The Rhetoric of Risk

by Beverly Sauer

The crash of an Amtrak train near Baltimore, the collapse of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, the incident at Three Mile Island, and other large-scale technological disasters have provided powerful examples of the ways that communication practices influence the events and decisions that precipitate a disaster. These examples have raised ethical questions about the responsibility of writers within agencies, epistemological questions about the nature of representation in science, and rhetorical questions about the nature of expertise and experience as grounds for judgments about risk.

In The Rhetoric of Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments, author Beverly Sauer examines how the dynamic uncertainty of the material environment affects communication in large regulatory industries. Sauer's analysis focuses specifically on mine safety, which provides a rich technical and historical context where problems of rhetorical agency, narrative, and the negotiation of meaning have visible and tragic outcomes. But the questions Sauer asks have larger implication for risk and How does writing function in large regulatory industries? What can we learn from experience? Why is this experience so difficult to capture in writing? What information is lost when agencies rely on written documentation alone? Given the uncertainties, how can we work to improve communication in hazardous and uncertain environments?

By exploring how individuals make sense of the material, technical, and institutional indeterminancies of their work in speech and gesture, The Rhetoric of Risk helps communicators rethink their frequently unquestioned assumptions about workplace discourse and the role of writers in hazardous worksites. It is intended for scholars and students in technical writing and communication, rhetoric, risk analysis and risk communication, as well as a wide range of engineering and technical fields concerned with risk, safety, and uncertainty.

386 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

Reviews

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

At heart, this is a book about technical communication in high risk environments and about how this communication could do a better job of conveying what those risks are and how to abate them. One of the key challenges Sauer uncovers is that documentation is one of those places where experience (in this case of mining experience) is rhetorically transformed into format that simultaneously make that risk clear to some people and not to others. Notably, the documentation shifts between experience as “pit sense” (i.e., experiential, derived from being in the mines), “engineering experience” (i.e., knowledge of objects and materials), and “scientific knowledge” (i.e., knowledge of geology and other science realms related to mining) (p.182). When risk information moves across these areas, it pushes responsibility for understanding and responding to risk onto different populations, sometimes to the exclusion of others. But the totality of local knowledge is made up, in part, of all these areas of experience.

Worthwhile read for those interested in risk communication.