine, Cook's Illustrated. I apply a framework for analyzing credibility in the context of online product reviews to the magazine in order to determine how it presents itself as a credible and reliable. In doing so, and in reviewing the sparse but relevant literature on cookbook rhetoric, I hope to pave the way for additional inquiry into cookbooks as a unique form of both rhetoric and technical communication.
5:00 - 5:30 Angie Mallory, "Applied Rhetoric: Defined by Which Gap We Fill and What Stuff We Fill It With"
The gap we seek to fill defines us. While traditional scholarship fills gaps in research, Applied Rhetoric fills gaps in the lived experience of non-academics, utilizing Rhetorical Listening (Ratcliffe) to understand what matters to others. Our deliverable is a tangible, experiential one, rather than a publication‚ research lived not read. However, this approach will require us to adopt methods that enable us to work in the here and now, not merely in a text frozen in time.
5:30 - 6:00 Large Group Discussion: Reflection on What We're Learning and Thinking
6:30 Dinner at Communal Restaurant
Saturday, June 16, 2018
8:00 am Breakfast in the Boardroom
Utah Valley Convention Center
9:00 am Morning Discussion
Making decisions: What is the future of Applied Rhetoric?
Facilitators: Jacob Rawlins and Matthew R. Sharp
Afternoon Presentations
1:00 - 1:30 Ed Nagelhout, "Applied Rhetoric in Academic Programs: Platforms and Tools in Practice"
This presentation will describe two current projects at the initial stages of development at our large, diverse, minority-serving institution. The first is a Domain of One's Own initiative conducted in collaboration with the Office of Institutional Technology. The second describes the development of a community-built, community-authored, open source and open access textbook revision in collaboration with Online Education.
1:30 - 2:00 Richard Mangum and Matthew Haslam, "Teaching Applied Rhetoric in an Engineering Setting"
The authors present an example of how engineering faculty and technical writing professors collaborate to prepare senior engineering students for the engineering and communication practices they will encounter in the workplace.
2:00 - 2:30 Laura Vernon, "Rhetorical Analysis of Trump's Speech About the Bears Ears Monument in Utah"
This presentation discusses the results of a rhetorical analysis of remarks Donald Trump made at a press conference in Salt Lake City in December 2017 to sign a proclamation to reduce the number of acres in the Bears Ears National Monument. The analysis shows how Trump attempts to persuade his audience and elicit certain responses from them; uses strategic word choices and rhetorical stylistic moves to justify his action; and considers the political and economic contexts in which his remarks are received. Participants will better understand and appreciate the rhetorical situation of the communication act and the master rhetor himself.
2:30 - 2:45 Break
2:45 - 3:15 Jacob Rawlins and Greg Wilson, "Material Rhetoric and Deliberation in the Workplace: Managing (Post-Human) Technology Change"
In this presentation, we examine the deliberative process surrounding the decision to change the central communication technologies of the Printing Services department at Iowa State University. Through interviews, observations, and documents gathered during a three-year ethnographic study of the organization, we show how the material spaces and technologies within a workplace network interact with the humans involved in deliberation.
3:15 - 3:45 James M. Dubinsky, "Standing Together or Falling Apart: Impact of NEH's Grant Program on Bridging Veteran/Civilian Gulf"
Much evidence exists to demonstrate that the gulf between America's armed forces and its civilians has never been greater. Many organizations focus on veterans, but few focus on bridging the gap between veterans and society. One organization engaged in bridge building is the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). My presentation will discuss a pilot project assessing the impact of the NEH's program Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War.
3:45 - 4:15 Melanie Joy McNaughton, "Coffee Cups That Make You Happy: Designing the Good Life"
This presentation knits together discourses on brand communication and graphic design with critical/cultural studies to explore the visual rhetoric of product packaging. This analysis takes up the branding of Martha Stewart home goods, investigating applied rhetoric in the form of product packaging. The visual rhetoric of the packaging, as well as the narratives printed on the packaging serve to ritualize these goods, and emphasize the place of design in sophisticated home-keeping practices.
4:15 - 4:30 Break
4:30 - 5:30 Large Group Discussion: Ok. What's Next?