3.1 Identifying the Rhetorical Context

As you begin your engagement with community partners, and during the drafting and revisions processes, understanding and articulating the rhetorical situation can be a tremendous benefit. For a quick read on the rhetorical situation, visit this open source chapter from Technical Writing Essentials:

1.3 Understanding the Rhetorical Situation by S. Last and C. Neveu

As you get settled into your project, identifying and understanding the rhetorical situation will facilitate your success. In this section, let’s focus on two components that are different in community engaged learning than in traditional academic writing opportunities: audience and purpose. In this course, your academic work now has a purpose beyond the academic setting with which you’ve likely grown familiar. Working with a community partner on a context-specific and consequential project invites a host of complexities. These questions will help you hone in on the audience and purpose to facilitate your success.

Audience

Reflecting on the audience of this project is key to establishing an effective strategy to tackle your community engaged project. While your instructor will be evaluating your materials with a rubric designed for this project, the primary audience of these materials is your community partner. The community partners we work with are keenly aware that you are enrolled in a course where you must achieve specific course objectives. The project, however, is designed such that you can achieve these course objectives in the process of serving the community partner through your project. Recognizing your community partner and their constituency as the primary audience is critical. Your instructor is a secondary audience; the materials you are developing serve your instructor by providing them exhibits to determine your achievement of course objectives. Your instructor evaluates your materials based on how you used skills and readings from your course to address community partner’s stated goals. There are also many tertiary audiences for your project. Some examples include: the clients who receive services from your community partner, faculty in your college who will see the work, and local community members, other instructors, and future students. Can you think of a few more?

Before you jump into your research and development work, take a few moments to develop an audience profile. Here are the prompts Last and Neveu provide, revised for our use:

Questions to consider regarding your primary audience:

• What are the specific names, titles, and general roles of your primary audience(s)?
• How is your primary audience situated in relation to you in an organizational hierarchy? Lateral? Supervisory (this could, for instance, be a site supervisor for an internship)? Outside of your organization?How much technical background do each of these audiences have?
• How much do they already know about the topic?
• How usable are these materials by your primary audience?

Questions re: secondary and tertiary audiences:

• Who else will necessarily read your materials and why?
• If you are producing materials partners will use with their clients, what special care must be given in the design and development process? Consider person-first language, accessibility, printing costs, etc.
• Do your materials meet the instructor stated criteria for this project? If not, is there a rationale grounded in community partner need to justify this exception?
• Besides your community partner and instructor, who else may review or see material associated with your project? Why?

These questions should help you situate your work within the broader infrastructure wherein which it will circulate. If you found yourself struggling to answer any of these questions, reach out to your instructor. It can be incredibly frustrating to work on a project without defined contexts, which include audience and purpose. While there is a great deal of ambiguity in the work so that you have freedom in how you work through the research and development work, the audience and purpose should be clearly defined before you begin.

Purpose

Now that you’ve identified your audience and done a bit of analysis, another key consideration that will help you succeed is determining the purpose of this project. Last and Neveu define purpose as the why of what you are writing. Accurately assessing this requires you to engage in a task analysis. An important framing question as you determine the purpose of this project is:

• What do you hope the reader/user will do/think/decide as a result of engaging with your materials?

Part and parcel with successfully completing this project is finding, soliciting, or building content, too. Consider emails to community partners or instructors requesting information or data. These emails, too, have a purpose. In the workplace, Last and Neveu suggest there are three major reasons for writing:

1. Create a record
2. Give or request information
3. Persuade

Ultimately, our goal with a community engaged project is for the major materials you produce to persuade. For instance, the materials could be the impetus for decision making (perhaps you’re writing a research-based genre proposing a specific social media campaign or establishing a process for soliciting donations from local businesses) or persuade the audience that further research/development is required or be actionable as is, or with minor revisions (for example, the content for a grant proposal, or fliers ready for printing).

Project Examples- How Would You Identify the Rhetorical Context?

Typically, your community partner and instructor have collaboratively written a brief assignment overview that exhibits what they are looking for. Here are some examples from prior semesters (we’ve replaced the name of the organizations with the word “Organization”).

Example 1: Teams will build a modular volunteer policy and protocol that includes sample documents designed for Organization’s use. Teams will begin by researching the standards and protocols for volunteer populations at comparable organizations. Teams will research best practices in defining and maintaining policies and protocols for both new and seasoned volunteers with regard to standards of appearance, type of communication, and representation of Organization, with special attention given to: 1.) issues related to working with youth; 2.) volunteers working at Organization locations via face-to-face interactions with minors; and 3.) volunteers working from home/off-site locations given social distance practices. Teams will propose options and pitch the best option based on multiple logistics and policies.

Example 2: Teams will develop a multifaceted proposal, detailing a set of best practices for interviewing adults in custody and/or returning citizens. Recommendations will center an interview format that would be specific to Organization’s mission and work, i.e., arts programs including music, theatre, and dialogue circles, through the lens of restorative justice. Examples, such as OJRC’s Herstory and PCAP’s Life on LOP, can be used as a starting point. The end goal would be a set of best practices and modular interview formats for Organization to use to build a repository of narratives, which will highlight personal stories, educate the general public, and advocate for rehabilitation. The modality of interviews (written, oral, etc.) would be suggested within teams’ recommendations. End users of the recommendations and materials produced include Organization representatives and future volunteers. Teams will use their white paper research to develop a set of best practices to conduct interviews and develop narratives that will be maintained by Organization. Research should centralize concerns regarding what interviewers should say, how interviews will be conducted, with whom, and scripts for questions and content.

Example 3: Teams will select an area of focus related to novel fundraising options for Organization. Options include: 1.) expand current fundraising practices to include digital delivery options, by finding new funding options or developing new justifications for current streams; 2.) draft new content for all programming by writing grant materials; or 3.) propose a funding opportunity/prospect. All projects must include proof of concept that work is focused on novel fundraising options via research into what other NPOs use, and investigation of relevant tax and/or donation information. Teams will pitch top options with a comprehensive strategy and measures of feasibility: this is not traditional grant writing.

As you can tell, these are brief discussions of the major goals of unique and context specific community engagement projects. If you are establishing your own project with a community partner, these examples may provide you some structure as you determine scope and purpose for your project. Your instructor will provide guidance on the sorts of genres, or types of documents, you are expected to produce; they anticipate that these genres will help you develop materials appropriate to the purpose and audience of the project. For example, in prior semesters, students have developed sequences that looked like this:

• Project Design Example #1
  • Preliminary proposal (500 words)
  • White paper (3000 words + at least 3 data visualizations),
  • Recommendation report (1000 words)
  • Pitch deck with visual and verbal elements not to exceed 2 minutes 30 seconds
• Project Design Example #2
  • Scope of work memo (500 words)
  • Research driven proposal (4000 words, 15 references, and 4 data visualizations)
  • Instructions for implementation (1000 words max, visuals to accompany each step)
  • Poster (4’x3’, 300 DPI)
• Project Design Example #3
  • Proposal (500 words)
  • Background report (1000 words)
  • Proposal (1000 words)
  • Approved deliverable for direct use (e.g. website re-design, style sheets, grant proposal, templates, etc)
  • Presentation (in class, 5 minutes)

These examples of genres and methods of producing deliverables that address the purpose of projects can help you understand how this sort of project can be tied to your course objectives. Early on in the project, your instructor may ask you to develop a proposal that shapes your/your team’s response to a specific task. Then, depending on the results of this proposal and how community partners respond, you will be encouraged to proceed with the production of other research-based genres and development of major deliverables that will be usable by partners. Finally, in technical and professional communication courses especially, you will likely be asked to remediate the materials, or transition all this work into a condensed presentation format for your peer audience (posters or presentations, for instance). All told, the work of establishing the scope of your project, conducting research, determining feasible proposals, and building out the best suited option – and then revising it all into a presentation- is a lot of work! Your community partner and instructor are here to support you through it all but need your assessment of purpose and audience to coordinate effectively.

Usability and Sustainability

Once you have identified your purpose and audience, there are two more rhetorical considerations that can ensure your hard work is put to good use. These include the usability and sustainability of the work. Long-term partnerships between community partners, faculty, and students require that at least some of the work developed by students is imminently usable and sustainable.

Usability Usability and user experience are broad and critical concepts in technical and professional writing; we introduced them in Chapter 2.3. In this instance, the usability of the work you produce refers to how actionable it is in the world. Have you written a funding proposal that triples the organization’s budget, even though they don’t have the capacity to leverage the funding into programming? Are you recommending they update programming to require a fee for service, even though the partner has suggested they will never charge for their services? These are examples that suggest the usability of the materials is questionable. Typically, your instructor and community partner will help you determine scope and purpose so that the materials you produce are usable. It is important to listen carefully to partners and, when you can, read between the lines. This means observing how the organization is represented online and in print, how stakeholders communicate about the organization, and how they interact with you and, if applicable, your writing team. One key to success in this project is ensuring that your recommendations are feasible: appropriate for the audience and purpose. Your instructor and community partner can provide insight on this element of the context, but it is important for you, too, to apply critical thinking and research- and evidence-based solutions throughout the project.

Sustainability in this context refers to the extended usability of the materials you (and your team) have produced for this project. Perhaps you’ve built out a robust website, including a staff page and “About Us” page for your community partner. They are certainly grateful for both the development work and that you got all the content up for them. But, is there a plan in place for updating the website in a few months, when your community partner hires on a couple new staff members? Or a set of instructions and login information for when they need to update their mission statement? Thinking several months and even years into the future, into the longevity and sustainability of your proposed developments, is crucial for a successful capacity building project. Your instructor will prompt you to consider these concerns, but, similar to the usability of your materials discussed above, it is necessary to observe how your community partner reacts, and assess their overall capacity, before proposing large scale programs or changes that cannot be sustained into the future. This is different, however, from proposing the initial component of a project that will take months or years to get off the ground. Sometimes, the purpose of your project is to lay groundwork for programs that another team from future courses will pick up, revise, and build out further until they are prepared for “showtime.”

These elements are all part of the capacity building cycle, so being honest with yourself about the sustainability and usability of materials as you contemplate purpose and audience will facilitate your successful completion of this project.