WHAT IS RHETORIC?

CONNECTIONS TO CULTURE

Rhetoric does not belong to one particular culture, but instead has a rich history featuring different styles and approaches to the art of persuasion. Rather than thinking that one persuasive method is “right” and another is “wrong,” we need to recognize that persuasion depends on context, which involves cultural, historical, technological, and situational factors that determine successful arguments. Furthermore, the persuasive tools available to us today are very different from those used even in recent history. Think of the ways that social media has expanded our understanding of and connection other people living around the globe. The possible means of persuasion have expanded throughout history, which means that writers need to determine which tools can possibly help them in an argument.

One resource lies in an older set of tools for thinking about persuasion known as the five canons of rhetoric, which includes invention, memory, arrangement, delivery, and style.

Invention is the process of deciding what to write about. What topic do you want to learn more about? What process of inquiry will help you learn more about what you want to know?

Memory is the process of learning a topic so well that you can remember and share the information in everyday conversation or while speaking on the subject in more formal settings. What topics are so interesting to you that they might be easier to memorize? How will internalizing the information you are researching help you to share it with an audience more effectively?

Arrangement is about ordering what you write. What kind of structure will make your position more effective to your audience?

Delivery gets into the tactical details of conveying your message. For example, if it is in writing, would it be better delivered in a series of tweets, in a formal letter, or engraved into the side of a boulder? On the other hand, If you are speaking, is your message best conveyed as a strident improvisation, full of energetic physical gestures, or as a calm, or even boring, recitation?

Style is also very important, and is very connected to your intended audience. Do you think they would prefer a casual and friendly chat, or does the moment call for formality and fancy words?

In other words, the canons have always been closely connected to ideas about how people should be trained to communicate, and which skills are most important to their education as it relates to speaking and writing. The canons remain useful to us today in helping us to understand traditional rhetorical values, but why stop there? What other rhetorical skills and values should we learn about and develop? Perhaps looking at more than just the Classical Western tradition can help us with that.

We have received what we think of as the classical rhetorical tradition from the Greeks and Romans, but rhetoric is universal and at least as old as humanity itself.  We can point to many examples of rhetoric around the world that may help us see beyond the classical Greco-Roman concepts. In Ancient Egypt, for example, silence seems to have been a powerful rhetorical tool. Silence was not only an indicator of good character (or ethos, as the Greeks would say), but also aligned the person who declined to speak too much with the order inherent in the universe itself. To be wisely quiet instead of foolishly gabby was to invite the presence of the goddess Ma’at, whose truth and order would work on one’s behalf (David Hutto’s work develops this in some detail).

Consider, also, a major moment in the organization of rhetoric in China: Chen Kui’s work Wen Ze (or The Rules of Writing) from 1170 CE. Kirkpatrick and Xu tell us a bit about Kui’s major contributions:

The rhetorical principles that The Rules of Writing promulgates include the importance of using clear and straightforward language, the primacy of meaning over form, and ways of arranging argument. These principles were, in large part, determined by the needs of the time… because The Rules of Writing was written at a time of great change in China. Two changes were of particular importance.

The first of China’s major changes was the advent of printing, which “made texts much more accessible and affordable than they had been before” (5). China’s second major societal change was the increasing number of people working for the government. As Kirkpatrick and Xu tell us, China’s hiring practices during this time shifted, which meant that people entered these civil service jobs through their own merit instead through inheritance or by privilege alone, which meant they needed to really have rhetorical skills to do the government’s work:

. . . The role of the civil service exams in ensuring only men of merit entered the civil service increased significantly… The Rules of Writing was written as a guide for men who wanted to enter a career in the civil service and who needed to pass the strict series of civil service exams in order to do so. (Kirkpatrick and Xu 5)

What we have received by way of the Greeks and Romans as rhetoric is just one version of a set of universal human activities related to thinking, talking, judging, writing, debating, and persuading each other. Every culture establishes expectations for communicating persuasively and appropriately. Traditions and cultural norms maintain expectations, but social change may disrupt these expectations or necessitate their evolution. For these reasons and more, the art of rhetoric is complex and fascinating to study.

CONNECTIONS TO POLITICS

Politics can be rhetorical, but too often people use the terms interchangeably. Politics is about getting things done with groups of people, or, as Saylor Academy puts it: “Politics describes the use of power and the distribution of resources.” Since any political activity requires persuasion to get groups of people to share power and resources, politics usually relies on rhetoric. But politics may set aside persuasive strategies to find other ways to effect change. For example, law and war can be coercive instead of persuasive, and may be a part of how political decisions are enforced as opposed to decided on by two or more consenting parties.

We often hear that a senator or president or mayor is using rhetoric, as when someone says, “That kind of rhetoric is dangerous!” Rhetoric is also often misunderstood as “just talk.” You’ve probably heard people’s positions dismissed as “mere rhetoric.” This way of talking about rhetoric dismisses the power of words to implement change—through talking, writing, and creating. Talk is powerful stuff. It’s so powerful that there are whole disciplines devoted to understanding it (communication studies, education and teaching, literary criticism, philosophy, and, yes, rhetoric as a discipline). The next time you hear the word rhetoric used by politicians, political analysts, or in media editorials, think about their intention. Are they dismissing another person’s viewpoint by implying that it’s just a bunch of hot air? Are they implying that another person’s stated position on an issue is somehow inherently dangerous? Or do they use the word “rhetoric” in a way that indicates they really understand the tactics of persuasion that may be at work?

And yet, rhetoric certainly has political roots. The Greco-Roman tradition categorizes speeches into three categories, which include forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. Forensic has to do with making a believable case for what happened—as is the case when someone tries to prove their innocence to a jury by offering evidence for an alibi. Epideictic texts or speeches are for ceremony or show—to praise or to blame in ways that aren’t necessarily legally consequential. But the last speech type—the deliberative speech—has always been about getting an audience to adhere to a position on what actions should be taken. Deliberative rhetoric is clearly tied to politics and the “deliberate” drafting of legislation as one way of working with diverse groups of people. Of course, other aspects of our communication may be connected to politics in subtle ways. If someone writes an epideictic letter to a newspaper editor praising the life of former Texas governor Ann Richards, might we have some reason to take that praise as a public endorsement of Richards’ politics, too? Or if a nonprofit research team makes a forensic case that community access to arts and cultural events improves educational outcomes, we might read it as implying that arts should enjoy increased public funding. Politics, like rhetoric, is widespread and touches on nearly all aspects of our lives.

In short, we often find that “mere rhetoric” is conflated with politics. But as we have seen, political (or deliberative) communication is only one purpose of many potential purposes driving rhetorical choices. Rhetoric contains politics, but is not limited by it. Rhetoric is much bigger than mere politics.

RHETORICAL SITUATION

A key component of rhetorical analysis involves thinking carefully about the “rhetorical situation” of a text. We can understand the concept of a rhetorical situation if we examine it piece by piece, by looking carefully at the rhetorical concepts from which it is built. The philosopher Aristotle organized these concepts as author, audience, setting, purpose, and text. Answering the questions about these rhetorical concepts below will give you a good sense of your text’s rhetorical situation—the starting point for rhetorical analysis.

One way of thinking about the rhetorical situation is through the work of Kenneth Burke. He wrote about “the dramatistic pentad” to call attention to these different dimensions of persuasion. This “pentad” (so called because it has five main elements) details the rhetorical situation: who is writing or speaking (agent); what means are they using to communicate (agency); when and where is this happening (scene); why is it necessary to write or talk at all (purpose); and what is being written about (act)? It’s a tidy but imperfect way to think about some of the complications we face when we try to persuade other people. You can think of the rhetorical situation as the context or set of circumstances out of which a text arises. Any time anyone is trying to make an argument, one is doing so out of a particular context, one that influences and shapes the argument that is made. When we do a rhetorical analysis, we look carefully at how the rhetorical situation (context) shapes the rhetorical act (the text).

Click over to the next sections for examples from President Trump’s inaugural address (the text) to sift through these questions about the rhetorical situation (context).

Speaker

The author of a text is the creator — the person who is communicating in order to try to effect a change in his or her audience. An author doesn’t have to be a single person or a person at all — an author could be an organization. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, one must examine the identity of the author and his or her background.

• What kind of experience or authority does the author have in the subject about which he or she is speaking?
• What values does the author have, either in general or with regard to this particular subject?
• How invested is the author in the topic of the text? In other words, what affects the author’s perspective on the topic?
• Example of author analysis for the rhetorical situation: (President Trump’s Inaugural Address) President Trump was a first-term president and someone who had not previously held political office. He did not yet have experience with running the country. He is, however, a wealthy businessman and had a great deal of experience in the business world. His political affiliation is with the Republican party – the conservative political party in America

Audience

In any text, an author is attempting to engage an audience. Before we can analyze how effectively an author engages an audience, we must spend some time thinking about that audience. An audience is any person or group who is the intended recipient of the text and also the person/people the author is trying to influence. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, one must examine who the intended audience is by thinking about these things:

• Who is the author addressing?
  • Sometimes this is the hardest question of all. We can get this information  of “who is the author addressing” by looking at where an article is published. Be sure to pay attention to the newspaper, magazine, website, or journal title where the text is published. Often, you can research that publication to get a good sense of who reads that publication.
• What is the audience’s demographic information (age, gender, etc.)?
• What is/are the background, values, interests of the intended audience?
• How open is this intended audience to the author?
• What assumptions might the audience make about the author?
• In what context is the audience receiving the text?

As readers and writers, we need to ask these questions of any text so that we can understand the rhetorical situation. We need to determine the deep contextual meaning of a text to fully appreciate the argumentative, persuasive, and informative strategies present. Without knowing the context, we’ll fail to understand how an audience would respond to the text. Let’s consider an example to see how analyzing audience can help us understand how writers respond to a rhetorical situation.

In this example, we can see how a writer needs to appeal to audiences’ values and beliefs. However, we can also see how these values and beliefs differ between audiences, which makes persuasion challenging in this rhetorical situation. So, we need additional tools to determine not only what our audience values and believes, but why.

Setting & Context

othing happens in a vacuum, and that includes the creation of any text. Essays, speeches, photos, political ads — any text — was written in a specific time and/or place, all of which can affect the way the text communicates its message. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, we can identify the particular occasion or event that prompted the text’s creation at the particular time it was created.

• • Was there a debate about the topic that the author of the text addresses? If so, what are (or were) the various perspectives within that debate?
  • Did something specific occur that motivated the author to speak out?

Social media has shown us how a text, written in a specific time and place, can take on new meaning as it circulates to different places at different times. Twitter posts that originally appeared on that platform can now be quoted in news articles, television programs, and even other social media sites, causing the text to take on new meaning as it circulates to new contexts. In the social media age of the internet, context shifts depending on how and where a text circulates.

To think about how texts circulate in culture is to consider how they get written, how they get shared, and how the meanings they carry move with them as they travel from context to context. These days such texts often include images, sound, and video, as well as words (for example, multimodal texts), and as the internet grows and expands, the circulation of texts, genres, and meaning all speed up, changing our writing and rhetorical practices in the process.

There are many ways to think about how texts circulate, from the posts we share online, to the memos we exchange at work, to the larger world of the public internet where texts and information circulate globally. Traditional print newspapers and magazines have long tracked their circulation and subscribers. However, in the digital spaces of the global internet, our experience of how writing and rhetoric move has radically changed, not only in how we write and communicate with friends and family, but also in the ways ideas flow through cultures and give shape to professional and public discourse about problems that matter.

To illustrate how textual circulation works, let’s look at a quick example of a genre that exemplifies how texts circulate in modern writing environments: memes. The term, coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is a play on the word gene. Analogous to genes, memes are ideas that replicate and spread through human culture as people encounter and share them. Memes may be exchanged by two people, as when a teacher explains a new concept to a student, or on a larger, societal scale when big ideas like liberty or social justice take shape over generations of people.

Modern internet memes may not always be about something as lofty as a concept like liberty, but they move and morph from person to person like any other meme.

Nowadays, memes come in many forms and genres, but one of the most common kinds is what is known as the “advice animal image macro,”as seen in Image 1. Most of us are familiar with this kind of meme. Advice animal image macros like “success kid” are common memes that use the same image but add a different phrase at the top and bottom of the image. In the case of “success kid,” the top phrase states a problem (“Get sick on Friday”), and the bottom phrase states a serendipitous outcome (“Three day weekend”).

Like all memes, “success kid” has a history of development and circulation. The original image was taken in 2007 by Lindey Griner of her 11-month-old son Sammy and posted to Flickr to share with family (Image 2). The “I hate sandcastles” image was the first image meme to be circulated that used the little boy’s image (Image 3). Others soon picked up on the 2007 image and began altering it for their own rhetorical purposes. By 2008, the image was used by dozens of other people to convey either a sense of frustration, as in “I hate sandcastles,” or a feeling of unexpected success, giving birth to the now well-known “success kid” meme (Images 4 and 5).

Today, thousands of image macros have been spun from this original image, and “success kid” memes continue to circulate online as other meme creators draw on the shared meaning of the meme in new contexts. Thus, when considering textual circulation, we are looking at how texts get composed, how they reference and borrow meaning from each other, where they go, and the meanings they carry as they circulate.

Purpose

The purpose of a text connects the author with the setting and the audience. Looking at a text’s purpose means looking at the author’s motivations for creating it. The author has decided to start a conversation or join one that is already underway. Why has he or she decided to join in? In any text, the author may be trying to inform, to convince, to define, to announce, or to activate. Can you tell which one of those general purposes your author has?

• • What is the author hoping to achieve with this text?
  • Why did the author decide to join the “conversation” about the topic?
  • What does the author want from their audience? What does the author want the audience to do once the text is communicated?

Want to read more? Check out “Purpose” from Purdue OWL.

Medium & Circulation

A medium is a singular material or interface through which we communicate a message or messages. Examples of media (the plural of medium) include newspapers, paintings, social-media apps, Zoom, or even your course learning management system. In a sense, media are the materials that lie between the communicator and the communication.

To better understand a creator’s choice of medium, you might ask the following questions:

• • In what medium is the text being made: image? written essay? speech? song? protest sign? meme? sculpture?
  • What is gained by having a text composed in a particular format/medium?
  • What limitations does that format/medium have?
  • What opportunities for expression does that format/medium have (that perhaps other formats do not have?)

We’ll expand our discussion of medium in the visual rhetoric section later in the chapter or read more about the relationship between genre and medium in our genres chapter.

Want to read more? Check out “Genre and Medium” from the Purdue OWL.

RHETORICAL APPEALS

The three rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos apply to types of responses elicited from the audience.  These appeals can be found easily in commercials. Ethos appeals to a person’s sense of credibility or respect, such as Shaquille O’Neal advertising Icy Hot. An athlete of his renown obviously knows the best methods for relieving achy, sore muscles. Logos appeals to a person’s sense of logic, such as “Nine out of ten dentists choose Crest.” The nine out of ten illustrates an easy fraction/percentage (90%) of professionals who choose Crest over any other brand of toothpaste. Pathos appeals to a person’s sense of emotions, such as “Choosey mothers choose Jif.” Most parents want only the best for their children, so they will identify with being “choosey.”

Also refer to What is Rhetoric?

Academic audiences are primarily persuaded by ethos and logos. They want to see research from credible sources and prominent authors in their field (ethos), and they want to see accurate facts and statistics that support a claim (logos).

RHETORICAL AFFECTS

RHETORIC ACROSS TEXT FORMS

What is visual rhetoric? To briefly answer this question, let’s first unpack these two terms. Rhetoric, as we defined earlier in this chapter, is the art of persuasion; we use it every day to communicate in ways aimed at convincing other people to go along with our ideas (or at least to consider them). By “visual,” we mean “the cultural practices of seeing and looking, as well as the artifacts produced in diverse communicative forms and mediums” (Olsen et al, p. 3). In other words, “visual” refers not just to what we see (“artifacts” such as cartoons, memes, movies, photographs, posters, fonts, symbols, icons, and colors), but how we see (for example, we may or may not associate red-white-and-blue with the U.S. flag and patriotism, depending on our cultural background and beliefs). By visual rhetoric, then, we mean the many ways imagery is used to communicate, create meaning, and compel us to think, feel, know, and act.

Let’s carry this thought a little further. In the study of visual rhetoric, we acknowledge that “images have power” (Sheffield), and we ask, “How do images act rhetorically upon viewers?” (Helmers and Hill 1). We explore the influence that visuals have on us and our audiences, and we recognize that visuals produce rhetorical effects; they use ethos, logos, and pathos appeals to influence an audience.

Visual rhetoric scholars Helmers and Hill, for example, mention a wide variety of examples: cave art, Egyptian hieroglyphics, stained-glass windows in churches, World War II posters, editorial cartoons, motion pictures, charts, graphs, and so much more. They point out the power or influence of some of these visuals, like Thomas E. Franklin’s 2001 photo, Firefighters at Ground Zero, taken the day after the World Trade Center collapsed. The photo shows firefighters raising a fallen flag on the rubble-strewn site. Helmers and Hill point out how such visuals communicate to us culturally and intertextually; that is, Franklin’s photo reminded some viewers of a now-iconic photograph and sculpture of the U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II; even if some viewers did not “get” the reference, the centrality of the flag in the photo and the firefighters’ upward gaze communicated what the photographer called “the strength of the American people” (7). That emotional effect, Helmers and Hill explain, was reinforced by widespread distribution of the photo by news media as well as its cultural context (i.e., how many viewers connected it to the war-time, Iwo Jima photo).

Of course, visual rhetorics draw our attention to more than emotional responses and cultural contexts. In “Breaking Down an Image,” for example, Jenna Pack Sheffield outlines how such elements as fonts, arrangement, colors, and more relate to purpose, audience, and context—the rhetorical situation, in other words. To illustrate, Sheffield displays an advertisement for a men’s watch:

She points out such key visual elements as the arrangement, color, fonts, and scale of images and text in relation to one another. The ad displays a close-up view of the watch in the bottom-right corner, the brand label in the upper-right corner, and, in the background, the blurred image of a man running. Look closely, and you can see the faint outline of a watch on his wrist. Each detail creates meaning and in some way creates an overall impression while also supporting the ultimate purpose (to sell a watch). For example, Sheffield says of the font choice in the company logo:

A “silly or playful font” might be more suitable for a kid’s watch, but such a choice would not support the overall purpose of the ad, its likely adult audience, or the ethos (character) of the company (or at least, the character it is trying to convey by choosing a strong, bolded, ALL-CAPS font); nor would it support the intended pathos (the “strong, serious, font type,” which Sheffield points out, playfully).

Why pay attention to details in visual artifacts? Sheffield explains that by noticing each element and understanding its possible individual and combined effects on the target audience, we can “break down” a visual. That is, we can analyze it. Think back to Chapter 3’s description of an analysis, which aims to describe the content of an artifact, analyze it (identify its key parts), and evaluate it. If we were analyzing the Pro Trek ad for a writing assignment, for example, we would work our way through these steps. We would also ultimately ask critical or evaluative questions such as: What details draw our attention first, and why do we think that is so? Sheffield mentions that in Western cultures, we read left to right, top to bottom; therefore, the order or arrangement of elements makes a significant difference to how we interpret an image.

Other questions we might ask include:

• Does the chosen font communicate something important to the overall purpose?
• What overall effect or effects do the colors create?
• Is it significant that the man’s image is blurred while both the logo and the watch itself are in focus?
• Overall, is the ad effective, and what evidence supports our assessment?

These questions are just a few critical or analytical explorations we might consider. For a full analysis of the ad, we would also likely consider what we know about the company, its products, and its customers. What is the company ethos or character?

By breaking down or analyzing the advertisement in such ways, we move toward synthesis. That is, we start making connections between the visual details, showing how they relate to each other and how they make the advertiser’s case (or not). Communication teacher Steve Covello explains visual rhetoric this way:

Visual rhetoric draws upon the rhetorical traditions found in oral and written rhetoric and operates to achieve the same effect on human perception. [Humans] communicate using a combination of codes, symbols, analogies, and discourse to form a shared reality.

In other words, visual rhetoric helps us consider the meaning behind what we see.

We started our discussion of rhetoric by defining what rhetoric is and is not. Rhetoric shifts across its traditions, cultures, and various situations because of contextual differences. As writers, we need to use the available means of persuasion to achieve rhetorical success in communication.

Want to Learn More?

We recommend checking out a few more articles if you’d like to learn more about rhetoric:

• Opinion Article on Confirmation bias
• A Short and Highly Idiosyncratic History of Rhetoric
• What Do Students Need to Know About Rhetoric?
• Five Features of Better Arguments
• Political History of the Birth of Rhetoric