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/