My Rhetorical Action Plan

The rhetorical action plan below is similar to the outline that was created for project two. The rhetorical action plan allows an author to develop a plan for addressing his audience and issue.

MacEntee, Sean "call to action" 05/03/2011 via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Audience 

1. What does your audience know about the topic?

Engineering majors would be familiar with the methodology behind the creation of the F-35 fighter, but they may not be familiar with the specifics of the program itself.

2. What values might your audience hold?

Engineers value logic and efficiency.

3. What type of research or evidence do you think will be most effective for your audience? 

Research on the context surrounding the F-35, as well as the data supporting my position will be the most effective for my audience.

4. What visual evidence might your audience respond to and why?

Charts or graphs are the best way to visually impact my audience, because they expect to see some form of data in an argument.

5. What is the purpose of your public debate?

My goal is to raise awareness of the root causes of the failure of the F-35 program. Raising awareness may help prevent similar problems with future defense programs.

Genre


1. What genre will you be writing in and what is the function of it?

Opinion Column
I may write an opinion piece for a magazine or newspaper. In this genre, an author presents his opinion on a subject related to the publication.

Examples 
Drones Could Bring Better Medical Care To Rural Patients 
What We Can Learn From the Epic Failure of Google Flu Trends
 
Scholarly Article
Alternatively, I could write a scholarly article for an engineering journal. This genre includes analysis of technical subjects, typically with purely logos based arguments.

Examples
Overview of the DAEDALOS project 
Survey on the novel hybrid aquatic–aerial amphibious aircraft: Aquatic unmanned aerial vehicle (AquaUAV)

2. What is the setting of your genre?

The opinion column could be written for a science and technology magazine like Popular Science or Wired. The scholarly article could be written for engineering journals like Progress in Aerospace Sciences.

3. How will you use rhetorical strategies in this genre?

Both genres require logic based arguments.

4. What type of visual aids will you be using in this genre?

The opinion column would give me more freedom for use of visual aids, but charts or graphs would be useful in both genres.

5. What type of style will you be using in this genre?

The scholarly article requires an academic style, but formal would suffice for the opinion column.

Response/Actions

1. Positive Support

• The F-35 has been too costly and taken too long to develop.
• More realistic and specialized defense goals should be used in the future to prevent inflation of blanket projects like the F-35.
• Politicians who blindly support these programs should not be trusted.

2. Negative Rebuttals

• The F-35 program is nearing successful completion.
• The F-35 combined multiple programs that would have been just as costly.
• The engineers working on the program simply failed to deliver capabilities that were within reach.

3. Refutation of Negative Rebuttals

• The F-35 program has exceeded its budget and failed to meet deadlines numerous times, and still has software and implementation issues to work out before its completion.
• With smaller programs, the government would not be as invested in the success of any one program.
• The demands of the project prevented specialized development of key engineering components.