D.A. Winsor Response

Reading this selection enabled me to analyze the Challenger disaster from three different perspectives. Certainly, it emphasizes the need for and importance of professional communicators and clarity in writing. Yet, Winsor's text suggests that communication is more than merely word placement and crafting sentences; rather, it greatly entails arranging a message that carefully considers the speaker, audience, and text by employing ethos, logos, and pathos at the appropriate time. Specifically, when the engineers wrote the reports, they did not consider the fact that their superiors were not themselves engineers and did not understand the true meaning within the message. Hence, the upper management concluded that nothing in the reports was terribly out of the ordinary and made the unfortunate decision to proceed with the launch.

Secondly, the entire communication process, or lack thereof, exposes a major ethical problem within this scenario. Not only were the conversations and documents too technical, which obscured the message, but they were also misleading. In her article, "Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators", Winsor stresses that the messages that reached the upper management had an "optimistic view" of the problem (104). Compounded with fact that the reports did not make practical sense, the managers were deceived about the potential danger of the operation. Instead of being forthright and going against their better judgment, many people involved chose to simply ignore the problem or avoid confronting the managers and making themselves look badly.

Lastly, the only letter that portrayed any sense of urgency was Roger Boisjoly's. In comparison to Brian Russell's, Boisjoly's letter uses language indicative of the severity of the problem such as "mistakenly", "catastrophe", and "loss of human life"(104). One the other hand, Russell's letter is organized in a question and answer format. The immediate impressions from this format, and even the way that he numbered the letter, could have implied two false notions: 1) Any potential questions that had been raised must have had a logical answer that the engineers already resolved, and 2) there are only two questions pertaining to the problematic secondary seals, so the issue could not have been that dangerous. Obviously these possible responses to his message were not what Russell intended. Yet, without even reading the letter, the style of this letter alone could lead an unfamiliar audience to make these possible assumptions. Russell's letter uses terms such as "squeeze", "no reason...ever fail", and "guaranteed" (105). Although his letter tried to voice the same concerns as Boisjoly's, Russell used words that seemed to downplay the severity of the matter. Even the subject titles for these two letters signal two different meanings.

Although both letters were intended to articulate the same concern, Boisjoly's used rhetorical strategy to communicate a more effective message. The biggest mistake he made, however, was in labeling the correspondence as "COMPANY PRIVATE", which kept the letter from reaching the audience that needed it the most.