Toward a strategic theory of communication design

As technical communication in the contemporary world becomes more complex and globalized, there is a need for a theoretical framework that captures the general building blocks of communication strategies. In this article I first identify three key dimensions of communication strategies and then situate communication strategy in the literature of rhetorical invention. I contend that previous scholars have not paid close attention to the notion of strategy as an explicit theoretical construct, despite extensive discussion on rhetorical invention over the past two millennia. To fill this gap in the research, I postulate a strategic theory of communication design by extending the theory of representational composition. The theory is intended to provide (a) communicators with “common” conceptual building blocks for developing their communication strategies, and (b) analysts with a means to uncover strategies found in existing communication artifacts.