Cicero, in De Oratore [1], suggests that the responsibilities of the orator with regard to an audience are to charm, to teach, and to move. For decades, technical communicators, as well as technical communication scholars [2], focused upon only one of these responsibilities-the responsibility to teach. Not that the other two responsibilities were non-existent in the work of technical communicators, just unregarded for the most part. For example, a user manual that fails to move a reader to use the information it contains is a failed communication. Likewise, a proposal that does not charm readers to accept its premises and approve its recommendations is also a communication that fails.
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