What Is Rhetoric?

Seth Graves, Lucas Corcoran, and Lisa Blankenship

Rhetoric, in a broad stroke, can be defined as the kinds of choices people make both to interpret and create forms of communication. Rhetoric is a method of analyzing the writing of others and a method of shaping our own thoughts and ideas, making us better writers and thinkers.

As the science or the study of both the production of communication and its reception, rhetoric provides us with a broad enough term to think about an infinite number of actions, gestures, signs, symbols, behaviors, and representations as rhetorical. Rhetoric can help us understand the choices of others and how to make our own choices that serve our purposes for writing or communicating.

Perhaps, in a certain sense, we’re all familiar with rhetoric in one way or another by now. If we’ve spent any amount of time in an American educational system, we’ve taken a writing class or an English class, we’ve been told that our communicative choices matter, or we’ve been asked to read texts written from multiple perspectives and points of view. Perhaps, due to this educational reality, a college-level composition class at first glance might seem like a repeat: been there, done that. However, although this course might seem familiar, it plans to raise stakes and pose the following question: what if we could interpret everything as if it were a poem, a short story, or any other form of intentional communication?

College English courses in the United States are just over one hundred years old, but the study of rhetoric in the European-American philosophical tradition—and its relationship to writing and persuasion—dates back to ancient Greece.

When you hear “rhetoric,” what do you think?

Often when people think of the term they automatically assume something bad, something overtly corrosive and manipulative or something deliberately incendiary and demeaning. This view of rhetoric often represents the way the term gets used in the media. When pundits discuss a politician’s “rhetoric,” what they often are suggesting is that rhetoric is a form of deception, a way of framing an event or person or idea that “hides” the true intent or covers over what really happened.

Part of the aim of this class is to undo this assumption and argue that rhetoric is an essential part of the way we communicate with each other rather than (always) a form of trickery or propaganda. Rhetoric lives inside our everyday lives: in the meals we cook with our families, the texts we send to our loved ones, and the doodles we make in the back of a classroom.

Many of you may have heard the term “rhetoric” used synonymously with “persuasion.” It’s not that this is wrong—it just also means more than that. There is no one definition of rhetoric, but a series of ongoing definitions proposed by thinkers across history, many of which remain under debate today.

The study of rhetoric has, for the most part, been confined to classical Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, but every culture uses symbol systems and language, so every culture has various forms of rhetoric. In a sense you could think of rhetoric as ways people in a certain culture or subgroup in a culture think, and how they use language and other sign systems (images, for example) to get things done, express themselves, and make sense of the world.

Aristotle, the most important figure in the study of rhetoric in the European-American world, developed many of the core terms we still use today, from what are known as the topics or topoi that describe how we reason, think, and “invent arguments,” to the big three: logos, pathos, and ethos.

• logos: the use of logic and reason to appeal to an audience

• pathos: emotional appeals to an audience

• ethos: the character and customs of a person, culture, era, or community. In rhetoric, ethos often refers to a rhetor’s perceived character strength or influence, established, for example, by credibility or popular recognition.

Our ability to use these concepts in our own work and identify them in the work of others is essential in developing critical thinking skills. (More on these in the next essay, “Tools for Analyzing Texts.”)

The study of rhetoric after the classical Greek period, for the most part all the way up to the 18th century, largely focused on style, or language as a kind of “dressing” on top of thought. The primary thinker who helped revitalize the study of rhetoric in the mid-20th century was literary and rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke, who wrote that rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents” (Burke 41).

Burke writes that “you persuade a man [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55).

In a radical way, Burke was zooming far outside the traditional definition of language as verbal and saying that any time we exchange symbols, we’re communicating with a kind of “language.” And it’s in part the language exchange itself that makes the moment significant—utilizing symbols that form a method of cross-identification between speaker/writer and hearer/reader. That’s not as odd as it sounds, if you think about it. Two people can communicate with each other in many ways, and an emoji can say more than a thousand words. (More on language in “Language, Discourse, and Literacy,” in Section 3.)

Language is never neutral—everything is rhetorical. How rhetoric and language are used is determined by the culture and time we live in, our physical bodies in terms of our sex and gender, (dis)ability status, our cultural and ethnic identifications, and many other factors. These factors also influence our own choices about how we “use” language for various purposes—and how language “uses” or forms us and our views.

Artifacts and Texts

You can think rhetorically about any kind of human-made thing with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose. You’ll often see scholars calling something a “text” even if it’s not a text in the traditional sense (e.g., a billboard, a music video, a commercial). The text often just means the thing being interpreted. We can also call these “texts” artifacts.

When you’re buying a product, that product has a certain audience, and the product is designed and packaged in such a way to appeal to that audience. The decisions of the designers can be analyzed.

When you’re listening to a song or reading a poem, the song or poem uses specific techniques, speaks back to other writers, artists and songs from the past, and has particular structures that come from understanding how the genre of a poem or song works. You can analyze these elements, and that’s rhetorical analysis.

Even societies can have rhetoric. According to philosopher Louis Althusser, the way we think and act are influenced a great deal (some would say entirely) by our culture and the groups we belong to. An ideology is a way of thinking that a particular discourse community has determined to be correct. For example, different groups of people have very different ways of seeing (or analyzing/interpreting) the idea of NFL players kneeling in protest during the U.S. National Anthem. An interesting exercise would be to compare how different groups have “framed” this issue using stories, metaphors, and foundational beliefs about what it means to be a citizen. When you analyze a text or an issue of any kind, you are using various kinds of lenses to help you think with or interpret. The next piece in this book, “Tools for Analyzing Texts,” discusses various kinds of interpretive lenses you can use.

Analysis is not the same thing as expressing an opinion. An opinion is “I like or dislike this.” A rhetorical analysis is “I think it’s doing x, and here’s why I think that.” Everything that was created with the intention of appealing to someone has a rhetoric, and you can do a “rhetorical analysis” of pretty much anything. In short, everything’s an artifact that you can analyze.

Remember: analysis asks you to consider the what (the point of the text), the how (ways the writer makes the point using rhetorical strategies), and the why (the audience, purpose, and exigence or reason for the text). If it was made by a human being and made with a particular intention, it has a rhetoric that we can analyze.

Using a Lens

Meaning, for the purposes of this class, comes from the interpretation of the person consuming it, not the author of it. This meaning has to be supported with clear evidence. So it’s about what we interpret the text to be doing, not “what the author wanted” (unless, one supposes, you knew the author personally, and knew what they wanted—but even then, that would be a different kind of reading and responding). In textual analysis, we talk about what the text suggests.

In academia proper, including at the undergraduate level, students and professional scholars generally interpret material using different perspectives of critical theories or theoretical lenses. And there are many. Each lens has a history, a body of scholarship, and shared terms. (More on various lenses you can use to do rhetorical analysis in “Tools for Analyzing Texts” following this piece.)

Why Do Rhetorical Analysis?

Until the mid-20th century, rhetoric in the European-American tradition was seen as a highly specialized and formalized form of speech that only occurred in high-stakes situations—the courtroom, the pulpit, the political platform. However, more current notions of rhetoric hold that every text and artifact that we encounter on a daily basis attempts to persuade or influence behavior. Rhetoric in this sense is not an extraordinary, dazzling speech, but rather the types of discourses that we compose and interpret everyday: the ads in the subway, the text messages we write, the messages that we take away from posts on social media.

In fact, one could say that one of the most prominent features of modern culture is that we have reached such peak levels of rhetorical saturation. It’s hard to think of a space of freed from persuasion and suggestion. With this in mind, rhetorical analysis can find its subject matter anywhere. It doesn’t need to look to famous speeches from famous people given at historically crucial occasions. Rhetoric analysis can use anything—from instruction manuals on how to build furniture, to embedded advertising in social media platforms, to overt attempts at persuasion—as something to be interpreted in light of the apparent intentions that went into its creation.

Studying rhetoric helps you to discern what the argument is behind something you read, watch, or listen to, and, in turn, to compose something that does what you want it to do. These are key aspects of being a good writer, critical thinker, and skilled communicator.

Work Cited

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1969.