About the Portfolio

This portfolio and critical introduction is in fulfillment of Master’s in Writing, Professional Writing and Rhetorics, at Illinois State University.  My audiences for this portfolio are the graduate committee, prospective employers, and future graduate students in the professional writing and rhetorics field.  For these readers, I provide evidence of the quality of work that I have completed as part of my degree requirements and as a professional researcher, writer, and editor; showcase my intellectual and material work that concerns how power, ethics, and rhetoric influence professional and technical communication; and help facilitate communication that is ethical, effective, and helpful for academics and practitioners.

This critical introduction is meant to establish how my portfolio does the aforementioned by critically connecting my artifacts to the following goals:

• To define ethical communication.

• To articulate why professional communicators have an ethical obligation to those impacted by their communication by emphasizing the issues of representation, subjectivity, and identity construction in ethical communication.

• To investigate the purpose of technical and professional communication, which will illuminate the reasons professional and technical communicators have an obligation to ethical communication.

• To evidence how technical communication’s historical, traditional basis in scientific and objective discourse has affected modern theory and practice in the field.

• To develop communication practices that promote more ethical and rhetorically effective professional communication by bridging the gap between theory and practice.

• To analyze of how my research, writing, and editing helps to convey the power technical communicators have in constructing and understanding people’s identities, bodies, and minds through rhetoric: I will specifically focus on how technical communication can impact people with mental illness.

• To justify the visual and textual rhetorical choices I made when designing my blog and portfolio, and why this medium and these choices for my portfolio are rhetorically effective and ethical for my audience(s).

• To provide an overview of the conclusions and implications for technical communication practice covered in this portfolio.