Rhetorical Delivery as Strategy: Rebuilding the Fifth Canon from Practitioner Stories

Abstract

While a number of scholars have discussed a need to retheorize the fifth canon in the age of the digital (K. Welch; Trimbur; DeVoss and Porter), the field lacks empirical research on rhetorical delivery itself (Rude). By examining one case example from a larger research project, this article explores how practitioner stories can challenge and expand existing theoretical frameworks of rhetorical delivery to include insights from practitioners' knowledge. This article argues that gathering qualitative case examples is a useful, though by no means exhaustive, methodological research framework for studying rhetorical delivery.

Notes

1I thank RR reviewers John Fredrick Reynolds and Duane Roen for their comments and suggestions.

2I was influenced by Ellen Cushman's work on reciprocity and saw this work of documentation as useful for the activists I was working with. All too often in activist groups, knowledge is not preserved and this is a problem in organizations with high turnover. In this sense my intention is that the research would help achieve some positive practical objectives for my participants.

3The goal here is to arrive at a story or oral history that the participant feels is accurate.

4Carolyn Rude does something similar when she compares the distribution of proposals across time and space to the classic Greek and Roman rhetorical notions of oral delivery.