Sophists Rule!

Week 7If you had to provide a brief account of the impact of Cicero on technical communication today, how would you do it? What would that impact be? Also, what messages have you learned from the Rhetorica ad Herennium?
Cicero foresaw SME's and the problem they would create for technical communicators everywhere. Cicero points out that knowing something doesn't necessarily help one communicate it. People with knowledge frequently need assistance communicating that knowledge to others. The company that Alison worked for obviously realized that when they hired her to write for engineers. They knew the engineers were ineffective at communicating and that their ineffectiveness could cost the company money or even lives--Alison to the rescue.

The other interesting thing that Cicero does is make the arguement that effective communication is more valuable than knowledge or information. That being an effective communicator requires natural talent, but also education and practice to perfect the skill. He implies that those with knowledge or information are a dime a dozen so to speak. In the 21st century new economy, theoretically it seems like that would be the case. The medium is the message. Remix is art. The selecting, framing, phrasing, and contextualizing of information is what makes knowledge, so technical communicators should be the ones with the most value. Unfortunately that's frequently not the case. Tiffany Craft-Portewig's dissertation pointed out that TCers either insert graphics as their told or just clean up the engineers graphics even though the TCers have the ability to produce far more effective graphics. On the ATTW listserv Karen Schriver just asked for help on developing a workshop for TCers and SME's who have lost the ability to work together effectively because the SME's have been bullying them. Two thousand years ago Cicero wrote an essay outlining both the problems and the solution to the work-a-day dilemma of TCers. We all need to listen.

As for Rhetorica Ad Herennium we still use the basic technique of defining techniques and explaining how to use or not use them even if we don't always use the vocabulary or techniques described in the Rhetorica. A big part of teaching style is teaching vocabulary--now it's more likely to be nominalization, telegraphic style, parallelism etc.--and teaching students how these things and correct or imitate them as necessary. We're still using the basic pedagogical techniques as demonstrated in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium.

Kendall