Carolyn R. Boiarsky

Abstract

Risk communication professionals, teachers, and trainers will find this book useful and practical. It accomplishes its purpose of presenting, in plain language, several historical cases of risk communication—good and bad—as object lessons for extrapolating best practices to follow and worst practices to avoid. Chapter 1 stresses the importance of considering and incorporating the reader’s background, knowledge, expectations, and reading process when writing about risk prediction, as illustrated by correspondence from two cases: memos between the Bureau of Bridges and the Department of Transportation that warned about leaks that caused the Chicago Floods in 1992, and a memo from Morton Thiokol, Inc., responding to questions from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center about whether to proceed with the Challenger launch in 1986. The author defines the reader-centered context upon which risk communicators should concentrate. The author also encourages writers to avoid writer-based documents and favor reader-based documents, which anticipate why readers need the information, how they will use it, what decisions they will make with it, and how they will read it.