Study Of Rhetoric And Rhetorical Theory example essay topic

Aristotle's Rhetoric Over 2300 years ago, Aristotle laid the groundwork for modern public communication. His teacher, Plato, hated the way that public speakers skillfully manipulated audiences with no apparent regard for truth. Plato saw little value for the mere rhetoric used by the fast-talking speakers of his day. Aristotle, however, saw great potential in rhetoric (one person addressing many). He believed it was an art that could and should be studied and that good rhetoric was not only persuasive, but also ethical.

He stated that all public presentations are some balance of three rhetorical proofs: ethos (ethical), pathos (emotional), and logos (logical). The ethos is the speaker and his or her character as revealed through the communication. The pathos is the audience and the emotions felt by them during the rhetoric. The logos is the actual words used by the speaker. Although no presenter today would speak without considering the audience, Aristotle's pathos was a novel idea in his time. He is the earliest record of a rhetorician identifying the audience and their perception as an important part of public speaking.

In fact, he believed that a speech was effective only if it stirred up emotions in its audience. Rhetoric is the study of the strategies of using words to accomplish a purpose. The traditional purpose most rhetoricians have studied is how to persuade people to do or to think what the speaker or writer wishes. Sometimes rhetoric has a slightly smelly reputation because people can (and do, all the time) use good rhetorical principles to persuade the ignorant or the unwary of things which are against their best interests.

Rhetoric is value neutral - that is, using the principles of rhetoric is neither moral nor immoral. If persuasion means to convince someone else that your interests and his interests are the same thing, then moral persuasion is when it is true that both your interests are the same. Immoral persuasion is when it is not true that your interests are the same, and to persuade him is to lie to him. Socrates hated the whole idea of rhetoric because it did not deal with the moral question. As an adult in a democracy, you must be responsible for your own moral decisions, but there is no doubt that the principles of rhetoric are very powerful tools for people who master them, not to mention that they are necessary for success in the worlds of business and industry. In the Western world, rhetoric is the very oldest school subject.

Its first teacher was a man named Tisias who lived just before Socrates' time in Athens. It was originally training in how to accuse others of wrongdoing in the public forum or how to defend yourself against accusations of others in the same place. Because there were no lawyers in ancient Athens, people had to argue for justice for themselves and, thus, had to be good public speakers. There were five major parts to the study of rhetoric: invention (the systematic discovery of ideas for speaking or writing), arrangement (that is, organization), style, memory (how to memorize in the age before writing was common), and delivery (covered in speech classes these days).

Now all of these parts are taught in school except memory, which has, in this sense, been replaced by writing. You will recognize some of the similarities in what is taught in freshman English and in public speaking. Some principles of rhetoric are also taught in courses like government, history, and economics as well. Over the centuries rhetoric has been used to train the leaders of countless generations in how to persuade people.

In Rome, young men studied how to be good citizens by taking the responsibility of debating public issues. In the middle ages, rhetoric became the specialized study of how to preach the Gospel. In the eighteenth century, it became the cornerstone of training for the leaders of society who developed the foundations for democracy in the modern world. Now it is often used to convince elderly people that they should buy magazines to improve their chances of winning clearing house sweepstakes - and to convince our society that all people deserve basic rights -- and to argue about who has the right to use publicly-held water for farming or industrial purposes.

To know rhetoric is to possess a powerful skill; NOT to know rhetoric is to make yourself vulnerable to hucksters. The rhetorical square is a useful device for reminding ourselves of the relationships among an author's purpose, his audience's interests, the impression he wishes to make, and the content of a piece of writing. If any of the elements of the square change, all must change. The purpose is what the writer wants to accomplish by the piece of writing. The audience is who the writing is addressed to. Writers are wise to analyze who their audience is and what attitudes and previous knowledge that audience has with respect to their subjects.

The persona is the impression the writer makes of himself in the piece of writing. That impression is implicit in every decision a writer makes, from the words he uses to the kind of paper he types it on. The content of the writing is what the writer says about the subject. Example: Suppose you want to improve late registration at Del Mar College. You have studied late registration at several colleges in Texas and have discovered that, without purchasing any new computer hardware, a set of computer programs can be custom tailored to Del Mar College which would reduce the hassles of late registration for everybody involved.

But it would take about $15,000 in programming costs to put the system in place. You write a letter to the Vice President of Academic Services and the College Registrar to suggest that the College spend $15,000 to pursue your idea. You will want to make the impression that you are a reasonable, businesslike adult with the College's best interests at heart. You will print your letter with a laser printer on good paper (rather than a nine-pin dot matrix on pin-feed paper with the printer set on "draft". You will choose the facts and explanations which will convince an audience of serious professionals who, after all, want very much to please the College's customers which include not only students but the taxpayers of Corpus Christi and the state of Texas. You will leave out personal grudges as irrelevant.

You do a great job of balancing the parts of the rhetorical square. You receive a reply that the budget this year contains about $10,000 which could be used for this purpose, but that, in order to have the system ready for fall registration, the other $5000 would have to be raised some other way. You decide to use the Student Government Association to raise these funds in their spring carnival. You have to convince the SGA to dedicate its efforts to your cause.

The same arguments you used to the Registrar won't work. You must produce a piece of writing that gives the impression that you are "one of the guys". You must use reasons that appeal to the self-interests of ordinary students. You won't be heavy on the details of precisely what the programming must contain - the students don't know or care - but you will emphasize their savings in time and frustration.

The words you choose and the subject matter you emphasize will shift. This principle - that all the elements of the rhetorical square shift when any of them shift - is what the rhetorical square is meant to be a reminder of. Good writers habitually analyze the four elements of the rhetorical square (whether they use the device to remind themselves or not) during the writing process. Learning how to make an appropriate fit among the elements is necessary for successful writing. A Brief Overview of Rhetoric Rhetoric is arguably one of the oldest disciplines in the world. Its earliest antecedent can be found in the sophist tradition of Classical Greece.

Two of the earliest sophists, Tisias and Coral, made a comfortable living traveling around Hellenic Europe teaching people the finer points of oratory. The sophistic tradition was harshly criticized by major philosophers of the time (most notably, Socrates and Plato) as an unintellectual and immoral profession. In Plato's view, rhetoricians (i. e., sophists) were more concerned with appearances rather than substance -- in Plato's play Gorgias, he has the character of Socrates accuse the rhetorician / sophist Gorgias of specializing in making the bad case seem best and the best case seem bad. Although Plato certainly felt that clear expression was important, sophists such as the "real" Gorgias thought that rhetoric played a much greater role in human affairs.

Basically, the difference between these views lie in the area of epistemology, or the study of knowledge. If one adopted Plato's foundationalism (the belief that genuine knowledge corresponds to a fixed truth) using language persuasively could naturally lead the listener away from the truth. But if one shared Gorgias' antifoundationalist belief that "nothing actually exists... but even if it did, it would be incomprehensible to man... but that, even if anything were to be comprehended, it could not be articulated and communicated to others" persuasion was not so much misleading as a way for society to come to consensual knowledge. Still other sophists, such as Gorgias's student Isocrates, believed the learning of rhetoric had a strong democratizing and civilizing effect. In his emphasis on eloquence and well-spoken ness, Isocrates represents another aspect of rhetoric that we continue to associate with rhetorical training to this day. Even a quick synopsis of Greek rhetoric would be woefully incomplete if it neglected one of rhetoric's most illustrious theoreticians: Aristotle.

Aristotle, a student of Plato, did more than any of the sophists to codify rhetoric into a rational system of argument and presentation. It is from Aristotle that we get the distinction of syllogistic (formal) reasoning from ethymemic (i. e., informal) reasoning, and the well-known division of rhetorical "proofs" into those which are logical (logos), those which appeal to the emotions (pathos) and those which get their strength from the credibility of the speaker (ethos). Aristotle is also credited with development of the to poi -- or topics -- that a rhetor could use to "discover" an argument. More than any other individual, perhaps, Aristotle gave rhetoric a quasi-scientific basis and connected the study of persuasion to other arts and sciences. Rhetoric's centrality to education survived the eclipse of Greek power by the Romans, and as with so many other arts and sciences, the Romans took the rhetorical tradition and made it their own. Like the Greeks, the Roman education system centered on, and expanded, the practice of declamation -- a sort of speech-making class in which young men were assigned often fanciful topics and instructed to give an appropriate speech.

Perhaps Rome's greatest rhetorician was Marcus Tullius Cicero. While, relative to Aristotle, little rhetorical theory actually originated with Cicero, he elaborated and developed several central ideas and is widely reputed to be the most widely read rhetorician of the Classical period. Chief among Cicero's contributions to rhetoric are his treatment of the "canons" of rhetoric (i. e., invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) and his rethinking of kairos (the occasions on which rhetoric is appropriately deployed), and stasis theory (a system for determining the issue upon which an argument rests). And although less famous than Cicero, Quintilian is another influential Roman rhetorician who did much to synthesize the best of the Greek and Roman traditions. The Fall of Rome and the onset of the Christian Era in Europe posed a set of unique problems for rhetoric, tainted, as it was, with its roots in pagan Greek and Roman education. Another factor in rhetoric's decline was that, historically, when the foundations of knowledge are weakest, the power of persuasion is most appreciated (as in the Greek experiment with democracy) but that the need for skilled argumentation is least pronounced when a "higher authority" is most stable, and Christianity provided the ultimate in higher authorities: the word of God as revealed in scripture.

Rhetoric as a discipline owed its survival to one of the most central figure of that era -- St. Augustine. Augustine's chief rhetorical work was De Doctrine Christiana in which he argued that even though Christians need not adopt the sophistic notion of persuasion, eloquence was still needed to make the Bible's teachings effective. Traditionally the study of speech rather than texts, with the onset of wider literacy rhetoric became more closely associated with the written word. Students were still required to study grammar, letter-writing (or "epistolary") and courtly expression, but as the writings of many of the Greek and Roman rhetorical scholars were lost to the Middle Ages, rhetoric continued to lose its intellectual edge.

Despite Augustine's efforts, the study of rhetoric and rhetorical theory suffered through a long period of benign neglect. Although rhetoric was still part of the curriculum it was essentially an impoverished and, often, trivial discipline limited to the study of tropes or figures of speech. A person who did much to keep rhetoric pushed to the margins was the educational reformer Peter Ram us who decided that the traditional canons of rhetoric should be divided between dialectic (i. e., logic) and a modified version of rhetoric consisting largely of style and delivery. The Age of Enlightenment, drawing its inspiration from Descartes' rationalism (another sort of foundation for knowledge), did little to revive rhetoric's fortunes, although the rise of sciences during this period also ushered in a desire for clarity. Thus, the study of rhetoric turned away from the study of ornamentation and towards issues of correctness and the avoidance of fallacies although it remained a body of technical skills. Still, it is during the Enlightenment that rhetoric found an advocate who tried to re-establish rhetoric's epistemological dimension and its general importance to science as well as to humanities: Giambattista Vico.

But just as Augustine was unable to really pull rhetoric out of the restrictive box religion had put it in, Vico was unsuccessful in saving rhetoric from the "new religion" of scientific reason. From Vico's era to our own century, rhetoric remained an important study, but one largely confined to issues of oral and written style and presentation. Of course, great rhetorical thinkers came along from time to time (Nietzsche, for instance, drew attention to the enormous role metaphors played in our lives) and the connections between rhetoric and psychology began to be explored, but it is clear that strong beliefs in scientific methods left little room for a respectable conception of persuasion. One curricular development occured during this period, however, that has had a lasting impact on the discipline. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Harvard University mandated that all students should learn the fundamentals of basic written English. With this decree, what we now call composition was essentially made synonymous with rhetoric.

Although freshman writing courses often deal very little with rhetorical theory, composition, along with speech communications, have nonetheless provided an academic "home" for scholars interested in rhetoric. Composition has also provided a space for a renewed appreciation for the women rhetoricians whose contributions to rhetorical theory from the Hellenistic period on continue to be uncovered. We can end this brief overview of rhetoric on a high note. The twentieth century is perhaps the most exciting era in which to study rhetoric since the Classical Era. This has come about with the advent of what is generally referred to as the New Rhetoric: the rediscovery of rhetoric's epistemological importance and the centrality of persuasion and argument to our everyday lives.

It is impossible to list all the reasons for this new-found prominence or all the contributors to the New Rhetoric, but among the most influential we must certainly count I.A. Richards, whose work on metaphor linked rhetoric to literary studies, Chaim Perelman, whose book The New Rhetoric is now a classic, Steven Toulmin, best known for his analysis of argument, and perhaps the most influential rhetorician of our era, Kenneth Burke. And among current rhetorical topics that are attracting the most attention, we might identify the study of how electronic environments influence persuasion and communication and what is called the "rhetoric of inquiry" movement. This movement uses rhetorical theories to examine the workings of sciences, social sciences and humanities in an effort to understand how language practices create and further what we accept to be "true" about the world. In this way, then, we can see that rhetoric has returned full circle to the epistemological issues that gave it its initial importance. Rhetorical Figures Stephen Toulmin is one of the modern day leaders of rhetorical theory. He did not start out as a rhetorician though.

He was born in London, England in 1922. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and natural sciences from King's College in 1942. Later he received his Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Cambridge. He has spent much of his life teaching at various universities around the United States.

Toulmin has written several books. The most important of these works to the field of rhetoric is his book entitled The Uses of Argument. In this book he lays out a structural model by which rhetorical arguments can be analyzed... Stephen Toulmin's layout of an argument consists of six elements. The first element is the claim. The claim of the argument is the conclusion that someone is trying to justify in the argument.

The second element is the grounds. The grounds of an argument are the facts on which the argument is based. The third element of the argument is the warrant. The warrant of the argument assesses whether or not the claim is legitimate based on the grounds. The fourth element is the backing. The backing of the argument gives additional support for a warrant by answering different questions.

The modal qualifier is the fifth element of the argument. The modal qualifier indicates the strength of the leap from the data to the warrant. The sixth and final element of the argument is the rebuttal. The rebuttal occurs when the leap from grounds to claim does not appear to be legitimate...

By creating this model for argument, Toulmin contradicted what philosophers have believed for centuries. For centuries, philosophers have believed that arguments can either be explained by relative means or by absolute means. Using either of these methods according to Toulmin is irrational to the modern argument. First of all, Toulmin claims that by using a relative method, no standards for the claims are made because the analysis of the argument is only relative to that particular argument. On the other hand, absolutism or foundationalism is irrelevant in the modern era according to Toulmin also. He claims absolutism is irrelevant for several reasons.

First of if all is the fact that this absolute logic is based in mathematics and geometry. Therefore the concepts which are contained in them are field dependent. Because of this fact, Toulmin argues that there is no room for these viewpoints in other areas of logic. Another problem that Toulmin has with absolutism has to do with the fact that answers are either correct or incorrect.

Toulmin believes that there is a definite gray area in some arguments that doesn't allow for this absolutism. The overall problem that Toulmin has with absolutism is that its rules are so strict that it just doesn't apply to modern reasoning... Another important belief of Toulmin is his evolutionary theory of rationality. Toulmin believes that ideas are constantly being created. He believes that these ideas are also constantly being argued over and the person who wins the argument persuades others of his beliefs. In this way, new ideas are constantly being evolved.

This concept is the most directly applicable theory to rhetoric that Toulmin has. After understanding this theory, it is no wonder why rhetoricians cherish the work of Stephen Toulmin. It is Toulmin's interpretive nature of his concepts coupled with his strong emphasis on persuasion that lend itself so well to rhetoric. Kenneth Burke was born on May 5, 1897 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He just recently passed away at the age of ninety-six in 1993.

He is a very important rhetorician and has many significant views on several rhetorical ideas such as the nature of rhetoric, dramatism, and the negative to name a few. Burke defines rhetoric as the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents. This definition seems close to the traditional definitions of rhetoric. However, he presents more characteristics of rhetoric that broadens his definition beyond that of the traditional ones. Some of these characteristics are identification, the functions of rhetoric, and the rhetorical audience. Burkes main addition to the definition is rooted in his thoughts on identification.

We identify ourselves through several different properties or substances, including physical objects, friends, relatives, occupations, and morals. As we identify with these different properties, we share substance with them. This association is described by the word consubstantial. As two items are united in substance by a common idea, they are consubstantial. Two actors may be totally different in style, but are consubstantial in that they share the substance of being actors. Burke uses the term identification synonymously with consubstantiality.

Shared substance establishes an identification between an individual and some property or person. He also groups persuasion, the key term for rhetoric, with identification and consubstantiality; he sees identification as a supplement to the traditional view of rhetoric as persuasion. Burke sees rhetoric as having many functions, one of them being the naming or defining of situations for individuals. For example, calling a person your friend is saying that the person agrees with you on qualities that you find important in different situations. Not only does rhetoric provide a name for a situation, it also gives a creative strategy for handling the situation. Essentially, it guides us through life, showing us which directions to follow and making us feel more comfortable in this modern world.

It may provide a vocabulary of feelings, actions, and thoughts for codifying and therefore interpreting the situation. Each rhetorical act is an answer to a situation. Burke has a unique view on audience. Rhetoric addresses an audience, whether it be real or ideal. Burke, however, believes that one can be his own audience. He says that a man can be his own audience, insofar as he, even in his secret thoughts cultivates certain ideas or images for the effect he hopes they may have upon him.

Dramatism is the way Burke chooses to study human motivation through the analysis of drama. He has developed a method of analysis, called the pentad. It is an essential instrument designed to breakdown statements of motives to the simplest level. Burke says five terms constitute the pentad: act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose.

An example of these five terms in a story is this: The hero (agent) with the help of a friend (co-agent) outwits the villain (counter-agent) by using a file (agency) that enables him to break his bonds (act) in order to escape (purpose) from the room where he has been confined (scene). Burke sees act as being any intended action. Teaching a class, playing a game, or acting in a play are all symbolic actions that can be studied in terms of their rhetor motivations. Scene is the area / location, time period, or situation in which the action takes place, basically the whole environment. The agent is who performs the act. Agency is how the act was carried out or what tools were used to help.

The purpose is the agents real reason for doing the act. Burke later decided to sometimes include attitude as a sixth element to be considered in motivation. Attitude is the manner in which the act was carried out. Burke's pentad is a simple way for the critic to name the elements in the act and then study the relationships between these elements. Burke has very strong views on the negative; he says there is no negative.

It does not exist. Humans invented the negative along with language. Everything simply is what it is and as it is. The only way something can not be something, is if it is something else.

An apple for example, is an apple; in no way can it be not an apple. If it is not an apple, then it must be an orange, or tomato or whatever it actually is. The New Rhetoric The definition of New Rhetoric is obscured by many different interpretations and opinions on the subject. Instead of determining the better of all the definitions New Rhetoric tries to combine all of the different ones and draw from their differences. In dealing with rhetoric it is no longer sufficient to deal only with what a rhetor communicates, but rhetoric is expanded to include how information is communicated and the social aspects of communication. Though communication depends on a system of symbols, be they oral or written, it takes more than these symbols to communicate.

Words, phrases, and sentences have direct and literal meanings, but in many cases these are not enough to determine what the speaker or writer is trying to convey. Communication is highly intention, context, and convention dependent. One sentence or phrase can be taken to mean totally different things. It is remarkable that the listener can understand what is being conveyed to them most of the time. The audience can dissect an utterance and determine it's meaning by using their previous knowledge of the culture, the intentions of the author and the situation of the text. Many of the different regional idiosyncrancies in language are not discernible without prior knowledge of the culture and it's conventions.

If one was to ask "Can you reach the salt?" they are not asking if you have the ability to reach the salt, instead they are asking for you to pass the salt. This would not be obvious to someone who was not familiar with the culture, or did not understand the intentions of the speaker. Intention plays a great role in communication. It has been proven that a large majority of people can understand a sentence or phrase even if it contains a lot of grammatical errors or poor word choice.

This is due largely to the fact that the audience understands the intentions of the speaker and can predict what they mean, even if it is not communicated that well. Situation plays on of the largest roles in understanding language. Words have numerous meanings and without some understanding of context it would be easy for the audience to understand a phrase in a different way then intended. These ideas that are found in New Rhetoric are new to the field of rhetoric and seem to imply some sort of injection of philosophy into the study of communication.

New Rhetoric is considered by many to be parallel to sociology. Not only does it deal with how information is understood, but also the social implications that induced a text and how the text influences society. Instead of studying old rhetorical works for content or structure, New Rhetoricians are now trying to understand what was happening in the time the text was authored that brought it about and what affect the text had on the society. Through rhetorical texts of the past and present we are better able to determine how a society functioned and learn about it's culture. This is not only due to the exact content of the text but can also be determined from the tone and implications of the piece. Text is not just an indicator of society but it can also mold society and through the study of the time period and author of a text we can better understand how the text affected the society and what brought the author to write it.

Rhetoric is breaking away from it's previous humanist's ties of studying text for their beauty or content and are now using it as a tool to decipher information about society. The old rhetoric dealt primarily with the structure and content of an essay or presentation. In pedagogy it was a tool to teach students how to write good essays, and in other areas it was a tool for persuasion. With New Rhetoric, rhetoric is given new bounds.

It now encompasses philosophy and sociology. It is no longer how to write a good essay or give a good speech, but how we understand communication and it's affects on our lives. Rhetoric is no longer a basic humanist study of structure and content but a study on how and why we communicate and what we can learn from the methods of communication. The Three Eras of Communication Walter J. Ong and Eric A. Havelock divide "eras" of communication into three parts. The first, primary orality, is prior to the first written Greek alphabet.

The second, literacy, moves through the first alphabet to the printing press. The third stage is considered secondary orality and begins with the invention of the telegraph and continues through present day technology. Each of these three parts build on each other and are "cumulative" rather than "exclusive."Regardless of which medium is chosen, primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality will exist in each one; they will inform one another, infuse one another, and create one another" (Welch 764). This is very important to understand in order to realize how today's new ways of electronic communication are changing our contemporary view of communication. Secondary Orality The Internet, the telephone and the television each have a way of eliminating the normal constraints of time and distance.

Information is at your fingertips, a friend is just a phone call away, and the world is brought into your living room by a 20 inch screen. In this, the Information Age, the world has gone from printed texts to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television and now the internet, all with in the last 150 years. Each new medium has it's own benefits and limitations. Film and Televison Film and Television combine sounds and pictures in order to transmit an idea. Mastering this art form of communicating that is as continually changing as our society is changing. Advertisers and producers are constantly trying new forms of persuasion either to watch their show, buy their product or believe their ideas.

The ethos, logos, and pathos of television and film is different than that of conventional speech or written text. This requires an entirely new way of expressing ideas and using rhetoric. It has allowed many new persuasive ideas to be spread across the world. Like a book is limited to finding a publisher, it is limited to finding a producer or network to be shown on.

The Internet The Internet is a vast network of computers throughout the world. It combines many different forms of communications. As the technology advances it could replace all other forms of communication by combining them into one. Magazines and newspapers are already being put online along with libraries, art, and research. Unlike most forms of communication it allows anyone with access to have his / her ideas and work displayed. "A group does not need to convince a major publishing house of its importance or saleability: it can use electronic mail and diskettes to disseminate its material" (Bolter 783).

This is even more true with the invention of the world wide web. The world wide web is the multimedia part of the internet and combines text with sound, photos, drawings, charts, graphs, animation, and even video. It allows the authors to link their page with others. This creates a "choose your own adventure" multimedia interactive document.

New innovations such as Java, a world wide web programming language, allows simple tasks to be performed inside the document. The more widespread the internet becomes the more important and powerful type of communication it will become. Cyberspace Cyberspace is a concept that builds on the belief that there is some kind of actual space behind the screen. It is some place you can't see but you know is there (Gibson). An alternate world of infinite communication possibilities. This is the virtual reality created by the internet and other forms of electronic communication.

Due to the power of the rhetoric on television or on a movie, the audience feels like they actually know the characters or are part of the story. This is also found in books but no to the extent because the reader cannot actually see the characters. With the internet the reader or viewer is free to choose his / her own story line. They can create their own virtual newspaper or magazine. If they see a topic of interest it is just a click away. This makes rhetoric very important in order to persuade the viewer to look at their web document instead of someone else's.

Mastering the art of electronic communication will, like mastering traditional communication, be a goal that mankind will never achieve. It's unique style and vast possibilities will allow it to captivate the human mind of the 21st century like books have in centuries past..