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