Expertise as Ethos: Tactical Technical Communication and the Clean Air Movement

Organizations like the WHO and CDC have been reluctant to admit that many common safety practices for COVID-19, such as keeping six feet away from other people or sanitizing door handles, are based on the wrong scientific paradigm. While these larger public health organizations were slow to change their prevention recommendations, air filtration specialists and public health experts dedicated themselves to creating and sharing information about how people could protect themselves from spreading the virus. In particular, the air quality engineers Richard Corsi and Jim Rosenthal used their ethos as scientists as tactical technical communication in an August 2020 Wired article to jumpstart the Clean Air movement. This article looks at three digital artifacts published about Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes, a DIY air filtration device, to think about how tactical technical communicators use their deep subject knowledge to talk back to larger organizations and share their messages with people outside of their discourse communities. Specifically, we examine ethos's role in tactical technical communication to argue that ethos acts as a pivot point between science communicators’ strategies and tactics.