-—
You are an actor. Each day of your life you play a variety of roles or “parts”—as son/daughter, sibling, friend, student, teammate, employee—and you act out these parts in a variety of scenes, whether at home, in school, in the gym, in the workplace, or in your neighborhoods or communities. As in the scenes of a movie or a play—where actors take their cues from co-actors and directors, the stage and surrounding sets, and the time and place of the action—you take your cues for how to act from the scenes you act within. As students, you constandy negotiate among scenes: from dorm room, apartment, or home to cafeteria, classes, or work; from meetngs of clubs or organizations to dinner with friends; from a date on Friday night to a party on the weekend, to the football game on Saturday, and to visits with your extended families on occasion.
Each of these scenes is different; each requires you to play a different role, which involves different strategies for acting and communicating within it. How you dress, how you present yourself, how you interact with others, what you talk about—all these behaviors depend in large part on the scene in which you find yourself. You are constantly coordinating how you act with the scenes in which you act. Within familiar scenes, this coordination becomes so habitual that it seems intuitive and effortless. When you enter new or less familiar scenes, however, you need to make more conscious, less automatic decisions about how to act.
Entering New Scenes
Think about what you do when you enter the scene, say, of a social get-together at your college or university and you do not already know the people attending. What do you do as you walk into the room? How do you decide where to go in the room and what to do there? In all likelihood, one of the first things you do is look around. As you begin to observe the room, what do you look at? What do you look for? You might pay attention to what people are wearing. Are they dressed formally? Are they dressed to impress? You might also take in the way the room is structured. Are people standing around? Is there space to walk, or is the room set up in such a way that forces people to sit? You almost certainly would focus on how people are interacting with one another. Is the room buzzing with conversation, or are people shyly avoiding one another? You might discover that some are talking in groups while others are engaged in one-to-one conversations.
Reading Scenes
You might notice these things and others as you begin to look around the room. But you don’t just passively absorb these images; chances are you also begin to analyze or “read” them to help you decide how to act. That is, you begin to think about what these images tell you about this scene, how people are acting within it, and how you might act. For example, what people are wearing and how they are interacting can tell you whether the scene is formal or informal and whether you will fit in comfortably. (Did you wear the “right” thing? Will you be able to tell raucous jokes or have intellectual discussions?) Drawing from your past experiences with how people present themselves on various occasions and how they interact, you begin to form assumptions about what sort of scene you have entered and how best to position yourself and act within it.
Say, as you make your way around the room, that you decide to join a group conversation. Once again, you probably begin by observing or “reading” the group. You might observe the group dynamic: Is everyone engaged in the conversation or is one person dominating the conversation? Are people interrupting one another or are they taking turns talking? Is it women or men who are interrupted most frequently? You surely also pay attention to the topic of conversation: Is it a topic you know something about? Is it something you are interested in? Is it a topic that must be treated seriously, or is there room for joking and banter? How far along is the conversation? Has it just begun, or has the group already covered much of the topic? Should you listen, or can you contribute something to the discussion? And if you can contribute, when would be the best opportunity to do so?
Timing may not be everything, but it does count quite a bit, as the ancient Greeks understood well. They referred to this notion of rhetorical timing and opportunity in communication as **kairos.** If you want to get people’s attention—if you want to persuade them of something, or get them to cooperate with you, or have them identify with you or something you believe in—your timing must be right given the conditions in which you are operating. Have you ever known someone whose timing was off, who always made comments a topic behind or leaped ahead to new topics when others were still discussing something introduced and “covered” earlier? In order to get the timing right, you must be able to read the scene effectively.
In addition to paying attention to the group interaction and its topic of conversation, you might also observe how the group is handling the topic: What is the style of conversation? Are people having a calm discussion, or is their tone animated? What kind of language are they using to discuss the topic? Is their language elevated or full of jargon and expressions that only they would understand? Are people making declarations, or are they hemming and hawing, qualifying what they say? Are some asking questions? What sorts of things are people using as evidence to support their views in this group: facts, citation of authority, personal experience, gossip, etc.? These are just some of the questions you could, and probably often do, ask unconsciously in order to make effective decisions about how to communicate and behave in an already existing scene.
#### Writing Activity 1.1
Describe the scenes you experienced yesterday. What different places were you in, who did you interact with, and what roles did you play?
#### Collaborative Activity 1.1
Make a list of all of the different scenes that you participate in at college. Compare your lists in small groups, and select one scene to analyze or read, as in the example of the social get-together we “attended” earlier in this chapter. Describe the various clues to how participants are expected to behave and interact within the scene your group selected. You might consider the kinds of clues we observed in our social get-together:
- How the place or setting of your scene is structured
- Who is participating and how they present themselves
- What style of communicating is common
- What people are communicating about
- How people are timing their contributions
- Any other elements especially important to the particular scene you are analyzing
### Making Rhetorical Choices
Observing a scene and reading it by the process described above help you make more effective choices about what to say, how to say it, to whom, and when. Scholars who study the art of communication refer to these choices as rhetorical choices. **Rhetoric** is the use of language to accomplish something, and **rhetorical choices** are the decisions speakers and writers make in order to accomplish something with language. Rhetorical choices include
- What sort of tone and language to use\
- How to engage and address others\
- How to develop, organize, and present one’s ideas so that others can relate to them\
- What kinds of examples to use when communicating\
- When and how to start talking and when and how to stop
The more appropriate your rhetorical choices, the more likely you are to communicate effectively.
**The scene in which you participate helps determine which choices are appropriate.** Whatever their writing tasks, writers are always making rhetorical choices as they ask themselves questions such as
- “What should I write about?”\
- “How should I organize it?”\
- “What should I include?”\
- “How should I begin?”
In fact, “How should I begin?” is perhaps the most significant—and challenging—question a writer can ask theirself. Yet answers to this question and others like it do not need to be as mysterious or elusive as they are sometimes imagined to be. Imagine how differently you would answer such questions if you were in your home writing in your diary rather than in a classroom writing an essay examination. You can develop answers to such questions by examining the context of your writing, what are here called **scenes of writing.**
Just as you make decisions about how to act based on your knowledge of the social scene you are acting in at any given time, so too writers make decisions about how and what to write based on their knowledge of the rhetorical scenes they are writing in. **The more effectively you understand the scene you are writing in, the more effectively you will communicate. Working from this premise, the goal is to teach you how to make more effective writing choices as you function within and move from one scene of writing to another.**
#### Writing Activity 1.2
Begin keeping a list of all the things you write in a day, including such small texts as notes or e-mails as well as longer texts like letters or reports. For each thing you write, describe the writing scene in which it functions—the location or context (workplace, classroom, academic discipline, dorm room, etc.), your role as a writer, your reader(s) and your relationship to them, and your purpose for writing it (what you were trying to accomplish/respond to).
-—
## Defining Scene, Situation, Genre
Let's begin by defining what is meant by the word scene and identify its key components, situation and genre. These three terms—scene, situation, and genre—figure prominently as the building blocks of all that follows.
Each of these terms receives explanation and examples in what follows, but here are brief definitions of each concept. A scene is the overall setting, a place where communication happens among groups of people with some shared objectives. A writing classroom is a scene; so are a restaurant kitchen, a chat room, and an editorial page. A situation is the rhetorical interaction happening within a scene. For example, students and teachers discuss readings and respond to each other’s writings, cooks and servers discuss food orders, chatters explore topics that interest them, and editorial writers convey their opinions on current issues. A genre is a common way of responding rhetorically to a situation, including class discussions and writing prompts, restaurant meal orders, chat room postings, and editorials. We begin with **scene** because it is the overarching term. **Scene is a place in which communication happens among groups of people with some shared objectives.** Examples of a scene range from a large tax accounting firm to a small business, from a classroom to a sorority house, from a doctor’s office to a peace rally, from a baseball game to a bar to a criminal trial—to name but a few.
Certainly, not all scenes are so obviously physical as a doctor’s office or a ball game. The “place” of a scene can extend across well-defined physical spaces. For example, the college or university you are attending is one scene, a clear physical place. But it also participates in a larger **academic scene,** a “place” of academia that reaches across colleges and universities throughout the world. Within the larger academic scene, there are a number of different disciplinary scenes, such as English, history, geography, and chemistry. These scenes consist of groups of people who have their own bodies of knowledge, facts, and theories; their own research methods; their own ways of communicating with one another—all of which reflect their shared objectives: to advance and convey understanding of a subject matter. You may learn to write case studies in your psychology class, lab reports in your biology class, and profiles in your sociology class. Each piece of writing will reflect its scene and should meet special expectations in terms of use of evidence, special terminologies, special styles and formats.
To illustrate, suppose you are taking a class in architectural history. This class will familiarize you with a specific subject matter: styles of architecture throughout the ages, landmark buildings, and ideas of influential designers like I. M. Pei and Frank Lloyd Wright. You will also gain knowledge of the economic and social forces that have shaped architectural structures—as well as the beliefs and values of architects and others who participate in the larger architectural scene, such as their struggles with the social and ethical issues of preservation. In order to feel comfortable in this scene and function effectively in it, you will need to become familiar with the participants’ language—their use of terms such as rectilinear design or the distinctions between concepts such as shingle style versus stick style. Finally, you will need to become familiar with the methods of communicating within this scene—perhaps by writing architectural descriptions of buildings, following guidelines set by the National Register of Historic Places. To participate effectively in this academic scene, you must participate in its **rhetorical practices** —practices which reflect the group’s shared objectives.
Like the academic scenes with which they overlap (as students move from architecture classes, for example, to architecture firms), **workplace scenes** are also places where communication happens among groups of people with some shared objectives. Your ability to succeed in the workplace depends on your ability to use the language of the scene in appropriate ways, to achieve its shared objectives—whether you are asked to write an e-mail to your coworkers to promote the company picnic or a sales letter to clients to promote a new product.
As in academic s