Impact of Certain Hegemonies on Johnson’s “Audience Involved: Toward a Participatory Model of Writing”
As many in this class have added, audience seems like a big deal for this week’s readings. Smith, in her extremely easy to read paper, says that rhetoricians must customize a work for a “target audience” (114). She’s not the only one worried about target audiences. Robert Johnson wishes to not only address a target audience, but to get them involved in the production process because they will help a person who’s familiar with jargon relate well with the general masses. He says that the audiences he wants to involve in the technical writing process “may have little specialized knowledge” (363) and would therefore not only need the technical texts he makes, but could contribute to the refinement of the language in those texts. Carolyn Rude wrote “The Report for Decision Making” because a student with little specialized knowledge about report writing completely blew a writing assignment (Rude 70). Specialization, then, seems key for Rude, as it is best to choose a genre according to the problem that needs to be solved (78). I also thought that Thomas Kent, in his article “Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric”, said something very similar. In the piece, Kent says that all of the schools of a university or academy worry about reading and writing (40). A student must “enter into [not only] dialogues with others both in and outside her discipline” (40), but they must use “specific dialogic” and “interpretive strategies” (37) – again, specialization is key.
All of this seems boring to discuss, though, because most everyone already has discussed it. In fact, though I wanted, earlier tonight, to go over the material in Kent’s article in my discussion posting, I see that everyone else is just as preoccupied with his claims as I am, so writing about his piece would be pretty boring, too. Instead, then, I’m going to discuss how certain hegemonies impacted, or had little to no impact, on Robert Johnson’s article.
Loving digital objects, especially PDFs, I chose to eschew my copy of Johnson’s “Audience Involved: Toward a Participatory Model of Writing” in our textbook for a copy I could find digitally from a library (oddly enough, I had to go back to my old institution to find it). When I first began reading the article, I noted that it followed a format that is probably familiar to any graduate student: It began with a citation, a title line, an abstract, and then the main text of the article followed not long after. Sandwiched between the abstract and the main text was a section for the article’s tags, or subject headings.
Subject headings, in layman’s terms, help to both organize digital articles and retrieve them. The subject headings for this article, since it is an academic work, should consist of terms that that user would most likely choose to search by when trying to find the article in an electronic database. As a former library sciences student, I had been taught that the Library of Congress’s (LOC) Subject Heading Authority list of terms is one of the first, and finest, resources a student should consult when retrieving information, so I naturally checked the LOC’s list for the terms included with this document. Oddly enough, though, few of that document’s headings were on the LOC’s list.
Why would the document not include very many terms from the LOC’s list? Surely a writer who included “Writers and the Hegemony of Author(ity)” in his paper as a bolded heading in its main text would recognize the impact that excluding such terms, terms that are deemed authoritative by a body with a sizeable amount of hegemony and power backing it, would have on the popularity of his paper. It could even affect his ethos, as defined by Smith (118). I considered, though, that a third party may have indexed Johnson’s article with those terms; it may not have been him who did that. I came to consider such an idea because of Tania Smith’s discussion of one of the five canons of rhetoric, delivery (116). Smith deemed a third party’s involvement in the production of a text as a modern, up-to-date way to define delivery, which had always been a key facet of Classical rhetoric (118).
Other subject headings, then, may have better served the needs of the readers/seekers of Johnson’s article. I’m curious to know who actually added the subject headings for Johnson’s article, and I’m curious to know whether whoever added those tags did so after consulting some common users of the databases housing this article.
If the hegemony of the LOC did not impact Johnson’s article, though, another hegemony did: The contemporary rhetoricians Kent complains of who love to codify all aspects of rhetoric “according to certain ontological categories” (24). Johnson appears to be fond of taxonomies. He chooses to classify users according to three different types: addressed, invoked, or involved (363). He even mentions an attempt to establish another one, for “user knowledge”, through a plug, added in a footnote to the digital version of his text, for one of his upcoming book publications (363). Johnson’s employment of taxonomies in his theories shows that the hegemony of contemporary rhetoric, and its adherence to standards of Classical rhetoric (Kent, Smith) are very present in his article.
Works Cited
Johnson, Robert. “Audience Involved: Toward a Participatory Model of Writing.” Computers and Composition 14 (1997): 361-376. PDF. 31 Aug. 2012.
Kent, Thomas. “Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 8.1 (1989): 24-42. PDF. 27 Aug. 2012.
Library of Congress Authorities. Library of Congress, 2012. Web. 2 Sept. 2012.
Rude, Carolyn. “The Report for Decision Making: Genre and Inquiry.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 70-90. Print.
Smith, Tania. “What Connection Does Rhetorical Theory Have to Technical and Professional Communication?’ Readings for Technical Communication. Eds. Jennifer MacLennan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 114-121. PDF.