Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 89 Consequently, technical communicators have come to devalue their rhetoric and use it as a mere tool of industry. The technical communicator employs skills, techne to Aristotle, that are forms of technology in themselves and exist separately from the writer and apart from the writer’s ethical responsibility (Sullivan 2004). Unlike Aristotle, modern technical communicators neatly separate what they write from the context in which they write it. The Audience's Responsibility Although Aristotle’s orator and the modern communicator may not agree that rhetoric necessitates ethics, both would agree that they serve their audiences. However, unlike Aristotle’s orator, modern communicators do not enter directly into a feedback loop with their audiences. Ong (1975) suggests that since the rise of the printing press, the audience has become more distant—and at times more fictional. However, audience analysis techniques have been prevalent since Mills and Walter (1950) wrote Technical Writing and since Doge and Westinghouse (1960) advocated audience-centered document design. Although technical communicators be distant from their audiences, ideally, they still seek to address a specific audience. However, communicators today do not always seem to remember that their audience exists since they cannot access their readers immediately as classical orators did. Thus, Johnson (2004) writes “the audience has been marginalized by a preponderance of scholarship that hegemonically places the receivers of discourse literally at a distance, rendering them invisible to the writers’ naked eye” (93). Since many technical communicators cannot access their audiences directly, they cannot enter into the same feedback loop that profited classical orators. Figure 2 illustrates that contemporary communicators do not interact directly with their audiences. The communicator and the audience remain at a distance. The audience may never give feedback, and the communicator may never receive it. Aristotle’s audience may have accosted a poor orator or praised a successful one; however, the modern audience cannot hold communicators directly responsible for their rhetoric. At best, readers may abandon manuals or proposals with poor rhetoric, but writers may never know—and may never alter how they communicate. Figure 2. In the Contemporary Feedback Loop, communicators do not receive feedback for their rhetoric.