1. Rhetoric: Appeals, Strategies, & Devices

2. When was the last time you had a lengthy, significant verbal argument?
Everybody Writes:
Create a Cornell notes sheet. Write the questions on the left and your answers to those questions on the right. The questions concern your last significant argument. You may chose a face-to-face argument or one conducted via electronic means.
With whom did you argue?
What did you argue about?
What was each side’s position?
What was used to support each side of the argument?
Did you try to convince the other side that you were right by trying to convince them that you know more than they did about the subject?
Did you try to get them to emotionally connect with your argument?
Did you present specific, factual, and verifiable evidence to prove your position? 1

3. RI6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.
L6: Acquire and use accurately general academic and domain specific words and phrases.

4. A Short Introduction to Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the Art of Persuasive Language
Writers and speakers use Rhetoric to convince readers and listeners to do something or to think something.
Think of every time you want to get your way. You are using rhetoric without knowing it!

5. Rhetoric throughout most of history referred to the arts of speechmaking and oratory.
In this class, we will use it to refer to persuasion that occurs through any medium, not just text or speech.
Eventually, I hope you start to see all communication as rhetorical—that is, as a set of deliberate, strategic decisions that someone made to achieve a certain purpose with a certain audience.

6. For our purposes -- "Rhetoric" is simply the ways in which we try to persuade a given audience, for a given purpose.
Here are some classic (and some would say less-than-reputable) examples of rhetoric:
When a politician tries to get you to vote for him, he is using rhetoric.
When a lawyer tries to move a jury, she is using rhetoric.
When a government produces propaganda, it is using rhetoric.
When an advertisement tries to get you to buy something, it is using rhetoric.
When the president gives a speech, he is using rhetoric.

7. But rhetoric can be much subtler (and quite positive) as well:
When someone writes an office memo, he is using rhetoric.
When a newspaper writer offers her depiction of what happened last night, she is using rhetoric.
When a scientist presents theories or results, she is using rhetoric.
When you write your mom or dad an , you are using rhetoric.
And yes, when I'm trying to explain about rhetoric, I'm using rhetoric.

8. The Rhetorical Triangle
A way of thinking about what's involved in any communication/persuasion scenario.
The 3 elements of The Rhetorical Triangle are:
a speaker or writer (who performs the rhetoric),
an audience (the people addressed), and
a purpose (the message communicated with the audience)

9. The Rhetorical Triangle
Writer/Speaker
Audience
Purpose/Message
The Rhetorical Triangle

10. The Rhetorical Appeals:
Aristotle (an ancient Greek philosopher) identified three major tactics that we use when we go about persuading people.
We call these tactics rhetorical appeals
Aristotle taught that a speaker’s ability to persuade an audience is based on how well the speaker appeals to that audience in three different areas:
ethos
logos
pathos

11. What is rhetoric? Rhetoric is the art of communication and persuasion.
Speaker: who is delivering the message?
Occasion: time and place; what’s the context?
Audience: the person or people who receive the message
Purpose: the reason behind the text
Subject: the information presented
Tone: the attitude of the author
The message is a combination of the purpose and the subject.

12. Rhetorical Appeals
Ethos: ethical/authoritative appeal – speaker emphasizes his/her own moral character and experience to establish credibility
Pathos: emotional appeal – the goal is to elicit an emotional response from the audience
Logos: logical appeal – relies on rational analysis; reason, logic, words
Aristotle’s 3 modes of persuasion.

13. Appeal to Ethos
refers to the character or authority of the speaker/writer. As an audience, our perception of the speaker/writer's ethos is what leads us to trust them.
It involves the trustworthiness and credibility of the speaker/writer
Is the speaker/writer dependable? Is he
knowledgeable? Can we trust him?

14. Examples of Appeals to Ethos:
In many cases ethos is pretty transparent: if Rachel Ray wanted to tell us how to make Chicken Marsala, we would probably just implicitly assume that she knew what she was talking about. After all, she has built her ethos in the sense of authority by demonstrating her cooking abilities every day on nationwide television, in her cookbooks, and through other media. She has also built her ethos in the sense of her character by appearing to be a friendly, savvy, and admirable person. However, if a random person on the street wanted to tell us how to make Chicken Marsala, we would probably first want to know what gave him the authority to do so: did he cook a lot? Does he make chicken marsala often? Why was he qualified to show us? In addition, such a person would probably lack the character component of ethos—being a stranger we would have no connection to him and we would have no sense of who he was as a person. In fact, we'd probably be creeped out by his unsolicited cooking lesson. Ultimately, we would have no reason to trust him.

15. Appeal to Pathos An Emotional Appeal
Appeal to human emotions (such as desire, passion, or patriotism) within the audience/reader
Includes considerations of the values and beliefs in the audience that will ultimately move them to action.

16. Examples of Appeals to Pathos:
Home security companies appeal to our fears of violent crime, carbon monoxide, fire, etc. in order to convince us to buy their home monitoring systems.
Personal hygiene products appeal to our fears of social rejection and to our desire to fit in with others.
Charities appeal to our emotions by showing us images of people that we will empathize with.
Casinos appeal to our sense of greed when they try to get us to gamble.
And of course, countless advertisements use sex to convince us to buy their products (this is technically eros, but we'll file it under pathos for the sake of simplicity).

17. Appeal to Logos logical argument appeal to reason or logic
frequently includes the use of data, statistics, math, research, order, and "objectivity."

18. Examples of Appeal to Logos:
When advertisements claim that their products are “37% more effective than the competition,” they are making an appeal to logos.
When a lawyer claims that her client is innocent because he had an alibi, that too is an appeal to logos because it is logically inconsistent for her client to have been in two places at once.

19. The best arguments contain more than one type of appeal!
It's important to recognize that ethos, pathos, and logos appeals are rarely found independently of each other, and that complex and effective persuasion usually involves all of them in some combination.

20. Example of Combination of Appeals:
For instance, appeals to logos by themselves are rare and seldom effective—they invariably rely on appeals to pathos and ethos as well.
If I wrote an essay that included the statement "five people die of AIDS every minute," it doesn't just convey an appeal to logos in the form of a statistic.
It also includes an implicit appeal to pathos: a sense of the emotional tragedy that is AIDS and a sense of the ferocity and terribleness of the disease.
It also includes an implicit appeal to ethos: it establishes my belief in the moral unacceptability of the disease and it may establish admiration in the eyes of my audience for holding such a stance.

21. Level 1 Exercise: Identification Identify the term from the word bank that best matches each description. Logos, pathos, rhetoric, audience, ethos, message, speaker
1. Related to the audience’s feelings.
5. Emphasizes the speaker’s character.
2. The ideas being communicated.
6. The individual(s) on the receiving end of the communication.
3. Emphasizes reason and proof.
7. The individual presenting the argument in speech, writing, or another medium.
4. “The art of ruling the minds of men.”

22. Everybody Writes: Which rhetorical appeal is evident in this passage
Everybody Writes: Which rhetorical appeal is evident in this passage? Why?
Determine the purpose of the following passage from Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul. Then identify the main rhetorical appeal evident in the passage. Provide and explain at least two pieces of textual evidence that support your opinion.
As an O.B. doctor of thirty years, and having delivered 4,000 babies, I can assure you life begins at conception. I am legally responsible for the unborn, no matter what I do, so there’s a legal life there. The unborn has inheritance rights, and if there’s an injury or a killing, there is a legal entity. There is no doubt about it. 2

23. POTENTIAL ANSWER
As an O.B. doctor of thirty years, and having delivered 4,000 babies, I can assure you life begins at conception. I am legally responsible for the unborn, no matter what I do, so there’s a legal life there. The unborn has inheritance rights, and if there’s an injury or a killing, there is a legal entity. There is no doubt about it.
In this passage, Paul prefaces his argument against legalized abortion by highlighting his background as an obstetrician who has delivered thousands of babies. By mentioning his thirty years as a medical doctor, Paul establishes his credibility and authority on the topic at hand. Identifying with the medical profession also allows Paul to benefit from the positive stereotypes that label doctors as people of considerable intelligence and character.

24. A More Complete Rhetorical Triangle
Writer/Speaker
Appeal to Ethos (Credibility of Writer)
Audience
Appeal to Pathos
(Emotions, Beliefs,
and Values)
Purpose/Message
Appeal to Logos
(Facts, Research, Data)

25. Rhetorical Device Repetition Tricolon Restatement Polysyndeton
Parallelism
Juxtaposition
Rhetorical Question
Allusion
Antithesis
Hypophora
Figurative Speech

26. Rhetorical Devices Used by Speakers and Writers
Rhetorical devices are the nuts and bolts of speech and writing; the parts that make a communication work. Separately, each part of is meaningless, but once put together they create a powerful effect on the listener/reader.

27. Parallelism
Writing structures that are grammatically parallel helps the reader understand the points better because they flow more smoothly.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts…who still wonders…who still questions

28. Hypophora
A common technique is to start a speech with a hypophora, in which the speaker first asks a question and then answers it.
In Obama’s speech, the word answer is used regularly as an obvious signpost of the speaker’s intention to give his audience answers. The questions, however, are implied here.

29. Repetition
Repetition can be effective in creating a sense of structure and power. In both speech and literature, repeating small phrases can ingrain an idea in the minds of the audience.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.

30. Antithesis
A figure of speech in which sharply contrasting ideas are juxtaposed in a balanced or parallel phrase or grammatical structure
Obama is famous for having said “There are no red states or blue states. There are only the United States of America.”
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way." (Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

31. Figurative speech
People like to think in metaphors. The image of bending the arc of history up towards hope is powerful. Figurative speech tends to work best when set off by concrete images.
“the arc of history with the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston”

32. Tricolon
A tricolon is a list of three, or a sentence in which there are three parts or clauses. The cumulative effect of three has a powerful effect on an audience.
Here, the backyards, living rooms and front porches build a strong picture of “plain folks”

33. Polysyndeton
using several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted—used to stress the importance of each item
$5 and $10 and $15

34. Juxtaposition the act of positioning close together
Obama talks about the “not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers”
The juxtaposition of “bitter cold” and “scorching heat” stresses the extreme conditions in which people campaigned for Obama, convincing the audience of their dedication

35. Allusion
By using allusion, you not only associate yourself with the ideas of the original text but also create a bond with the audience by evoking share knowledge
The words government of the people, by the people, and for the people are lifted from the “Gettysburg Address”

36. Varied Sentence Length
Varying the sentence length is always a good way to strengthen any writing style, be it speech writing or essays.
--“To the best campaign team ever assembles in the history of politics: you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done. But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.”

37. RHETORICAL STRATEGIES
HOW ideas and evidence are PRESENTED/DELIEVERED to the readers/audience

38. Rhetorical Strategies
Cause and Effect
Description
Narration
Process
Example
Comparison
Analogy
Classification
Definition

39. Description
Describing involves showing rather than telling – uses precise verbs, specific nouns, and vivid adjectives

40. Cause and Effect
Focuses on the “why” of the issue and the subsequent effects/results

41. Narration
Tells a story to make a point, to illustrate an argument, to offer evidence or counter- evidence

42. Process
Explaining how something is done, i.e. how to make French fries or how to face death

43. Comparison
Looking for similarities between things

44. Analogy
Comparison between two different things in order to highlight some point of similarity

45. Classification
Putting things into groups  this is good for organizing facts or handling big topics

46. Definition
Tells the reader what something means – and what it does not
* Often one will redefine a common term more precisely OR give nuance to a term that is used too broadly