The Five Canons (10-15 min)
On page 43 of Bowdon and Scott, there is a handy graphic on the five canons of rhetoric. It is important to keep in mind that the canons are based in the rhetorical tradition as it was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome–that is, used by the elite in the context of law or formal political discourse. But, it has been used and adapted for all people in (pretty much) all situations. Let’s go through each canon as described by Bowdon and Scott and try to work out what it all means to us.
Blending Canons, Appeals: Style and Audience (30-45 min)
Ethos and Audience (and all the appeals):
As described by Aristotle in the piece ethos is, “like persona, the character a writer projects through text,” (13). How the writer conveys themselves to the audience will influence how likely the audience is to listen to what they have to say, how much they will believe it, and even how they are going to respond to it.
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Generally speaking, your word choice needs to stem from the audience’s experience with your topic. It needs to reflect how they are going to feel; build the connection the article touches on. It needs to consider how they are going to respond to you; give them reason to trust you. It finally needs to give them reason to respond and act; give them validation and reason to act, if a claim is made there needs to be information behind it.
Style and Professional Writing for an Audience:
Bowdon and Scott also identify the five canons of rhetoric as a tool in professional writing. Style, defined as “the expression of a text shaped by word choice and sentence composition,” is much more important in professional writing than other forms. In non-professional writing, such as narratives, an author may choose to use a certain “voice” to portray a personality: for example, choppy sentences can be used to portray someone as absentminded, or a situation as intense or confusing. On the other hand, professional writing may use an unorthodox voice or tone, but must be used without compromising clarity, concision, or coherence. Any claims or suggestions must be explained clearly and concisely, and the flow of the information and argument must be coherent to keep the reader engaged.
When do we need to persuade with a given audience? How do you know?
Whether you are writing reviews, advertisements, or even informational pamphlets a rhetoric is extremely important. To inform people you have to either reinforce their current opinion, create one, or change their bias (all of those involve persuasion). Writing for a private audience, the writer normally does not feel the need to persuade them. Usually private audiences are small and known. A public audience is broad and normally a big group. When you have a big professional or public audience, it is up to the writer to define the target and secondary audience. Those audiences normally include specific demographics of who will be the biggest listeners/viewers of the content, also called a “Discourse Community” (Bowden & Scott, 2003).
Writing is always a dialectical relation to a reader…but the writer has to leave “clues” in their work in ways that speakers do not (though, speakers certainly have to do this work–for example, saying “it sure is hot in here” to signal to someone that they should talk about opening the window)
Public writers, since they don’t really know their readers and their readers often don’t know them, have to establish a desirable relationship with their reader. One way to do this is by paying attention to style, by using language in an appropriate way for the situation at hand.
Let’s go through an example together.
Example sentence from Bowdon and Scott (talk word choice, sentence structure, sentence type, length, secondary audiences):
When you hear the word “rhetoric,” you may think of the empty promises of a politician or the slanted words of a lawyer. But rhetoric has a history and set of meanings that expand well beyond such negative associations. This chapter will offer some definitions of rhetoric and then explain how technical and professional communication–especially when grounded in a service-learning approach–are inherently rhetorical. The chapter’s main purposes, though, are to outline the rhetorical theory that undergirds this book and to provide you with a rhetorical toolbox for critiquing and producing technical documents. We introduce you to rhetorical terms not to bombard you with theoretical jargon, but to begin to establish a common set of concepts to guide our inventing, discussing, workshopping, drafting, and revising as communicators. (p. 28)
Activity: Look at the below linked documents.
-Pick 2 sentences in each document that you are drawn to in terms of the rhetorical appeals, but particularly ethos. What sort of relationship is the document trying to build with the reader? How do word choice, syntax (structure of sentence; order of words/clauses), sentence length and type, etc. all help to contribute to that relationship? Are there any secondary audiences in mind?
-What does the layout or the images contribute?
-Ok, now, let’s try to take that relationship we have established and try to make a new one. How? How do you do that by word choice, syntax, layout, use of images, and other methods? Try it out by rewriting the sentences you picked (or, redrawing or re-arranging…but have to rewrite at least one sentence if doing that, too).
Genre Brainstorm (10-15 min)
What kinds of documents are these? How do you know? What do you call them? What do they do?
What are all the types of writing you could do for a public audience? We already know of about a few from what we saw on during our first few classes: a white paper, a brochure, an informative webpage, a blog post. What other options are there?
As many as we can get. What options would be useful for your campaign? What ones do you want to know how to compose? What might be useful for you later, too?
Break (15 min)
Campaign Introductions (5 min)
We have some new students. Wanted you to introduce your campaigns to them. They are going to work out if they might join a group or work independently
Campaign Huddle (10-20 min)
P. 38-39 in Bowdon and Scott has some fantastic invention questions to get you going for your campaign plan.
Take out your proposal and review it again in response to these questions. If in a group, divide sections of questions among each other and try to answer. What sorts of things are jumping out to you?
Interview Prep (10-15 min)
One way to try and get you to learn more about your subject is to conduct an interview. I’m hoping that each group completes their interview by February 20th, so group members have an opportunity to incorporate them into their first campaign piece if they wish. I am asking that at least one document per group incorporates part or all of their interview into the piece. Today, I just want you to start thinking about who you might interview. Next class and/or the class after we will spend a little time thinking about how to develop questions and how to conduct an interview. You should plan to reach out to someone this week.
Who knows a lot about your topic?
Are they accessible?
Who is going to reach out to them?
By when?
Letter to a Classmate on Public Interest (10-20 min)
Let’s pick pen pals here for this assignment due on February 6th. The goal here is that you’ll be writing partners throughout the term when we do peer response in class on your campaign pieces. Pair off and get to know one another a bit! That’s your audience.
After assigning partners, let’s spend some class time working.
I can come around if you have questions.
Letter to Classmate on Public Interest. 1000-1250 words. This is an independent assignment. In class, we talked about writing privately, to one’s self, compared to varying degrees of writing outward, to other readers. In this assignment, we will have a concrete audience (one classmate) that you will write to. You’ll write them a letter about the topic you will be building a campaign for. You can take this in a number of directions, but the essential items in this letter are these:
- Describing the problem (what exists), and supporting that with the work of experts on that problem (make sure that your reader has a way to look into those sources either by some kind of citation or hyperlink). Having at least 4 sources would make sense here.
- What should be done ideally to address this issue (what is good). Feel free to be honest here. You can be uncertain, but start to talk about what you think would be best.
- What can be done (what is possible)? Based on your sense of what can realistically be done, start to work through some possibilities of what different actors (e.g., organized citizens, government agencies) can do to remedy the situation.
At the end of the semester, after you’ve had time to think more about your issue, you’ll return to this letter and try to revise it into something that can be designed for a wider public than that of your classmate. The goal is to think about longer-form alphanumeric writing and its potential usefulness to persuade and inform wider publics. In my feedback to you on this, I’ll press you on how to take the letter outward toward a larger public.
Admin (5-15 min)
I will have feedback on your proposals very soon. This week at some point.
Next class you are reading the Derek Thompson piece (not Carolyn Miller!). I changed the reading because we have a guest lecturer coming in next week that will be helping me to speak about genre. This is a piece she read and found useful for thinking about genre.