Rhetorical Sensitivity

Basic Tenets of Rhetorical Sensitivity

Essentially, rhetorical sensitivity is a set of attitudes that lead to thoughtful consideration of how a message should be phrased and framed for best audience understanding and effect. Three main dimensions of a rhetorically sensitive attitude set can be summarized as follows:

1. Thoughtful orientation toward interpersonal candor involves a recognition that not all ideas and feelings should be verbally expressed during interpersonal contacts and that particularly frank rhetorical configurations, or ways of stating a message, can make some ideas bereft of impact. From such a vantage point, rhetorically sensitive communicators weigh the degree of candor most appropriate for making known one's feelings. Thus, the rhetorically sensitive individual reacts to the total situation in deciding how candid he or she should be. This reaction is often a painstaking process of hard intellectual work in deciding what to verbalize in a particular encounter because one's first thought, one's initial reaction, is always suspect as the best way to communicate. Hallmarks of the rhetorically sensitive person on this dimension are discretion, nonspontaneity, and intellectual honesty in striving for the most desirable interaction.

2. Inventional complexity, referring to the many ways in which a message can be composed or invented, affirms that there is a distinction between feelings and the ways in which such feelings can be communicated and that a given idea or feeling can usually be communicated in many different ways. In a given social contact, only part of the complex network of selves that make-up each individual will be given visibility. Viewing interactions in this manner means that acceptance of individual complexity is a necessary and even desirable part of the human condition. Thus, the rhetorically sensitive individual is not unduly concerned with apparent inconsistencies he or she may make in different interpersonal settings and encounters. Arbitrary social conventions have little value from such a perspective because of the complexity imbedded in each encounter.

3. Interaction consciousness, a term borrowed from Erving Goffman, calls for awareness of the complexity of the other in addition to the complexity of the self. Thus, rhetorical sensitivity includes a careful attempt to balance the sovereignty of the self with the intellectual and attitudinal makeup of the other. The rhetorically sensitive individual will carefully construct his or her content and delivery in such a manner as to best affect the other while maintaining his or her own integrity and sovereignty. To maintain such balance, one must be willing to take the time and effort to choose carefully among rhetorical alternatives.

[Page 852]Rhetorical sensitivity, then, takes a rather distinctive stand vis-ä-vis interpersonal encounters. However, not all individuals behave in this way. Researchers have identified two additional attitude sets commonly encountered.

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