Engl 424 Winter 08 :: Technical Writing | Main / CreativeRhetoricScenario

Creative Rhetoric Scenario

The Creative Rhetoric Scenario (CRS) is an assignment designed to help:

reveal the naturalized rhetoric of dialect in personal relationships, and
employ your audience awareness to craft an explanation & definition of rhetoric useful to this audience.

The basic form of the final product will be a document with three sections:

Introduction:

Introduces and explains the document
Introduces and offers
- basic explanation of the relationship of the speakers,
- the features of their dialect (register), and
- how they function

Dialog: An Example Performance of a "Personal" Discourse Community (PDC) Moving from Norm Topics to Integrate Rhetoric

Sets scene and situation
Presents the dialog

Analysis: Revealing/Documenting Rhetorical Design and Action, Personal and for Class

As we have discussed in class, the Analysis section of the CRS needs to work through several different layers of rhetorical analysis.

Analysis

Intro [save to last--come back and explain the "problem" of the whole assignment. You all have lots of rhetorical practice--and use and apply it every day, but don't recognize as such. Understanding that you already do audience analysis, problem and purpose articulation, figuring out how to say the best thing, etc. But for you to get a job as a writer/information designer, you need to be able to explain what you can do for a boss or a client.

Body

I. Start at the beginning--

Your community-team-tribe

Speech Community

Discourse Community

Features of how you all talk in each

Words/terms
How said, gestures, faces, etc.
Topics allowed (or not) for discussion
Accepted purposes for talk

Each section of the Body should have examples it shares/shows, and explain how the features of communication function-- of course as we also said in class Wed., what works, what the success is, is also a variable for each community. Sometimes goals are work-related, sometimes they are simply bonding, help reinforcement, etc., all sorts of things.

II. Transition/ Sneak Attack / The other person's Communication "Exigence/Need/Problem"

For the other person, in a consulting sort of way,

Analyze Audience
Articulate Purpose
Figure out what the real goals are, and how to try to achieve them

III. Rhetoric

Look at all the stuff I'm learning about how rhetoric "works"

Connect Any and All aspects of the project you can to the stuff we are/have learned about rhetoric, technical communication, etc.
Thinking about communication across communities
How language serves multiple purposes at the same time, and on and on and on.
How writing always has to function as documentation of a given discourse, and an extension of it
How writing would only ever be a link in a chain of discourse
How Invention is constrained to the "rules" of the community, and/or when it can be broken. These kinds of discussions of how rhetoric and language "work," and how they are evident in your examples, are pretty limitless.