Effectiveness in the Environmental Impact Statement

Abstract

The environmental impact statement (EIS) was created by the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 as a means of ensuring careful study of possible effects on the environment of projects involving public lands and as an aid to effective decisions regarding such projects. This article presents a case study involving the reading of several EISs produced by one government agency, the Bureau of Land Management. An analysis of these documents reveals that, to answer the leading question of rhetoricians in the field of technical writing—Is the document effective?—we must consider the social and cultural context of the EIS as well as the characteristics of the text, its organization and style. Simple notions of purpose and audience are ruled out. We must account for pragmatics as well as syntactics and semantics. The very category of “effectiveness” is conditioned by the historical and political forces that shape the EIS. An approach through genre theory is recommended.

Environmental Impact Communication: Cape Wind EIS, 2001–2015

“…This EIS is also based on existing research; a 62-page bibliography includes over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, about the same number of technical reports from government agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service, and many university-press books on scientific topics. This practice is contrary to the claim by Killingsworth and Steffens (1989) that mainstream science does not influence EISs (p. 173).…”

“…The handful of previous technical-communication studies of EISs are brought together in David Dayton’s (2002) article, “Evaluating Environmental Impact Statements as Communicative Action.” Dayton first proposes to understand the “dismissive attitudes” of those studies that include Killingsworth and Steffens (1989), Killingsworth and Palmer (1992), and Patterson and Lee (1997), and then to “rehabilitate the reputation” of the EIS (p. 356). His focus, like the ones he cites, is on the comprehensibility of the documents themselves as determined partly by their organization (“packaging”), bureaucratic language, and effectiveness in addressing the public.…”

Industrial Discourse in Voluntary Environmental Disclosure Questionnaires Responses: A Case Study

“…The field of technical writing began reflecting on this genre in the late 1980s. Initially, most of the scholarship (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992;Killingsworth & Steffans, 1989;Patterson & Lee, 1997) focused on identifying and describing the EIS as a genre with a heavy emphasis on the negative aspects of the inherent regulatory discourse, like the use of instrumental rationality in EISs (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992) or the commonplace use of balance as a metaphor without providing a mechanism for input (Patterson & Lee, 1997).…”

Composition Studies and Literary Criticism: A Hermeneutic Transaction

“…Patricia Bizzell (1989) [7] considers academic writing (published scholarship) as a complex literary genre, with its own conventions, ideological assumptions, and epistemological implications. Within this stream of thinking lie other attempts of applying genre analysis to technical books (Elizabeth Tebeaux, 1993) [78], medical record keeping (Catherine Schryer, 1993) [71], environmental impact statements produced by the (USA) Bureau of Land Management (Jimmie Killingsworth and Dean Steffens, 1989) [47], an Amish farmer's writing about nature (Rene Galindo and Constance Brown 1995) [31], and teachers' end comments on students' writings (Summer Smith 1997) [74]. In a more general perspective, David Brauer (2009) [10] incorporates genre theory in order to foster a connection between Composition Studies and literary studies while discussing "The Future of the Humanities,"Chen and Su (2012) [16] have utilized a genre-based approach to teach EFL students summary writing.…”