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 ( 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 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 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).