Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 91 directly to reality, rather it creates a perspective of reality by “organizing meaningful perceptions abstracted from a complex, bewildering world” (quoted in Vatz 1999, 160). Just as Edelman asserts, as individual communicators draft documents, they order syntactic units intentionally. They decide what information to include or ignore, what verbs to employ, what punctuation to use. Like Æsop’s trumpeter, they choose which melody they play to rally their troops. They use their rhetoric to persuade. The rhetoric a technical communicator chooses to employ determines the meaning that communicator creates. Since people encounter events from different perspectives, one perspective cannot objectively define an event (Vatz 1999). Consequently, communicators first choose what information to communicate and then “transmit” that information to their audience. As they “transmit” information, they frame reality and create meaning. Vatz (1999) delegates a tremendous amount of power to the communicator, saying that “events become meaningful only through their linguistic depiction” (157). Since communicators generate meaning, they are also responsible for what and to whom they communicate. Again, they must choose the melodies they play and which troops they rally. Although communicators cannot be responsible for every possible action an audience member may take in light of the realities they create, they are at least responsible for their own intentions and to what extent they understand their own rhetorical situations. As Aristotle argues, they are responsible for what and to whom they communicate. The writer’s role in a rhetorical situation—and the tremendous power and responsibility a writer possesses—become evident when a communicator fails to frame a rhetorical situation well. One example of failed rhetoric concerns the crisis of Three Mile Island. As communicators attempted to frame the nearly catastrophic event, Farrell and Goodnight (1981) write that “discourse [failed] to fulfill ordinary epistemological and axiological expectations” (272). In one of the first public statements officials made, they handled the situation poorly: before one spokesperson quite finished calling the event an “accident,” he named it an “incident.” As officials dealt with the infamous “accidi-indent,” Farrell and Goodnight (1981) describe that communicators “searched awkwardly for language capable of defining, explaining, and assimilating urgent events” (273). Since the orators did not have a full picture of what had happened or would happen to the plant, they could not frame the situation effectively. Moreover, since they could not frame the situation, their audience struggled to understand the crisis, evaluate it, and respond appropriately. As the situation at Three Mile Island developed, communicators clearly attempted to frame the event. They seemed to understand that their audience would react to the rhetoric they chose. Farrell and Goodnight (1981) note that, “[i]n general, the accidental rhetoric at Three Mile Island, however inconsistent and tension-ridden, was a continual attempt to depersonalize the accident itself while reassuring the public sector as to its human costs” (282). Officials structured their rhetoric to minimize panic. Moreover, as they responded to the crisis, they developed their rhetorical style, selecting their diction and structuring their sentences according to their needs. They initially attempted to project the idea that officials still maintained control over the event; however, when officials learned more about the crisis themselves in the days following the initial alarm, they eventually labeled the “incident” an “accident.” Through their rhetoric, they intimated that management did not