Some thoughts on thinking rhetorically

"The Idaho Debates will help you cut through all the rhetoric." This promotion spot could be heard on Idaho Public TV stations during pre- election days this fall. Rhetoric. What is it, anyway, and why do people say such terrible things about it?

The IPTV ad illustrates the most common idea of what rhetoric is. If you have to "cut through all the rhetoric" to get to the substance of an issue, then the substance is not in the rhetoric. The rhetoric is a kind of smoke screen, or a trick with mirrors meant to deceive. It's what speakers do to "make the worse case seem the better," as Socrates complained against the Sophist rhetoricians (the "bad name" of rhetoric is at least that old). Our own century has seen plenty of the dark side of rhetoric, from Hitler's Germany to Rwanda. Rhetoric has always been a tool that can serve either good or evil, as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle knew.

The Sophists appear to have taught that winning and argument is the main thing, more important than seeking the truth. After all (as John Ramage and John Bean put it in Writing Arguments, 3rd ed.), "How `true' is a truth if you can't get anybody to accept it?" Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, countered that truth exists in an absolute way, and the only proper use of rhetoric is to lead people to it.

Aristotle is generally credited with trying to find some middle ground between the extreme positions taken by the Sophists on one hand and Socrates and Plato on the other. Aristotle taught that there are many areas of human experience where the truth is hard or impossible to determine; he took the domain of rhetoric to be uncertainty and probability, particularly in the law courts and the deliberations of democratic government. People should use rhetoric to try to persuade each other, so that in the end, after hearing arguments on all sides of a question, they might arrive at the best course of action. Put another way, rhetoric is a way to affirm values and hopefully avoid armed conflict: it's better that people work out their differences with words rather than with swords or guns.

Formal rhetoric was practiced long before it was codified by the Sophists, Aristotle, and their successors. The Iliad, which existed in written form four centuries before the earliest rhetoric teachers, is a case in point. It is as interesting for its use of rhetoric as for its poetry, tragedy, humor, or epic scope. Some of the most dramatic scenes are those in which the characters attempt to persuade other characters: Agamemnon's disastrous attempt to rally the troops; Nestor, Ajax, and Odysseus trying to persuade Achilles to rejoin the battle; Hera seducing Zeus to distract him from the war; Priam persuading Achilles to give up the body of Hector. Clearly the Greeks had a long-standing fascination with persuasive speech-making.

Everyone practices rhetoric

Another assumption behind the slogan "cut through all the rhetoric" is that rhetoric is only what certain people use, such as politicians and orators, and they only use it on certain occasions. But most rhetorical theorists today contend that everybody uses rhetoric. In the academic community we would do well, all of us, faculty and students, to think of ourselves as rhetors -- even as rhetoricians, students of rhetoric. Because in some ways we are.

George Kennedy, a leading scholar of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, has provided a fascinating way to conceive of rhetoric. He proposes that rhetoric might be defined as a form of energy, the "energy inherent in communication." Kennedy identifies four kinds of rhetorical energy:

the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message.

From the idea of rhetoric as energy, Kennedy goes on to propose that rhetoric is prior to speech: both in the sense that rhetorical energy "has to exist in the speaker before speech can take place," and in a historical-biological sense.

Speech would not have evolved among human beings unless rhetoric already existed. In fact, rhetoric is manifest in all animal life and existed long before the evolution of human beings. ("A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 25 no. 1 (l992), pp. 1- 21).

Anyone who has lived with a cat or a dog can think of numerous ways these animals practice rhetoric in Kennedy's sense -- exert rhetorical energy -- to express their feelings and to get humans to do what they want. In similar but much more complex ways, we humans practice rhetoric on each other all the time.

When we think of rhetoric we may think first of speech. But rhetoric has always been a concern of both speech and writing. In ancient times the primary goal of a student of rhetoric was to become an orator, but the training involved copious writing. Some trained rhetors practiced rhetoric by writing speeches for others, much as Presidential speech writers do today.

Rhetoric is more than "mere" persuasion, but always persuasive

For the ancients, rhetoric's domain was mainly discourse aimed to change people's minds. But the domain has shifted many times in subsequent ages. In the Middle Ages, rhetoric was concerned with sermons and letter- writing. In the Renaissance, its domain was extended to poetry and all else that we call "creative" writing. During the Enlightenment, rhetoricians and natural philosophers studied the role of language and rhetoric in the making of scientific knowledge.

Today, many rhetoricians argue that most speech and virtually all writing must be regarded as not only rhetorical, but as persuasive in some important ways. Even when rhetors do not intend to persuade outright, still they must be concerned with their credibility; with what their audiences already know and needs to know; with how their audiences are likely to feel about the subject; with how to begin, how to end, how to arrange the middle -- all these and more, to earn the greatest possible cooperation from their readers. We could consider everything from poetry to pie recipes to parts lists as being rhetorical in some sense -- at least to the extent that the writer has to earn the trust and cooperation of the audience. And it involves decisions, as Erica Lindemann (A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 3rd ed.) explains.

Discourse that affects an audience, that informs, moves, delights, and teaches, has a rhetorical aim. . . . Rhetoric implies choices, for both the speaker or writer and the audience. When we practice rhetoric we make decisions about our subject, audience, point of view, purpose, and message. . . . Furthermore, the audience must have a choice in responding to the message, must be able to adopt, modify, or reject it. . . . [R]hetoric is inoperative when the audience lacks the power to respond freely to the message. . . . A burglar who holds a gun to my head . . . may induce my cooperation, but not by means of rhetoric.

Even the writer of a parts list has to decide on nomenclature, arrangement, and the appearance of the list on the page or computer screen for the greatest clarity -- all rhetorical decisions. And the reader cooperates by trusting the reliability of the information.

Rhetoric is influenced by culture

Though Kennedy's characterization of rhetoric makes it seem "natural," we have to qualify that view by realizing that the nature of rhetoric varies considerably with the cultural context. Cultures vary over space and over time. What was true of rhetoric for the ancient Greeks and Romans is not necessarily true for us. We can apply much of their work directly to our own rhetorical practices, but we also have to modify much of it to make it fit. For instance, two of the main "arts" or rhetoric, memory and delivery, have taken entirely new forms in this age of word processing and desktop publishing.

People moving from one culture to another must cross not only a language barrier, but also a cultural barrier -- part of which is rhetorical. Consider what some of our Asian students must learn. Whereas Western cultures tend to prize originality and individuality in student writing, Asian cultures tend to prize preservation of cultural values. To Western teachers, the writing of Asian students might look conformist and clich‚d. Also, Westerners want their writing (not in all genres, but in exposition and argument) to drive forward, from beginning to end, in a linear fashion. Asian writing is more likely to spiral on itself, reiterating ideas in various ways. Many students who come to us from foreign countries have to learn not only to speak and write in English, but also to follow the rhetorical conventions of a foreign culture.

We may speak of cultural difference in other ways, too. Each academic discipline, in a sense, is a culture -- or in current popular terminology, a discourse community. Those of us who have not had the adapt to a different ethnic culture may still have experienced, in school or some other environment, the shock of entering the "Burkean parlor."

The phrase "Burkean parlor" comes from Kenneth Burke's parable of the parlor in The Philosophy of Literary Form.

Imagine you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

The "Burkean parlor" might be taken as a parable for a lot of things: for entering the culture of a different country (as many of our students have done), for entering college or a new job, perhaps for life itself.

It could also stand for the experience of being initiated into a new academic discipline, at the level of a core course or a major. Consider the following scenario. A student (and that could be any of us) tries to read a journal article in an unfamiliar field. It could be in physiology, education psychology, rhetorical theory. The student struggles with the article, rereads paragraphs, writes notes all over the margins trying to understand the gist of what's being said. In the following months the student reads more books and articles, talks with people in the discipline, listens to lectures, keeps trying to learn more, tries not to forget too much. A year later the student happens across the original article, reads it again easily, and wonders, What was so hard about that? The student has been initiated into the discourse community and is getting ready to join the conversation.

Teachers and students as rhetors/rhetoricians

Few of us on the faculty would call ourselves rhetoricians. But all of us function as rhetoricians when we study the ways language is used in our own disciples: whether to inform, persuade, move the emotions, or move people to action. When we study the organization and style of journal articles and conference presentations in order to write and speak in a similar or different manner, we are being rhetoricians. When we teach our students how to write in the discipline, how to handle the conventions of subject matter, arrangement, language, format, and documentation, we are being rhetoricians.

It might be interesting to think of the speaking and writing we do when we teach as rhetoric. For example, what is the rhetoric of the syllabi we hand out? We could apply Aristotle's three types of appeals. Ethos: what image do our syllabi project of who we are? Or want our students to think we are? Pathos: what do the syllabi tell students they should feel about the teacher, the course, the work? Logoi: what information do the syllabi convey about the course? What do they withhold? We could ask similar questions of our writing assignments. What rhetorical contexts do they set up to help students feel they are saying something important to other people? (See Word Works #80.)

It might be interesting, too, to think of our students' writing as rhetoric, and help them understand it as rhetoric. For they have to deal with similar decisions. Ethos: how can I establish credibility, to show I've "done my homework" on the subject I'm writing about? What face should I present to the reader: that of a student? a professional in training (Word Works #55-56)? Pathos: who are the audiences for the writing? What can I assume the audiences already know and feel about the subject (#76, 77)? Logoi: how can I make sure my information is complete and my arguments logical (#78)?

The Word Works issues mentioned above discuss different aspects of the rhetoric of faculty and student writing. In fact, we would do well to think of most of our communication as rhetoric, as a series of decisions and strategies for earning the cooperation of our audience.

RL

The editorial team wishes to thank Mike Hassett for reviewing a draft of this Word Works issue.