Hello, I'm Dr. Steve Klien from the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri
Welcome to this video lesson introducing "rhetoric." For over 2000 years rhetoric is a field that's been met with controversy.
Philosophers as prominent as Plato distrusted rhetoric as a field of study
because it provided the potential to manipulate audiences by distorting reality,
making the weaker appear the stronger, without any necessary sense of knowledge or wisdom behind a message.
However, we have numerous examples from throughout world history who show how
individuals,
organizations, interest groups and social movements have utilized rhetoric both effectively and ethically to bring about
Important social cultural and political changes. So, not just so we can be effective communicators
ourselves, but so that we can also be critical consumers of the communication we face on a daily basis,
we really should have an understanding of rhetoric. And so to start that process
I wanted to find what rhetoric is and then provide a brief introduction to some key rhetorical concepts from rhetoric's
premier theorist, Aristotle.
So what is rhetoric?
Rhetoric is an aspect of education that's been recognized ever since the days of the Greek polis and the Roman Republic as
absolutely essential, not just to be an effective career professional,
but also to be an effective public citizen. When we get to the Renaissance and the university system
starts developing the notion of a liberal arts education,
rhetoric becomes part of the essential core of the liberal arts,
something absolutely necessary to be a completely educated individual.
So rhetoric is important, but that doesn't tell us yet what it is.
According to Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric, "rhetoric" is "the ability in a particular case to identify the available means of persuasion."
It's a simple definition,
but it's got a couple of components that are really important. The first important component is this piece: "in a particular case."
Persuading someone is not a paint-by-numbers enterprise. You can't take the same message, present it in the same way to different audiences in different
situations and expect to have effective results.
Aristotle and others recognized that rhetoric is situated. In order to be able to persuade any audience one needs a really clear understanding
of contextual circumstances -- what is it that's surrounding the message
that's going to influence the way that you present it and the way that audiences receive it? Aristotle constructed three divisions of rhetoric that
define the primary contexts in which persuasive communication often takes place.
The first division is deliberative rhetoric.
This is the rhetoric of the legislature.
It's about policy argument; in other words, convincing an audience to take a course of action.
It's about making laws, but it's also about how we select our leaders in election campaigns, how
interest groups and social movements convince us to support certain policies or points of view, or to move
social change in a desired direction.
But deliberative rhetoric can also be as simple as
commercial speech which convinces us to buy a particular good or service, or to support a particular brand.
It's about engaging in a course of action and whether or not
that's a good idea. The second division of rhetoric is forensic rhetoric, For Aristotle
this was the rhetoric of the law, of the courts in the legal system. In order to determine
questions of justice, whether someone was guilty or not guilty of a crime,
whether or not someone was liable or not responsible for some violation of the civil law,
we needed to engage in fact-finding and to construct a case to convince a jury that someone is guilty or not
responsible or not.
But forensic rhetoric goes beyond just legal rhetoric. In
contemporary use we can think about forensic rhetoric as the rhetoric of science: how do we convince someone that a new theory is
actually a valid way of understanding the universe? Or how do we convince somebody
that a particular set of research findings is actually valid and convincing?
So the third division of rhetoric is epideictic. We also engage in rhetoric in order to
promote community values.
In situations that involve rituals or ceremonies,
moments of unity, entertainment and memorializing, Aristotle recognized that we use rhetoric in these circumstances
when we praise a person or an idea or an event to remind the audience
who we are as a community and what kind of values we stand for and admire.
And we see this kind of rhetoric today in everything from presidential inaugural addresses
to commencement speeches at a graduation ceremony to the best man toast at a wedding reception.
So in deliberative, forensic and epideictic rhetoric we see different sets of circumstances that require
different sorts of expectations and
different sorts of rhetorical strategies.
Once we understand that rhetoric is situated, the next important part of the definition is the available means of persuasion.
If we have an understanding of context, then we can start getting at the central question:
What are the options that are available to me in order to persuade my audience?
There's a couple of ways that we can look at this. The first is to understand how
persuasive messages are constructed and presented in the first place.
Since the time of Greek and Roman rhetorical education, and as especially well
articulated by Roman rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintillian, the canons of rhetoric are
essentially the steps involved in the rhetorical messaging process. The first step is invention: one needs to figure out
"What am I going to say? What are the main points?
I'm trying to establish in order to support a given thesis? What's the content of my message?
What lines of argument do I need to present? What kinds of supporting materials are going to provide evidence to
justify my claims?" the next step is "what order of the points going to be in?" That's the canon of arrangement, or
organization. The way in which I sequence my points is important, not just for clarity,
but also to make my argument more logical and also to develop my audience through a
motivational process. So I want to select and arrange my points in ways that are strategic.
Once I know what I'm going to say and what order the points are going to be in, the next canon is style.
Traditionally speaking this has been about the use of language in
order to frame my message in a way that is both clear for the audience to understand and
engaging and aesthetically pleasing enough to grab my audience's attention and keep them engaged.
But it's not just about language anymore. In contemporary rhetoric we can think about how a message is styled in
everything from the use of images and video to the use of music and sound effects and a whole host of multimedia special effects that
make it possible for us to understand and be engaged in a message.
The fourth Canon
is that of memory. In
classical Greece and Rome this meant learning certain
mnemonic devices and other sorts of strategies so that one could deliver an oration
anywhere from an hour to two hours to six hours long verbatim
without notes.
That's pretty impressive. These days that really isn't the expectation for most public speaking situations.
But memory today is about the process of preparation:
how we do things like write speech manuscripts and outlines, how we construct the materials we use to present our speech such as
note cards that provide a speaking outline. It also involves such things as the construction of presentation aids like the PowerPoint
I used to put this video together. The final part is the presentation, the delivery.
This canon traditionally involves the use of the voice and the use of the body and nonverbal communication
to convey the message.
But as we can see in contemporary rhetoric the canons of style and delivery combine in some interesting ways, because we can present
mediated messages through everything from sound to vision.
But this is how we put persuasive messages together.
What makes them persuasive? Well, Aristotle spoke to this as well.
Scholars of Aristotelian rhetoric sometimes refer to the "artistic proofs":
Artistic because they come from the art of rhetoric,
proofs because these are the ways that we convince our audience, ways in which we persuade them. And for Aristotle
the almost infinite ways that we can persuade audiences can be boiled down to three broad categories of persuasive appeal:
logos, ethos, and pathos. For Aristotle logos is
appeal on the level of the intellect. You persuade me if you convince me intellectually
through reasoned argument in the content of your message.
We construct claims, we come up with evidence to support those claims, and most importantly for Aristotle we use
reasoning - we use logical
Inferences to connect the dots between our evidence and claim so that our audience can see the logical connections and be convinced.
The second proof is ethos, or the character and credibility of the speaker. You can have a great argument,
but if I don't trust you, I'm not gonna be persuaded by you. So Aristotle talks about ethos
not as the prior reputation or the credentials of a speaker.
That's not part of the art of rhetoric; that happens before you construct a message.
Ethos is about what a speaker does in the message to convince the audience that
they can be trusted and they can be believed, either because they have knowledge and expertise, or they have
values and ethical stances that the audience admires, or
they're looking out for the audience's best interests. All of these involve speaker credibility.
Finally, if logos is appeal to the mind and ethos is appeal to the soul,
pathos is appeal to the heart the guts in the glands.
It's about audience emotions and senses, appealing to the mood and
temperament and reactions of audiences, in what some would critique is an irrational way. And
Aristotle recognized that pathos appeals had the potential for ethical manipulation and distortion.
But he also recognized that appealing to audiences' emotions and senses can be absolutely
essential to persuasive success. Not everyone is going to be able to be persuaded by
logical argument alone on an issue -- for instance, if they don't recognize
why it's relevant to them or they're just not interested and engaged enough to pay attention to the message in the first place.
So in effective and ethical combination
logos, ethos and pathos provide the resources necessary to persuade an audience in any given situation.
We can think about how these proofs play out in a framework based on Aristotelian theory often referred to as the rhetorical triangle.
It essentially establishes
all of the relevant pieces in a rhetorical moment as well as the important relationships between them.
First, any rhetorical action is going to involve a message source,
what's often referred to as the "rhetor."
So, the speaker in a public speech or the author in a written message. Now of course if
we're going to engage in persuasive communication we need someone to persuade, and so any
rhetorical moment is going to have an audience, the recipient of that message.
And f course in order to persuade that audience the redder needs to construct a message,
which is often referred to in this field as the "text."
The relationships between these pieces are important.
Rhetoric in particular needs to think about the relationship between the speaker and the audience.
Rhetoric is goal-oriented, and every choice a message source makes in order to put a message together
has to think about the purpose of that message in order to persuade the audience.
So each decision made throughout all of those five canons of rhetoric we talked about earlier need to keep this purpose in mind.
Doing so, then we can think about the relationship between the source and the message as
the consideration of the content of the message through the process of invention, and the
tone of the message through the canons of style and delivery. Given the purpose of the message,
how does a speaker put together the message in such a way that it's going to fulfill the intended purpose?
Now of course it's vital to keep in mind that just because a message source
intends that text to be interpreted in a particular way
doesn't necessarily mean that that always happens. The final relationship is critical: the
relationship between the message and the audience, or
reception. Because once a message is out there an audience
that's made up of human beings, with their own free will and
bringing to this rhetorical moment their own knowledge and experience and values and feelings, have the capacity to
interpret a message in any number of ways.
So if a speaker wants an audience to interpret a message in a particular way that fulfills that speaker's purpose,
the content and the tone of the message need to take the audience into account
in order to guide the reception of the audience in a specific desired direction. And
so you can see in this very simple, but elegant and important configuration
the three elements of any rhetorical moment -- the source, the message and the
recipient -- can be understood in complex ways to see how persuasion works, and why persuasion doesn't work when it doesn't.
So in a nutshell that's over 2,000 years of rhetorical theory in just a few minutes. Hopefully by now
you've got a better understanding of what rhetoric is and the primary elements of what makes rhetorical persuasion
what it is. if you have any questions about the concepts or issues raised in this video,
please feel free to make a comment or reach out to me and ask a question,
and I'd be happy to address whatever concerns you might have.
Otherwise, I'll see you in my next video!