Rhetorical Genres in Code

Abstract

We examine the rhetorical activity employed within software development communities in code texts. For technical communicators, the rhetoricity of code is crucial for the development of more effective code and documentation. When we understand that code is a collection of rhetorical decisions about how to engage those machinic processes, we can better attend to the significance and nuance of those decisions and their impact on potential user activities.

Rhetorical Code Studies

“…This attention takes place through the cultivation of a rhetorical orientation toward software, code, and its algorithmic procedures, which we can recognize through scholarly literature in several fields: digital rhetoric, software studies, critical code studies, and technical communication. Over the past decade, there has been continually increasing interest in the rhetorical study of software and code, with examinations of software as possessing and communicating ethics (Brown 2015) to advocacy for code-related literacy (Vee 2017) to an understanding of video games as a form of embodied practice (Holmes 2017) to the potential emergence of genres in code texts (Brock and Mehlenbacher 2017), as well as to experimentation with writing meant for algorithmic readers (Gallagher 2017). This interest, as well as its broadening scope and deepening focus, suggests the birth of a scholarly field related to but not incorporated entirely within rhetoric nor within the fields of software studies or critical code studies.…”

“…The two genres discussed below certainly recur across numerous code projects, iterations, and authors, but they are not always typified in easily recognizable ways; that is, the formal or structural components of many genres do not lend themselves easily to code texts written in different languages or for different communities whose style preferences may radically vary from those of other communities (cf. an examination of code genres via Drupal modules by Brock and Mehlenbacher 2017). The purposes for particular recurrent responses to given situations are certainly recognizable, as are the kinds of action that rhetors may attempt to induce through their communicative efforts.…”

Game Design Tactics for Teaching Technical Communication in Online Courses

“…These processes and the algorithms that form them are rhetorical (deWinter & Moeller, 2016) because they effectively and persuasively communicate ideas in a procedural fashion, an argument outlined by Bogost (2007) in his book Persuasive Games . The code that enables these procedures has been likened to “a collection of rhetorical decisions about how to engage those machinic processes” (Brock & Mehlenbacher, 2018, p. 383) that exist behind the user interface of software. McAllister (2004) further notes a rhetorical dimension of games due to the tensions that are found not only in the conflict between players and rule-based systems but also in the social, economic, and political conditions that surround games.…”