Technical documentation Rhetorical transformation

Chapter 2 describes the cycle of technical documentation within large regulatory agencies. This framework allows us to identify Six Critical Moments of Rhetorical Transformation when knowledge in one modality (oral... 

But technical writers and rhetoricians have also not developed a workable, empirically based theory for understanding how the uncertain material conditions of hazardous environments affect the quality of technical documentation. We have not examined the rhetorical features that individuals employ when they describe their experiences or how this experience is transformed in writing. We have grounded our assumptions about technical dcKumenta-tion in systems where outcomes are predictable and certain. But we have not examined the nature of documentation in systems of profound material and institutional indeterminacy. 

The men and women who provide this training also stand at the rhetorical interface between agencies and local experience within the Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries, but trainers differ from investigators because they must reconstruct the local experience and observations that have been extracted and transformed in the process of creating standards. 

These documents allow the public to evaluate MSHA s conclusions based upon the evidence presented in the investigation. In this sense, they allow us to see the rhetorical transformations that occur as local information moves into the domain of science. At the same time, the variety of viewpoints represented in the documents creates a complex and heterogeneous representation that exists outside of—and in fragile tension with—the agency s technical findings and conclusions. 

Within the Cycle of Technical Documentation within Large Regulatory Industries, the processes of rhetorical transformation that shape the construction of instructions and procedures are designed to strip away the site-specific... 

If embodied information is not present in written communication, we might ask, where is it to be located In the following chapters, we show how miners deploy both speech and gesture to construct representations of risk that integrate theory and practice. These interviews allow us to examine the rhetorical transformations that occur outside of written communication at critical moments within the Cycle of Technical Documentation within Large Regulatory Industries. 

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