Risk Communication and Miscommunication: Case Studies in Science, Technology, Engineering, Government, and Community Organizations

by Carolyn Boiarsky

Effective communication can help prevent or minimize damage from environmental disasters. In Risk Communication and Miscommunication , Carolyn Boiarsky teaches students, technical writers, public affairs officers, engineers, scientists, and governmental officials the writing and communication skills necessary for dealing with environmental and technological problems that could lead to major crises.

Drawing from research in rhetoric, linguistics, technical communication, educational psychology, and web design, Boiarsky provides a new way to look at risk communication. She shows how failing to consider the readers’ needs and the rhetorical context in which a document is read can be catastrophic and how anticipating those needs can enhance effectiveness and prevent disaster. She examines the communications and miscommunications of original e-mails, memos, and presentations about various environmental disasters, including the Columbia space shuttle breakup and the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, and successes, such as the Enbridge pipeline expansion and the opening of the Mississippi Spillway, offering recommendations for effective communication.

Taking into account the growing need to communicate complex and often controversial issues across vast geographic and cultural spaces with an ever-expanding array of electronic media, Risk Communication and Miscommunication provides strategies for clear communication of data, ideas, and procedures to varied audiences to prevent or minimize damage from environmental incidents.

160 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2016

Reviews

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short read with case studies of environmental disasters highlighting where communication failed. The assertion of the need to make communication reader-based is welcome.

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boiarsky's book focuses on the ways communication--both effective and ineffective--affects decision making and action in a variety of situations. She focuses on various disasters or incidents as case studies that exemplify failures (and successes) in communication through memos, letters, emails, and PowerPoint slides.

I grabbed this book because I thought it would focus on some of the principles of risk communication through specific cases; however, its primary goal is instructive. In other words, this book is geared more heavily for a tech comm student rather than a researcher. It does not focus on theoretical orientations, instead emphasizing practical approaches to communication in these contexts to improve the likelihood of a message being received effectively. Risk communication theory is not its primary focus, despite the title, though it obviously deals with communication of risk.

I give it a 3.5 overall for that purpose: I could see using it in my classroom to talk about why effective and clear email practices are necessary (she focuses on the BP/Deepwater Horizon disaster through bad emailing practices) or about how to give more effective PowerPoint presentations. The focus on reader-based approaches and discussions of how readers interact with texts is also useful (predict, read, align), since understanding the reading process allows a communicator to create a structure to convey the information in a reader-based way. However, at times, the explanations were lacking for what I wanted, and the quotations included were often heavily amended, which made me wonder why she didn't just paraphrase or summarize them.

If you're looking for an introduction to effective communication rooted in real-world scenarios for teaching technical communication, check this one out as a supplement for other course material.