In Progress Research

My research converges around two primary areas: rhetoric of health and medicine and technical and professional communication (TPC). My current, in-progress projects extend or complement my published scholarship.

Following are some of my current projects in and around the broad category of rhetoric of health and medicine:

• finishing up the Routledge Handbook of RHM (due to the publisher in summer 2026)
• Embodied Temporalities
• Attention-Comprehension Gap specific to issues of health fluency
• Health Experience Design (which updates Patient experience design, or PXD)

I also still tinker a little at a time with a project in the history of medicine and rhetoric: Vernacular health and healing: Making medicine through rhetoric, 1450-1575

Finally, I’ll begin the process of updating both rhetorical accessibility and expanding methodologies of RHM in the near future.

In TPC I’m still interested in programmatic research that focuses on questions and problems that arose when I was working on TechComm Programmatic Central, a longitudinal study of  technical and professional communication programs in the US (though we do now have some international data we are starting to organize!). Some things in various stages of development are

• teaching and learning in the service course
• how to train teachers who teach TPC
• a field-wide look at the research course
• review of feedback
• relationship between writing programs

Along with some collaborators, we have a couple of things forthcoming on a field wide view assignments in the service course and another piece on the size and scope of the service course. 

• While not programmatic, this project does deal with issues related to the academic worklife:
  • Reappointment, tenure, and promotion: a state of the field (based on the analysis of tenure documents and follow-up interviews)

I am also returning to some workplace research that revisits usability and personas, as well as gaining a better understanding of how communication moves in organizations.

Sitting in the middle of these two areas is my ongoing concern and interest about the research enterprise itself.

• trying to understand the questions driving textual and rhetorical analysis
• an update to both the pedagogical and empirical research trends
• a collection on research practice
• a manuscript in progress on relational research (more of a textbook for use in TPC)

orcid.org/0000-0002-6551-098X