Toward Audience Involvement

Abstract

This article explores rhetorical implications of extending the audience of written physician notes in hospital settings to include patients and/or family members (the OpenNotes program). Interviews of participating hospital patients and family members (n = 16) underscored the need for more complex understandings of audience beyond “universal” and “particular” explanations. Interviews were organized around the aspects of comprehension, affect/emotion, and likes/dislikes about receiving notes. Results from these interviews indicated that participants understood the notes overall but had questions about abbreviations and technical terms. Many participants felt reassured about the care they were receiving, and many liked having the notes as a reference and springboard for further discussion with health care staff. A more detailed content analysis of the interview data yielded themes of document use, readability, involvement, and physician care. Findings from this study reveal an expansion of audience in this case to include both universal and particular audiences. Also, findings point to the possibility of audience involvement among patients and family members through activities such as asking questions about the physician notes. This study has implications for other forms of written communication that may extend readership in novel ways.

Who’s a Vaccine Skeptic? Framing Vaccine Hesitancy in Post-Covid News Coverage

“…Examination of the content of other news sources—local, national, and global, as well as new sources, specifically, that appeal to different demographics than the NYT , particularly news sources that draw more conservative, rural, and racially and ethnically diverse readerships—can address whether the frames documented here are consistent across sources or whether new frames occur in different sources, targeting different audiences. Additionally, this study does not account for how people are responding to, using, adapting, building on, or subverting these frames and discourses (refer to Breuch et al, 2016, for important work on involving audiences in writing studies research). To this point, vaccine scholars have shown that qualitative, in-depth interviews are a useful method for rhetoricians and writing studies scholars to track and analyze how individuals link up available discourses, broader health beliefs, and personal vaccine choices and behaviors (Lawrence et al, 2014).…”

Coding Streams of Language: Techniques for the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data

“…These reports used a wide range of data. For example, Breuch et al (2016) coded interview data from hospital patients and their families for recurring themes. Martinez et al (2015) coded video data for the cognitive activities students used while writing syntheses.…”