Education and Pedagogy in Technical Communication
Everyday Rhetoric: Shaping Perceptions, Behaviors, and Interactions
Tammy Rice-Bailey and Kimberly S. Baker. London, UK: Routledge. 2026. 286 pages.
Index Terms — Composition, media literacy, rhetoric, writing
Reviewed by Gregory Zobel, Western Oregon University (zobelg@wou.edu)
Review posted on Aug 13, 2026
I like Tammy Rice-Bailey and Kimberly S. Baker’s Everyday Rhetoric: Shaping Perceptions, Behaviors, and Interactions. The e-book version is WCAG 2.2 AA accessible, features a clear three-section organization (Foundations of Influence, Forms of Expression, Rhetoric in Context), writes with a voice that balances essential vocabulary with plain language, and presents an approach to rhetoric that’s understandable, accessible, and non-classist. For readers or students who have little to no knowledge of rhetoric, this makes for an ideal early introduction.
Everyday Rhetoric’s strengths are numerous. First, the readable voice; while the second person “you” felt cringey in a few places, the overall tone, writing, impact, and delivery was so smooth, consistent, and active that I was surprised. I enjoyed reading this book. Next, the consistent presence of key terms and chapter end materials is useful as are most of the assignments. Assignments are designed for groups and individuals with most being detailed and developed. Given these factors, this book makes for an excellent reference, assigned book, or excerpted text for anyone teaching in an undergraduate writing or composition classroom. Third, the clean textual chunking at the section, subsection, and paragraph levels make the text even easier to use. Cherries on top: multiple consistent, contemporary, and relevant examples of news and media; centering of audience; and emphasizing ethical communication.
This book is excellent, but it does have a few limited issues. First, accessibility and disability. Accessibility is mentioned but four times yet given multimodal and multimedia’s current communication dominance, access and accessibility should be more than a few paragraphs spread over 300 pages that could have included more discussion, considerations, or actual assignments. Disability appears five times in Chapter 11: Rhetoric of Health, but nowhere else. As disability scholarship has shown for at least two decades, disability is far more than a health issue. As with accessibility, disability should be more explicitly addressed.
These authors are not alone in this oversight. Sadly, this type of drive-by or performative inclusion, where there’s a few mentions but scant depth, is still the dominant approach to accessibility and disability in almost all fields. Everyday Rhetoric is perfect for first year writing students at community colleges and small state universities, but its price puts the book beyond the reach of many. Finally, while the text’s images are solid and relevant, more visuals would have helped; for example, showing the contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (CRAP) design principles standing alone before doing a CRAP-related image analysis.
The book opens stating its scope was designed for readers in any field where communication is important. Reading this, I was deeply skeptical. That’s a big claim. Having read and reviewed Everyday Rhetoric, the unpretentious, pedagogically sound, and engaging authors met their claim for about 95% of potential fields. Equally important, the authors have made rhetoric accessible to readers and writers new to the practice. Their clear organization, explicit statements of purpose and practical application, and wise selection of high-contrast visuals all create a practical, powerful tool for enhancing communication. Everyday Rhetoric is a user-friendly text that raises the bar on what accessible textbooks look like. A well-done teaching resource, but I’d get the hard copy.
Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience
James M. Lang. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press. 2025. 256 pages, including index.
Index Terms — Nonacademic writing, nonfiction craft, writing strategies
Reviewed by Bonnie Denmark, IEEE Member (denmarkb@wcsu.edu)
Review posted Aug 13, 2026
Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience opens with a persuasive thesis: “If you want to write great nonfiction, write like you teach” (p. 1). James M. Lang’s central premise is that the same habits that make teaching effective—clarity, structure, curiosity, and connection—can also make nonfiction more accessible and engaging. Scholarly writing often follows conventions that serve academic audiences but fail to welcome general readers. Lang’s goal is to help academics carry the energy and responsiveness of good classroom teaching onto the page. The book is especially useful for scholars with deep expertise who want to reach readers outside their fields. Lang’s encouragement may provide just the push some need to move beyond journal articles and write for broader audiences. Readers do not need to be academics to benefit from Lang’s advice. Anyone who writes technical or business material, teaches, or designs presentations can use his guidance to render complex information easier to grasp, more engaging, and better suited to varied audiences.
The book is clearly organized into useful chapters titled “Intriguing Questions,” “Writing Design,” “Using Evidence,” “Cultivating Reader Attention,” “Invitational Language,” and “Revising and Editing.” Each chapter is divided into sections with informative headings, examples from well-written nonfiction, a recap of key strategies, and writing prompts. Five of the six chapters also include a “GenAI Callout” suggesting ways to use generative AI as a writing aid. The final appendix, presented as a course syllabus, guides readers through the process of submitting, publishing, and promoting a book.
Lang, a longtime educator and writer, argues that the instincts teachers use to capture and hold students’ interest also make nonfiction compelling for general readers. Teachers learn to spark curiosity, organize content logically, ease cognitive load, and use stories to animate ideas. Writers can draw on those same practices to create reading experiences that do not bore, confuse, or exhaust their audience. Nonfiction should lean into storytelling, use description and detail to bring ideas to life, and close knowledge gaps that experts may otherwise overlook.
Lang reminds writers that attention is fragile: “You are competing with a world of distractions” (p. 93). Just as teachers must pivot in the classroom when students start nodding off, fidgeting, or sneaking looks at their phones, writers must help readers stay oriented and engaged. Readers of popular articles and trade books may not share the background knowledge, purpose, or attention span of scholars who seek out academic journals. So, like teachers, nonfiction writers must rouse interest, provide context, use vivid examples, and create breathing room when information becomes dense. Lang presents a practical toolkit of attention strategies, including opening with an intriguing fact, striking statistic, provocative claim, or memorable quotation (this one familiar from first-year composition); breaking up text with chapters, paragraphs, and section headings; using formatting to guide the reader’s eye, such as bullet points and font features; and controlling rhythm and emphasis through sentence structure and punctuation.
Scholarly prose can feel unwelcoming to general readers, so Lang advises, “Your prose should offer a warm welcome to readers who don’t have the expertise that you do” (p. 146). Writers can humanize their prose through word choice, sentence and paragraph length, and glimpses of the person behind the words. As Lang puts it, “To write like you teach means to write like a human educating other humans” (p. 148).
Lang cautions writers not to overwhelm readers with dense subject matter or excessive evidence. Instead, they should explain as if teaching someone without deep knowledge of the subject matter. The techniques rest on a simple principle: put the audience’s needs first. The same elements that make for a strong lesson—piquing curiosity, weaving in stories, providing background, using accessible vocabulary, being mindful of pacing, and reinforcing key messages—also make for strong writing.
The book’s practical guidance includes finding an angle, shaping narratives, and pitching publications. When choosing a topic or publication, it’s important to focus on the intended audience because as Lang notes, “If you write a book intended for everybody, nobody will read it” (p. 142).
Write Like You Teach can encourage scholars who have treated teaching and writing as separate practices to recognize how closely the two can inform one another. Lang intends the book “to serve as the bridge between classroom practices and writing practice, because too many academics either don’t see that bridge or fear to cross it” (p. 2). That bridge can also work in reverse, giving teachers fresh ways to keep students engaged.
My only reservation is that academics who lack a sense of audience in their writing may lack that sense in the classroom as well, so the suggestion to write like they teach may not be of obvious benefit to them. Even so, this book may help them develop that awareness in both settings. And while experienced writers may already be attuned to audience, Lang nonetheless offers a helpful review of what makes nonfiction clear, engaging, and effective.
Overall, Lang’s advice is sound, and his encouragement can be eye-opening for professionals who have not considered that their specialized knowledge might interest general audiences. For writers who need a reset, Write Like You Teach reinforces essential principles of nonfiction craft. His message is captured in the final sentences of the introduction: “You are a teacher. You help people learn. Write like it” (p.15).
Inventing Languages: A Practical Introduction
Carolina González. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2025. 378 pages, plus index.
Index Terms — Communication domains, constructed languages (conlangs), grammar, linguistics, synthetic languages
Reviewed by Geoffrey Hart, STC Fellow (geoff@geoff-hart.com).
Review posted May 27, 2026
If you’ve successfully communicated with family, friends, and colleagues, then you’ve used a natural language (natlang) to achieve this feat. Natlangs are languages that were never consciously planned, and that arose and evolved to meet the needs of a specific people living in a specific environmental, cultural, or historical context. Such languages include jargon and slang, which are subsets of natural languages that arose to meet specific needs. Jargon evolved to express domain-specific knowledge that nobody outside the domain will ever need to know, such as the names of the hundreds of ropes and doohickeys on a ship from the age of sail. Conversely, slang evolved to identify who belonged to a group, and who emphatically didn’t, as in the vocabularies developed by teenagers to distinguish themselves from their parents.
Constructed languages (conlangs) are very different things: they’re deliberately planned and codified, and unlike most natlangs, they may have an authority (usually, the creator) who defines the language’s characteristics and how they should be used. At their extremes, conlangs may bear little resemblance to a natural language. Consider, for example, the language of mathematics that we all grappled with in grade school and many of us continue to use into and after university. Or consider the many computer languages that made the computer revolution possible, from the most abstract binary machine language spoken by computer chips to full-fledged languages such as BASIC that resemble English. But conlangs aren’t purely functional. Fiction is one of their most common uses. However, as Carolina González notes in Inventing Languages: A Practical Introduction, another goal is “[t]o learn how languages work…To serve as a guide to conlanging, while learning more about the languages of the world” (p. 10). She succeeds admirably; students and teachers of languages (not to mention fiction writers!) will love this book!
Languages represent a collection of words that are assembled from morphemes (meaningful units that can’t be subdivided to produce smaller meaningful units) and phonemes(pronunciations) that are structured using a typology (rules for how morphemes and phonemes fit together to produce a word structure) and a grammar (rules for assembling words into sentences). But they evolve as a people’s needs and priorities change over time and mutate to produce irregular and variant forms.
González works through these and other key linguistic concepts step by step, chapter by chapter, following a rigorous, powerful pedagogical structure. Each chapter begins with a list of key terminology that will be explored, with these lists providing an excellent study guide for students who will take an exam in this subject and an excellent refresher if you decide to roll up your sleeves and commit language. The author provides a step-by-step guide to conlang creation, with copious examples and exercises to guide the reader, supported by her encyclopedic knowledge of the linguistic quirks of the world’s several thousand natlangs, few of which resemble English. Although the exercises lack an answer key that would let you confirm whether you’ve correctly understood a point, the book’s instructor’s guide (not reviewed) provides suggested answers.
Throughout the book, González provides concrete, practical advice and a cornucopia of illustrative examples that guide readers through the complexities of creating a language. To make the details concrete, she creates a conlang for a people whose culture is heavily based on salt production to illustrate her theoretical explanations of how that context might influence the design of a language. Each chapter ends with a list of recommended reading, followed by a summary of questions you should ask and answer to reveal how to apply each chapter’s lessons to your own conlang. This also provides a checklist for reviewing specific aspects of the language. Each chapter includes a progressively more complete description of the book’s sample conlang to illustrate the practical aspects of building languages. Readers are frequently reminded to invest time up-front to define rules that will guide word and sentence construction and to refer to them constantly during the creation of new words to maintain consistency. Refreshingly, González isn’t dogmatic and repeatedly acknowledges how your budding conlang may change as you gain increasing familiarity with how it works.
Inventing Languages repeatedly reminds us to remember the language’s context: who will use it, and their environmental, physical, emotional, cultural, gender, hierarchical, and geographic characteristics. Chapter 2 provides a strong description of the requirements imposed by a story’s world that will be useful even for fiction authors who don’t want to create a full new language. For example, there are probably no words for snow or ice in a tropical world and interesting complications would arise for a society with only one gender or with more than two genders.
González also warns about major pitfalls. For example, unless you’re deliberately trying to modify an existing language, it’s better to create your language de novo to avoid ending up with a facsimile of the original. González demonstrates repeatedly how unnecessary it is to start from your native language. Each chapter includes abundant examples from both natlangs and conlangs to clarify the practical meaning of more theoretical concepts. There’s also a good list of fonts and software for typing phonetic notation on your computer, including an online sound sampler.
The book isn’t perfect. I’d like to have seen a list of (say) 1000 essential concepts for words that should exist in most languages, as this would represent a good starting point for developing the rudiments of a language that may eventually grow to include many more words. Such a list would make the challenge of developing a lexicon less challenging. But there are pointers to online lexicons (or corpora) that can get you started. Another problem is the inadequate index, which should have been at least 3x its current size. It omits many key terms (e.g., CV = a consonant–vowel structure) and doesn’t break up longer lists of page references using contextual subheadings. And although the book provides eight-page and five-page appendices for the natlangs and conlangs (respectively) mentioned in the book, they’re cited by chapter, not by page. González discusses how degrees of formality shape a linguistic principle in several places, but this subject merits a separate chapter or a new subsection of an existing chapter. Lastly, although the book is clearly targeted at oral languages (there’s a long and fascinating description of how human anatomy controls the sounds that can be made), I would have liked to see a section in Chapter 14 (on writing systems) that discussed the interaction between language and punctuation, which would be important for creating written languages.
Creating a conlang is difficult and complex. J.R.R. Tolkien famously took decades to create satisfactory versions of the languages used in the world of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. González’s book’s strong pedagogical approach will make it an excellent choice for classroom use, as well as for any writer who wants to add flavor and depth to their story world by adding a language unique to the story. Inventing Languages is 378 pages long, and it’s a dense read because it’s packed with grammatical and linguistic jargon—but it’s the good kind of jargon, which communicates more efficiently and clearly than might otherwise be possible. The writing is lucid and clear, with few (mostly helpful) detours into academic jargon. Creating a conlang is not a casual endeavor. It may be one of the most difficult cognitive feats you ever attempt. But if you love language, you’ll be amply rewarded by González’s detailed analyses of how we speak even if you don’t aspire to language creation.