The Rhetorical Approach and Heuristic Strategies
Recap: Academic v. Professional Writing
Consider some of the ways in which academic writing differs from professional writing.
| Academic/College Writing | Business/Professional Writing | |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt & Purpose | Students write because instructors make them. Instructors assign reports, essays, and papers, and provide guidelines, requirements, and parameters. Students write to learn, to draw connections between things they’ve learned, and to demonstrate what they know to their instructors. | Professional writers write when a situation calls for writing–either at their own initiative or because someone in their organization expects them to write. Professional writers write not to create a document, but to accomplish something–to make things happen. |
| Audience | Most often, students write for a singular reader–their instructor. To varying degrees, instructor-audiences make their expectations known. Instructor audiences expect student writers to demonstrate and apply their knowledge. | Professional writers often write for large and complex groups of people, various stakeholders who have different needs and interests. Expectations aren’t always explicit, but professional audiences still want professional writers to meet or exceed their expectations. |
| Genre | Students write papers, essays, journals, lab reports, summaries, etc. | Professional writers write memos, letters, proposals, reports, performance evaluations, business plans, marketing plans, audit reports, sales presentations, manuals, handbooks, contracts, etc. |
| Style & Design | For the most part, students follow formatting requirements outlined my MLA or APA guidelines, typically 12 point font, Times New Roman or Arial, double-spaced, with indentations, a proper heading, and style appropriate in-text citations and documentation. Students write complex sentences and lengthy paragraphs to develop and support their ideas, and must conform to maximum and/or minimum page length or word count requirements. | Professional writers design their documents to be visually attractive and to allow their readers at least two ways of reading documents–quickly by scanning, or more slowly for details. Professional writers often use white space and graphic highlighting to facilitate reading. They use headings, subheadings, bullets, graphic organizers, and visual aids to increase readability and comprehension. Professionals typically write shorter, simpler sentences and include much less paragraph development. Professionally written documents are just as long as they need to be (or, as short as possible). |
| Product, Feedback, & Evaluation | The product–a finished paper–is the end point in the communication process. The student’s instructor may offer some feedback in addition to a letter or percentage grade. | In general, the product of a business writer’s context–the written report, memo, etc–is secondary to what that product accomplishes. The document is only a means to communicate something (to get something done), and so, is usually only a small piece of what will be a larger project or goal, or a component of a business relationship. |
| In Summary | Students write to learn, to demonstrate what they have learned, and to demonstrate their ability to communicate what they’ve learned. | Business writers write to get things done. |
*Adapted in part from “Differences Between Academic and Business Writing”, by Dave Dusseau, University of Oregon
What is a Rhetorical Approach?
Business writers write to get things done–to accomplish goals, to motivate action, to persuade audiences, to sell products and ideas, etc. Because the contexts, audiences, and purposes of business writing are all unique, professional writing isn’t formulaic. Instead, to achieve various purposes within a range of contexts to diverse audiences, professional writers must take a rhetorical approach.
What is a rhetorical approach?
Aristotle defines rhetoric “as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Rhetoric, Book 1, Ch 2, emphasis added). Let’s unpack that:
So, in other words, rhetoric means finding yourself in a particular situation, identifying the techniques that might work best, and making purposeful choices about content, organization, and style in order to get things done.
According the Stanford, “The rhetorical approach recognizes that what works in one situation may not work in another; communicators must be attentive to the contexts and communities in which they hope to work.” To do that, writers must evaluate specific audiences and contexts to make informed choices about structure based on an assessment of the rhetorical situation.” (A Rhetorical Approach to Writing at Stanford)
Heuristics
Professional writing is more about a rhetorical approach to writing than about a codified body of knowledge or genres. It’s about knowing the goals of professional writing (in general), learning skills to help you achieve those goals, and the ability to put those skills into practice in writing.
In order to think through a rhetorical (or communication) situation, we will use a heuristic called a PAGOS plan to help us make conscious choices about what and how to write.
What is a heuristic?
A heuristic is a flexible strategy that can be used in any situation to generate ideas. It’s not a template, formula, or a fill-in-the-blank worksheet, and not all of it’s components will be helpful in every writing situation. Part of what a heuristic does is to help you see what components are more or less important in any particular writing situation.
A heuristic (hyoo-ris-tik) “is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical methodology not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals . . . [H]euristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.” (“Heuristic,” Wikipedia)
According to Janice Lauer, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) at Purdue University,
“Psychologists characterized heuristic thinking as a more flexible way of proceeding in creative activities than formal deduction or formulaic steps and a more efficient way than trial and error. They posited that heuristic strategies work in tandem with intuition, prompt conscious activity, and guide the creative act but never determine the outcome. Heuristic procedures are series of questions, operations, and perspectives used to guide inquiry. Neither algorithmic (rule governed) nor completely aleatory (random), they prompt investigators to take multiple perspectives on the questions they are pursuing, to break out of conceptual ruts, and to forge new associations in order to trigger possible new understanding. Heuristic procedures are thought to engage memory and imagination and are able to be taught and transferred from one situation to another.While students typically use heuristics deliberately while learning them, more experienced creators often use them tacitly, shaping them to their own styles.” (Lauer, Invention in Rhetoric and Composition, 8-9, emphasis added)
Heuristics aren’t rule-goverened (formulaic) or random, but instead, heuristics guide writers toward conscious activity without prescribing the final product.
You’ve probably used them before. Free-writing, mind-mapping, journalist’s questions (who, what, when… etc.), and outlining are all writing heuristics, though much less structured than the one we’ll use for professional writing. Our heuristic–our flexible, “practical methodology”–is called a PAGOS plan.
We’ll get into the details of PAGOS plans in the next section, but briefly, a PAGOS plan is a set of questions to ask yourself about the elements of a particular writing situation. The elements are:
In the next reading, you’ll see specific prompts and questions for each of the five areas–purpose, audience, genre, organization, and style. But as you read, keep in mind that a PAGOS plan is a heuristic, which means that in practice, certain elements will be more or less important depending on the overall situation.
A quick example: One prompt under the audience area of a PAGOS plan asks you to consider the demographics of your audience–their age, gender, class, background, etc. Sometimes one or more of these demographic factors will be very important. Sometimes, none of them will be important.
For instance:
When Demographics Matter More: When I teach evening ENC 3213 classes at Davie, the students in my classes are demographically different than my morning ENC 3213 classes in Boca. My evening Davie students, on average, are typically older than Boca students. They often have more professional experience in their fields, sometimes have children and families, and are often students returning to school after several years (or decades) in their careers.
In the particular case above, when I’m planning and delivering my course, does it matter that my students have more professional experience and are older than “traditional” college students? YES. It matters because their demographics means they often have experience with professional environments, professional writing, and various business genres.
When Demographics Matter Less: When I teach courses in technical writing or communications for engineers, most of my students are male. I’ve had classes with only two or three female students out of 25.
In the particular case above, when I’m planning and delivering my course, does it matter that my students are predominantly male? NO. It doesn’t matter because a technical writer’s or an engineer’s gender doesn’t affect what they need to know about writing, nor does it affect the way I teach the course.