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Introduction
When
we first started moving text onto the Web, styleguides appeared like
mushrooms after rain [1-3, 5, 12, 22, 23, 26, 33, 36, 40, 55, 57].
Now, after a dozen years, the Web demands a full-scale rhetoric-a
theoretical and practical analysis of what it means to communicate over
the Internet, and through the Web [61].
A
rhetoric endeavors to answer questions often asked by people who are
preparing to communicate in public. For instance:
-
Who exactly is my audience, and when I have discovered that, how should
what I have learned affect the way I communicate to them?
-
How can I come up with something to say?
-
How should I organize my material?
-
What style should I use in this context?
-
How should I deliver my ideas?
-
How can I remember all of them?
-
What is my role, here? How
should I portray myself, in relation to the audience?
The
Web transforms the traditional answers to these questions. In this little
talk, I sketch out a rhetoric for the age of customized, personalized,
object-oriented content, delivered in many formats and media, as part of a
continuous conversation between customers, subject matter experts,
marketing honchos, support personnel, and-getting in an occasional word or
two-technical writers.
I
build my mini-rhetoric around a dialog with Aristotle, the twentieth
century's nominee for most influential theorist of rhetoric [4, 7, 9, 11,
35, 59]. He's so modern, and
I'm not. Compared to Plato,
the other leading candidate for Lead Rhetor, Aristotle has the techie
tone, the absence of charm, and a completeness lacking in the more
inspirational, loving, and metaphysical dialoguer [43, 44]. I am setting
up Aristotle as a straw man, to represent commonly held "modern
classical" opinions about audience, invention, arrangement, style,
emotional appeal, delivery, memory, and ethos. If you find my presentation
of Aristotle's positions a bit simplistic, blame me, not him; to
demonstrate how different our rhetorical situation is today, I may at
times tilt toward caricature when I quote him.
1.
What is rhetoric?
 Aristotle:
"Rhetoric is
the faculty of
observing in
any given case
the available
means of
persuasion"
[4, p. 2155].
 Jonathan:
"But in The Rhetoric you focus on only one purpose for
communication--persuasion--in a limited number of contexts (trials,
political debates, and eulogies), in only one medium--speech. Also, you tend to assume a coherent audience.
Yes, you recognize that one audience may be made up of rich old
men, and another audience may be composed of restless young men (no women,
of course), but you do not address the problem we face today, where we
have to communicate with half a dozen different demographic groups through
a single Web site.
Also, you
tend to view the audience as fairly passive, a crowd to be manipulated,
not an active participant driving the exchange.
In your view, the audience makeup may give a speech writer some
ideas, some tactics, some stylistic strategies, but then the writer takes
over, and prepares the speech, and delivers it.
Overall, you see the communication itself as a single speech--a live
event that ends--rather than an ongoing conversation."
Aristotle:
"So how do you define rhetoric?"
Jonathan:
"The craft of communicating through one or more media with a
particular set of audiences for specific purposes."
Aristotle:
"So you call rhetoric a craft, rather than a science or art."
Jonathan:
"Yes. By craft I mean a skill that has measurable objectives and aims
at being functional, so it is not a pure art, and yet depends on
intuition, imagination, and guesswork, so it is not a real science."
Aristotle:
"And you mention multiple purposes?"
Jonathan:
"Yes, I argue that people communicate for many different purposes-not
just to persuade, but to entertain, to instruct, to sell, to spread
awareness, heck, just to participate in a group."
Aristotle:
"And what medium is there, other than written and spoken
language?"
Jonathan:
"Well, first off, we don't speak very often to our audiences any
more. We may occasionally
talk on the phone, but mostly we post electronic text, with accompanying
images, sound bytes, animations, and video clips. Content, for us, derives
from what used to be, in the modern period, different media. Everything we
do must seem very indirect to you, very mediated [29-31, 61].
"Our
rhetoric, then, assumes we communicate for many different purposes, in
many different media, to many different audiences-and they talk back.
"In
fact, our audiences often start the conversation; they rarely sit still,
awaiting our speech. Our
audiences proactively raise issues, send in questions, complain. On the
Web, they drive the discussion, and if we don't give them the answers they
want, they turn to each other, in their own forums, and publicly chastise
us."
2.
Who's my audience?
Aristotle:
"Let us now consider the various types of human character, in
relation to the emotions, states of character, ages, and fortunes. ...
People always think well of speeches adapted to, and reflecting, their own
character: and we can now see how to compose our speeches so as to adapt
both them and ourselves to our audiences" [4, pp. 2213-2215].
Jonathan:
"Well, we follow your lead when we perform demographic analyses,
sorting out our market segments according to common characteristics.
And, with user and task analysis, we investigate the people who
make up our audiences, in depth [10,16]. But, increasingly, we define
these groups using Alan Cooper's personas, preparing individual character
descriptions that focus on their main goals, to help us respond with an
offering of informative objects (text, art, and so on) [8]. We create
customized content for each audience, catching each visitor upon arrival,
typecasting him or her, then displaying the information we think will be
most relevant. No more mass
audience, then; we are customizing for the members of distinct groups, one
by one [53, 54, 56].
"And
we are moving toward allowing visitors to personalize our content, picking
the information they want, grouping it their own way, sequencing it so it
makes sense to them, individually. Through
software we allow each visitor to create a more personal experience of
content we provide; we no longer have total control over the organization
of the material, because our uppity audiences are taking charge" [17,
18, 24, 25, 37, 38, 41, 42, 62].
3.
How can I invent content?
Aristotle:
"The thought element is the way to invent and refute arguments.
We have next to discuss language and arrangement" [4, p.
2237].
Jonathan:
"Getting ready to move content onto the Web, our team invents a
series of standard objects-procedures, conceptual overviews, reference
sections-in response to hundreds or thousands of people all asking the
same kind of question, such as "How do I ... ?" or "What is
... ?" We invent a class
of object, such as the abstract, generic procedure or concept (Plato would
enjoy this), and then, when we are writing about a particular situation,
we create an instance of that class, that is, a particular object
answering a particular question of that type, such as "How do I
install this version of your software?" or "What exactly is a
checkpoint?" We come up
with text in response to the needs, tasks, dreams, and wishes of our many
audiences. [45-47, 49, 51].
"We
are less interested in arguments than you were, and much more interested
in answering questions, resolving problems, and assisting people in
carrying out tasks. So user
and task analysis underlie the process by which we develop a set of topics
to discuss, and objects to create.
"And,
as we investigate the topic, we sort what we learn into a set of
predefined structures. That
process-thinking structurally-enables us to get a better hold on the
material, and as we learn it, we can improve the organization and clarify
the style [48, 50]. To us, invention can no longer be considered an
activity that is separate from arranging and styling the text; we do all
three activities iteratively, continuously."
4.
How should I
arrange my material?
Aristotle:
"A speech has two parts. You
must state your case, and you must prove it. ... These are the essential
features of a speech; and it cannot in any case have more than
introduction, statement, argument, and epilog"
[4, pp. 2257-8].
Jonathan:
"Well, we used to arrange our material in documents, such as books,
white papers, job aids, and then we organized the documents into larger
collections, such as help systems, libraries of documentation, long lists
of PDF files.
"Now,
as we move documentation onto the Web, we are beginning to carve up the
original documents into smaller pieces identified with tags created in XML,
then to put together various sets of those little chunks, assembling pages
on the fly with content tailored differently for particular groups or
individuals [15, 19, 28, 32, 34, 63]. In this situation, our old ideas
about documents (or speeches) no longer hold. We are creating discrete
units of information that can be reused in many contexts, sending messages
to each other, appearing and disappearing, fitting together into multiple
structures.
"Now,
instead of thinking about a speech having a natural sequence of parts, or
a book having an introduction, chapters, and appendices, we are
contemplating an array of meaningful objects.
Instead of making a book, we are discovering classes of
information, building information structures, populating databases, and
issuing answers to queries. But unlike a database developer, our goal is
to communicate with other people-and, increasingly, with software agents
acting on behalf of those people. Because we still care about
"talking" with other people in this new environment, we need to
come up with a new way of describing the things that we arrange.
"The
thinking is a bit abstract. First
we define a class of rhetorical objects-a pure form as Plato might say, a
concept, a category of information. Then we write a particular instance of
that class. So we start with
the idea of a class called Procedure, and then write many specific
procedures, throughout our user guide. An instance of the class, then, is
an actual, tangible chunk of content.
"The
informative object's class defines the responsibility, relationships,
structure, attributes, and messages [6, 13, 14, 20, 21, 27, 39, 46, 51,
52, 58, 60, 64].
-
Every object of that type has a fixed responsibility, which is to answer a
particular type of question from users. For instance, a step answers the
question, "What do I do next?"
-
Each object has predefined relationships with other objects. For instance,
a step is contained by a procedure. In turn, a step may contain
subcomponents such as an illustration.
-
Each object has a preset internal structure.
For instance, a procedure contains components such as an
introduction, followed by one or more steps, each of which may or may not
contain explanations, warnings, illustrations, and definitions.
-
Each type of object has certain attributes, which give information about
the information (meta data). For
instance, in the abstract, a procedure may have attributes such as the
date created, date modified, subject, and author. Each instance of a
procedure, then, might have different values for these attributes.
-
An object can send out, or receive messages.
With objects that contain content-informative objects-these
messages tend to be simple links, requesting another object to show
itself.
"In
this environment, then, we are trying to sort what we learn about a topic
into a predefined structure, such as a procedure, a conceptual overview,
or a reference section. While
this process seems constricting, it actually forces us to learn our
subject better than before, and makes us more expert in the topic."
5.
What style should
I use?
Aristotle:
"It is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also say it
as we ought. ... Give everyday speech an unfamiliar air; people like what
strikes them, and are struck by what is out of the way.... But you must
disguise your art, and give the impression of speaking naturally, and not
artificially" [4, p. 2238].
Jonathan:
"Many of us follow your advice, as best we can, though we try to
avoid the grander style. But
now our content includes more than words.
When we include art, video, and sound, whoever creates that content
draws on the traditions of photography, graphic design, TV and video,
music and radio-each of which comes with its own conventions about style. We have a styleguide for each medium. And in each of these areas, through usability testing, we are
beginning to get more reliable evidence about what kind of stylistic
strategies work best, for particular purposes [36].
Where you used to test out a trope on a live audience, to get
instant feedback, we watch click streams, customer service call volumes,
discussion lists, and testing data."
6.
How should I
deliver my information?
Aristotle:
"It is essentially a matter of the right management of the voice to
express the various emotions-of speaking loudly, softly, or between the
two; of high, low, or intermediate pitch; of the various rhythms that suit
various subjects" [4, p.
2238]
Jonathan:
"For us, delivery is mostly electronic, so we don't have to do voice
exercises to warm up. Instead,
we upgrade our infrastructure, tweak software, publish objects, build
business rules that respond to the user's profile with customized content,
or draw inferences from user behavior, concluding what content the user
might now find relevant. We
do not lecture; we make the conversation possible, and we participate.
We are not the only ones delivering content; our users do that,
too-often with more verve, panache, and gusto than we can."
7.
How can I remember my material?
Aristotle:
"The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and
have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by
art and reasonings" [4, p. 1553 (Metaphysics)]
Jonathan:
"I don't remember much of what I write.
I learn as I go, and without memorizing, I go over and over the
material, considering where each fact fits in the evolving structure I am
building. As my own
conception gathers detail, my long-term memory widens and deepens. I write from that, tempered with new information, and
assisted by my old files. To
recall facts, then, I don't have to envision hanging them around the
Acropolis, but I do envision their location in my file structure, (the
hard disk is my kind of memory) or in the abstract hierarchy described in
my schema or Document Type Definition (DTD).
Beginning with the familiar, I learn the new by placing it within
the existing structure, as best I can.
"Of
course, these days, because everything we write gets saved somewhere, we
have multiple archives and backups, while our users also store our words,
often without knowing they have, on their own hard disks. The effect: the individual moment is less important, because
if we must, we can look up what we said, and reuse it, verbatim.
"So
we don't have to recall the text-just where we stored it, in electronic
memory."
8.
What is our role?
Aristotle:
"It adds much to an orator's influence that his own character should
look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings
towards his hearers" [4, p. 2194].
Jonathan:
"Traditionally, we've gone along with your approach.
As technical communicators, we have concocted writerly
personas-friendly or austere, chatty or abrupt.
We often adopt a corporate tone, which suggests the way we see
ourselves relating to our users.
"But
one persona no longer fits all. Now
that the audience has exploded into a dozen niches, we must develop a
dozen slightly different personas to write from-the sympathetic expert
talking to newbies, the intelligent peer showing respect for fellow
techies, and so on.
"We
are developing multiple personas. But
at the same time, visitors long for any sign of our real life, behind the
scenes. They want us to
answer their questions-a corporate responsibility-but they also want to
get a sense of who we really are, as individuals, behind the organization
persona.
"Particularly
if we get drafted to answer users' e-mail, we'll discover that the bland
boilerplate response is not enough. Visitors,
increasingly, want to know where we live, what our hobbies are, what we
think about politics, movies, music, what we feel. My gosh, they want to
get to know us.
"Technical
communicators face a Web where commerce is driving personalization of
content, while most corporations fear individuals expressing themselves
under the logo-but Web consumers are pushy, and they are demanding that we
put aside our authority, at least occasionally, and act like human beings.
Instead of hiding behind fake good cheer, we may have to become
deliberately personal [17, 18, 24, 25, 37, 38, 41, 42, 62].
"In
your sense, Aristotle, we earn trust through character."
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