Rhetoric

• In ancient Greece: "the teaching and practice of persuasive speaking about civic affairs"   Reid accepts this and talks of rhetoric as the study of persuasive discourse about law and public affairs.
• Aristotle's definition is: "the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion."
• Donald C. Bryant, a past professor of Rhetoric at U of Iowa, defined it as: "The art of adapting ideas to people and people to ideas."

• "formal writings and speeches that attempt to persuade popular audiences about matters concerning civic affairs." [Reid]

• deliberative: to accept or reject a proposed policy–a debate about future action; we will study many of these types of speeches.
• forensic: to accept or reject a proposition about past actions [as in the law court where we make a decision about a fact such as guilty or not.]
• epideictic: speeches of praise or blame...speeches that deal with present attitudes toward a person or thing or place; today we talk about it as a special occasion or ceremonial speech.  In class we noted that Inaugural Addresses would be a current example.

What are some ways to approach rhetorical analysis?

Ideological approaches

• You may read the speech to ascertain the ideas of the speaker and/or audience to whom it was addressed.  Sometimes by looking at what is stated by the speaker and sometimes noticing what is not stated, in other words, by noting what is assumed that the audience already believes.
• Here Reid notes the syllogism–that foundation logic–more often seen as the enthymeme.
• To find out more about the syllogism you can look at the notes from SpCm 212 here.

• extrinsic approaches focus on things external to the speech.
• it begins by asking what was the speaker's purpose?
• What were the audience's attitudes about the speaker's purpose?
• What audience attitudes constituted an available means of persuasion?  What did they hold in common with the speaker?
• Intrinsic approaches focus on things internal to the speech.
• it is the close textual analysis of discourse, but is more than describing or summarizing the discourse.
• Good intrinsic approaches can follow a classical system of analysis
• invention: the content or persuasive appeals of the speech; here is where one would examine arguments, the Logos of the speech; or the Ethos--the credibility appeals of the speech; or the Pathos--the emotional appeals of the speech.
• disposition, selecting and organizing the appeals.  Consider patterns of organization such as topical, problem-solution, causal, chronological as well as how clear the ideas are in the speech; how are the ideas connected to one another?
• style, the wording of the discourse--attention to language use especially to stylistic devices such as: metaphor, simile, antithesis, parallelism, repetition, etc.  For more information on stylistic devices as well as some examples go here.
• memory, tools for memorizing the speech--or today tools for prompting memory such as note cards, Powerpoint, teleprompters etc.
• delivery, issues of verbal and nonverbal delivery

• Also known as genre criticism this approach looks at the things that speeches delivered in similar situations have in common.
• It holds that some factors of some speeches are determined by the expectations or constraints of the situation.  For example, the inaugural address must do particular tasks as should the commencement speech.  Sometimes people who study a genre do it to show what the speeches hold in common--what they must do because of the situation, but other times they will examine how an individual rhetor goes beyond the contraints to produce something original and effective.

• often look at several discourses over time to see the emergence or dissent, inception, maturation, termination, and post-termination of a social movement.
• this is most often a special form of ideological criticism as one is often looking for the development of the ideas of the social movement.

• analyze the social impact of speeches or rhetorical discourse.
• One reason scholars study media violence is to analyze how it effects people.  You can look at a speech this way too.
• For example we will study some speeches of women who argued that women should have the vote because women will be better able to clean up politics or to make sure that the government doesn't overlook the needs of children.  In other words, they seem to have argued that women should have the vote because women are essentially different from men–Reid has that bit about women as morally superior.  Now what are the unintended consequences of that argument?  If you get the vote because women are especially concerned or good at or it is their place to take care of children [as destined by God or biology] then you are reinforcing arguments about women's proper role in society as caretakers and perhaps limiting society's ability to think outside those deterministic boxes and let each person find his or her own strengths.  So one might "critique" a speech for having negative social consequences.