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Below are the slides and handout from my talk at RSA 2016. The abstract appears on a previous post. And the program for the session appears in another post, too.

Updated 5/27, 3:30p.m. EDT: Added session today at 3:30. Below is a list of concurrent sessions at the Rhetoric Society of America conference that have an overt focus on law and rhetoric. If you are giving a talk focused on law and rhetoric in a session not listed here, please add it in the comments! If you are giving one of these talks, and your presentation, slides, handout, etc., are available on the web, post a comment with the link. And finally, if I’ve messed up any of these titles or presenter names (which are taken verbatim from RSA program), please Read More …

My short piece with Christopher Soper has appeared in the spring 2016 issue of The Second Draft. The full issue is available here on the Legal Writing Institute page for The Second Draft. You can find the text of our article here: The article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program I led with Chris at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. We wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, Read More …

Below is a link and preview for the flier for one of my spring courses. I have open slots in it, so if you know of any Georgia Tech students interested in law and technology, forward this to them, please!

I submitted proposals, either jointly or on my own, to present at five conferences next spring and summer. So far, four of the five have been accepted, and I have not yet heard on the fifth, but I’m almost dreading it will be accepted, too. I posted about RSA 2016 and CCCC 2016 before. The new acceptances are from the Legal Writing Institute conference in Portland in July and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in Seattle in March–the abstracts for those presentations appear below. There are pros and cons of having so many conferences on the horizon. One the Read More …

My proposal to speak at the Rhetoric Society of America conference here in Atlanta in May 2016 has been accepted. Here is the abstract: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more the stay the same. The French proverb counsels one not to expect too much from change. But what does it mean to s(t)ay “the same”? The question is of crucial importance in the law, where the Principle of Justice demands that a court should treat a situation today “the same” way that previous courts have treated “the same” situation in the past. Read More …

The organizers have accepted the roundtable proposal that I spearheaded for the 4Cs in Houston in April 2016. “New/now cognitivism: Strategies for theory and ‘literate action’” will include presentations from five scholars: Deborah Rossen-Knill, University of Rochester; Erin Williams, University of Saint Francis; Airlie Rose, UMass-Amherst; Jose Gomez, University of Texas, El Paso; and me.  Dr. Peter Elbow, Professor Emeritus at UMass-Amherst, will chair the roundtable. In my talk, titled “Relevance, cognitive environment, and audience,” I’ll offer a cognitive model for analyzing rhetorical performance by explaining the writer’s and audience’s “cognitive environments.” As used here, this concept originated with Sperber and Wilson (1995) Read More …

The diversity of research in scientific and technical communication (S&TC) is both exciting and maddening: exciting because it permits researchers to approach the subject of S&TC using a wide variety of theoretical orientations, methodological approaches, and objects of study and analysis; maddening because the diversity makes it difficult to pin down “the” discipline of S&TC. Taking the second issue first, I attempt in this post to provide a definition of S&TC, substituting the name “disciplinary, professional, and technical communication” and showing how studies considered part of S&TC really span these three subcategories, often addressing more than one of them at Read More …

I’m scheduled to defend my dissertation on April 24, 2015, at 10:00a.m., Rm. 125, Nolte Center, 315 Pillsbury Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455.  The event is open to the public; the public portion of the defense will not last more than an hour. Here is the abstract for the diss. If you are really curious and plan to attend, let me know, and I will share the whole PDF with you privately. -Brian