Rhetorical Situation for "Digital Natives"

RWS 280 KEY IDEAS

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WHAT IS RHETORIC?

◼ Aristotle noticed that some speakers in Athens were more effective in persuading the public than others. In On Rhetoric, a collection of those observations, he offered this definition:

◼ “Let rhetoric be defined as the faculty of observing in any case all of the available means of persuasion.” (this is where my interest lies in terms of multimodal means of persuasion. Meaning, how different modes of communication—textual, audio, visual, spatial—influence audiences to respond in particular ways)

◼ Rhetoric refers to the study and use of written, spoken, and visual language.

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What Rhetoric is Concerned With:

WHY HOW

RHETORICAL SITUATION—5 MAIN CATEGORIES

◼1. Author ◼ Who is the author? ◼ When reading a text you should always take

a few minutes to research who the author is.

◼ Who is she, what kind of writing does she do, what organizations does she belong to, what is her reputation?

2. AUDIENCE

◼ Who seems to be the intended audience?

◼ Who might be secondary audiences?

◼ How is the text shaped to target those people? Figuring out where the text was published, when it was published, what kind of text it is (speech, op-ed, article, song, etc.) and how it addresses readers can help provide clues to audience.

◼ We can also ask who is likely to find the text important, relevant, or useful.

◼ Consider style, tone, diction, and vocabulary. What does this tell you about the potential audience for the text?

◼ Examine the other authors and works referred to in the text (if there are footnotes or a works cited page, look at what is listed there. Just as you can learn a lot about a person by the people around him, you can learn a lot about a text from all the other texts it references).

◼ What does the author assume her readers know? This can help identify the author’s intended audience.

◼ What does the author assume about readers’ age, education, gender, location, or cultural values?

3. PURPOSE

◼ What is the author trying to achieve?

◼ What does the author want us to do, believe, or understand?

◼ All writing has a purpose. We write to being awareness to a problem, make sense of an experience, call people to action, contribute to an area of knowledge, criticize/defend a position, redefine a concept, complain, clarify, challenge, document, create a beautiful story, and entertain (to name just a few purposes for writing).

4. CONTEXT

◼ Context refers to situational influences that are specific to time, place, and occasion.

◼ When and where was the text written and where is it intended to be read/seen/heard?

◼ We can also consider the context of the author’s life and work, texts referred to by the author (or that refer to the author) and the “conversation” the text is part of.

◼ How does the current context influence our reading of the text.

5. GENRE

◼ Genres are types of communication that have become routine and “conventionalized.”

◼ A poem, meme, lab report, op-ed, and magazine article are all examples of genres.

◼ Identifying the text’s genre can tell us a lot about audience, purpose, and context.

◼ Genres give us clues about how we should read a text, what we can do with the text, and who the audience is.

RHETORICAL SITUATION

ARGUMENT

◼ In the broadest sense, an argument is any piece of written, spoken, or visual language designed to persuade an audience or bring about a change in ideas/attitudes.

◼ This is the overall position or conclusion advanced by an author.

◼ We abstract this from the entirety of the text to arrive at the position or conclusion the author wants us to accept.

◼ Arguments are concerned with contested issues where some degree of uncertainty exists (we don’t argue about what is self-evident or agreed upon). For example?

EXAMPLE ARGUMENTS:

1. Social media is having a negative impact on students’ writing and reading skills.

2. The opioid crisis in America is partly the result of over-prescription, but is primarily caused by the rise of inequality, economic dislocation, and community breakdown.

3. To combat “fake news” social media companies need to make serious efforts to limit its spread, and schools and universities must start teaching students how to identify and avoid fake news.

4. Children should not be allowed to play tackle football until they reach high school, as their brains are particularly vulnerable to damage from high impact sports.

5. While it is common to assume that our sense of morality comes from the culture we live in, there is growing evidence to suggest we are all born with a “moral instinct” that has evolutionary roots.

EXAMPLES OF (NON) ARGUMENTS

◼ “Vanilla ice cream is the best.”

◼ “Guns are good.” ◼ Can be changed in order to be an actual argument. But how?

◼ “The sky is not blue—in fact, it’s green.”

◼ We want to make sure that arguments—at least in an academic setting—move beyond one’s opinions or beliefs. There needs to be substantive, viable, legitimate reasonings and evidence in order to perpetuate an argument.

CLAIMS

◼ Claims are the “engine” of an argument.

◼ They are the main assertions or lines of reasoning advanced by an author.

◼ Claims assert that something is the case, and (usually) provide some justification for this.

◼ Claims are contestable, and deal with matters on which there is disagreement and uncertainty.

◼ THINK: Topic Sentences

EXAMPLE CLAIMS

◼ Overall argument: We do not need to have stricter gun laws put in place. ◼ Claim #1: We do not need to have more gun laws because there are already enough measures put in place to ensure guns

are obtained ethically.

◼ Claim #2: Having stricter gun laws may cause more “black market” gun purchases.

Not claims:

◼ I do not believe gun laws will help with mass shootings on school campuses.

◼ Why isn’t this an effective claim?

EVIDENCE

◼ The component of the argument used as support for the claims made.

◼ Evidence is the support, reasons, data/information used to help persuade/prove an argument.

◼ To find evidence in a text, ask what the author has to go on. ◼ What is there to support this claim?

◼ Is the evidence credible?

◼ Some types of evidence: facts, historical examples/comparisons, examples, analogies, illustrations, interviews, statistics (source & date are important), expert testimony, authorities, anecdotes, witnesses, personal experiences, reasoning, etc.

LET’S PRACTICE RHETORICAL SITUATION Sandy Hook Promise "Evan"

RHETORICAL SITUATION: DISCUSS, PROVIDE EVIDENCE.

◼ In small groups, discuss the rhetorical situation and how you came to your decisions. ◼ Author ◼ Audience ◼ Purpose ◼ Context ◼ Genre