Rhetoric and Technical Communication

1. Rhetoric and Technical Communication Classical Roots/Canons (Peeples, chap. 1) “Becoming a Rhetor” (MacKinnon) Three Views (Ornatowski)

2. 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

3. 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.)

4. 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.

5. 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)

6. 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.”

7. 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.

8. History of Rhetoric Timeline BCE 5thc 4th c 3rd c 1st c Corax Sophists Aristotle Cicero Gorgias Isocrates Plato AD 1st c 2nd-5th c Middle Ages (400-1400) Quintilian Second Sophistic Preaching, (earns the criticism Letter-writing, Plato leveled in 4th c BCE) Education Renaissance (1400-1600) Modern (1600-1900) Peter Ramus (16th c French) Francis Bacon (16th c English) Trends: epistemological, belletristic, elocutionist

9. “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 therhetorical 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)

10. “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

11. “Becoming a Rhetor” (cont.) MacKinnon refers to the Bank as a “self-regulating 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

12. 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.

13. 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)

14. 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.

15. 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 senderà messageà 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.

16. 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 à Receiver elements inseparable, in dynamic interaction

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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)

20. 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