Laura's PhD dissertation, completed at Rensselaer in 1994, entitled The Rhetorical Dynamics of a Community Protest in Cyberspace: The Case of Lotus MarketPlace, is the first close study of the discourse of CMC from a rhetorical point of view. Her findings are part of a larger project where she hopes to help develop theory about the rhetoric of communities on computer networks.
Laura has presented the results of her research at a number of academic conferences. She is author of a chapter in the forthcoming anthology Computer-Mediated Communication (ed. Susan Herring, John Benjamins Publishing). She has also published in the fields of technical communication and rhetoric, most recently having won Outstanding Article of the Year Award (1992) from the journal Technical Communication.