"Novelty or Replication: A Pedagogical Foray into the Technical Communication Class"
About the AuthorJosephine Walwema received her MA in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of New Mexico. She is now a doctoral candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design Program at Clemson University. Her research interests include the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, technology as human capacity, and mechanical technology. Contents |
The rhetorical situation | InventionThere are ways in which rhetoric's conceptual and terminological offerings lend themselves to working with templates. One of these is the rhetorical situation defined by Lloyd Bitzer as "a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence … so as to bring about significant modification of the exigence" (2). Bitzer emphasizes the situation as the starting point for discourse similar to the way question elicits a response. Moreover, the emergence of the discourse is constrained by the exigence, the audience, and the act. Despite the constraints, Bitzer suggests that the orator brings "his personal character, his logical proofs, and his style" to the situation (8). So how does the rhetorical situation operate in the immediate environment of postmodernity? In a technical writing class governed by Microsoft templates, the rhetorical situation is quite distinct. This modern world of replication enables a wide distribution of identical templates; it privileges reason as foundational to knowledge, which in turn propagates sameness as characteristic of humans. However, the rhetorical situation makes clear that content and form may not be separated, which is why visual design is so important to technical communication. Consider Charles Kostelnick and David Roberts, who teach professional communicators the strategies of designing visual language through illustrating the concepts of design. As they see it, "The act of creating any workplace communication is driven by the writer's understanding of…the rhetorical situation" (5). They suggest that visual elements are never used arbitrarily but are carefully considered for the rhetorical purpose they serve. What this demonstrates is not only the importance of identifying a strategy of argument from the templates as topoi, but also of considering ways in which those strategies may be deployed based on the demands of the specific writing situation as part of the invention process. I emphasize specific because different writing situations demand definite responses. Contrary to an erroneously held view, the role of technical communicators is not limited to transcribing already existing concepts into more communicable forms. Technical communicators originate ideas and novel forms of seeing familiar texts (Todd, Winsor). Dorothy Winsor specifically shows that invention in technical communication is procedural, productive, and actualized all at once (10). Invention is a rhetorical concept that describes ways of generating ideas and text. Aristotle calls it a techne, a means of inquiry that results in a set of persuasive proofs. Résumé templates can be the starting place for generating ideas, but also points of departure for students to chart new directions from the generic to the specific. Attending to manner is a rhetorical move. It is the means by which a technical communicator can be creative and persuasive in a rhetorical situation. It is important to distinguish between acquiring a skill through practice and applying theory to practice. In my view, understanding the theory often results in a more informed application. In the constraints of a rhetorical situation, we can perceive a template as a part of the means of persuasion to which the student brings ideas of production based on a valid intellectual pursuit. A template can fall into the category of "intellectual virtue" that Alan Gross writes of from which a teacher can derive "a set of principles to be taught," where "students can master the techne in question through cycles of study and practice that produce progressively more competent actualization" (26). This iterative way of making and learning serves as a way of investigating the subject by way of direct instruction in visual design. Instructors can impart in our students a reasoned way of knowing, based on the principles of visual design this way. In technical communication, format and design play an important role in the receptiveness of the document. Research in Gestalt psychology, the semiology of documents, and eye tracking has shown the importance of design and how elements in the document in themselves communicate rhetorical intent. Understanding principles of design helps students apprehend that levels of headings in a résumé are not ornamental. Rather, they guide "the reader through the pages" by unify[ing] disparate parts of the design" (Robin Williams 55). Thus when we focus on templates as envelopes, we miss out on new ways of invention. Understanding this principle becomes a way of reasoning for students through which they can infer a form of logic that manifests in the way they visually design documents. Other ways of invention in response to the rhetorical situation pertain to heuristics which, in the classical curriculum, were "a strategy for creating content," Jim Porter and Danielle DeVoss (2). A heuristic as a way in which meaning is co-created through a process of interaction between rhetoric and audience makes possible its benefits in the technical writing class. We learn "heuristics have the potentially dynamic characteristic of energizing thought by shaping meaning" (Enos and Lauer 81). Consequently, conceiving of templates as heuristics revolutionizes them as places of invention. The idea of heuristics advanced by Richard Enos and Janice Lauer suggests "a process that explains how rhetoric as a techne was used as a generative power" and prompts us to regard templates as places of novelty as opposed to mass customization, or, for that matter, replication (80). When students see templates as heuristics, they may hold themselves accountable to the point where they "provide transformative value through other rhetorical strategies" (Porter and DeVoss 2). I like this notion of "transformative value" because it speaks of something new, a result of situated knowledge that does not replicate existing, perhaps dated, work. Templates as heuristics can be taught both explicitly and implicitly in the technical writing class. From imitation, we can use "heuristic as a power for observing the available means of persuasion" (Enos and Lauer 82). Indeed Porter and DeVoss base their 2006 WIDE Research conference paper on this idea of sharing and reusing in digital rhetoric as fundamental to creation and innovation. Templates as heuristics can enable students to discover that which is appropriate or that which is fitting—an astuteness that is more than a convention, more than a skill, but a design acumen contextualized by rhetoric. |