This pilot study obtained baseline information on verbal and visual rhetorics to teach microscopy techniques to college biology majors. We presented cell images to students in cell biology and biology writing classes and then asked them to identify textual, verbal, and visual cues that support microscopy learning. Survey responses suggest that these students recognized some of the rhetorical strategies used and conflated others, revealing intriguing questions for further research in undergraduate microscopy education.
In the August 2015
Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ)
special issue on Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM), Lisa Meloncon and Erin Frost introduced readers to this "emerging field." Since a
Poiroi
commentary in 2013 written by Scott, Segal, and Keränen, numerous scholars that earlier identified our sub-discipline with the terms
medical rhetoric,
have embraced this what might be seen as a more inclusive term, although I would argue that for some of us, the term
rhetoric
already included at least every possible manifestation of health, medicine and language. However, RHM does indeed cast a wider net, as pointed out in the 2015 issue, including essays on architecture, social work, and psychology. While rhetoric per se is certainly found within all fields, if writing about such fields and especially from such fields is included in RHM, then such a transdisciplinary impulse takes us very much further indeed. While this particular issue can easily find itself under the RHM umbrella, these particular scholars writing here were invited because they had participated in 2016 as a very successful panel at SIGDOC annual conference. These five scholars have much to share and teach us, as well as move us forward in our thinking, research, writing and participation in health and medical settings.
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