Rhetorical Artifacts
Dialogue as Terministic Screen
Artifact 1 - Courtroom discourse
An advice of rights during a plea hearing –
dialogue v. control
When judges address defendants in the courtroom during certain hearings, like sentencings and guilty pleas, there is a back-and-forth that by all appearances could be understood as a dialogue.
Although this exchange abides by very strict turn-taking rules and may appear to be a bidirectional exchange between the judge and the defendant (terministic selection), a closer look reveals that this is more of a unidirectional form of address in which one person controls the flow of information and the other one either acquiesces or offers some corrective comment (terministic deflection), but does not actually take a turn to initiate the flow or exchange of information (terministic reflection.) In this instance there is a clear power imbalance that one person (the judge) uses to control the turn-taking and the input that the other speaker is allowed to have. It may happen that the other speaker does not get an opportunity to engage in the turn-taking and ends up being silenced by the speaker who is in control of the discursive event.
Artifact 2 - Courtroom discourse
A colloquy during a revocation hearing –
dialogue framed as situated meaning
There are other instances, unlike the previous example, in which judges do engage with defendants in authentically bidirectional and reciprocal turn-taking with each one contributing to the dialogic co-creation of shared meaning. The following is an example of such an instance.
In this example there is a dialogue intended to build upon each interlocutor’s contribution to the situated knowledge about the defendant’s technical violation of his conditional release, and a shared objective, which is to resolve the conflict that the violation caused.
Artifact 3 - Social Media Thread
Dialogue as performative engagement
Social media can provide an outlet for the sort of interaction that is essentially performative inasmuch as it foregrounds the communicative turn-taking of a dialogue in an orderly and coherent sequence leading to some commonly agreed-to resolution.
PARTICIPANT #1 – GRRRRR!!! Venting rant... So I finally get called to federal court in Boston before a Judge (not a magistrate- not that I get called for that many either) Another NON-cert walks in and introduces herself. Says there are 2 more here doing stuff all over.
"Just walked in to see if I'm needed" So she is letting me do the hearing.
PARTICIPANT #2 – I remember that happening many, many years ago. People literally sitting outside courtrooms waiting to be “found” by the attorneys/court staff. That was SO upsetting! It made me think of the guys sitting outside Home Depot waiting to be picked up by general contractors or homeowners needing help for the day. I had no idea that is still happening.
PARTICIPANT #3 – This is happening too often in my area as well, unfortunately. 🙁
PARTICIPANT #4 – That used to happen in my courthouses here. Thankfully it stopped.
PARTICIPANT #1 – So the other interpreter sat in for the hearing. 3 defendants. They scheduled the next hearings, one this Friday, other May 15. I ask the ct deputy (here it is them who call terps) if he wants to schedule me. "I'll let you know" 😡 One of the attorneys asked if I could meet with him after hearing. I turn around, he's gone. I go down to lockup, he's there with the other terp 🤬Seriously????
PARTICIPANT #5 – Sounds like a project for the drafting committee :)
This dialogue involves multiple voices and resembles William Isaacs’ description of dialogue as “a living experience of inquiry within and between people” (1999, 9) and what he termed “a conversation with a center, not sides.” (Isaac 1999, 17-48.) In a very Burkean way, interlocutors share a coded language for which they have already applied a terministic screen (terministic selection): NON-cert (= non-certified), ct deputy (= court deputy), terps (= interpreters), lockup (= court’s holding cells.) There’s also a reference to some “drafting committee” for which no further explanation is needed because all participants are expected to know what it means and, by the same token, it acts as terministic deflection. Clearly, Paul Grice’s cooperative principle is fully functional here.
The symbolism in the dialogue also incorporates emojis, defined as “any of various small images, symbols, or icons used in text fields in electronic communication (as in text messages, email, and social media) to express the emotional attitude of the writer, convey information succinctly, communicate a message playfully without using words, etc.” (Merriam-Webster.) This is a discursive event in which meaning is and has been previously co-constructed using symbolic assets that make understanding entirely dependent on assumptions and inferences that draw from that prior knowledge (terministic reflection.) Without that shared knowledge the dialogic engagement would fail.
Other social media threads are not always or necessarily this coherent.
Artifact 4 - Social Media Thread
Dialogue as fragmented discourse
Social media can be an outlet for monologic input or dialogic involvement in the communicative event. To identify which is which, the reader must interrogate the tension between the participants and whether they are engaging in multidirectional discursive affordances or isolated soliloquies directed at no one in particular. Here’s an example of the first sort of engagement.
Participant 1: We really need to have a dialogue about remote work. It’s clearly more productive and better for employees.
Participant 2: Actually, remote work is ruining company culture. People are less engaged and collaboration is suffering.
Participant 1: Studies show remote work increases productivity by 13%. The data is clear.
Participant 2: Productivity isn’t everything. What about team cohesion and long-term innovation?
Participant 3: This is just corporate control disguised as “culture.” People work better without micromanagement.
Participant 1: That’s not true. Companies need structure or everything falls apart. I’ve worked remotely for 5 years and my team is stronger than ever.
Participant 2: Anecdotes aren’t evidence. Most companies are rolling back remote work for a reason.
In this exchange, participants are expressing opinions but not really listening to what others have to say. There is a forced turn-taking that the medium itself imposes, but the turn-taking alone is not enough for the exchange to constitute a dialogue. The way Isaac puts it: “[t]he heart of dialogue is a simple but profound capacity to listen. Listening requires we not only hear the words, but also embrace, accept, and gradually let go of our own inner clamoring” (1999, 83). The participants’ incapacity to listen to each other makes this not a dialogue but a sequential collection of monologues.
Artifact 5 - Personal Conversation
Dialogue as debate
Dialogue is not always amicable. Take, for example, the dialogue between countries as they negotiate some international agreement. Even when it’s called a dialogue, there is a lot of tension involved. There will always be one party trying to get more conditions approved that favor them, while the other party is trying to do the same. In the example provided here, which was created by AI for my keyword essay, what appears to be a dialogue about dialogue is more of a sparring match in which both sides are surreptitiously trying to win an argument disguised as dialogue.
In the end, the person who started the debate selects a single terministic screen to define what a dialogue is and is not: all dialogue is a performance.
That unidirectionality resembles the power discourse in artifact #1, the courtroom dialogue in which the judge controls the flow and content of information, even when it appears to be a turn-taking exchange.
Artifact 6 - Personal Conversation
Dialogue as Pedagogy
This example was also created by AI for my first keyword essay. Rather than presenting a true exchange of ideas or information, this is an exchange in an asymmetrical power relationship where the professor imparts knowledge that the student receives rather passively. There is a semblance of dialogue because of the turn-taking and the questions asked by the student, but the engagement is pedagogical and yet quite different from the Socratic method which asks questions to encourage students to develop their critical thinking skills.
David Skidmore writes about dialogue in the classroom between teachers and students and advocates for what he calls dialogic pedagogy, a new terministic screen for this term that had not surfaced before.
“Drawing mainly on the theoretical ideas of Bakhtin on the dialogic nature of language, a number of authors have stressed the educative potential of teacher-student interaction which enables students to play an active part in shaping the agenda of classroom discourse” (Skidmore 2006, 503).
It just goes to show how the terministic process of selection, deflection, and reflection never ends, as long as people can invent new meanings for old terms.
Artifact 7 - Dialogues in Literature
Mutual Engagement
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…”
“Sir?”
“…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
“But if you don’t understand a person, how can you know what he’s going to do?”
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) — Atticus & Scout
This example shows how dialogues are constructed in literary works to reflect a genuine problem, disagreement, or some other source of friction that produces a conversation in which both interlocutors are equally engaged. Here, Scout and Atticus are discussing Scout’s experience that day in school. In an effort to persuade Scout of a different point of view, Atticus uses a metaphor—climb into his skin and walk around in it—that selects empathy and deflects conflict. Interlocutors listen to each other and by doing so can arrive at a resolution that is mutually agreeable, even if one of them is not entirely convinced—how can you know what he’s going to do?
Artifact 8 - Dialogues in Literature
Misaligned selection, deflection, and reflection
“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”
Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.
“You loved me too?” he repeated.
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — Gatsby & Daisy
In this brief example, what the exchange shows is how, even with turn-taking between two interlocutors, the two have each made the wrong assumptions and inferences from each other’s discourse which has resulted in an illusion of understanding, and in that sense the dialogue has failed.
Overall, the way in which terministic screens shape meaning is always going to be contingent on Burke’s five elements of dramatism: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. These provide us with the “relational and functional principles” (Blakesley 2002, 6) of discourse that enable us to arrive at co-constructed understandings of how ideas, words, and actions fit together.
