Transcript Rhetoric and Technical Communication

Rhetoric and Technical
Communication
Classical Roots/Canons (Peeples, chap. 1)
“Becoming a Rhetor” (MacKinnon)
Three Views (Ornatowski)
Classical Roots
Academic study of writing (not just TC) has roots
in classical rhetoric, especially
Aristotle (Greek, 384-22 BCE) and
Cicero (Roman, 106-43 BCE)
rhema – Greek for “a word”
rhetor – Greek for “a teacher of oratory”
Terms retain vestiges of social/historical context,
especially the fact that it was an oral culture
Classical Roots: Corax
Foss, Foss, and Trapp (in Peeples) date the study of
rhetoric from the Corax of Syracuse (a Greek colony on
the island of Sicily, 5th century BC), who wrote a treatise
on “The Art of Rhetoric,” mainly for people speaking in
law courts after a revolution instituted a democracy in
Syracuse.
Corax’s treatise (which no longer exists) introduced the
three formal parts of a speech: Introduction, Argument
(or Proofs), and Conclusion. (We will return to this when
we study the canon of Arrangement.)
Classical Roots: Sophists
From this study of rhetoric as an art rose sophists in Greece, itinerant teachers of
rhetoric.
“Sophist” is Greek for knowledge or wisdom. Greeks did not believe wisdom could be
taught, hence their distrust of the sophists, who conflated rhetoric and wisdom.
Plato’s dialogues ridicule the sophists, but sophists are worth our study.
Leading sophists:
Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480-411 BC) “man is the measure of all things.”
Gorgias (483-378 BC) – key philosophy, nihilism (nothing exists and if it did it
could not be known). One of Plato’s dialogues, the Gorgias, sets Gorgias against
Socrates. Here Plato portrays rhetoric as a “technique or knack rather than an art”
(Foss et al. 14; cf. Miller, “What’s Practical”)
Isocrates (436-338 BC) – est. Athenian school or rhetoric; believed rhetoric
inseparable from politics
Plato’s Phaedrus – in defining and “ideal rhetoric” based on “the truth and the nature of
the human soul” (Foss et al. 14) sets the stage for the first systematic study of rhetoric,
by Plato’s pupil Aristotle.
Classical Roots: Aristotle
Aristotle was Plato’s most famous pupil, though his ideas about
rhetoric differ greatly from Plato’s.
By drawing on both Plato and the sophists, Aristotle made the
first significant ancient contribution to the study of
communication, taking a scientific approach, rather than an
ethical or moral one (as Plato did).
Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering in the
particular case what are the available means of persuasion" (qtd.
Foss et al., 14)
He Rhetorike Techne, Aristotle’s Rhetoric (trans. “the art of
speaking”), develops a scientific and philosophical theory of
rhetoric.
It emphasizes Invention, but includes material on Arrangement,
Style, and Delivery, much later codified as the “canons of
rhetoric” (adding Memory, to which Aristotle does not refer)
Classical Roots:
Rhetorica ad Herennium
Rhetorica ad Herennium (86-82 BCE) – 200 years after
Aristotle’s death, the five canons of rhetoric are
documented as such in a manual for schoolboys (practical
rather than theoretical).
Author unknown, usually attributed to Cicero (but now
viewed as unlikely to be his). (We will return to Cicero
when we study the canon of Style, his major contribution.)
Establishes a system of rhetoric in the five canons or
categories for analysis
These are the heart of what Aristotle meant by “rhetoric.”
Classical Roots: Canons
Inventio (heuresis) – types/sources of ideas
Dispositio (taxis) – arrangement of ideas
Elocutio (lexis) – style; choice/use of words
Pronuntiatio (hypokrisis) – delivery; use of
voice and gesture
Memoria (mneme) – memory; ability to
recall examples and passages for utterance.
History of Rhetoric Timeline
BCE
5thc
Corax
AD1st c
Quintilian
4th c
Sophists
Gorgias
Isocrates
Plato
3rd c
Aristotle
2nd-5th c
Second Sophistic
(earns the criticism
Plato leveled in 4th c BCE)
1st c
Cicero
Middle Ages
(400-1400)
Preaching,
Letter-writing,
Education
Renaissance (1400-1600)
Modern (1600-1900)
Peter Ramus (16th c French) Francis Bacon (16th c English)
Trends: epistemological, belletristic, elocutionist
“Becoming a Rhetor”
A case study in the workplace
Jamie MacKinnon uses “rhetoric” in several ways:
“purely rhetorical” – having to do with the ability “to
move the world through written language” (42)
“highly rhetorical”– analytic, arguing a case; their
readers want “analysis, evaluation, argument, and ‘stories,’
not purely descriptive writing” (53)
“ When their argument succeeded, it meant that they
had succeeded in understanding the rhetorical dynamics
of the Bank and the demands of their own rhetorical
situation. . . . The participants developed an effective,
though largely tacit, understanding of the organization as a
rhetorical domain” (53)
“Becoming a Rhetor” (cont.)
A “rhetor” in MacKinnon’s case study is
writer who:
Seeks to persuade rather than simply
describe
Recognizes the dynamics of the rhetorical
situation—what came before, what after
Write for a specific audience, recognizing
their specific interests and needs
“Becoming a Rhetor” (cont.)
MacKinnon refers to the Bank as a “selfregulating discourse community” (43)
Becoming a rhetor means recognizing oneself
as a member of a discourse community
and writing for that community:
a group of people having a shared
vocabulary and rhetorical expectations
Three Views (Ornatowski)
Ornatowski explores the way TC has
positioned itself within the larger
framework of rhetorical studies, which have
been dominated by
Specialists in speech communication
Scholars who focus on literary texts
Ornatowski, Cezar M. “Technical Communication and Rhetoric.”
Foundations for Teaching Technical Communication. Ed. Katherine
Staples and Cezar Ornatowski. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1997. 31-51.
Three Views (Ornatowski, cont.)
Technical communication is a much newer
discipline than speech communication and
literary studies
Technical writing courses date from the
early 1900s (first textbook 1908)
Technical writing as a profession came of
age after World War II (first professional
organizations founded 1953)
Three Views (Ornatowski, cont.)
Some views of rhetoric would deny that technical
communication is rhetorical at all.
Ornatowski cites three views of how rhetoric applies
to technical communication
Positivist
Postmodern (constructivist)
Aristotelian (classical rhetoric)
These derive from different ways of looking at the
world.
Three Views: Positivist
Positivism – a philosophy that says that sensory
impressions are the only basis for knowledge.
For positivists, rhetoric is a set of verbal strategies
for communicating
sender message receiver
Historically, this view has dominated and still
appeals to engineers and scientists. In
Ornatowki’s essay, what Richard Lanham calls
“serious man” fits here. Stanley Fish calls this a
“foundational” world view.
Three Views: Postmodern
Postmodernism (constructivism)– a philosophy that
says that rhetoric is inherent in all thought and
behavior, a condition of discourse.
Postmodernists emphasize the social context of
communication and believe that all reality is
socially constructed
Sender




Message   Receiver
elements inseparable, in dynamic interaction
Three Views: Aristotelian
Aristotelian rhetoric (classical rhetoric) describes the
perspective of classical scholars and those in speech
communication for whom rhetoric is primarily about
persuasion.
Aristotelian technical communicators seek “deliberation
directed at the discovery of the best reasons for accepting
certain beliefs in view of available knowledge and facts”
(Ornatowski 37)
This emphasis on dynamic mediation resembles Carolyn
Millers’s reading of rhetoric as a form of “conduct,” a
process (praxis) that mediates between theory and practice.
Three Views: Aristotelian (cont.)
Aristotelian rhetoric mediates between positivism
and postmodernism in these ways:
Relies on direct observation of nature and
believes theory should follow fact (as positivists
do)
Believes in changeless first principles as the
basis of knowledge (this is contrary to
postmodernism, which regards nothing as
changeless)
Emphasizes the importance of audience, which
brings postmodern contextuality into play.
Three Views: Aristotelian (cont.)
“Rhetorical man . . . is committed to no single
construction of the world; much rather, to
prevailing in the game at hand” (Richard
Lanham qtd. Ornatowski 33)
Rhetoric and TC: Summary
Technical communication is “a range of
communicative activities” (46), some more
rhetorical than others, i.e.
* more embedded in social context and
* more persuasive
Persuasion is the link between
“rhetoric” -- with its connotation of appeal to
emotion
and
“technical communication --with its emphasis on
objectivity