Action or bubbling - or both?

Peter Elbow is still on my mind today with his point about getting-the-results versus getting-it-right - and I might as well put something down now and make the most of having no readers.

As we come closer to an audience, its field of force tends to pull our words into shapes or configurations determined by its needs or point of view. As we move farther away from the audience, our words are freer to rearrange themselves, to bubble and change and develop, to follow their own whims, without any interference from the needs or orientation of the audience (- that's more from Elbow, page 191)

This last part might be true of secretive beginners' blogging, but the distinction itself is important in spectacular personal reporting too. Suddenly, however, I've become confused as to which side of the distinction I've actually been celebrating in my PhD work when I have pointed out the "explicit rhetoricity" of this kind of journalism.

On the one hand, the readers watch the first person make a plan (to go under cover at a tabloid newspaper or to cover the Honolulu marathon) and carry out this plan. That is: the reporter is inventing, acting and getting-the-results, on a literal as well as on a rhetorical level. On the other hand, the reporters do exactly cover the process - the field trip as well as the writing process - with such care that the texts get an undetermined, essayistic quality about them. That is: the reporters make an explicit effort to get-it-right by letting observations bubble. They tend to slow the process down, pulling away from deadlines and from readers' and editors' expectations in general, perhaps by simply staying on their case longer than what is usual, by writing longer texts than what is usual and by using the first person singular to expose their planning as well as their pondering. In the case of Thompson, an essayistic quality is present in his definition of an almost metaphysical mission, say finding the American Dream (as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), but the metaphysical dimension becomes situated in the matter-of-factly genre of reporting and thickened with specific details from the road. The two types of writing are pulling in different directions.

So does one kind of writing display more 'rhetoricity' than the other? Or is it the clash of genres which brings out rhetoricity? Well, rhetoricity is a quality which has to do with admitted perspectives and exposed textual choices. Which again makes my notion of "explicit rhetoricity" somewhat tautological...