Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Toscano, Aaron, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Dept. of English

Resources and Daily Activities

  • Dr. Toscano’s Homepage
  • ENGL 2116-083: Introduction to Technical Communication
    • ENGL 2116 sec. 083 Major Assignments (Summer 2020)
      • Final Portfolio Requirements
      • Oral Presentations
    • June 11th: Continue with I, Robot
    • June 15th: Ethics and Perspective Discussion
      • Ethical Dilemmas for Homework
      • Ethical Dilemmas to Ponder
      • Mapping Our Personal Ethics
    • June 16th: More on Ethics
    • June 1st: Effective Documents for Users
    • June 2nd: Final Project and Research Discussion
      • Epistemology and Other Fun Research Ideas
      • Making Résumés and Cover Letters Better
      • Research
    • June 3rd: Technology in a Social Context
    • June 8th: Information Design and Visuals
    • June 9th: Proposals, Marketing, and Rhetoric
    • May 18th: Introduction to the course
    • May 19th: Critical Technological Awareness
    • May 20th: Audience, Purpose, and General Introduction
    • May 21st: Résumé Stuff
      • Making Résumés and Cover Letters More Effective
      • Peter Profit’s Cover Letter
    • May 25th: More Resume Stuff
    • May 26th: Plain Language and Prose Revision
      • Euphemisms
      • Prose Practice for Next Class
      • Prose Revision Assignment
      • Revising Prose: Efficiency, Accuracy, and Good
      • Sentence Clarity
    • May 27th: More on Plain Language
    • May 28th: Review Prose Revision
  • ENGL 4182/5182: Information Design & Digital Publishing
    • August 21st: Introduction to the Course
      • Rhetorical Principles of Information Design
    • August 28th: Introduction to Information Design
      • Prejudice and Rhetoric
      • Robin Williams’s Principles of Design
    • Classmates Webpages (Fall 2017)
    • December 4th: Presentations
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4182/5182 (Fall 2017)
    • November 13th: More on Color
      • Designing with Color
      • Important Images
    • November 20th: Extra-Textual Elements
    • November 27th: Presentation/Portfolio Workshop
    • November 6th: In Living Color
    • October 16th: Type Fever
      • Typography
    • October 23rd: More on Type
    • October 2nd: MIDTERM FUN!!!
    • October 30th: Working with Graphics
      • Beerknurd Calendar 2018
    • September 11th: Talking about Design without Using “Thingy”
      • Theory, theory, practice
    • September 18th: The Whole Document
    • September 25th: Page Design
  • ENGL 4183/5183: Editing with Digital Technologies
    • Efficiency in Writing Reviews
    • February 3rd: I’m in Love with the Shape of You(r Sentences)
    • January 20th: Introduction to the Course
    • January 27th: Rhetoric, Words, and Composing
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4183/5183 (Spring 2021)
  • ENGL 4275: Rhetoric of Technology
    • April 13th: Authorities in Science and Technology
    • April 15th: Articles on Violence in Video Games
    • April 20th: Presentations
    • April 6th: Technology in the home
    • April 8th: Writing Discussion
    • Assignments for ENGL 4275
    • February 10th: Religion of Technology Part 3 of 3
    • February 12th: Is Love a Technology?
    • February 17th: Technology and Gender
    • February 19th: Technology and Expediency
    • February 24th: Semester Review
    • February 3rd: Religion of Technology Part 1 of 3
    • February 5th: Religion of Technology Part 2 of 3
    • January 13th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective
    • January 15th: Technology and Democracy
    • January 22nd: The Politics of Technology
    • January 27th: Discussion on Writing as Thinking
    • January 29th: Technology and Postmodernism
    • January 8th: Introduction to the Course
    • March 11th: Writing and Other Fun
    • March 16th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 1 of 2
    • March 18th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 2 of 2
    • March 23rd: Inception (2010)
    • March 25th: Writing and Reflecting Discussion
    • March 30th & April 1st: Count Zero
    • March 9th: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
  • ENGL 4750-090 & ENGL 5050-092 Video Games & Culture
    • Assignments for Video Games & Culture
    • August 25th: Introduction to the Course
    • November 10th: Aggression & Addiction
    • November 3rd: Moral Panics and Health Risks
    • October 13th: Narrative, ludology, f(r)iction
    • October 20th: Serious Games
    • October 27: Risky Business?
    • October 6th: Hyperreality
    • September 1st: History of Video Games
    • September 22nd: Video Game Aesthetics
    • September 29th: (sub)Cultures and Video Games
    • September 8th: Defining Video Games and Critical Theory Introduction
      • Marxism for Video Game Analysis
      • Postmodernism for Video Game Analysis
  • ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory
    • April 13th: Umberto Eco & Jean Baudrillard
    • April 20th: Moving Forward on Theory
    • April 27th: Last Day of Class
    • April 6th: Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition
      • What is Postmodernism?
    • February 10th: St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine [Rhetoric]
      • Oratory and Argument Analysis
    • February 17th: Knoblauch on Magical and Ontological Rhetoric
    • February 24th: Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method
    • February 3rd: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Books 2 and 3
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 2
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 3
    • January 13th: Introduction to Class
    • January 27th: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Book 1
    • March 16th: Friedrich Nietzsche
    • March 23rd: Mythologies and Meaning of Meaning (part 2)
    • March 30th: Derrida’s (refusal to have) Positions
    • March 9th: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
    • Rhetorical Theory Assignments
  • LBST 2212-124, 125, 126, & 127
    • August 21st: Introduction to Class
    • August 23rd: Humanistic Approach to Science Fiction
    • August 26th: Robots and Zombies
    • August 28th: Futurism, an Introduction
    • August 30th: R. A. Lafferty “Slow Tuesday Night” (1965)
    • December 2nd: Technological Augmentation
    • December 4th: Posthumanism
    • November 11th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 2)
    • November 13th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 2 con’t)
    • November 18th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Part 1)
      • More Questions than Answers
    • November 1st: Games Reality Plays (part II)
    • November 20th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Part 2)
    • November 6th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 1)
    • October 14th: More Autonomous Fun
    • October 16th: Autonomous Conclusion
    • October 21st: Sci Fi in the Domestic Sphere
    • October 23rd: Social Aphasia
    • October 25th: Dust in the Wind
    • October 28th: Gender Liminality and Roles
    • October 2nd: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
    • October 30th: Games Reality Plays (part I)
    • October 9th: Approaching Autonomous
      • Analyzing Prose in Autonomous
    • September 11th: The Time Machine
    • September 16th: The Alien Other
    • September 18th: Post-apocalyptic Worlds
    • September 20th: Dystopian Visions
    • September 23rd: World’s Beyond
    • September 25th: Gender Studies and Science Fiction
    • September 30th: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
    • September 4th: Science Fiction and Social Breakdown
      • More on Ellison
      • More on Forster
    • September 9th: The Time Machine
  • LBST 2213/HTAS 2100: Science, Technology, and Society
    • December 10th: Violence in Video Games
    • December 15th: Video Games and Violence, a more nuanced view
    • December 1st: COVID-19 facial covering rhetoric
    • December 3rd: COVID-19 Transmission and Pandemics
    • December 8th: 500-word Essay
    • November 10th: Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 27-end
    • November 12th: Frankenstein (1818) Preface-Ch. 8
    • November 17th: Frankenstein (1818) Ch. 9-Ch. 16
    • November 19th: Frankenstein (1818) Ch. 17-Ch. 24
    • November 3rd: Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 1-17
    • November 5th: Planet of the Apes (1964) Ch. 18-26
    • October 13th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 5 and 6
    • October 15th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
    • October 1st: The Golem at Large Introduction & Ch. 1
    • October 22nd: The Time Machine
    • October 29th: H.G. Wells and Adaptations
    • October 6th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology) Ch. 2
    • October 8th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 3 & 4
    • September 10th: Science and Technology, a Humanistic Approach
    • September 15th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 2
    • September 17th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4
    • September 22nd: Collins & Pinch Ch. 5 & 6
    • September 24th: Collins & Pinch Ch. 7 & Conclusion
    • September 29th: Test 1
    • September 8th: Introduction to Class
  • New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology (Spring 2021)
    • February 16: Misunderstanding the Internet
    • February 23rd: Our Public Sphere and the Media
    • February 2nd: Introduction to Cultural Studies
    • January 26th: Introduction to New Media
  • Science Fiction in American Culture (Summer I–2020)
    • Assignments for Science Fiction in American Culture
    • Cultural Studies and Science Fiction Films
    • June 10th: Interstellar and Exploration themes
    • June 11th: Bicentennial Man
    • June 15th: I’m Only Human…Or am I?
    • June 16th: Wall-E and Environment
    • June 17th: Wall-E (2008) and Technology
    • June 18th: Interactivity in Video Games
    • June 1st: Firefly (2002) and Myth
    • June 2nd: “Johnny Mnemonic”
    • June 3rd: “New Rose Hotel”
    • June 4th: “Burning Chrome”
    • June 8th: Conformity and Monotony
    • June 9th: Cultural Constructions of Beauty
    • May 18th: Introduction to Class
    • May 19th: American Culture, an Introduction
    • May 20th: The Matrix
    • May 21st: Gender and Science Fiction
    • May 25th: Goals for I, Robot
    • May 26th: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
    • May 27th: Hackers and Slackers
    • May 30th: Inception
  • Teaching Portfolio
  • Topics for Analysis
    • American Culture, an Introduction
    • Feminism, An Introduction
    • Frankenstein Part I
    • Frankenstein Part II
    • Futurism Introduction
    • Langdon Winner Summary: The Politics of Technology
    • Marxist Theory (cultural analysis)
    • Oral Presentations
    • Our Public Sphere
    • Postmodernism Introduction
    • Protesting Confederate Place
    • Punctuation Refresher
    • QT, the Existential Robot
    • Religion of Technology Discussion
    • Rhetoric, an Introduction
      • Analyzing the Culture of Technical Writer Ads
      • Rhetoric of Technology
      • Visual Culture
      • Visual Perception
      • Visual Perception, Culture, and Rhetoric
      • Visual Rhetoric
      • Visuals for Technical Communication
      • World War I Propaganda
    • The Great I, Robot Discussion
      • I, Robot Short Essay Topics
    • The Rhetoric of Video Games: A Cultural Perspective
      • Civilization, an Analysis
    • The Sopranos
    • Why Science Fiction?
    • Zombies and Consumption Satire

Contact Me

Office: Fretwell 280F
Phone: 704.687.0613
Email: atoscano@uncc.edu
ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory » April 27th: Last Day of Class

April 27th: Last Day of Class

Plan for Today

Reminder that your Rhetoric/al Projects are due today at 11:00 pm…I’m too easy.

  • Final Exam time–let’s all get on the same page
  • Leftovers from last week
  • Paulo Freire
  • Knoblauch Ch. 5, 6, and “Afterward”
  • Presentation Discussion

Cy Knoblauch’s Rhetorical Perspectives

Knoblauch doesn’t give us quick, concise definitions of these rhetorical perspectives. Instead, he takes us through his thinking about them in each chapter. Knoblauch spent many years considering these perspectives. In 1988, he published an article that discussed four of the six he has in his book: ontological rhetoric, objectivist rhetoric, expressivist (expressionist) rhetoric, and sociological rhetoric. The article was mainly focused on discussing education and literacy studies at the end of the 1980s and how these perspectives might enhance composition classes.

Below I have attempted to capture concise definitions of Knoblauch’s perspectives from Discursive Ideologies (2014) and his 1988 College English article “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment”:

  • Magical Rhetoric
    • “Magical rhetoric…refers to the discourse of the sacred, a theory and practice of language conditioned by the assumption that the world is” created by a divine being. (p. 26–Discursive Ideologies)
  • Ontological Rhetoric
    • “Philosophically, the ontological argument presumes an absolute distinction between the concept of ‘language’ and the concept of ‘reality,’ the second prior to the first and denoting an intrinsically coherent “world” (that is, metaphysical order) to which language ‘makes reference’ so as to enable human communication….”
      “In this view, language use is largely irrelevant to the substance of knowledge although crucial for its transmission.” (p. 128–College English)
    • “Ontological rhetoric deals with the nature of being and privileges the view that “language derives its power to signify from its relationship to an intrinsically and purposefully ordered, that is, teleological, exteriority.” (p. 51–Discursive Ideologies)
  • Objectivist Rhetoric
    • “The objectivist statement locates knowledge in human intellectual activity as it acts upon experiential information. Its challenge to the ontological view is its assertion that knowledge depends upon discourse or language use, on the human search for significance, rather than on an intrinsically rational, ‘revealed’ order of things.” (p. 130–College English)
    • “Objectivist rhetoric is comprised of empirical inquiry, driven by a cycle of hypothesis and experiment, which leads to defensible assertions linked to previous, similarly tested assertions in a temporally evolving pattern of data-driven argument.” (p. 79–Discursive Ideologies)
  • Expressivist Rhetoric (he calls it “Expressionist” in the College English article)
    • “…expressionist rhetoric, a theory that locates the source of knowledge not in sensory experience but in the processes of human imagination.” (p. 130–College English)
    • not concerned with “objective reality independent of the perceiving subject,…but rather what…[it] means to the perceiving subject.” (p. 105–Discursive Ideologies)
    • “The issue is human intelligibility, while the status of objects in themselves is as irrelevant as it is undecidable.” (p. 105–Discursive Ideologies)
    • “People identify the preferable…by experience, and they seek to persuade those who hold different views that their advantage lies in accommodating conventional agreements about the preferable.” (pp. 105-106–Discursive Ideologies)
  • Sociological Rhetoric
    • “…privileging the social as the conceptual starting point for our understanding of discursive practice and the making of knowledge.” (p. 130–Discursive Ideologies, emphasis added)
    • “…the ground of meaningfulness in sociological rhetoric is what I call intersubjectivity, the social consciousness that groups of people compose through verbal and other signs in the ceaseless production of human reality.” (p. 132–Discursive Ideologies, emphasis added)
    • “Language is regarded as a social practice rooted, as are all social practices, in material and historical process….Society is to be sure a human construct, but the individual is also a social construct: one’s sense of “self” is made possible through the essentially social identifications-family, home, country, culture, religion, ethical orientation, school-that allow selfhood to define itself” (p. 134–College English)
  • Deconstructive Rhetoric
    • Are we surprised there’s no concise way to articulate this perspective?
    • “…deconstructive rhetoric valorizes irreverence and critique, the powerful mischief of play….deconstructive rhetoric can subvert hegemonic ideas or institutions while lacking the energy and determined commitment, the confident sense of agency, necessary to sponsor (or even envision) change for the better.” (p. 199–Discursive Ideologies)

Knoblauch Ch. 5 “Sociological Rhetoric”

Drawing heavily on Karl Marx and Thomas Kuhn, this chapter identifies the intersubjective framework governing the meaning of meaning without substituting one socially constructed framework as the grand narrative. Although reductive and in desperate need of qualifications, as a starting point, I would claim that this perspective combines objectivist rhetoric and expressivist rhetoric. Immutable, objective reality could be an intersubjectively held position, but communities share rules for appropriately recognizing and organizing experiences–not an individual free for all.

  • p. 131: “…society is simply the assemblage of independently conscious individuals–perceivers who amass composite perceptions, thinkers who share their knowledge, speakers who join in conversation.”
    • “…the practices of language are a priori social practices defining the very possibility of individuation.”
  • p. 132: “social ratification, the collective understanding that something is true.”
    • “Signification is the architect of the human world.”
  • p. 133: “Kuhn’s position, contrary to that of classical objectivism, is that science does not develop historically…as though progress were a single, unbroken arc of intellectual achievement.”
    • Paradigms from Kuhn
  • p. 136: “There are no one-person world views….The construction of new knowledge…is achieved only by communities.”
  • Kenneth Burke’s pentad
    • Act: What is going on?
    • Scene: Where is the action taking place? What’s the location?
    • Agent: Who or what is carrying out an action?
    • Agency: How, by what means, is an act completed?
    • Purpose: Why is the act being done?
  • p. 137: The Burkean “rhetor is socially enveloped within the ‘scene’ of language (symbolic action), and socially positioned by means of myriad identifications, differentiated interests, and hierarchical orders.”
  • p. 140: “Dramastic method is evidently grounded in dialectic, the give and take of opposing views.”
  • p. 141: From K. Burke–“‘the basic function of rhetoric’ is ‘the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents’ (p. 41).”
    • “Rhetoric…becomes a medium for socialization.”
  • p. 142: “…modern media make it more appropriate to consider the constructed nature of an audience, a group ‘carved out’ of the social fabric, as market analysts contrive the groups that are most likely to desire commercial products.”
    • “…there are no unrhetorical uses of language.”
  • p. 145: From a Marxian perspective–“…the human species differentiates itself from other animals through the character of its work, which is not merely instinctual but conscious and motivated.”
    • I, of course, question how conscious we are…
  • p. 146: “…human beings…derive our individuality from the social realities in which we already and necessarily participate. Our labor exists within a network of productive relations.”
  • p. 147: “The life-world is better understood as a process than as a condition, the continuous reconstruction of social reality as humanity applies its labor to the satisfaction of its needs.”
  • p. 151: “…language always preexists the specific user and is only meaningful because its meanings are already collectively shared.”
  • p. 152 (top): “We create the illusion of personal ownership, including the sense of distinctive voice or style…failing to hear our utterances as echoes of the speech practices existing everywhere around us.”
  • p. 153: “Meaning in dialogue cannot reside, therefore, in the words themselves, or in the ‘soul of the speaker,’ or in the ‘soul of the hearer.'”
  • p. 157: Commenting on Raymond Williams–“the production of cultural meanings and values is far from a rigidly constrained, uniform, or one-directional social process leading to or supporting monolithic ideological formations.”
  • p. 158: “…hegemony explains how ideology becomes ‘common sense,’ no longer articulate but pervasive in social consciousness.”
    • “It has become ‘the sense of reality for most people in the society’.”
  • p. 160: “Actual writers…are always surrounded by voices they hear in their heads from the recollected speaking and writing of others that form their consciousness.”

Knoblauch Ch. 6 “Deconstructive Rhetoric”

Well, keeping with the tradition of Derrida and postmodernism, this perspective is both meaning maker and critique of the assumed meanings–the traces of knowledge and meanings–privileged by particular groups. Unlike ontological or magical rhetoric, which have absolute grounds for truth, this perspective is more concerned with explaining how slippery meaning and affixing meaning can be.

  • p. 163: “The process of signifying has no starting point, no termination, no textual boundaries, and most important, no exit from the network of significations that sprawls from any and every point.”
  • p. 165: “There is no outside, no extraverbal, transcendent source for our images. ‘We’ are all endlessly constructed as images by the textual mirrors themselves.”
  • p. 165: “The pieces on the chess board have no meaning outside the game.”
    • “The game is a coherent system of interrelated positions and moves, values that regulate the details of play.”
    • Speaking of games, let’s consider dice as tools vs signs.
  • p. 167: “Intertexuality, the endless dependency of meaning upon meaning across all boundaries of signification, from the word to the book, phoneme to the discourse, begins from Saussure’s assertion about language as a system of differences.”
  • p. 168: “Belief in the transcendental signified as a meaning that lives beyond the games of language is ‘logocentrism’.”
  • p. 173: “It’s the nature of signs to refer only and always to other signs: presence is not less elusive in one than in another.”
    • Metaphysics of presence is Derrida’s phrase for Western civilization’s privileging of (the assumption) of immediate access to meaning and not deferred access to meaning captured in the concept différance.
    • Arche-writing is Derrida’s concept of writing that comes before speech and writing.
  • p. 176: “…writing has been historically implicated in the rise of empires, the creation of castes and classes…”
  • p. 179: Thinking of metaphors, writing is both supplement and substitution.
  • p. 181: “Through practices of irreverent reading, texts are turned against themselves and interrogated for their claims of transcendent coherence, clarity, and sufficiency.”

Presentation Discussion

Do your best. Sharing a PowerPoint seems to be working for us.

Next Class

Next week is our final exam time, and you’ll be doing your presentations. I want us to meet during our regularly scheduled class time of 6:00 pm-8:45 pm and not during the scheduled exam time for this class. Make sure you don’t have any conflicts.

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