rhetoric

After a semester of classical rhetoric, I've got a bunch of definitions for rhetoric swimming around in my brain. The one that springs to the forefront most often these days is the ability to see the various means of persuasion, a paraphrase of Aristotle's definition. This seems especially an especially apt definition to use in business.

I have no idea what rhetoric is... well, that's not true. Part of the challenge is that rhetoric is a lot of things. Beyond being "the art of persuasion," rhetoric is the ways that the world falls into meaningful chunks around us, and the way that we extract meaning and try to give it to others. I realize,quite often, that I tend to use rhetoric with my students as a short cut for very complicated actions that I know about, but they might not.

Rhetoric, as broadly as I can define it, is the art of persuasion. I tend to think of it as persuasive writing, but I know that many would argue the defintion should be broad enough to include visual rhetoric as well. Clearly, persuasion is vital in professional communication at all levels.

I was actually thinking about what rhetoric is yesterday as I struggled through the last mile of a four mile jog down the dangerously busy highway near my house. One thing I considered is that rhetoric necessarily implies dissent and diversity. The birthplace of rhetoric was a really diverse place with influences from merchant ships all over the Mediterranean. Rhetoric was funded by a rising middle class and generated out of a need to provide nonviolent means to negotiate textual and oral spaces. Of course, this negotiation could be performed to violent ends, e.g.

Rhetoric is the art of writing or speaking to effectively persuade, inform, entertain and impress. Rhetoric should be used ethically, to promote better relations between us, and even though used to persuade, this persuasion should be founded on “truth” and not used purposefully to mislead or deceive.

My own use of the word rhetoric covers any discursive act that partially or completely motivates an audience to a favorable action (linguistic or non-linguistic). The “favorable action” resulting from rhetorical effectiveness does not need to be explicitly defined, or directly linked to the discursive act, or closely related to the discursive act in time. For example, a speech given by a politican may be rhetorically effective in that it makes an audience member more receptive to unspecified future appeals for action.