Burke’s concept of terministic screens or the “reality” that “has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems” (48) is a useful construct.  It’s sort of a more elaborate, more far-reaching conception of looking at the world “through rose-colored glasses” or having a “grey cloud hang over us” which “colors” all our thoughts and interactions. 

At the gym earlier today, I was pondering Burke, and of course the commentary I needed to wring out of my tired brain today, when the blaring television usurped my attention.  To my dismay, someone had turned the volume high and the channel to The Martha Stewart Show.  Unable to escape the self-proclaimed lifestyle guru, I pondered what terministic screens her apparently still-loyal fans must have used to ignore that she’s a convicted criminal as I jogged on the treadmill.  I’m imagining that the screens, or symbol systems, that her fans use might “select” and “deflect” different details from reality if they were considering, say, a convicted small-time drug dealer.  I’m theorizing that Stewart’s fans use terminologies which incorporate “continuity” with her, whereas the mainstream of our society has developed terminology of “discontinuity” from convicts, to see ourselves as essentially different from them.  All manner of details about a small-time drug dealer’s life that may have brought him to selling drugs would more than likely be “deflected” and the symbol (as opposed to the experienced reality) of a drug dealer selling drugs to school kids, for example, would be “selected.” 

Given the right circumstances and opportunities after prison, I would argue that Ms. Stewart and the small-time drug offender could both avoid further criminal activity; however, the small-time criminal often has fewer opportunities or second chances than Ms. Stewart seems to have upon leaving prison, regardless of the actual danger either of them did or did not represent for society, because of the screens through which they are each viewed. 

Burke states that we rely on a “web of ideas and images that reach through our senses only insofar as the symbol systems that report on them are heard or seen” (48).  Certainly in our postmodern world much of the symbol systems that “reach through to our senses” work through the media and those around us that we feel similar to.  Terministic screens can be based on differences of kind or of degree (50).  I’m guessing that Stewart’s fans either see themselves as similar to her or as different in degree, perhaps because of her self-conscious portrayal of herself through the media as the goddess of home, as just a “regular person” like her fans. 

The concept of terministic screens is useful for more than pondering the queen of the home-improvement empire.  Although I use his concept in perhaps a narrower way than he meant it, I think that as composition teachers, we need to be aware of the screens through which we view our students from different backgrounds, classes, and cultures, as well as their writing.