Blog 11: World Wide Rhetoric

“Very short introduction” indeed - this entry marks the conclusion of Richard Toye’s piece on Rhetoric. What a cute little introduction booklet that was...well, anywho. Here we cover chapter 4 and the conclusion chapter, which cover the last couple of bit about the subject of rhetoric that Toye wished to cover. There two bits that were brought up that I want to talk about, so let’s get started.

First, I found it interesting that the book brought up how rhetoric speeches are interpreted go beyond the national border. I always forget that, especially nowadays, speeches from leaders that are targeted at the local level are often heard globally, and as such a leader has to consider the reactions of those on the global scale. Considering how quickly news spreads in the modern day, it’d be bad if you said something specifically to boost local morale and completely alienate those around the world. In an even worse case, you could end up misunderstand your audience and give a speech that, though popular in other parts of the world, aren’t liked in their homeland.

Second, I very much see the point brought up about how rhetoric has been dumbed down as time has gone on. I do think that it’s important to have speeches be easier to understand the person’s message and better guarantee that they can’t use rhetoric in a way that hides important information so that a leader can’t essentially lie their way out of a situation. Because of this simplification though, speeches have been leaning more and more on Ethos rather than Logos (emotion rather than logic) and history has shown that such a shift can have damning effects if not incredibly careful. All one has to do is look at our most recent election to see how effective such a focus on Ethos can have on the people. Hopefully such a shift in rhetorical focus won’t lead to history repeating itself.

Questions:

• Keeping the worries of simplification in mind, should leaders give speeches that are better understood by the common person or should the common person become better able to understand more complex wording and be able to read between the lines?
• Assuming you did agree with the book’s point last entry that “there is no thing as perfect rhetoric”, do you think that the vain hope that a perfect rhetoric does exist is partially what lead to the focus on Ethos in speeches?

Image from: http://www.scps.nyu.edu/academics/departments/foreign-languages.html

Blog 10: Perfect Rhetoric

In the next two chapters of this “short” introduction, we delve deeper into the concept of rhetoric. Namely we look at how it is constructed when used in different contexts in Chapter 2 and the different ways that it can be applied in Chapter 3.

The main thing I want to talk about was how it was slightly surprising to hear the book state that there is no proper ‘recipe’ (as they call it) for the use of rhetoric. The way that the topic described in this text, it would seem as though it’s very possible create a apted rhetorical argument/statement/etc. to be used when addressing peers. I think what they may’ve been trying to get across was that even if you have a well done rhetorical analysis (for example) that is supposed to persuade others to agree with some view point you have, they may still disagree with you because of other factors outside of your analysis. After all, if it’s well known that the group you’re speaking to is usually against whatever you’re trying to persuade, it shouldn’t be any surprise if they don’t respond to your words. Ultimately if a rhetoric use fails, it's just as likely a failure due to outside forces as it is that the rhetorical statement itself is flawed.

As I assumed from the previous blog post, the idea of pathos, ethos, and logos was brought up and if used in tandem with the five canons, I think that a perfectly made rhetoric is possible. It’s just how this rhetoric is used that can lead to varying results.

Questions:

• Do you agree with the book or the argument here?
• Considering how similar the idea of persuasion and rhetoric are, would you argue that the two are equivalent, or are there differences between the two?

Image from: http://imgur.com/gallery/Lpvsnlk

Blog 9: The Power of Rhetoric

Onward to the next title, we’re now on Richard Toye’s Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction. A clear change of direction from our previous readings, this book begins to cover our course’s topic of rhetoric and what that actually means. Going off of the first chapter, it looks like this piece is going to be a more factual discussion of the topic rather than the story-esque direction our previous books took. Granted our previous reading was more historical in nature, but there was still a sense of growth of the internet throughout the reading. This book appears to just state out facts about the topic in hand, with a bit of history on the side.

Speaking of which, I, at first, thought that the topic of rhetoric was going to be brand new to me, as the term itself wasn’t very familiar to me. After this reading and looking up the topic on my own time, I finally remembered talking about this concept in previous writing courses. In particular, the rhetorical triangle image on the top of this post (or as I like to call it, the rhetorical triforce). I’m sure this concept will be covered in depth at a later point, so instead of talking about that, I’ll just bring up something interesting I noticed in the reading.

Rhetoric, as the book states, is something that dates back as far back as the greek period and has been a part of our history for ages. Though it is often seen as something used for dishonest purposes, it can also be used for good intentions - something along the lines of telling a white lie for the greater good (and even then a lie might not be involved at all). No matter how it’s used though the idea is to present information in a manner that leads the listener to agree with what the speaker is trying to get across. This can be done through a speech in where the speaker uses affirming character traits to show their seriousness on the matter, or, for example, a book that that makes a lot of statements that seem reasonable at a glance and provides historical evidence to try and prove it’s point - evidence that may or may not be valid to the context at hand...kinda the book we’re reading now. Once again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does show how rhetoric can be applied to pretty much anything as long as you try hard enough.

Questions:

• What other examples of rhetoric have you seen before?
• Do you think there’s an easy way to distinguish between rhetoric used for “good” versus for “evil”? Is there a difference between the two in the first place?

Image from: https://www.fortgordon.com/rhetoric/