This paper is a narrative examining how the types of discourse used by the El Paso Electric Co. s... more This paper is a narrative examining how the types of discourse used by the El Paso Electric Co. since the company founding in 1901 have reflected periods of relative calm and also have anticipated periods of tumultuous change. I use annual reports from the company supplemented with notes from my 10 years reporting on its activities for a daily newspaper to show how El Paso Electric's rhetorical output has evolved to meet multiple exigencies. These include fuel shortages, rapid growth in demand, a nuclear power adventure, bankruptcy and the current threat of deregulation. At times, the company has responded to these situations by employing all three types of Aristotelian rhetoric: epideictic, forensic and deliberative. My study also considers shifts in El Paso Electric's rhetoric from that reflecting a modernist faith in the predictive powers of science to a post-modern awareness that scientific design alone cannot ensure success.
Stories of development from childhood to adulthood or of journeying through a 1ifechanging experi... more Stories of development from childhood to adulthood or of journeying through a 1ifechanging experience to gain new knowledge are replete in oral and written tradition, as exemplified by the Greek epic of Odysseus and countless other tales. Often the hero journeys naively to an alien land and then, with great difficulty, returns home wiser but forever scarred. Such a journey can take the hero to a terrible place, from which he may escape physically, but from which he can never escape emotionally. The hardship of travel and its ensuing lessons is a common theme in human narratives, its protean form identified repeatedly in world mythologies by scholar Joseph Campbell. According to Campbell, the hero comes in many forms, bearing a thousand faces, but always with the same underlying experience-moving from a call to journey and often an initial refusal, then acceptance followed by a crossing of the threshold into temptation and atonement, finally leading to an eventual return bearing both...
Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of... more Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of Texas: one, the perception that Texas culture, if it exists at all, is inconsequential and lowbrow ; and, two, that college students even within Texas are becoming illiterate in regards to their state\u27s rich heritage of creative fiction and nonfiction writing and film. The book succeeds on both counts, reminding readers familiar with the canon of how much fun it is to enter the world of Texas\u27s written and film literature and how much one can learn from it about the timeless challenges of being human
The 40th anniversary of the publication of Elmer Kelton’s 1973 novel The Time it Never Rained coi... more The 40th anniversary of the publication of Elmer Kelton’s 1973 novel The Time it Never Rained coincides with one of the most severe droughts on record in Texas. Meanwhile, as of 2005, local groundwater conservation districts in Texas are required by law to determine how much groundwater they want to conserve for future generations. Such policy decisions have led to debates in West Texas among agricultural producers over whether pumping restrictions amount to erosion of the famous “rule of capture” and private property rights. This article presents Texas water law history, the Ogallala Aquifer, and its users as a continuing story in which producers and government policymakers are actors. This paper first summarizes the ways in which water challenges in the American West and elsewhere have been classified according to different disciplines and then shows how each of those ways of knowing can be understood as a kind of storytelling. The author uses Kelton’s drought novel and scholarly ...
This article explores the writing of archaeologists to argue that the metaphor of context-as-rhet... more This article explores the writing of archaeologists to argue that the metaphor of context-as-rhetorical-situation may understate the power that context has to shape scientific discourse. The author offers instead the metaphor of context-as-active-agent in the rhetorical situation—one that sometimes reifies values that are dangerous to the archaeologists' belief systems. As scholars of technical writing, we must develop a greater understanding of the subtle but powerful influences that context wields on the writing we read and help to produce.
... perspective would be courses with synchronous components offered in the early morning hours b... more ... perspective would be courses with synchronous components offered in the early morning hours by providers in the Central United States (mid-evening in India; see Table 3). If the US course providers preferred teaching in the ... Technical skills ... Intercultural communication skills ...
... Heine , H. 1995 . Die Lorelei. In: Songs of love and grief pp. 40 41 . ... Stevens, J. 1988... more ... Heine , H. 1995 . Die Lorelei. In: Songs of love and grief pp. 40 41 . ... Stevens, J. 1988. Hoover Dam: An American adventure , Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. View all references historical account of the Hoover Dam project, impounding the Colorado River. ...
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2016
We argue for a course in which students analyze writing about a common topic—in this case World W... more We argue for a course in which students analyze writing about a common topic—in this case World War I—from multiple genres (e.g., poetry and technical manuals). We address the divide between instruction in pragmatic and literary writing and calls to bridge that gap. Students working in disparate areas of English learn the strengths and the limitations of their fields, and how text represents and promotes different interpretations of reality. Such written representations do not neatly line up along a utilitarian-literary binary but are more closely interwoven in the presence of a profound subject such as war.
... class in the Rhetoric of Science. I am particularly indebted to Kathy Northcut, who offered a... more ... class in the Rhetoric of Science. I am particularly indebted to Kathy Northcut, who offered a page-by-page critique of the work in its later stages. She suggested many subtle, help-ful changes. Charlotte Kaempf at the Institute ...
This paper is a narrative examining how the types of discourse used by the El Paso Electric Co. s... more This paper is a narrative examining how the types of discourse used by the El Paso Electric Co. since the company founding in 1901 have reflected periods of relative calm and also have anticipated periods of tumultuous change. I use annual reports from the company supplemented with notes from my 10 years reporting on its activities for a daily newspaper to show how El Paso Electric's rhetorical output has evolved to meet multiple exigencies. These include fuel shortages, rapid growth in demand, a nuclear power adventure, bankruptcy and the current threat of deregulation. At times, the company has responded to these situations by employing all three types of Aristotelian rhetoric: epideictic, forensic and deliberative. My study also considers shifts in El Paso Electric's rhetoric from that reflecting a modernist faith in the predictive powers of science to a post-modern awareness that scientific design alone cannot ensure success.
Stories of development from childhood to adulthood or of journeying through a 1ifechanging experi... more Stories of development from childhood to adulthood or of journeying through a 1ifechanging experience to gain new knowledge are replete in oral and written tradition, as exemplified by the Greek epic of Odysseus and countless other tales. Often the hero journeys naively to an alien land and then, with great difficulty, returns home wiser but forever scarred. Such a journey can take the hero to a terrible place, from which he may escape physically, but from which he can never escape emotionally. The hardship of travel and its ensuing lessons is a common theme in human narratives, its protean form identified repeatedly in world mythologies by scholar Joseph Campbell. According to Campbell, the hero comes in many forms, bearing a thousand faces, but always with the same underlying experience-moving from a call to journey and often an initial refusal, then acceptance followed by a crossing of the threshold into temptation and atonement, finally leading to an eventual return bearing both...
Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of... more Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of Texas: one, the perception that Texas culture, if it exists at all, is inconsequential and lowbrow ; and, two, that college students even within Texas are becoming illiterate in regards to their state\u27s rich heritage of creative fiction and nonfiction writing and film. The book succeeds on both counts, reminding readers familiar with the canon of how much fun it is to enter the world of Texas\u27s written and film literature and how much one can learn from it about the timeless challenges of being human
The 40th anniversary of the publication of Elmer Kelton’s 1973 novel The Time it Never Rained coi... more The 40th anniversary of the publication of Elmer Kelton’s 1973 novel The Time it Never Rained coincides with one of the most severe droughts on record in Texas. Meanwhile, as of 2005, local groundwater conservation districts in Texas are required by law to determine how much groundwater they want to conserve for future generations. Such policy decisions have led to debates in West Texas among agricultural producers over whether pumping restrictions amount to erosion of the famous “rule of capture” and private property rights. This article presents Texas water law history, the Ogallala Aquifer, and its users as a continuing story in which producers and government policymakers are actors. This paper first summarizes the ways in which water challenges in the American West and elsewhere have been classified according to different disciplines and then shows how each of those ways of knowing can be understood as a kind of storytelling. The author uses Kelton’s drought novel and scholarly ...
This article explores the writing of archaeologists to argue that the metaphor of context-as-rhet... more This article explores the writing of archaeologists to argue that the metaphor of context-as-rhetorical-situation may understate the power that context has to shape scientific discourse. The author offers instead the metaphor of context-as-active-agent in the rhetorical situation—one that sometimes reifies values that are dangerous to the archaeologists' belief systems. As scholars of technical writing, we must develop a greater understanding of the subtle but powerful influences that context wields on the writing we read and help to produce.
... perspective would be courses with synchronous components offered in the early morning hours b... more ... perspective would be courses with synchronous components offered in the early morning hours by providers in the Central United States (mid-evening in India; see Table 3). If the US course providers preferred teaching in the ... Technical skills ... Intercultural communication skills ...
... Heine , H. 1995 . Die Lorelei. In: Songs of love and grief pp. 40 41 . ... Stevens, J. 1988... more ... Heine , H. 1995 . Die Lorelei. In: Songs of love and grief pp. 40 41 . ... Stevens, J. 1988. Hoover Dam: An American adventure , Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. View all references historical account of the Hoover Dam project, impounding the Colorado River. ...
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2016
We argue for a course in which students analyze writing about a common topic—in this case World W... more We argue for a course in which students analyze writing about a common topic—in this case World War I—from multiple genres (e.g., poetry and technical manuals). We address the divide between instruction in pragmatic and literary writing and calls to bridge that gap. Students working in disparate areas of English learn the strengths and the limitations of their fields, and how text represents and promotes different interpretations of reality. Such written representations do not neatly line up along a utilitarian-literary binary but are more closely interwoven in the presence of a profound subject such as war.
... class in the Rhetoric of Science. I am particularly indebted to Kathy Northcut, who offered a... more ... class in the Rhetoric of Science. I am particularly indebted to Kathy Northcut, who offered a page-by-page critique of the work in its later stages. She suggested many subtle, help-ful changes. Charlotte Kaempf at the Institute ...
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Papers by Ken Baake