Creating Complicated Conversations With My Audience

For my blog post, I drew from accumulated class discussions over the first unit of the course, specifically on Killingsworth and Palmer and Grant-Davie's essays. The main focus of my writing for this blog was to provide the audience information about a topic they are familiar with and can maybe make a connection with but lack a technical/scientific background on it. However, I also wanted to use the scientific studies to gear the familiar topic in a direction which may have not been addressed to the audience in that manner before. For example, majority of college students reading this blog suffer from stress at one point in their lives, or have witnessed their parents struggle with work related stress growing up (a topic most are familiar with). Once that immediate connection has been made, I used the results from the scientific studies to start a conversation about working from home burnout and the benefits of having a support system program to alleviate the burnout symptoms. 

Other influences on my writing stemmed from Grant-Davie's essay, Rhetorical Situations, and his idea of a "compound rhetorical situation." Grant-Davie describes how previously a rhetorical situation included one speaker and one audience, but what about the situations that call upon multiple audiences and/or multiple speakers. More specifically, "It may be useful, then, to think of an entire discussion as a compound rhetorical situation, made up of a group of closely related individual situations," (Grant-Davie, 274). Those closely related individual situations are what I aimed to address by providing space for multiple audiences (college students, work from home employees, children of stress burnout victims, individuals suffering from stress, etc.) who could comprehend the studies from the blog, and then potentially create their own rhetorical situations (conversations) about it on their own time. These conversations could be intrapersonal while/after reading, with another person over the phone, small talk with a stranger, a comment directly responding to the blog, etc. These closely related individual situations are what my blog "Circulating the Conversation" is all about; I wanted to act as a catalyst in a way for public conversations about effects of burnout stress symptoms and scientific data revealing ways to manage it. 

Another concept I drew from in creating my blog was brought up in Killingsworth and Palmer's Ecospeaks excerpts. The phenomenon of journalists (citizen science journalists) transforming scientific information solely for the purpose that the public might benefit from the info, or it might solve an ongoing issue directly related to them. They speak of the "human interest theory" and how "the result is the making of science into a story tied to the longing and struggles of humankind in general, a veritable mythologizing of science," (Killingsworth, Palmer 135-136). When calling upon this idea of creating human interest within my sci/tech/health blog post, I didn't do it for the reasons that Ecospeaks alludes to. How media outlets/sources only post these citizen science articles if they're tied to human struggles because those stories sell. My goal is not to become the most popular blog online and make money; my goal is to transform scientific evidence from a manner that people may not want to read to a form which they may want to read. I'm catering to my audiences' needs by focusing on an aspect of the science that most likely relates to them, and that way they will be inclined to continue talking or thinking about the information presented in the blog—to circulate the conversation. 

                                                                            Works Cited

1.  Ellin, Abby. “Resiliency: The Buzzword That Could Take Your Career to New Heights.” Content Lab U.S., Johnson & Johnson, 12 Oct. 2017, www.jnj.com/innovation/resilience-in-the-workplace-training-human-performance-institute.

2. Department, Published by Statista Research, and Aug 4. “Working from Home: Impact on Stress U.S. 2020.” Statista, 4 Aug. 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/1140789/working-from-home-impact-stress-us/.

3. DiFrancisco-Donoghue J, Balentine J, Schmidt G, et al. Managing the health of the eSport athlete: an integrated health management model. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 2019;5:e000467. doi:10.1136/bmjsem-2018-000467

4. Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 1997, pp. 264-79. 

5. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Southern Illinois UP, 1992. excerpts.

6. Department, Published by Statista Research, and Aug 4. “Working from Home: Impact on Stress U.S. 2020.” Statista, 4 Aug. 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/1140789/working-from-home-impact-stress-us/.

7. Keller, Abiola, et al. “Does the Perception That Stress Affects Health Matter? The Association with Health and Mortality.” Health Psychology : Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2012, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3374921/.

8. Witteveen, Dirk, and Eva Velthorst. “Economic Hardship and Mental Health Complaints during COVID-19.” PNAS, National Academy of Sciences, 3 Nov. 2020, www.pnas.org/content/117/44/27277.

9. “Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases.

10. “Esports.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Feb. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esports.