Rhetorical Strategies

Key rhetorical strategies underlie effective communication – regardless of the type of communication. Age old techniques – such as metaphor, argument structure, etc. – can help even modern documents get their messages across to the right audiences. This page lists resources that explore those strategies and help you to apply them to communication acts.

  • IEEE Transactions Available, Sept 2024

    Published on September 19, 2024 IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication SEPTEMBER 2024       VOLUME 67      NUMBER 3       IEPCBU      (ISSN 0361-1434) INTEGRATIVE LITERATURE REVIEWS The Evolutionary Convergence of Technical Communication and Translation: An Integrative Literature Review of Scholarship from 2000 to 2022, G. Palumbo and A. H. Duin This study sought to ...

  • Experience Design Should Not Make Users Cry

    Published on June 9, 2024 An Experience Design Review of Munich’s Altes Pinakothek Museum By Kristin Zibell, guest author June 2024 I thought the Albrecht Dürer masterwork painting, “Selbstbildnis imcPelzrock” would make me cry.cInstead, it was the abominable experience design of the Altes Pinakothek museum that brought me to ...

  • Back to Basics: What Can Aristotle Teach Us About Modern Communication?

    Published on November 11, 2022 By Kohava Mendelsohn As a Professional Engineer, it is important to be convincing in many circumstances: Convincing companies to hire you, convincing people to invest in your business, and convincing customers your product is what they desired. Much like today, in Ancient ...

  • Cognitive Biases in Technical Communication

    Published on July 2, 2020 How aware are you of your cognitive biases and how they can impact your reception and delivery of communication? In a paper to be delivered at ProComm2020, Quan Zhou categorizes and outlines over twenty cognitive biases that can play into the ...

  • Flatten the Curve: Why certain messages catch on

    Published on May 4, 2020 When communicating about risk, the hope is to craft appropriate messaging to motivate appropriate action and understanding by the public. This is often challenging, particularly when there is so much scientific uncertainty involved in the risk. Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, many ...

  • Communicating Leadership in a Crisis

    Published on April 19, 2020 Photo: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, we have witnessed many stark examples of strong, responsible leadership – and some examples of not so responsible leadership. This leadership has been demonstrated through legislative action, but also ...

  • Language Choices in Times of Crisis: Wordsmithing our Response to COVID-19

    Published on April 16, 2020 Times of crisis can provide stark reminders of the importance of language and communication. At a moment in time when the majority of us are – to varying degrees – practicing social isolation in an attempt to prevent the novel coronavirus ...

  • Using Data AND Story to Persuade Readers

    Published on June 4, 2019 For a technical audience of engineers, quantitative data often holds the key to persuasion. For more general audiences, however, narrative or storytelling has been shown to potentially hold greater sway. In addition, the effectiveness of both techniques is context-based and contingent ...

  • Think like your audience for better, more effective communication

    Published on April 2, 2019 One of the cardinal sins in professional communication is to focus on what you want to say, rather than what your audience needs to hear. A poet or a novelist may have the privilege of their audiences wanting to hear what ...

  • Tell your Story: Understanding Narrative to Engage Audiences

    Published on March 4, 2019 One of the most frequent things we hear from audiences – both of reports and presentations – who fail to engage with and understand the content being communicated is: “What’s the story?” It may seem like an odd request, since engineering ...

  • Making the Unfamiliar Familiar: Metaphors as a Strategy for Clarifying Technical and Scientific Concepts

    Published on January 15, 2019 For the engineers that I have taught, one of the most challenging communication tasks is explaining scientific concepts to less technical audiences, such as the general public. Yet explaining their work to the public – and other audiences with varying levels ...

  • Communicating about New Sustainable Technologies: Aachen University’s Claas Digmayer

    Published on December 18, 2017 We asked Aachen University’s Claas Digmayer to talk about the importance of public communication in the acceptance of new sustainable technologies. In this video, he describes how two similar technologies, Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Capture and Utilization, have been ...

  • The Impact of Indirect Speech Acts on Professional Communication

    Published on November 19, 2016 We don’t always say what we mean … In fact, we often avoid direct speech acts – saying what we mean – in the service of politeness and conflict avoidance, relying instead on indirect speech to communicate complex thoughts. An indirect speech act, according ...

  • Five Ways Engineers Can Improve Their Writing

    Published on May 30, 2016 Our expertise and resources are on display this month in The Institute, IEEE’s news magazine. A few weeks ago, Richard House, our society’s president, and Jessica Livingston, one of his co-authors on The Engineering Communication Manual, spoke with John R. Platt-a technical communication expert ...

Communication Resources