Basic Rhetorical Modes
Basic rhetorical modes are patterns of organization used to achieve specific purposes in writing or speaking. The four main modes are narration (telling a story), description (creating a sensory experience), exposition (explaining or informing), and argumentation (persuading or convincing). These modes help writers and speakers effectively communicate their ideas and engage their audience.
4 Key excerpts on "Basic Rhetorical Modes"
eBook - ePubWriting Put to the Test
Teaching for the High Stakes Essay
- Amy Benjamin(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...II Rhetorical Modes 5 Teaching Writing Through Rhetorical Modes Because much of our understanding of the world comes through the recognition of patterns, it is extremely helpful to understand how writing topics fall into the following major rhetorical modes: ♦ Narration ♦ Description ♦ Cause and effect ♦ Classification and division ♦ Comparison/contrast It should be noted that some writing texts condense these categories onto only four rhetorical modes: narration, description, exposition, and persuasion. Each rhetorical mode accomplishes its own purpose. Each comes with its own structure and language. Most text is organized around a predominant rhetorical mode, supported by at least one secondary mode. For example, narration often partners up with description; definition partners with exemplification. Teaching writing through the rhetorical modes, which are also called discourse modes, goes way back to Aristotle. However, this paradigm for teaching writing lost its place at the table of writing instruction in the 1970s and 1980s when “process pedagogy” came into favor. Actually, there’s no reason why instruction in the rhetorical modes needs to compete with writing process instruction: both can be mutually supportive. The advantage of teaching writing through the rhetorical modes, as we will see, is that once we know what mode we’re in, we can build within an existing structure that we already understand. Karen Gocsik, executive director of the writing program at Dartmouth College, says this about discourse mode pedagogy: [M]odes of discourse instruction can be used to lead students systematically through a hierarchical system of cognitive functions. In these classrooms, professors develop assignments that progress through the modes, moving students from the personal narrative to the analytical argument, and from simple organizational strategies that are chronological and spatial, to more complex organizational strategies that are more formally logical...
- John Allen, Susan Bureau, Stacey A. Kiggins(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 10 Approaching the Essay Questions: Rhetorical Modes In Chapter 4, we looked at the rhetorical strategies used by authors of nonfiction to help you analyze passages and answer multiple-choice questions. In this chapter we will briefly review rhetorical modes with an eye towards using them effectively in your own essays for the AP English Language and Composition exam. On the style-analysis essay, you will be using rhetorical tools to analyze an author’s writing methods in a passage. On the persuasive and synthesis essays, you will be using these tools to present logical, structured arguments about topics that are provided. It helps to be familiar with these rhetorical modes and methods so that each time you are faced with a prompt you can choose the approach that best helps you accomplish the required writing task. Deciding on Your Writing Purpose The modes of writing you will use on your responses include expository, persuasive, descriptive, and narrative. You might use a combination of all of these on one essay. Before you choose your writing mode, you must decide on your purpose for writing: • To inform or instruct —The essay seeks to explain, describe, or define something. This type of essay should be tightly organized, with a series of main points and supporting details. • To persuade —The essay seeks to convince the reader to believe something or agree with a certain point of view. This type of essay is logically organized to present an argument step by step. • To entertain —The essay seeks to evoke laughter, sadness, suspense, nostalgia, or other emotions. Generally this type of essay has a looser, more improvisatory structure. When you read a writing prompt, think about what it is asking you to do. For example, a prompt might ask you to explain how an author uses irony in a passage to criticize social conditions. Another prompt might instruct you to support or refute an argument, or to take a position on a viewpoint expressed in a passage...
eBook - ePubIntercultural Communication
A Discourse Approach
- Ron Scollon, Suzanne Wong Scollon, Rodney H. Jones(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...What we mean by mode here is any conventionally recognized semiotic system such as speech, writing, color, taste, or the design of images. Some modes, such as speech, posture, gaze, and gesture, can be considered “embodied modes” in that we must use our physical bodies to produce them. Others like images, writing, and architectural layout can be considered “disembodied modes.” Different modes allow us to make different kinds of meaning. There are things that we can express in pictures, for instance, that we cannot express in words, and vice versa. In other words, different modes bring to communication different sets of “affordances” and “constraints.” From the perspective of interdiscourse communication, the important thing about modes of communication is that different discourse systems might favor different modes or combinations of modes, and that they might use and interpret these modes differently. The fact that different discourse systems might favor different modes of communication is no small matter. Since the mode we use affects both how we can communicate and what we can communicate, modes of communication can have a profound effect on how we view the world and how we organize our social relationships. Perhaps the best example of this is the distinction between what have been called “oral cultures” and “literate cultures.” According to Walter Ong (1982), the shift from oral communication to communication dominated by writing engendered fundamental changes in the way people thought and organized their social relationships...
eBook - ePub- Richard Andrews(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But as the argument progresses, it becomes clear that rhetoric is seen as a verbal and nonverbal means of exchange and making things happen in the world: “acting on others through words is merely one aspect of the larger rhetoric of behaviour” (115). What is contemporary about this conception of rhetoric is that it acknowledges the multimodal. Speech and writing (the verbal modes) are seen as mixing with other behavior or modes, and only later are they separated out to be taught as individual and seemingly distinct arts. So in drama, Moffett sees rhetoric in action: a rhetoric of persuasion. Such a conception of rhetoric is Aristotelian (“the art of persuasion”), which tends to put emphasis on one of the specific functions of rhetoric rather than on its myriad forms. If we adjust the notion of persuasion to include a wider range of communicative functions (entertainment, description, exchange, etc.), we could recast rhetoric as the “arts of discourse” and thus marry Moffett's conception of the centrality of speech and drama more happily to his conception of rhetoric … and indeed to the tenor of the book as a whole, with its emphasis on the “world of discourse.” One of the key links that Moffett makes, however, is to suggest that the seemingly distinct written forms in the English curriculum are all intimately related to the basic spoken and dramatic forms and motivations. The following passage crystallizes the argument: Although we enter school already with a rhetoric, it is of course naïve and drastically inadequate to later communication needs. The function of the school is to extend the rhetorical repertory and to bind messages so tightly to message senders that this relation will not be lost in transferring it to the page. What is too obvious to notice in conversation must be raised to a level of operational awareness that will permit this transfer...
