Creating Coffee Monsters

My recent rhetorical situation has been training new hires how to make coffee at Reunion. Over the past two weeks I have trained seven employees how to make coffee, six out of the seven having no experience making coffee before and five of the seven having never worked a customer service job before. Reunion lost a majority of its employees to graduation at the end of last May, and due to this, we are being forced to train about thirty employees in all. I had to use language, body language, and written text to train these employees by showing them how to use the coffee machines, registers, and how to make every drink.

I was constrained in a couple different ways, the most significant being time. Most employees only had 2-3 hour shifts to learn an entirely new world, and I was forced to show them everything in this little amount of time. This made me speed up my actions; however, I couldn’t go too fast or the employees wouldn’t be able to comprehend and remember everything they were being told. I took time into account and decided to create a cheat sheet for the employees that included all of our drinks with their perspective recipes and amounts of each ingredient.

I wanted to have a positive affect on the new hires; because I know learning something like this can be rough as I was new to coffee at this time last year. I wanted the new hires to learn quickly, but correctly, in a way that made them feel like they were doing well. I used a lot of positive reinforcement and constructive criticism to achieve this. Another technique I used was letting them dive right into the job. I would give a quick demonstration and then let them try it out, so they would get hands on experience, as this is how I learned the best when I first started working.

My actions seemed to be successful through the actions of the new hires. I trained them all throughout the week before school started, and watched them slowly improve. During this time they asked a lot of questions and I was always sure to give the best answers I possibly could. Towards the end of the first week they were beginning to pick up on drinks and starting to remember techniques that Reunion uses. By the end of last week, the new hires were on their own, having fewer questions, and remembering drinks without having to look at the cheat sheets as much. Today, I worked with one of the new hires and she was able to man a register by herself during rush without asking any questions or making any mistakes. It seems to me I am a successful trainer and faced the rhetorical situation correctly and effectively!

Precis 8/25

Consigny, Scott. (1974). Rhetoric and Its Situations. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 7(3) 175-186.
Scott Consigny's rhetoric explanatory piece, "The Rhetorical Situation" (1974) asserts that rhetorical situations are tools and we are able to change exigencies with our given tools. Consigny argues one can try and respond to exigencies to change them. By thinking of exigencies as tools helps us escape the idea that we can’t change all of our exigencies because they do matter. Consigny is presenting his own argument in response to Bitzer and Vatz. Consigny is speaking to Bitzer, Vatz, philosophers, and those interested in studying rhetoric, bringing the idea of exigencies back into the rhetorical study world. 
"In part one I argue that Bitzer correctly construes the rhetorical situation as characterized by "particularities," but misconstrues the situation as being thereby determinate and determining" (176).
I think it is interesting to see that Consigny agrees with parts of Bitzer; however, he creates an argument against Bitzer alleging he is too "determining"in his studies. 
"The rhetor's task is not to answer questions and solve well-formulated problems, but rather to be able to ask good questions and to formulate or discover relevant problems in an indeterminate situation" (177).
I think this is a strong statement that really allows the reader to understand the point Consigny is attempting to argue, showing us how to use the tools we have to change our exigencies. 

Losh, Elizabeth, Jonathan Alexander, Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon. (2014).Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's 35-63.
Losh, Alexander, Cannon, and Cannon's "Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing" explains the rules of rhetoric and the meaning of certain words like "ethos, pathos, logos" to create a guide for understanding rhetoric. The guide uses a series of comics to explain key information of rhetoric using funny pictures to capture and hold the readers attention. This point of this piece is to give readers a better understanding of how to write and why rhetoric is important to everyday life, especially in writing. The article is meant for those who are new to rhetoric, need a refresher on rhetoric, or simply want to expand their knowledge on the subject.
"Actually, the ancients developed the concept of rhetoric to facilitate discussion" (37).
This quote was interesting to me because I always thought of rhetorical questions as something that aren't meant to be answered (as seen in the text), so learning that the word has the opposite meaning came as a surprise to me!
"ETHOS is the credibility that a speaker or writer brings to the subject that he or she is communicating about" (44).
I found this page extremely helpful and I know it will behoove me in the future, so I wanted to be sure to mark it down! Knowing a strong definition of ethos, pathos, and logos, along with examples will engrave them into my mind so I am always aware of them when writing!