▼ Students are motivated to use technology to write. Using this idea, teachers can assimilate what the students are already doing through personal websites/blogs and classroom content with a meaningful audience. Students, no matter gender or ability level, need to see that writing is a vehicle to show individual thought on subjects, and that this is powerful. Technology, such as web logs, can provide one part of the answer, but educators should recognize that the key to conscientious writing among students is that the students need to be a more active part of the educational community. The aim of this study is to shed light on a range of student needs, and show that the differing or ranges in levels of motivation to write with consideration for an audience can be addressed through web logs. A very real audience is out “there,” the Internet, for students to use. Advisors/Committee Members: Heba, Gary.

▼ The problem that I will examine is the gap between expert communication and public perception, which interferes with effective environmental risk communication. This thesis will investigate the communication of mad cow disease, experiences from an expert in environmental health, and public participation information from the Ohio EPA web site to show what we have learned about communicating health risks to the public. My case study analysis of mad cow communication, interview with an environmental expert, and web site analysis of the Ohio EPA reveal how this gap is created using statistics, and ineffective public input. There are several challenges facing governmental agencies and experts who communicate information to the public. Government agencies have the primary responsibility for risk communication, specifically those agencies having authority over a broad range of health and environmental risks. These agencies already have the legal authority to manage risks. Agencies need to determine who is responsible at the state, federal, and local levels and assign groups to communicate information to the public. Some experts believe that knowing more about the current scientific research would calm the public’s nerves in matters of risk. But it is very difficult communicate this to non-expert audiences. One way to communicate risks is for technical communicators to get the public’s opinion through surveys and interviews, and give this information to the experts. Technical communicators can investigate the audience (the concerned public) about their view of health risks. Experts can use technical communicator’s skills and experience with audiences in distributing information to the public. Advisors/Committee Members: Mara, Andrew.

▼ Semiotics and visual rhetoric are a large part of technical communications. Technical communicators often use visuals within the documents they are writing and formatting. Visual rhetoric goes beyond the signs used for assistance; it's everywhere. One such example is album covers. Album covers are considered cultural images, but when looked at as a product, they travel through the cultural circuit. The cultural circuit looks to bridge the gap between cultural studies and technical communication. For this paper, the Beatles' album covers were used because of the great influence the band had on both music and visuals. Through a textual analysis of three Beatles' album covers; With the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles ("The White Album") and the other six top selling albums of those years (1964, 1967, and 1969, respectively), were analyzed to learn if the Beatles covers were visual examples of Mikhail Bakhtin's monoglossia, heteroglossia and polyglossia. This is important to discover since this theory is ubiquitous in society (i.e democrat vs. republican, comedy vs. tragedy), and can be applied to images as well as texts and ideologies. The conclusions stated that while, in comparison to six other album covers of those years, With the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Beatles can be considered heteroglossic or polyglossic, but after traveling through the cultural circuit, being redistributed by computers and rearticulated, they are monoglossic. However, since these covers have transcended from heteroglossic and polyglossic to become monoglossic, they are ultimately polyglossic, because they become their own genre, resulting in bricolage. Advisors/Committee Members: Heba, Gary.

▼ This thesis identifies Chinese university situations specific to the transfer of technical communication to China, especially the relationship between general socio-economic settings in China and the influences these general settings have on the university disciplinary structure changes. The objective of this research is to reveal openings in translation discipline as a shell for technical communciation to merge with. The necessities for the merger and the reasons for choosing translation as the right discipline are analyzed through the conception of institutionalization by Berger and Luckman and the theory of power relations by Michel de Certeau. Earlier attempts of U.S. technical communication to reach China are reanalyzed to expose both accomplishments and problems in these efforts. In order to show the openings of translation discipline for technical communication, a survey has been conducted among Chinese translation professionals to reveal tensions in the development of translation theories and practices. It is concluded that the merger of technical communication with translation can both gain technical communication a pivotal status of being a discipline in Chinese universities and solve some problems of the translation field. More importantly, such a merger offers a future-oriented perspective of development for the merged discipline to ride more successfully the stablly growing Chinese economic growth. Advisors/Committee Members: Heba, Gary.

▼ This thesis explores the rhetoric of integrative medicine, especially how integrative medicine represents Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). The objective of this research was to reveal physician’s sub-conscious and/or conscious perceptions of CAM as evidenced by their rhetoric. An enthymematic analysis (based on Aristotle’s definition of enthymeme) informed by the semiotics of Saussure was used to analyze selected texts, three of which are represented in this paper. Various forms of rough rhetorical treatment were uncovered, including blatant and subtle use of disparaging language against CAM, name-switching, mystifying rhetoric, and unfair contrasts. It was concluded that this rough rhetorical treatment was possible due to a widespread enthymeme that exists concerning CAM: because allopathy is the dominant form of health therapy and because it is more often tested, anything else is automatically second best; thus, CAM is inferior to allopathy. The existence of this enthymeme is evidenced by the aforementioned rough rhetorical treatment. Advisors/Committee Members: Mara, Andrew F.

▼ This study investigated the challenges Chinese students may encounter from the beginning of their study-abroad experience in a Midwestern U.S. university and their responses to these challenges. The sample group was composed of 26 Chinese students who were studying in a Midwestern university in the United States. The data were colleted through a questionnaire distributed to the participants. The results of this study indicate that 1) most Chinese students ask for help in the visa application process when they pursue their study in the U.S.; 2) Chinese students tend to take actions rather than being quiet and passive when they face challenges only when the “mianzi” (face) and “guanxi” (relationship) issues are considered as less important in the situation; 3) Chinese students identify their co-nationals (family, significant other, and friends) as their strongest social support. This study also found that Chinese students have both academic and non-academic difficulties in the U.S. The biggest non-academic difficulty for this group of participants was transportation. The differences among their reactions to different levels of challenges were studied in previous research. Their needs for help in the visa application process, the available help sources, and the helpfulness of these sources were first researched in this study. Recommendations for universities, professors, international program specialists and Chinese students were provided based on the results. Future research may include open-ended questions, employ cross-sectional research design and recruit a lager sample of participants. The difference in Chinese students’ reactions to different levels of challenges has not been researched before in other studies, so replications of research are needed to retest this conclusion with a different sample or population. Advisors/Committee Members: Coggin, William O.