Professional Writing, Personal Stakes: Rhetorical Empathy in Feedback Giving on Analytic Writing in the Intelligence Community

Rosemary Pinney

Advisor: Michelle LaFrance, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Courtney Wooten, Solon Simmons, Lisa Blankenship

Horizon Hall, #4225, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/92715030361?from=addon
February 27, 2026, 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation examines rhetorical empathy in the practice of giving feedback on analytic writing in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Rhetorical empathy has been theorized primarily in pedagogical, public, and cultural contexts, where scholars have explored its role in teaching, civic discourse, and engagement across difference. Much less attention has been given to how rhetorical empathy is taken up in high-stakes professional settings, particularly in institutional contexts where writing circulates under conditions of authority, responsibility, and time pressure. At the same time, research on professional writing feedback has rarely foregrounded the perspectives of those who give such feedback, especially in environments where feedback carries real consequences for writers, organizations, and downstream decision-making. Drawing on the IC as a revelatory site of professional writing, this study explores how seasoned analysts, managers, and analytic writing instructors describe their experiences giving feedback on analytic writing and considers what their accounts make visible about rhetorical empathy in this setting.

Lisa Blankenship’s theory of rhetorical empathy (2019) provides the primary conceptual framework for this study's examination of how rhetorical empathy is understood and taken up in participants' feedback-giving practice. The study combines constructivist grounded theory, situational analysis, and voice-centered relational methodology to examine participants’ lived experiences while remaining reflexive about my positionality as an experienced analyst, manager, and writing instructor within the same professional community. Across iterative cycles of coding, memoing, and mapping, I approach participants’ accounts as situated rhetorical knowledge rather than evidence to be abstracted from context. This analytic orientation allows the study’s methods to align with the relational and reflective commitments it seeks to understand.

Findings indicate that rhetorical empathy in feedback giving on analytic writing in the study's setting is experienced as an attuned, context-responsive practice that unfolds across relationships, institutional expectations, and ongoing interaction, and that cannot be reduced either to individual disposition or to a set of discrete communicative moves. Participants’ accounts extend Blankenship’s framework by placing rhetorical empathy within the situational ecology of feedback giving on analytic writing in the IC—an ecology shaped by the interplay of bodies, institutional demands and procedures, communicative practices, emotional undercurrents, and the tensions that gather around the work. Attuned empathy names the analytic refinement developed through this study to account for how rhetorical empathy becomes legible within that ecology as it is carried through relation and sustained across time.