what do we mean by "rhetorical writing"? (long)

[newma_sl@JHUVMS.HCF.JHU.EDU]

Dear Centaurs,

I'd like to step out of my accustomed lurker mode--my fellowship 
causes me to feel guilt when I do anything but work on my diss., though 
I'm certainly grateful for the time to write--to comment both on the 
"presentations" thread and an earlier exchange between Bobbie Silk,
Rob Boehm, Scott LaBarge, and others on the relationship of knowledge 
to one's ability to communicate it.  If I am repeating points made
 by previous respondents, my apologies; I haven't been
 following this thread as closely as I'd like.

The quote in my subject line is extracted from Rob's most recent post, in 
which he urges us to put what we teach our students about "rhetoric" into 
practice when we deliver papers.  By this, he seems to mean that we 
should not merely read from a printed text--that we should take advantage 
of the 'live' nature of the forum and make our presentations as engaging
as we can in order to draw our audience in.  Or, in Rob's terms, we 
should take care to stimulate their limbic systems.

Now, I imagine that most of us appreciate presentations in which the 
reader chances at least one aside that acknowledges that she is
speaking directly to us, let alone more attention-grabbing media such as 
slides.  But I have to part company with 
Rob when he moves from a general statement about the import of emotions 
in learning to specific recommendations about delivering papers at a 
professional conference and then in his further move to equate this plan of 
action and its undergirding theory with the tenets of "rhetorical writing."  
My objection is that this equation misses what I take to be a familiar 
but nonetheless crucial point made by social constructionist rhetoricians 
about the varying attitudes that inform different audiences considered as 
communities of knowers.  What this means is that different communities 
may have their limbic systems stimulated by different rhetorical 
strategies and stimulated in ways that defy easy analyses of "interest."
In other words, we have to refine our sense of "audience." 

Take the case of NWCA:  The first thing to say is that the papers are 
presented on panels.  So, unlike the audience listening to a preacher or 
a politician (examples that Rob cites), the audience here gets to respond 
directly to the speaker through question and answer.  This brings us to 
questions about what tends to count as an appropriate talk and an 
appropriate response given this particular forum--a meeting among wcenter 
professionals, however much they would like to make self-effacing jokes 
about their status (my namesake at Mt. St. Mary's may already be typing one 
at my expense about the irony of sending a bone-dry post on what makes 
presentations exciting). For my part, I can say that 	
it is sufficiently exciting to hear a well-reasoned or, if one 
is really lucky, an elegantly-structured argument being read aloud.  Or 
to hear a series of not-quite-tied-together but nonetheless eyebrow-raising 
musings.  While the latter may lack "polish," it nonetheless asks the 
audience to help the author think through what's still missing; while the 
former may lack the pyrotechnics of a presentation alive  with computer 
graphics, it may challenge those who listen to respond either directly to 
the presenter and/or to those auditors sitting next to them or some 
NWCAer down the hall in the hotel.  This also means that it is not 
necessarily the case that a presenter reads straight from a text because 
of a "lack of self-confidence." Leaving aside the time constraints and 
differing writing styles 
which make it difficult for many of us to do anything more than bang  
out the pages we need a few hours before the presentation, reading 
one's paper aloud may be the most confident thing one can do.  

By saying this, I certainly don't mean to claim that I have a lock on 
describing or evaluating academic conference culture.  Rob or anyone else 
couldquestion my characterization in many way, among them:

a) "But wouldn't you find a presentation that exploited the forum more 
fully more exciting?  So why not lobby for such an approach?"  But this 
would not answer the theoretical apoint about audience I'm trying to 
raise.  

b) "You're in the perverse minority in what excites you and thus your 
suggestions about what may hold true for the audience as a whole is 
mistaken."  While I'm sure I'm perverse, this response would 
lead us into an empirical argument in 
which I think I'd have no small support about the cathection of 
academics to a certain form/presentation of argument 
 and would still not really address the theoretical 
question of what we mean when we say "audience," which is my main point 
here.

c) "You may be properly describing certain values held by this audience; 
but that's just what I'm out to challenge by arguing from the basis set down by 
Coleman, et. al.  We rhetoricians are befuddled about what is truly 
convincing and thus more likely to be learned."  But then we'd be arguing 
about competing theories of how knowledge is constructed in the academy, and 
the advantage of mine would be the irony 
that, if my suspicions are right, Rob's needs some tinkinering before it 
can see a category of "audience" as I see it.  It would also mean that 
any quick opposition between 'the cognitive' and 'the emotional' would need 
some refining before it convinced me. 

I belabor these points because of the series of replies elicited  
some weeks back to Bobbie Silk's suggestions about the dependence 
of knowledge on its communicability.  There, Rob dismissed this 
argument as unpragmatic or, ending his sentence with an ominous ellipsis, 
worse. . .But I hope I have at least intimated why a concern with 
"audience" as Bobbie and others more agreeable to her argument would 
define itmay be an _extremely_ pragmatic way to go.  While I take the 
point ofScott LaBarge's expert interrogation of the relation of truth claims to 
context, I would still hold that one need not claim that the 
truth-content of all propositions depend on context in order to 
underscore the import of context on what the field defines as "rhetoric"
for both our theory and our practice.

For what it's worth, my skepticism toward invoking context to interpret 
language comes from the other side--as a Romanticist finally unconvinced 
by the invocation of certain historical determinants to explain, say, the 
Lucy poems.  And it's back to those poems that I go now.  Sorry for such a 
long post.

Steve Newman
Johns Hopkins University


> So how to capture me?   Please make the reading, the presentation, interesting
> to me.  That's "entertainment" to me.  And if you consider your time, your
> effort, your intelligence as being worthy of sharing with an audience, then
> perhaps you will practice and polish and prepare your presentation so that it
> will be well received by your audience.  Yes, "sell" your ideas, and yourself,
> to me.  Is that not what we teach students to do in rhetorical writing?  So, put
> it into practice.
> 
> Consider the reasons why a presenter has to have a word-by-word text.  Fear? 
> Lack of self-confidence? Basically, all factors to do with one's limbic system,
> rather than cognitive intelligence. Latest research (branching off from
> Gardner's multiple intelligence, by Daniel Goleman) is showing clearly the
> balance of success comes from 80% emotional response (limbic system) and only
> 20% mental response (cognitive system). This is a real challenge to how we
> decide on curricula content, and then how we teach that content. Do you want
> your presentation to be successful?  Do you want to be seen as successful?   
> More could be said on this aspect of learning, but not now.
> 
> Every presentation is a "performance" of some form or another, with at least
> some  element of "entertainment" value in it--whether it be in the classroom,
> with an individual, in the lecture room, in the pulpit, on the political
> campaign trail.  Please don't just stand there and read the paper to me. I can
> do that from a journal.  Make it an interesting presentation/performance for me
> so I will go away from it having been enriched, not only for the content, but
> also the experience of having been in your presence. 
> 
> There is no such thing as bad learning:  only bad teaching.
> 
> Robert
> 
>