Transcript What is Rhetoric? - Erie Community College

What is Rhetoric?
What is Rhetoric?
• Plato: Rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse."
• Aristotle: Rhetoric is "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of
the available means of persuasion.
• Cicero: "Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio,
dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio." Rhetoric is "speech
designed to persuade."
• Quintillian: "Rhetoric is the art of speaking well."
• Francis Bacon: Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for
the better moving of the will."
• John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
[Rhetoric,] that powerful instrument of error and deceit.
• Rhetoric (Greek) is the art or technique of persuasion through the use of
oral or written language. There is a divide between classical rhetoric and
contemporary practices of rhetoric which include the analysis of written and
visual texts.
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
• Aristotle says that "rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic
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( the exchange of arguments and counter-arguments)."
The art of rhetoric follows and is structurally patterned
after the dialectic form of exchanging propositions.
Aristotle emphasizes logical appeals (logos). But he also
discusses emotional appeals (pathos) and ethical appeals
(ethos). He identifies three steps in the process of
developing rhetoric--invention, arrangement, and style-and three different types of rhetorical claim.
Types of Rhetorical Appeals
• Ethos: how the character and credibility of a speaker influence an
audience to consider him to be believable.
- Ethical appeals refer to the intelligence, virtue or goodwill inherent
in a speaker or writer.
• Pathos: the use of emotional appeals to alter the audience's
judgment.
- Commercial language, for example, aims at creating an emotional
connection to a product.
• Logos: the use of reasoning, either inductive or deductive, to
construct an argument.
– Inductive reasoning uses examples to draw conclusions.
– Deductive reasoning uses hypotheses to derive specific conclusions.
Rhetorical Modes
• A rhetorical mode is a strategy for
organizing your ideas about a subject and
also a way of understanding what you
read. Some of the better known rhetorical
modes are "argument," "cause and
effect," and “classification.” Knowing the
modes can help us understand the
organization of most kinds of writings or
other presentations.
Argument
• An "argument" is an opinion, or claim made about a
subject, not a simple fact. It is something debatable:
“George Bush is president" is a fact, but "George Bush’s
presidency will be remembered as reactionary" is an
opinion. Anything that reasonably can be debated is an
argument. A simple argument paper usually presents a
debatable opinion and then offers supports in favor of it,
or sometimes an argument paper will discuss both sides
of an issue and then give good reasons for choosing one
side over the other.
Cause and Effect
• "Cause and effect" means that you start with a
subject (an event, person, or object) and then
show the causes (reasons) for it, and/or the
effects (results) of it. "Cause" means the
reasons why or for something, or the source of
something. "Effects" simply are results or
outcomes. Cause-and-effect writing shows a
chain of connected events, each the logical
result of the one before it.
Classification
• "Classification" means that a subject--a person, place, event, or object--is
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identified and broken into parts and sub-parts. This type of paper is slightly
more complex than others.
For an example of a classification paper, imagine you want to classify a
specific student. You might first start by identifying this student by name
and briefly defining him or her. Second, you would choose a system by
which to classify him: e.g., you could choose a system that would describe
his looks, school classes, and after-school activities; or you might choose a
biological system and describe him by his physical type, health, blood type,
and other biological markings; or, perhaps, you might choose to describe
the student by his psychological makeup, his family history, and/or even his
medical history. Third, once you have chosen a system, you would then
describe the person. As you do so, you would want to show how, in each
part of our classification, he is similar to others like him and also how he
differs from them--this is the heart of developing lengthy description in a
good classification paper, to use comparisons and contrasts with each small
element of our classification system.
Compare/Contrast
• "Comparison/contrast" means to show
how subjects are alike and/or different. A
simple comparison/contrast paper often
has two subjects and describes how they
are alike and then how they differ.
Description
• "Description" means "illustrative detail." A
description paper often takes a person or
object and then describes that person or
thing in great illustrative detail. One
system is to use the five senses to
describe; another, is to use the five W's of
journalism by answering the questions
"Who, What, Where, When, and Why or
How?"
Exemplification
• "Exemplification" means "the giving of an
example." An exemplification paper
usually starts with a main idea, belief, or
opinion--something abstract--and then
gives one extended example or a series of
shorter examples to illustrate that main
idea. In fact, an exemplification paper is a
paper that illustrates an abstract idea.
Definition
• An extended definition simply defines a
subject in a fuller or more extended--more
thorough--way than does a dictionary.
Narration
• "Narration" or a "narrative" provides
details of what happened. It is almost like
a list of events in the order that they
happened, except that it is written in
paragraph form. A narration or narrative
doesn't have to show any cause and
effect; it only needs to show what
happened in the order that it happened.
Conclusion:
Rhetorical Modes
•
Each rhetorical mode is an
excellent device to use for writing a paper
or understanding a text.
Ethical Appeals
• For Aristotle, the writers' ethos meant the degree of
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credibility or trustworthiness that authors establish
with the audience through their writing. Through tone an
author's character and attitude toward his/her audience
and subject becomes clear to the audience: this forms
the basis of the author's ethical appeal. The author's
character is what gives value to the ideas in the
argument and thus provides support for the arguments
since the audience trusts the speaker.
Rhetors can establish credibility by demonstrating three
characteristics: intelligence, virtue, and goodwill.
Logical Appeals
• Logos translates as "word" or "reason," and in
rhetoric, logos refers to different systems of
reasoning, working together to persuade an
audience. Logos, pathos, and ethos are different
but complementary methods of persuasion.
Ethos moves an audience by proving the
credibility and trustworthiness of the rhetor,
pathos seeks to change the attitudes and actions
of the audience by playing to the emotions of
the audience, and logos persuades through the
powers of reasoning (Covino and Jolliffe 17).
Emotional Appeals
• Pathos, also called the pathetic or emotional
appeals, persuades audiences by arousing the
emotions. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that
there are two different sources of the emotional
appeals. First, the rhetor may use enargeia. The
word 'enargeia' means literally "in work" —
energizing or actualizing. It refers to the rhetor's
goal of arousing the passions within the
audience to move them to act (Corbett 319).