Rhetorical Awareness and User-Centered Design
Summary: This resource explains the two dominant ideas in professional writing that will help you produce persuasive, usable resumes, letters, memos, reports, white papers, etc. This section outlines the concepts of rhetorical awareness and user-centered design, provides examples of these ideas, and it contains a glossary of terms.
Contributors:Allen Brizee
Last
Edited: 2010-04-21
08:19:46
In the last
twenty years, two important ideas have developed that help professionals
compose effective workplace writing:
- Rhetorical awareness
- User-centered design (also known
as the reader-centered approach).
Rhetorical
Awareness
The idea of
rhetorical awareness for workplace writing includes the following concepts:
- Workplace writing is persuasive.
For example, when a writer composes a résumé, the persuasive goal is to
get a job interview. Similarly, a report writer may need to persuade a
client to take action to improve work conditions ensuring employee safety
and timely production
- Workplace writing, since it's
persuasive, must consider the rhetorical situation:
- Purpose (why the document is
being written, the goals of the document
- Audience (who will read the
document, includes shadow readers-unintended audiences who might read
your work)
- Stakeholders (who may be affected by
the document or project)
- Context (the background of and
situation in which the document is created).
Through
rhetorical awareness, professional communication has shifted from a genre-based
approach, which focused on learning and reproducing forms or templates of
documents, to thinking about the goals and situations surrounding the need to
write. While professional writing still uses reports, white papers, etc.,
authors should approach these texts considering the rhetorical situation rather
than considering documents as isolated work.
User-Centered
Design
Concepts
The idea of
user-centered design includes the following concepts:
- Always consider and think about
your audience
- Consider your readers based on:
- their expectations. What
information do your readers expect to get? What can be provided to your
readers?
- their characteristics. Who,
specifically, is reading the work? Is the audience part of the decision
making process? Will stakeholders read the work? Or is the audience a
mixture of decision makers, stakeholders, and shadow readers? What
organizational positions does the audience hold and how might this affect
document expectations?
- their goals. What are your
readers planning to accomplish? What should be included in your documents
so that your readers get the information they need?
- their context. For what type of
situation do the readers need this information?
- Identify information readers
will need and make that information easily accessible and understandable
- User-centered documents must be
usable, so consider how the document will be used rather than just how it
will be read. For example, if a writer wants information regarding MLA
formatting for an essay, s/he needs this information quickly in order to
start work. The MLA information must be easily accessible, so the author
can find, read, and understand it to begin writing
- Make your documents persuasive
(see Rhetorical Awareness above).
By adopting
user-centered design, workplace writing focuses on the expectations, goals,
situations, and needs of the readers. Closely related to user-centered design
isparticipatory
design, which aligns users with designers in a collaborative relationship.
See
our Audience
Analysis handout for more information on researching your readers.
