The rhetoric of the comment box: editorial queries as arguments and relationships in engineering proposals

Abstract

In today's academic engineering environments, securing funding has become a volatile process, requiring the hard work of and collaboration between many different people. Technical editors are one of these important forces in the proposal writing process, as they help engineer writers to develop their proposals and persuade reviewers of the value of their research. However, to date, there have been very few studies on how editors convince engineer writers to accept their proposed revisions. To fill this gap in the literature, this thesis offers an in-depth style analysis of six proposals in order to determine what technical editors do when they edit engineering proposals and how they create working relationships with engineers. In particular, I will concentrate on how two editors in Clemson University's College of Engineering and Science argue for changes and create stylistic relationships--and the interrelationship between argument and style--by querying writers through the Comment function in Microsoft Word.