ENHANCING COMMUNICATION THROUGH SUCCESSFUL REPAIR: EXAMINING FLUENCY AND MECHANISMS FOR SYNTACTIC PROGRESS IN APHASIC AND NON-APHASIC SPEECH

The fields of Rhetoric and Communication usually assume a competent speaker who is able to speak well with conscious intent; however, what happens when intent and comprehension are intact but communicative facilities are impaired (e.g., by stroke or traumatic brain injury)? What might a focus on communicative success be able to tell us in those instances? This project considers this question in examining communication disorders through identifying and analyzing patterns of (dis) fluent speech between 10 aphasic and 10 non-aphasic adults. The analysis in this report is centered on a collection of data provided by the Aphasia Bank database. The database’s collection protocol guides aphasic and non-aphasic participants through a series of language assessments, and for my re-analysis of the database’s transcripts I consider communicative success is and how it is demonstrated during a re-telling of the Cinderella narrative. I conducted a thorough examination of a set of participant transcripts to understand the contexts in which speech errors occur, and how (dis) fluencies may follow from aphasic and non-aphasic participant’s speech patterns. An inductive mixed-methods approach, informed by grounded theory, qualitative, and linguistic analyses of the transcripts functioned as a means to balance the classification of data, providing a foundation for all sampling decisions. A close examination of the transcripts and the codes of the Aphasia Bank database suggest that while the coding is abundant and detailed, that further levels of coding and analysis may be needed to reveal underlying similarities and differences in aphasic vs. non-aphasic linguistic behavior. Through four successive levels of increasingly detailed analysis, I found that patterns of repair by aphasics and non-aphasics differed primarily in degree rather than kind. This finding may have therapeutic impact, in reassuring aphasics that they are on the right track to achieving communicative fluency.

How do we teach usability? An Investigation of Usability Instruction in Technical Communication

This dissertation investigates the curricular implementation of usability instruction in technical communication. Though there are a plethora of publications and studies on usability in technical communication, little discussion focuses on usability instruction in the classroom or its implementation in the curriculum. Thus, this exploratory qualitative research seeks to contribute to a better understanding about technical communication students' and instructors' knowledge of and experiences with usability practices in the classroom, the challenges that impacted their usability efforts, and their recommendations on how their efforts could be improved. The study results demonstrate the need for more productive discussion on this issue and for developing more effective strategies for implementing usability in the classroom.

Moving Beyond Hastiness and Superficiality: Being an Ethical Technical Communicator via Digital Communication Technologies in Health Care

This thesis examines digital technologies used by technical communicators in healthcare settings. I show that technical communicators, who function as users, advocators and evaluators, need a useable framework for ethical engagement with digital technologies, which integrally affect the physician-patient relationship. Therefore, I apply rhetorical methodology by producing useable knowledge and phenomenological methodology by examining lived experiences of technical communicators. Substantiation comes from theories spanning technical communication, philosophy, and composition studies. Evidence also emerges from qualitative interviews with communication professionals working in healthcare; my concerns arise from personal experiences with electronic recordkeeping in the exam room. This thesis anticipates challenging the presumed theory-practice divide while encouraging greater disciplinary reciprocity. Because technical communication infuses theory into productive capacity, this thesis presents the tripartite summons of the ethical technical communicator: to exercise critically-reflective action that safeguards the physician-patient relationship by ways of using digital technologies, advocating for audiences, and evaluating digital technologies.