The Rhetorical Transformation of Experience

Because the Commission wanted to identify deficiencies in the mining industry, the Commission recognized that either method would have long-term consequences. By articulating the problem. Commissioners were able to present two different but equally true perspectives on conditions in the mining industry. If they had presented only one conclusion, they would have presented a valid but distorted picture of conditions underground. 

Sion s report cites data from a study by H.R. Phillips that suggested that the percentage of miners killed in explosions had risen from 3.3% in the perkxl 1955-1967 to 21.3% from 1981-93, despite a general decrease in rhe number of miners killed in coal mining accidents (p. 30). 

In the chapters that follow, I focus largely on two particular moments of rhetorical transformation accident investigations and training. 

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Agencies would be horrified, we imagine, if investigators recorded their second-hand conclusions and impressions before they collected physical evidence from the accident site. But agencies have institutionalized the rhetorical transformation of experience in the post-accident interview. Agencies use the methods of science to help them collect physical evidence at the site. 

The Southmountain interviews thus allow us to examine one aspect of the rhetorical transformation of experience when local knowledge moves into the domain of science where it is captured and transformed in writing. But these interviews also demonstrate how easily the absence of any sort of negative feedback can create a sense of complacency that can lead to disaster. In fact, one of the questions that is never explicitly stated is why miners who heard bumps did not communicate with management or persuade management to take a different course of action. When Shane describes how the rock dust always kept going toward the outside, investigators ask if this was normal. They are particularly concerned about the direction of dust flow in the mine, which seems to indicate problems with the ventilation system prior to the accident. But that concern did not move individuals to action. 

The following chapters focus on the rhetorical transformation and re-transformation of experience at the boundaries between agencies and the sites they seek to regulate. In exploring these transformations, we begin to discover the full range of rhetorical practices that constitute the Rhetoric of Risk (Fig. 3.3). 

FIG. 5.3. The Rhetoric ot Risk focuses on the rhetorical transformation and re-transformation of experience at tlie boundaries between agencies and experience. 

The ecstatic tenor of Khunrath s rhetoric is itself perhaps modelled on the spiritus rhetoricus of Erasmus early hermeneutics in which he had explored the spiritual sense of a text as being a force of divine grace that could spontaneously transform the reader. It was the personal experience of the sense of scripture that Erasmus had favoured in the Enchiridion Hence, also the outcries of Hallelujah and Lob Herr that punctuate, or conclude, Khunrath s writings. 

This framework enables us to identify Six Critical Moments of Rhetorical Transformation in large regulatory industries. At these moments, writers must extract information that is presented in one rhetorical modality (oral testimony, for example) and literally change the form so that the information can be re-represented for a different audience (1) when oral testimony and embodied experience are captured in writing (2) when the information in accident reports is re-represented in statistical records (3) when statistical accounts are re-represented as arguments for particular policies (4) when policies and standards are transformed into procedures (5) when written procedures are transformed into training and (6) when training is re-represented to workers at local sites. (Chapter 2 describes the cycle in detail.)... 

But technical writers and rhetoricians have also not developed a workable, empirically based theory for understanding how the uncertain material conditions of hazardous environments affect the quality of technical documentation. We have not examined the rhetorical features that individuals employ when they describe their experiences or how this experience is transformed in writing. We have grounded our assumptions about technical dcKumenta-tion in systems where outcomes are predictable and certain. But we have not examined the nature of documentation in systems of profound material and institutional indeterminacy. 

The men and women who provide this training also stand at the rhetorical interface between agencies and local experience within the Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries, but trainers differ from investigators because they must reconstruct the local experience and observations that have been extracted and transformed in the process of creating standards. 

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