Reviewing how to analyze rhetorically for all genres

“The faculty of finding the available means of persuasion in a given case” (Aristotle). What is rhetorical analysis? Examination of written texts, literary or “ordinary,” to determine how the author has shaped the content in order to achieve an identifiable purpose for a given audience. Rhetorical analysis commits the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy with impunity.

Invention, arrangement, style, memory & delivery Key terms: Exigence: a gap, a need, a lack of something that needs doing. What’s sticking in the author’s craw? Audience: A reader or group of readers capable of acting on this exigence. Important distinctions: Primary and secondary audiences, immediate and mediated audiences.

C. Purpose: What the author intends for the reader(s) to do while and after they read the text. D. Appeals: Closely related ways the author aims to get readers to take up the purposeful action. 1. Ethos: appeals to the character of the writer or the persona 2. Pathos: appeals to the emotions or interests of the reader. 3. Logos: appeals to the structure of the argument. Three perspectives:

A. Enthymemes: syllogisms in which the major premise is suppressed and unstated for several reasons: The audience believes it a priori, it is common knowledge, it is controvertible presumption, not an incontrovertible presumption. B. Toumlin’s informal structure: “Informal logic is an attempt to develop a logic that can assess and analyze the arguments that occur in natural language (“everyday,” “ordinary language”) discourse. Discussions in the field may address instances of scientific, legal, and other technical forms of reasoning (and notions like the distinction between science and pseudo- science), but the overriding aim has been a comprehensive account of argument that can explain and evaluate the arguments found in discussion, debate and disagreement as they manifest themselves in daily life — in, etc.); in advertising and corporate and governmental communications; and in personal exchange (Plato).”

C. A paradeigma: a repeated series of examples that form a pattern.

E. Figures of speech: Schemes and tropes and their functions: 1. Scheme: any system of correlated things, parts, etc., or the manner of its arrangement. 2. Trope: any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense

F. Imagery, syntax, diction, and their functions

This is the context during which a writer or speaker decided to take a stand. Is it more appropriate to shout out at people as they pass on the street, or to have an organized meeting with an agenda and platform prepared for a speech?

Exigence: What happens or fails to happen? Why is one compelled to speak out? Persons: Who is involved in the exigence and what roles do they play? Location: Where is the site of discourse? E.g. a podium, newpaper, webpage, the street? Speaker: Who is compelled to speak out or write? Audience: Who does the speaker address and why? Method: How does the speaker choose to address the audience?

Institutions: What are the rules of the game surrounding/constraining number 1-7?

The first step in analyzing rhetoric must always be a descriptive analysis of the strategies present in the rhetoric. All analysis begins with a description of the strategies found in a piece of discourse. The goal of analysis is to see clearly: -What is being said (and) -How the rhetor is saying it

The five cannons (principles) of rhetoric are: A. Invention B. Organization C. Style D. Memory (since contemporary rhetors no longer give extended speeches from memory, critics no longer attend to that cannon) E. Delivery (The Cannon of delivery refers to the verbal and non-verbal performance of speech)

Although delivery is the key in the presentation of traditional rhetorical discourse, critics cannot analyze it unless they have access to the actual event or some sort of recording (video etc.)

Most framework for describing rhetorical strategies continue to be rooted in the work of classical theorist who laid them out as a five part system.