Editor's Introduction to Special Issue on the Works of Alan Gross

Gross’s groundbreaking text The Rhetoric of Science. The Rhetoric of Science has been (in large part) responsible for catalyzing, shaping, and redirecting an immense scholarly project for understanding science and persuasive strategies. This work is also the touchstone of a complex career in rhetorical criticism, analyzing as Gross does the full range of rhetorical strategies that characterize modern life. Over his forty years working in the area, he has theorized visual as well as print communication in public, technical, and professional sites. These contributions assess historical as well as contemporary documents and issues.
In this Introduction, we briefly survey Gross’s work, map his career path, and list his contributions to the rhetoric of science as a field on inquiry. To this end, we divide his work, albeit a bit artificially, into four themes that serve well to inform readers about the wide variety of topics he has addressed: the rhetoric of science as an enterprise, visual rhetorics of science, the rhetoric of museum displays, and the effect of these initiatives on rhetorical theory more generally. The order in which the essays presented in his honor in this issue follows this four-field division.