I was born in the new hospital in Kitimat, BC, jaundiced, bald, underweight, and, quoting my father now, "ugly as sin." Understandably, nothing much happened after that until I found myself by sheer chance at the University of Lethbridge 20 years later, only to discover I was pretty good at schoolwork, something neither I nor anyone else had noticed up to that point. I transferred to Queens after two years, though it recognized only about half my courses, and none toward the major, so I ended up taking nothing but historically based English literature classes for the next two and a half years. The Victorian novels course alone almost killed me. I lived in the library. I loved it. There followed a string of different academic preoccupations, at a variety of institutions, as I dabbled in every passing fancy (literary theory, linguistics, professional communication, graphic design, rhetorical theory) over the next dozen years. But, miraculously, I was employable anyways, and I have been toiling joyfully at Waterloo ever since, still dabbling.

Selected Publications

Editor. Rhetoric and Incommensurability. Parlor Press, 2005.

Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.

Editor. Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997.

The Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Second edition, 2012.

Acoustic Dimensions of Functor Comprehension in Broca's Aphasia. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1988.

Fellowships & Awards

SSHRC Standard Research Grant, "Cognitive Rhetoric;" University of Waterloo, 2010-2013
MITACS/ACCELERATE Grant, "Large Inbox Voice Interaction;"
Outstanding Performance in Research Award; University of Waterloo, 2005
Learning Initiatives Grant; University of Waterloo, 2005
SSHRC Standard Research Grant, "Rhetoric and Incommensurability;" University of Waterloo, 2002-2004
Izak Walton Killam Memorial Post-doctoral Fellowship; University of Alberta, 1990-92
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1985-87
Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1985-87
Rensselaer Scholar Fellowship; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1985-86
Province of Alberta Scholarships; University of Alberta, 1982-83, 1983-84
Izak Walton Killam Memorial Pre-doctoral Scholarship; Dalhousie University, 1980-81.

Current Research

I am currently pre-occupied with the way in which rhetorical figures reflect brain structure. (You want to remember a phone number? Repeat it over and over. Hey! That's ploche! You want to structure a list in the most cognitively efficient way? Arrange the phrases into parallel syntactic patterns. Hey! That's isocolon! You want to learn something new? Compare it to something you already know. Hey! That's metaphor!) This study, the study of the mental correlates of figuration and other other aspects of argumentation, aesthetics, and persuasion, is Cognitive Rhetoric.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Rhetoric (especially cognitive rhetoric, rhetoric of science, history and theory of rhetoric), professional communication (especially document design, usability, and multimedia), interaction design (especially speech), and linguistics (especially cognitive linguistics and history of linguistics)