Baake, Ken. "Decision-Making in a Quasi-Rational World: Teaching Technical, Narratological and Rhetorical Discourse in Report Writing (Tutorial)." IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Vol. 50 No. 2 (June 2007).

Summary: Economics and decision science suggest that we base our decisions on a blend of rational, quasi-rational and irrational preferences. So, while technical writing teachers present students with ways of evaluating technical, professional and ethical situations that are systematic, they can also use narrative and myth to show how decision-makers are affected by cultural beliefs and circumstance. This latter strategy illustrates the complexity of decision-making and the ways in which a society's controlling narratives—its myths—act as guiding forces.

Evaluation: Baake is working against a tendency in the technical professions to look at all situations as quantifiable and subject to distillation into tables, graphs and charts, which strikes me as admirable, even necessary. But I wonder if asking students to read such widely varying genres in what is essentially a writing course will be confusing. Also, his method demands that the instructor find technical documents and works of fictions whose subjects match. He gives one or two good suggestions, but leaves it at that.