The Public Issue Assignment

The public issue paper assignment is bounded by the following constraints:

• First, the audience must not be an expert or specialist audience. It may be a general-public audience; it may be shareholders of a company; it may be a congressional or county hearing audience; it may be a consensus seeking group composed of people representing various constituencies, or it may be some other public audience, but you should talk to the teacher to see if the propose audience fits this constraint.
• Second, the audience must contain at least someone who constitutes a "rhetorical audience" in Bitzer's terminology. Remember, a rhetorical audience is someone who has power or authority to do something you want done.
• Third, the paper has to be embedded in a believable rhetorical situation. You may satisfy this requirement by speaking into a present rhetorical situation, as long as you describe the present situation in such a way as to show that a rhetorical exigence exists. You may also construct a hypothetical situation, describing the exigence, in such a way as to show that you have a real rhetorical situation in mind. The exigence, in either case, must be described in terms of its historical circumstances (existing conditions in nature or culture) and dialogic circumstances (previous discourse on the subject that has prompted this response and anticipated responses). Remember, rhetoric is a response to a situation.
• Fourth, the paper must be an identifiable genre, such as a position paper, a feasibility report, a public relations campaign, a persuasive speech, a compromise offer. The genre has to be appropriate to the rhetorical situation. Remember a genre is a typified response to a recurrent situation, so this must be a kind of response that one would expect to arise from the situation.
• Fifth, the paper must be about a current public issue, and the point(s) of contention must be clearly articulated.
• Sixth, the paper must use effective reasoning (logos), must appeal in some way to the audience's emotions (pathos), and must portray an image of good morals, good will, and good sense (ethos).
• Seventh, it must weave the voices of others into the argument, including voices from both (or several) sides of the controversy, and these voices must be clearly documented in either APA format or MLA format.
• Eighth, the paper must incorporate visual elements as well as verbal elements. These elements may be pictures, charts, graphs, or tables.
• Ninth, the paper must be 6-8 pages long (double-spaced text-adjust for visual elements so that a paper with many visual elements should be longer than one with fewer).
• Tenth, the paper must be persuasive in one of the following ways. It can be polemic, arguing strongly for one side while rebutting opposition (this does not necessarily mean that the paper has to be belligerent). It can be evaluative, weighing a couple options, comparing them against a set of criteria, and offering recommendations. It can be consensus building, following a Rogerian pattern, in which both sides are described positively and a compromise mutually beneficial to both sides is offered.