Technical Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse

Academic writing on environmental communication proliferated in the 1990's. A few of us had been calling for such work and making initial investigations throughout the 1980's, but the momentum in the field built slowly. Spurred by coverage in the mass media, academic publishers finally caught the wave of interest. In this exciting new volume, the editors demonstrate more fully than ever before how environmental rhetoric and technical communication go hand in hand. The key link that they and their distinguished group of contributors have discovered is the ancient concern of communication scholars with public deliberation. Environmental issues present technical communicators with some of their greatest challenges, above all, how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making. The editors encourage us to accept the challenge of contributing to environmentally conscious decision making by integrating technical knowledge and human values. For technical communicators who accept the challenge of working toward solutions by opening access to crucial information and by engaging in critical thinking on ecological issues, the research and theory offered in this volume provide a strong foundation for future practice.

NANCY W. COPPOLA is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Master of Science program in Professional and Technical Communiation at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In addition to publishing articles on environmental communication and pedagogy, she is co-author of Environmental Perservation and Pollution Prevention:Science and Humainties Perspectives (1997).

BILL KARIS is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Technical Communications at Clarkson Univerisity. He has published in Rhetoric Review, Journal of Business and Technical Communications, Journal of Engineering Technology, Technical Communication, IEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly, as well as a recent Ablex collection (Sebler,1997). He co-edited, with Jimmie Killingsworth,a special issue of CQ (Winter,1997) focusing on environmental discourse.