Moments of Transformation

In a bimolecular reaction the two molecules must be in collision at the moment of transformation, so that the activating process might be the collision itself. 

What else do we get from these pivotal moments of transformation ... 

The chapters that follow use this framework to examine how agencies attempt to reconcile diverse viewpoints to make sense of accidents (chapters 4 and 5) how embodied sensory experience is rendered invisible in writing (chapter 6) and how speakers gestures help them understand the temporal and spatial complexity of a hazardous environment (chapters 7 and 8). In chapter 9, I analyze 31 oral interviews with miners following the South-mountain disaster in Norton, Virginia (January, 1993), in order to show how embodied experience and gesture are documented in writing at one critical moment of transformation. 

Part II Moments of Transformation shows how information critical to risk assessment may be reconstructed and rendered invisible in writing at specific moments of transformation within the cycle. Chapter 4 describes how two different writers attempt to capture experience at one specific moment of transformation. This chapter contrasts a miner s narrative, inside of the hazardous environment he describes, with the agency s reconstruction of the accident, above and outside of the mine. When John Nagy attempts to reconstruct events in the Wilberg disaster, his account presents only a limited view of the complex viewpoints that individuals must assume to work safely in dynamic and hazardous environments. This chapter argues that writers must pay increased attention to the ways that individuals manage multiple viewpoints because agencies rely on accident narratives to determine the cause or causes of a disaster. 

Moments of Transformation The Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries... 

Hazardous environments are poorly understtK)d and difficult to manage, even with the best technologies. Workers and management face production pressures that frequently invite disaster. Even under the best circumstances, compliance is difficult and complex. Within the Cycle, no single document can include all of the information that individuals would need to provide a 100% certain level of safety underground. Each document is ultimately the product of many rhetorical actions that may be so naturalized that writers no longer see these acts as rhetorical choices. If we attempt to build a theory of rhetorical practice based solely on our analysis of mitten documentation at any moment in the Cycle, we may miss the important rhetorical work that takes place at critical moments of transformation within the Cycle. 

Chapters 4 and 5 examine two specific features of this documentation the writer s viewpoint and the representation of embodied knowledge in speech and gesture. Chapters 6-8 look at ht)w these rhetorical features affect two. specific moments of transformation—in accident reports and training. 

Together, these two documents help us understand the processes by which agencies reconcile and reconstruct the diverse and sometimes conflicting viewpoints of individual observers at one critical moment of transformation. Blake s... 

This chapter describes how individuals capture experience in writing at one particular moment of transformation within the Cycle of Technical Doc-... 

Rhetorical analysis, informed by feminist theory that attempts to examine the silences in written texts, can make visible the viewpoints lost at critical moments of transformation. Such an analysis, we argue, can help us resolve the dichotomy between incommensurable post-modem relativism (all viewpoints are equivalent) and the limitations of a perspective that privileges a single distanced perspective (the so-called androcentric viewpoint of the Archimedian observer). ... 

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