Understanding Evaluations

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Evaluations are everyday arguments. By the time you leave home in the morning, you’ve likely made a dozen informal evaluations: You’ve selected dressy clothes because you have a job interview with a law firm. You’ve chosen low-fat yogurt and fruit over the pancakes you really love. You’ve queued up the perfect playlist on your iPhone for your hike to campus. In each case, you’ve applied criteria to a particular problem and then made a decision. That’s evaluating on the fly.

Some professional evaluations require more elaborate standards, evidence, and paperwork (imagine an aircraft manufacturer certifying a new jet for passenger service), but they don’t differ structurally from the simpler choices that people make all the time. People love to voice their opinions, and they always have. In fact, a mode of ancient rhetoric — called the ceremonial or epideictic (see Chapter 1) — was devoted entirely to speeches of praise and blame.

Today, rituals of praise and blame are a significant part of American life. Adults who would choke at the notion of debating causal or definitional claims will happily spend hours appraising the Oakland Raiders, Boston Red Sox, or Tampa Bay Rays. Other evaluative spectacles in our culture include awards shows, beauty pageants, most-valuable-player presentations, lists of best-dressed or worst-dressed celebrities, “sexiest people” magazine covers, literary prizes, political opinion polls, consumer product magazines, and — the ultimate formal public gesture of evaluation — elections. Indeed, making evaluations is a form of entertainment in America and generates big audiences (think of The Voice) and revenues.