Languages & Linguistics
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of persuasive communication, involving the use of language to influence or persuade an audience. It encompasses the study of how language and symbols are used to convey meaning and sway opinions. Rhetoric examines the strategies and techniques employed in public speaking, writing, and other forms of discourse to achieve specific persuasive goals.
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9 Key excerpts on "Rhetoric"
eBook - PDF- Stephen Pihlaja(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
6 Rhetoric Beau Pihlaja 6.1 Background, History, and Key Terms Rhetoric traditionally studies persuasion. Although public, political speech was historically the focus of Rhetorical studies, researchers have also used Rhetorical analysis to reveal persuasive dynamics in writing, teaching writing, analysing literature, and evaluating and producing technical or professional communica- tion – all with an increasing focus on everyday language practices. Researchers have also historically studied relatively stable ‘Rhetorical situations’ into which people speak, circumstances that create a need or exigency for a timely, kairotic (or fitting) written or spoken response. One of the challenges for using and studying Rhetoric is that you ‘can start Rhetorical investigation anywhere, and you can get everywhere from there’ (Segal, 2008, p. 2). Consequently, histories of Rhetoric are contested spaces, debated and challenged both within the discip- line and as applied to study religious language (e.g. Schüssler Fiorenza, 1999). Rhetoric as a Western practice and scholarly discipline is typically traced to the work of Plato and his successor Aristotle. Plato’ s view was decidedly negative, seeing Rhetoric as a tool to deceive audiences. However, although Aristotle still subordinated Rhetoric to philosophical speculations as a topic and practice of the learned free person, he approached the topic far more positively. Aristotle’ s systemisation of practices and theory in On Rhetoric, as well as his definition of Rhetoric as ‘the available means of persuasion’, serves as the field’ s foundation, impacting educational practices in the ancient and modern world. Rhetoric has also always been intimately linked to the accumulation and assertion of power and authority and its key concepts intersect and build on one another to make meaning both in the service of, and against the exercise of, political and social power.
- Ruth Wodak, Michal Krzyzanowski, Ruth Wodak, Michal Krzyzanowski(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
Generally though, effectiveness or efficiency is most central to the question of Rhetorical goodness . In this respect, Rhetoric can be charac-terized as the practical science and art of effective or efficient speaking and writing in public. It is the science and art of persuasive language use; the 96 5 three crucial objectives of such persuasion are logos , ethos and pathos (see Plett 2001:2–4). Whereas persuasion connected with logos consists of bringing about a rational conviction by sound argumentation ( probare ), factual information ( docere ) and reasonable admonition or exhortation ( monere ), types of persua-sion related with ethos and pathos are linked with reaching consent through forms of non-argumentative linguistic force , such as emotionalization, sugges-tion, demagogy, propaganda and the use of threats (manipulative persuasion). The goal of ethos is to create a gentle and constant attitude or emotion as part of the hearers’ and readers’ habitus by advertising ( conciliare ), or through aes-thetic pleasure and entertainment ( delectare ). Rhetorical pathos, instead, aims at rousing momentarily violent, fierce and intense emotions through Rhetorical instigation ( movere ). All these purposes can be found in contemporary political Rhetoric. They are identified with terms such as political education ( docere ), political control ( monere ), political deliberation ( logos ), political justification or legitimization ( probare ), political advertising ( conciliare ), politainment ( delectare ) and polit-ical incitement ( movere ). Following the above explication of Rhetoric, we can conclude that rhetori-cal analysis means to analyze the employment and effects of linguistic (includ-ing nonverbal ) and other semiotic means of persuasion in Rhetorical terms. The second step in answering the question of what political Rhetoric denotes consists of explaining the meaning of political .
eBook - PDF- Joachim Knape, Alan L. Fortuna(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
that during the course of the communication, one or the other speaker is trying to impose his own point of view or his own intentions through the use of persuasive speech. In short, my observation focuses on the Rhetorical factor in communi- cation. This factor is the phenomena of persuasion, with all its implications. Thus, I am not simply interested in the question of how they communicate on the island in general: how their language is ordered, how it works, what kinds of texts are exchanged, what is narrated etc. On the contrary, I look at the matter from a very specific angle, namely: what are the conditions of successful communication on this island? That is the Rhetorical question.” Lévi-Strauss isn’t satisfied with this answer, “although this is a clearly directed question, the phenomena you want to analyze go far beyond what Herr Lausberg has just presented to us as ‘Rhetoric’.” 41 Jacobs 2002, p. 213. 88 Language or Rhetoric? A Dialog “You’re right,” I reply. “Herr Lausberg concentrates entirely on the internal set of rules and regulations that have been established over a period of two- and-a-half-thousand years for the composition of Rhetorically overcoded texts. He represents a tradition which views Rhetoric as an art of speaking well, an ars bene dicendi. These Rhetoricians devote their attention to the linguistic and non-linguistic overcodes that have arisen over the course of history. They are regularities that join with the grammatical regularities in the construction of a text. The grammarian is interested in convenient and correct sentences. The intrinsic Rhetorician is interested in overcodes, in forms like parallelism or chi- asmus, which you can build on top of the grammatical foundation, and which promise some kind of specific effect. This intrinsic perspective is of course very limited, despite the fact that it stems from a long-standing tradition.” “That is why I called my book the ‘Handbook of Literary Rhetoric’,” Laus- berg interjects.
eBook - PDF- Angela Goddard, Neil Carey(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
SPEECHES AND CONTEXTS Aristotle’s definition of Rhetorical skill as ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ reminds us that speeches are an art form that is highly dependent on context. The effectiveness of any speech is not simply about technique. It will be highly reliant on capturing the right moment and tailoring a speech to the nature of any given audience. It will also depend on the medium of delivery. For example, some of Churchill’s most mem- orable speeches were delivered on the radio, the medium at the time that was the most far-reaching in terms of national coverage, and much better suited to Churchill’s portentous delivery than any written text would have been. In contrast, Martin Luther King Jr’s speech was an address performed visually as well as orally/aurally, delivered from a high platform to thousands at a civil rights rally. In contrast again, Charles Spencer’s speech was both public and as-if-private, unfolding in Westminster Abbey but directed at a royal family who had been recently criticised for their public non- appearance. His speech was simultaneously relayed via TV and radio to the wider public, as well as via a public address system outside the abbey, positioning the public as witnesses to his statements. In all these cases, the speech, the moment in time, the performance space and the broadcast medium were all inextricably linked with how the speech was performed. Nowadays we have the technical means to archive and even re-master historical recordings as well as being able to view speeches repeatedly online. This means we have the power to reconfigure the spatio-temporal aspects of the original perfor- mances, preserving them in time and sending them across the world 74 DISCOURSE AND Rhetoric for possible repeated viewings. Something originally delivered to an audience of thousands face-to-face can be watched again on a digital device by an individual on a train.
eBook - PDF- Anthony G. Amsterdam, Jerome Bruner, Anthony G. AMSTERDAM, Jerome S. Bruner, Jerome Seymour Bruner(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
C H A P T E R S I X On Rhetorics Categorization and narrative account for much of the weave of dis-course. But discourse takes on special features in the presence or the prospect of dispute. Those features are the subject of this chapter and the next. We call the subject “Rhetorics” because it has to do in part with strategies of persuasion (the focus of classical Western Rhetoric) 1 and in part with the use of symbols to construct alternative meaning frames (a focus of modern and postmodern Rhetoric). 2 The old rheto-ric and the new converge upon the means by which language deals with controversy or potential controversy—how it delimits what is contestable and in what terms. Rhetoric in today’s popular sense of spin control is simply one of those means. So we take “Rhetorics,” the plural, to denote the various linguistic processes by which a speaker can create, address, avoid, or shape issues that the speaker wishes or is called upon to contest, or that a speaker suspects (at some level of awareness) may become contested. 3 There are obvious reasons why legal discourse offers a particularly fertile field for Rhetorics in this sense. Legal discourse is specialized for waging and negotiating controversy, on the one hand, and manipulat-ing symbols, on the other. Talk becomes law-talk only when the way to do (or think about) something is contestable, when people want to settle the contest or its boundaries by ruling some of the contenders out of bounds, and when the ruling needs legitimation by resort to
eBook - PDFPolitics & Rhetoric
Coming to Terms with Terms
- G. Yoos(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
64 Politics & Rhetoric Individual variation is sedimented by heredity into the evolution of the species. In language, what is passed on to successive generations is usage that has evolved and been refined from someone’s innovative personal use. Uses of language can be multiple and complex. Uses of language from one point of view are Rhetorical actions. And you will find that uses are the things that we do with language that are at times resistant to conventional interpreta- tions of the words being used. Uses are thus consequently open to shifts and indeterminacies, ambiguities, imprecision, and inaccuracies of meaning as they move away from the conventional senses of terms that once conventionally have anchored us in the world and that have hooked us up with the practical activi- ties that we need to engage in to be able to function within it. Language use, by abandoning old trails of usage, gives us the opportunity and freedom to explore and discover what never has been thought or expressed before. Use allows us the freedom through definitional proposals to change the meanings of our words in our language. Use thus through the processes of defi- nition and redefinition enables us to transcend our repertoire of literal usages. Definitional proposals in their use are importantly one mode of language cre- ation and exploration. And definitional reports are at the heart of validating an interpretation of a use that becomes an established usage. And interpretation is the foundation of any foreign language translation. At times we may find that the complexity of all this shifting back and forth about the meaning of words becomes extremely baffling. And that is why we need the skill of interpretation to sort things out. It is a basic skill necessary for self- definition and any capacity for any self-education.
eBook - PDF- J.L. Mey(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
The speech act theory is very close to Bakhtin’s views. Rhetorics and Semiotics of Culture From the viewpoint of the semiotics of culture, two levels of Rhetorics should be distinguished: implicit Rhetorics as a strategy of generating texts (on this level, Rhetorics is a cultural universal), and explicit Rhetorics (or Rhetorics in the direct sense of the word) as a teaching of generating texts. The semiotics of culture, especially the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow school, is characterized by an an ex-tended understanding of text: text is a vehicle not only of verbal but of any kind of information; text is a signal that an addresser sends to an adressee, and in the positions of both the sender and receiver, there can appear individuals and social groups as well as whole cultures. In this sense it is possible to regard, for example, ballets, commercials, chess games, elec-tion campaigns, and wars as texts. Every such text has its own grammar, stylistics, and Rhetorics. From the viewpoint of cultural typology, each culture displays its own clear Rhetorical characteristics. The Western European Rhetorical ideal is simplicity and straight-forwardness, based on Cratylean understanding that things have their right names and speech activity is controlled by reason. It is interesting that although the expression ‘‘the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names’’ is attributed to Confu-cius, in Chinese and in Far Eastern speech practice in 872 Rhetoric: Semiotic Approaches general, there prevail indirect speech strategies and an idea that many different roads lead to truth. Such understanding permeates different strata of culture: for instance, we can see how the rules of Rhetorics are reflected in the art of warfare. The metaphor ‘‘argu-ment is war,’’ analyzed by Lakoff and Johnson, is effective in different cultures; at the same time, it reflects the important characteristics of these cul-tures.
eBook - PDFThe Rhetoric of RHETORIC
The Quest for Effective Communication
- Wayne C. Booth(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
83 Some Major Rescuers Part II The Need for Rhetorical Studies Today Our choice of language is a matter of truth or error, of right or wrong – of life or death. Michael Polanyi All life therefore comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with one another. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech Since Rhetoric, good and bad, makes a great part of our reality, and since at its best it is the art of removing misunderstanding, there is no corner of our lives that would not deserve a full book about the dangers of neglecting its careful study. My choice of three of the largest of those corners – education, politics, and the media – has not been easy. Surely I should include a long section on the Rhetoric and rhetrickery of lawyers; of psychologists, including Freudians and their enemies; of self-help books, from destructive to profound; of geron-tologists, ecologists, Marxists, postmodernist art critics, and so on. Why not a full chapter on the neglect by economists, celebrating Deirdre McCloskey’s two fine books that attempt to awaken fellow economists to their inevitable reliance on Rhetoric? Why not a chapter on the appalling rhetrickery by the managers of huge corpor-ations? 85 The universality of Rhetoric and its problems should not surprise anyone who thinks a bit about our beginning as human beings, whether traced biologically or as religious myth. Whoever wrote the first draft of Genesis had to decide what Rhetorical exchanges to report.
eBook - PDFThe Realms of Rhetoric
The Prospects for Rhetoric Education
- Joseph Petraglia, Deepika Bahri, Joseph Petraglia, Deepika Bahri(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
Of course, in Antiquity, we have famous logographers, or speech writers, such as Lysias and Isocrates. Lysias had a wonderful theory called ethopoeia, which asks that speechwriters carefully craft their speech to the contracted speaker’s ethos. The result is a logographer who learns about the speaker in depth to better characterize his or her mannerisms, vocabulary, and lifetime of experiences. While such abilities are still prized today, technology is creating a demand for present-day Rhetoricians to be able to invent, arrange, stylize, and deliver their projects through a whole host of Rhetorical means. The difference between these two situations is that with the new technologies, new millen- nium Rhetoricians can now incorporate all of these attributes with what has been, until recently, financially, technically, and artistically untouchable technologies. The remainder of this chapter will further consider how we will be chal- lenged to think about our ideas in multiliterate, interactive fashions, and how such a project creates a multidisciplinarily united Rhetoric in its richest, fullest sense. In focusing on the teaching of Rhetoric through a mediated interaction between the oral, literate, and visual dimensions of symbols, we hope to envi- sion a new educational millennium that has Rhetoric at its center. Furthermore, we believe that this can occur when we consider the nature of interactive John T. Scenters-Zapico and Grant C. Cos 65 multimedia, the way it shifts the responsibilities of audiences to authors, and these implications for the teaching and praxis of Rhetoric. EVOLVING ROLES: AUDIENCES TO AUTHORS The way Rhetoricians teach will change. Perelman (1982) states that, “In con- trast to ancient Rhetoric, the new Rhetoric is concerned with discourse addressed to any sort of audience—a crowd in a public square or a gathering of specialists, a single being or all humanity” (5, emphasis).
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