In their essay “Toward a Civic Rhetoric for Technologically and Scientifically Complex Places: Invention, Performance, and Participation,” W. Michele Simmons and Jeffrey T. Grabill note that traditional concept of public deliberation “don’t help us understand […] how citizens might act in most public forums. They do not deal effectively with problems of knowledge — invention — or what Dahlgren calls the ‘relevant knowledge and competency’ condition of civic culture” (421).
What I particularly like about their essay is the call for composition and first-year writing courses to look more like technical communication courses, which is an insight that surprises me, partially because of my bias against technical communication (born out of my perception that is has been, traditionally, boring, which I know is problematic on my part). Simmons and Grabill write that “it should also be clear that the genres and literacies [they studied] look like the material taught in technical and professional writing classes, not the first-year writing class” (422). More:
Foremost among these issues [raised in their essay] are problems related to the usability and usefulness of computer interfaces, problems that are no longer the sole concern of technical communication — if they ever were — within the larger domain of rhetoric and writing. [… A]ny theory of invention must concern itself with helping users orient themselves to complex information technology interfaces and help them find relevant information within them.” (438)
Their essay acts as a call to understand community civic rhetoric in complex technological societies: “our notion of civic rhetoric must expand to accommodate not only the growing shift toward the screen and the visual, but also the complicated nature of interface technologies” (439). For first-year writing courses that focus on preparation for citizenship, “we think writing programs and pedagogical efforts could well learn from the rhetorical practices of those engaged in writing for community change” (44). This is necessarily a call for an understanding of collaborative or coordinated invention and production: “invention and production are never a function of a single writer. Rhetorical practice in communities is coordinated if not collaborative” (441). The continue:
Rhetoric is no longer the terrain of the individual rhetor speaking or writing to “the public.” Although we realize that this subject position has not been the default for some time, the civic rhetoric we imagine requires collaboration of a breadth and depth perhaps not seen before or made visible to us in previous scholarship. (442)
Simmons and Grabill call for pedagogical approaches that focus on collaborative work regarding invention in complicated technological interfaces, which they note, requires that “our students, to be effective citizens, must become effective researchers. They must have the capacity to invent” (442).
For further reading:
Atwill, Janet. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998.
(The authors cite her as arguing that rhetoric’s “purpose is to enable transgressive acts of the least powerful” [Simmons and Grabill 442].)
Blyler, Nancy. “Habermas, Empowerment, and Professional Discourse.” Technical Communication Quarter 3.2 (1994): 125-45.
Dahlgren, Peter. “The Internet and the Democratization of Civic Culture.” Political Communication 17 (2000): 335-40.
Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold, 2001.
Wells, Susan. “Jurgen Habermas, Communicative Competence, and the Teaching of Technical Discourse.” Theory in the Classroom. Ed. Cary Nelson. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1986. 245-69.
