In writing the needs assessment proposal for our fictional Japanese consumer electronics company, AKAI Corporation, Ltd., our group had the opportunity to "make up" the drivers of the concept sector. We attempted to fabricate an audience, purpose, and situation that would make as easy as possible our task of developing a document integrating visual and verbal rhetoric which responded closely to the rhetorical situation.

Our Rhetorical Situation
Fred, Rachel, and I developed our rhetorical situation after discussing our abilities and interests. Rachel's background in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) and Fred's knowledge of industrial procedures led us to focus on the situation of a Japanese company exporting consumer electronics to U.S. automobile manufacturers. We envisioned the cross-communication problems that might occur in both oral and written communication and saw the necessity of specific needs assessment so that AKAI might develop a training program to achieve greater communicative competence in English. Because of the fictional nature of the assignment, the audience, purpose, and context driving many of our choices were occasionally somewhat fuzzy.

Audience
Our most important understanding of the audience for our proposal included the following elements:

• they are Japanese
• they are mid-level management (Director of Training and Development and Staff)
• they speak English as their second language (or third)

Purpose
Our purpose is essentially persuasive–we hope to persuade AKAI to hire Global Communications to complete their needs assessment survey.

Context
The context of our rhetorical situation includes:

• AKAI's recent erosion of market share during a growth period in the American auto industry
• AKAI's competitors' recent investment in cross-cultural communications training
• Global Communication's previous work with AKAI and extensive experience in Japan
• they speak English as their second language (or third)

The combination of these factors created the rhetorical situation that drove many of our choices in both the verbal and visual sectors. This analysis will examine specific aspects of our rhetorical choices in those two sectors: generic structure, arrangement, content and voice in the verbal sector, and usability, visibility, accessibility, and legibility in the visual sector.

Choices in the Verbal Rhetoric Sector
Choices in the verbal rhetoric for our proposal are closely tied to each other. The generic structure of proposals effected organizational and content choices, while our persuasive purpose most influenced choices in generic structure, arrangement, content and voice.

Generic Structure
We put careful thought into filling the six slots of the generic proposal structure outlined by Freed and Roberts in their 1989 article, "The Nature, Classification, and Generic Structure of Proposals." Because our document was to be primarily persusaive in intent, we attempted to reiterate persuasive elements in each slot where they seemed applicacable. For example, we identified one of our most important selling points our past relationship with AKAI. We mention it as a favorable element in several slots. In the situation slot we write, "Therefore, to regain strategic competitive advantage, AKAI and Global must build on their existing relationship to expidite this recovery process." That point becomes a theme repeated in our methods, qualifications, costs, and benefits slots.

Though our persuasive purpose was focused many of our choices in filling the slots of the generic proposal structure, the context suggested tour second "theme" of expediency. Because AKAI faced eroding market share, their RFP included a time constraint. We focused on the time element throughout the proposal, often tying it to the idea that our previous work with the corporation would enable us to complete the needs assessment in a more timely manner than other consulting firms might be able to.

Arrangement
The arrangement or organization of verbal portion of our proposal was largely driven by the generic structure, rather than by the rhetorical situation. This was one area in which the classroom situation intruded upon the rhetorical context we had set for ourselves. As group, we disagreed about how to arrange the material--in particular the wording of titles, headings, and sub-heads. I was interested in grouping the material in a way which would fill the slot without calling attention to the fact that we were filling a slot in a generic structure. My thought was that we need more reader oriented headings of the sort Redish, Battison and Gold discuss in "Making Information Accessible to Readers." Our headings, based on the generic structure, are suggestive of those the authors want writers to avoid, because they are removed a step from the context of the document. "Global's Approach for Assessing AKAI's Communication Needs" seems more user-friendly than "Methods." Our decision to use the slot titles of the generic structure was based on Fred's previous experiences writing proposals for the classroom, rather than being driven by the rhetorical situation we had constructed.

Content
The degree of detail we chose to contain in our proposal was driven mainly by our understanding of the situation and by our purpose. We discussed audience in this context and the possibility of simplifying the level of detail for a non-native English reading audience. We were aware of contradictory forces--Nancy Blyer's article "Aspects of Reading Theory and Persuasive Business Communications," suggests that "inferring may make unnecessary a detailed, heirarchically organized description of an issue or concept by allowing readers access to a schemata already stored in memory" (387). What, then, are the implications of simplifying if the writer and reader do not share a first language or a culture? The need to simplify becomes greater to overcome the language barrier, but the reality may be that if there is no ready cross-cultural schemata stored away, the level of detail needs to be even greater than it might be when the writer and reader share a culture. Eventually, we rejected this option, because the reality was that none of us knew enough about Japanese language and education to guess at how to accomplish simplifying the text while maintaining communication. (We chose instead to chunk information in a way to make reading easier, and leave it at that.)

After avoiding audience, and focusing on purpose and situation as deciding the degree of detail we would include, we made our most important choices based on our abilities. Rachel's expertise in TESL filled out details of the methods slot and Fred's industrial and business knowlege accurately named all sorts of things that Rachel or I had only a general idea of. In addition, our persuasive intent made it necessary to be more detailed in the costs and qualifications slots, not just laying out the facts, but showing why we were best able to do the study in a more cost efficient way. For example, we admit we are expensive, but we explain that our methods are more thorough than those of some other consulting firms.

Voice
Group projects often have trouble maintaining a consistent tone and this one was no exception. We wrote our proposal in three separate sections—one by each of us. Even though we had extensive notes on our rhetorical situation, we had interpreted that situation very differently. Our proposal had three distinct voices, one very negative, one positive, and one academic. We had to reassess our purpose in order to choose a tone and rewrite the document in a single voice. Because we decided our purpose was persuasive, we decided a wholly negative tone might make our audience too defensive to hire us.

Choices in the Visual Rhetoric Sector
Because the goal of this paper is to let you know what I've learned in this course, I want to concentrate on the area of visual rhetoric. I didn't know such a thing existed until I took this course, but it quickly became my interest, and because of this interest, my group let me do the page design aspects of our proposal. I want to discuss our visual rhetorical choices in terms of Charles Kostelnick's 12-Cell Matrix of Visual Communication.

Usability
Kostelnick would call those features that combine to make a document usable "Supra-textual." These include titles, headers, and pagination at the alphanumerical level, placement of page or section breaks at the spatial level, and logos and page unifiers at the graphic level. Because our audience consists entirely of non-native readers, I wanted the document to be visually unified and easy to follow. I introduced a logo on the cover, and carried a smaller variation of it through the subsequent pages. The stylized repetition of our corporate name would, we hope, be a persuasive element as well as a unifying one. To make the material easier to follow, I made the page numbers bold and in a larger size than the text, and placed them within the extended line of the logo, at the top of each page. They are on the right side so that even when a set of pages are stapled, the numbers are easy to locate by flipping through the stack. Because the proposal themselves are likely to be used and referred to in a business setting, ease of retrieving information is particularly important.

Accessibility and Readability
To make sure information in the document was as quickly accessible as possible, we not only had a clear and detailed table of contents, but we added an executive summary to lay out our argument in a way that a reader could understand easily. For example, the executive summary not only followed the design of the document, it forecasted the argument. In addition, we used a hierarchy of headers, with those headers denoting the generic structure slots in all caps, centered, bold, italic, while the smallest level of subhead was simply indented italic (with the text left-side indented below it). This makes the organization of the proposal easily accessible for all readers.

We also decided the document would be most readable if we chose a basic serif font, like Times. Because the company is somewhat conservative and English is a second language of decision-makers, we wanted simple fonts that the readers would be familiar with. We also attempt to chunk paragraphs, use short paragraphs, and left-justify to maintain clean lines. Separating paragraphs with a line of white space also helps readers visually gauge the length of paragraphs and know when one idea has ended and another will begin.

Conclusions
This rhetorical analysis addresses the choices we made in able to make our proposal an effective document for a specific audience. It is clear to me after completing this assignment, that we did carefully think about issue of audience, purpose, and context while we designed and wrote our proposal. I think our document is an effective one.

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