Rhetorical Modes

5 Key excerpts on "Rhetorical Modes"

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  eBook - ePub

  Writing Put to the Test

  Teaching for the High Stakes Essay

  • Amy Benjamin(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  II

  Rhetorical Modes

  Passage contains an image

  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. In this way, modes of discourse instruction sharpen students’ critical and analytical skills.

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  The College Writer: A Guide to Thinking, Writing, and Researching (w/ MLA9E Update)

  • John Van Rys, Verne Meyer, Randall VanderMey, Patrick Sebranek, John Van Rys(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  This mode thus presses readers to care about a problem, embrace the recommended solution, and (sometimes) even implement the solution. The Modes at Work In academic writing, a specific rhetorical mode might dominate a piece of writing, giving the essay structure and direction from start to finish, such as in an essay classifying types of student weight lifters. However, the Rhetorical Modes are more often seamlessly combined in your writing, all serving the specific mental work you are doing with your topic. For example, your main purpose might be to explain how a knuckleball works (cause-effect), but in doing so you also walk through a typical pitch delivery (process) and describe the distinctly different ball movement of other pitches such as fast balls and curve balls (contrast). Indeed, it is fair to say that the Rhetorical Modes build and rely on each other: analytical writing can contain narrative, descriptive, and reflective elements; argumentative writing, in turn, depends upon effective analytical moves to bolster its claims. Example: To explain the nature of prosopagnosia, student writer Audrey Torrest uses narration and description to describe its effects, and she uses definition to identify its cause. Dr. Smith stood beside a fellow neurobiologist on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. While engrossed in conversation, Smith noticed from the corner of his eye an undergraduate walking in their direction. At first he thought nothing of it, but as she approached, it dawned on him that she was looking directly at him. “Strange,” he thought. He tried to ignore her and continue his conversation, but when she was about 20 feet away he heard her laugh. Upon hearing the sound, the unfamiliar undergraduate who had been staring so intently at him morphed into his daughter. Smith had been unable to recognize her. Dr. Smith suffers from a unique condition known as prosopagnosia or face blindness.

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  Multimodality and Genre

  A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents

  • J. Bateman(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In such work, we see rhetoric in its old sense as the ‘art of persuasion’—i.e., it is considered how multimodal documents achieve particular persuasive or attention-getting effects on their readers (as, for example, in advertisements). The use that we will make of rhetoric here is somewhat different. We are less concerned with an analysis of visual persuasion than with an analysis of communicative ‘effectiveness’ as such. We want to develop an account by which we can identify the particular functional contributions made by the elements of a document to the intended communicative purposes of that document as a whole—and we want to do this regardless of mode and as reliably as possible. These aims show several similarities to those of accounts of the relations between image and text. Some approaches here also draw extensively on traditional rhetoric (e.g., Marsh and White 2003), others draw on extensions of relations originally proposed in linguistic treatments of ‘connection’— both grammatical (cf. Martinec and Salway 2005, Kong 2006) and discour- sal/semantic (cf. van Leeuwen 1991), and others still draw on Barthes’s (1977b) seminal semiotic work on text-image relations (cf. Schriver 1997, pp412-428). Combinations and extensions within and across all of these approaches are common. This entire area of research is very relevant to our Multimodality and Genre: a Foundation for Analysis 145 aims in this chapter, but space precludes a detailed comparison and critique of proposals at this point. Instead we will highlight just one very general reoccurring problem common to all current discussions. This problem consists in the fact that the organisational structures pro- posed are typically single relations between elements: for example, be- tween a picture and the text functioning as its caption, or between a map and its legend.

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  Reframing Rhetoric

  A Liberal Politics Without Dogma

  • G. Yoos(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In form they are usually expository. Rhetorical genres are usually categorized by aims. A rhetorical genre has a conventional form or mode of presentation. As such, genre are especially defined by style and arrangement. If our aim is to praise someone, we give an encomium. If we choose to memo- rialize the dead, we give a eulogy. If we wish to introduce someone, we make an introduction. If we wish to describe or make a judgment about a book, we write a book review. If we wish to explore an idea, we write an essay. If we wish to nar- rate someone’s life story, we write a biography. If we wish to describe someone’s character, we give or write a character sketch. If we wish to narrate our own life’s story, we write an autobiography. If we wish even to let people in on our deep dark secrets, we write confessions. If we wish to relate intimately or formally with someone about matters of personal concern or business, we write letters. If we investigate a matter and want to communicate the results, we write reports. Reports are about all sorts of things. We write news reports, business reports, sci- entific reports, experimental reports, observational reports, medical reports, and even reports of surveys and studies. We find from the history of rhetorical studies that the traditional classical canons of expository rhetoric and argument are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery (see Corbett 1999). In the classical rhetorical traditions in Greek and Latin invention was called hueresis or inventio, arrangement was taxis or dispositio, style was lexis or elocutio, memory was mneme or memoria, and delivery was hypokrisis or pronuntiatio. These elements of the canon have varied in form and style throughout the history of rhetoric (Kennedy 1980). The classical pattern of arrangement, which still has much in common with contemporary patterns of public address, are introduction, statement of fact, con- firmation, refutation, and conclusion.

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  Textual Construction of the Female Body

  A Critical Discourse Approach

  • L. Jeffries(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy Although most of this book is concerned with quite detailed analysis of localized stretches of language in texts, it turned out at an early stage of the project that it was going to be important to think a little about global questions of what kinds of text I was dealing with, and also what kinds of strategy were being used to present information, or sometimes simply opinion, to the readers. The result of these more general investigations is reported in this chapter, and I have, for convenience sake, divided these observations under the headings of ‘Genre and text types’ and ‘Rhetorical strategies’ respectively. The term ‘genre’, like other similar terms which attempt to classify text types, is fraught with difficulty, but nevertheless, researchers find it useful and relatively recognizable, despite the difficulty in defining the term precisely. The most obvious definition, largely in terms of linguistic characteristics, can be seen in the following from Trask (1998: 105): A historically stable variety of text with conspicuous distinguishing features The key fact about a given genre is that it has some readily identifiable distinguishing features that set it off markedly from other genres, and that those features remain stable over a substantial period of time. In most cases, a particular genre also occupies a well-defined place in the culture of the people who make use of the genre. Another definition, from Swales (1990) emphasizes the communicative function of genres, arguing that the linguistic features of their style are subordinate to function: A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes 26 Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 27 are recognised by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre.

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