rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    non sort: An
    title: analysis of conceptual metaphor in the professional and academic discourse of technical communication
  name:
    name part: Sherwood, Matthew Aaron, 1974-
    role:
      role term: creator
  name:
    name part: Killingsworth, M. Jimmie
    role:
      role term: thesis advisor.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: txu
    date issued: 2005
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: electronic
    form: remote
  abstract: This dissertation explores the ongoing division between technical communication practitioners and academics by examining the conceptual metaphors that underlie their discourse in professional journals and textbooks. Beginning with a demonstration that conceptual metaphor theory as formulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is a viable lens through which to engage in rhetorical (in addition to linguistic) analysis, the dissertation shows that academics and practitioners engage in radically different linguistic behaviors that result from the complex and often conflicting interplay of conceptual metaphors that guide their work. These metaphors carry assumptions about writers, texts, and communication that create covert tensions with the ethical value systems overtly embraced by both practitioners and academics. Chapter II looks at two professional publications written primarily by technical communicators for an audience of colleagues, and demonstrates that practitioners tend to use metaphors primarily centered around machines and money, objectifying both documents and people and reducing the processes of communication to a series of abstract mathematical influences. Chapter III looks at two technical communication journals with a more scholarly audience, and argues that academics participate in a much more convoluted conceptual system, embracing "humanist " language about communication that favors metaphors of human agency, physical presence, and complex social interaction; however, academics also participate in the abstracted, object-oriented metaphors favored by practitioners, leading to a particularly convoluted discourse both advocating and at odds with humanist social values. Chapter IV shows the practical consequences of these conflicting conceptual systems in several widely-used technical communication textbooks, arguing that academics inadvertently perpetuate the division between industry and academy with their tendency to use conceptual metaphors that contra…
  note: by Matthew Aaron Sherwood.
  note: "Major Subject: English"
  note: Title from author supplied metadata (automated record created on Feb. 17, 2005.)
  note: Vita.
  note: Abstract.
  note: Electronic resource.
  note: Mode of access: World Wide Web.
  note: System requirements: World Wide Web access and Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  note: Ph. D. Texas A&M University 2004.
  note: Includes bibliographical references.
  note: Text (Dissertation).
  subject:
    topic: Major English
  subject:
    topic: Technical Communication
  subject:
    topic: Conceptual Metaphor
  identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/1483
  record info:
    record content source: TXA
    record creation date: 050419
    record change date: 20151101060808.0
    record identifier: in00002043982