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Date:         Tue, 21 Jul 1992 20:23:00 PDT
From:         James Crosswhite <JCROSS@OREGON.BITNET>
Subject:      Communication models again and again

In response to Allene Cooper, about Perelman. This is Jim
Crosswhite keying (Jaime tres in high school Spanish). I
misunderstood you. When you said you rejected Perelman's
notion of a universal audience, I thought you were rejecting
the concept itself. Now I understand you to be rejecting the
claim that it is a useful and memorizable contribution to a
communication model that you could easily relay to your
business writing students and which would help them in the
communicative situations they face in the business world. Is
this right? If so, I'm more inclined to drop the
discussion...and yet, and yet...
   As I see it, you are right that Perelman's notion is an
idealization--and yet there are real limits to its ideality.
For example, particular audiences are, according to
Perelman, legitimate critics of the audiences which have
been universalized from them. The particular audiences
involved should, to some degree, recognize their
universality in the universal audience. And I think you are
right too that the universal audience is supposed to be
intelligent, of good will, and ready to listen--although the
Belgians' theory is not prejudiced as to what counts as
intelligence, good will or readiness--or even listening.
   When you say that you want your students to understand
the diversity of possible audiences in the business world, I
would think the Belgians' array of different kinds of
audience--particular, elite, individual, composite, etc.--
would be of some help. When you say in addition to this that
you want them to understand the demands of writing for an
international/multicultural audience, I seem to recall that
this is just what the idea of a universal audience is
supposed to help with. The Belgians give us different (even
conflicting) ways of expanding our concept of audience
outward, to embrace more and more groups.
  Further, and I'll just throw this out, wouldn't the
Belgian theory give one a good way to raise questions about
the ethics of business writing? That is, what are the
situations in which we address people as particular
audiences? Which situations call for us to deal with people
in terms of their elite qualifications? And which business
situations make more universal demands on us to communicate
with people as human beings in their relative universality--
whatever we take that to be?
   In my more Emersonian moments, I like to think that my
friends in business have not infrequent glimpses of the
universal features of their activities, including their
written communication.
   Finally, if I think of business writing students as a
kind of universal audience (diverse, intelligent),  I think
Bob Boston's thought: why believe just one model of
communication will be adequate for all the situations they
will face? That would be to have more faith in the
universality of a particular model than the Belgians would
ever have dreamed possible.
   Buena Suerte to all,
   Jim Crosswhite  jcross@oregon.uoregon.edu
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