Customer Reviews

The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Society Series)

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I found this book to be a good introduction to issues of documenting accidents as well as the creation of technical reports by engineers from the narratives of people who are not engineers but with a great deal of tacit knowledge about risky environments. While the primary focus of the research documented in this book is for the coal mining idustry, the material has applications to other types of hazardous industries as well as to any project which involves people of differing specialities. For me this book pulled together some other readings on the construction of social reality and the transformation of information derived from different, non-scientific viewpoints into a technical report suitable for managers and engineers. Of especial interest to me was the section on gestures and how gestures provide information in a visual way that is seldom captured with any degree of accuracy within technical reports.