Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [16]
a rhetoric is a systematic body of techniques for coming to understand and find things to say about a subject (invention), and
rhetoric is also the term used to describe a speaker’s or writer’s way of using language to appeal to a particular audience.
It is from the second definition—rhetoric as a means of arranging language in order to persuade—that the negative definition of rhetoric has come. But finding a way of saying something so that others might hear and consider it does not necessarily mean that people skilled at rhetoric are puffed up tricksters.
The various academic disciplines you will study have rhetorics, which is a very helpful way to understand them. The struggles we all have with writing are to a significant extent rhetorical, because writers are concerned not just with what they want to say but with how to say it so as to be best understood by their target audiences.
It follows that stylistic decisions are always also rhetorical decisions. This is why writers cannot rely on a single set of style prescriptions for all occasions. Different styles have different rhetorical implications and effects. (See the short take on Style Guides.)
Two Key Terms
Here are two key terms from classical rhetoric that you will encounter in this book:
Heuristic: Although this word has other meanings in disciplines such as engineering, in classical rhetoric a heuristic was an aid to discovery. It comes from the Greek word heuriskein, which means “to find out” or “discover.” Heuriskein is the Greek equivalent of the Latin word, invenire, which means “to find” or “to come upon” (Crowley 20). This book’s analytical methods, such as the ones you will find in the two Toolkits (Chapters 2 and 4), are heuristics.
Commonplace: Rhetorical training provided rhetors—those who were skilled at public speaking—with pre-determined arguments called places that might fit any number of situations. The Greek word for “place”—topoi—gives us our word topic. Our word “commonplace” is descended from the way classical rhetoric treats commonplaces: as commonly held beliefs.
Here is a 20th-century definition of the term commonplace from an essay by David Bartholomae called “Inventing the University.” Bartholomae argues that college writing—especially writing in the academic disciplines—requires students to learn not just forms and styles, but disciplinary commonplaces, the commonly held ways of thinking in the various academic communities that make up the university:
A ‘commonplace,’ then, is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration. We all use commonplaces to orient ourselves in the world; they provide a point of reference and a set of ‘prearticulated’ explanations that are readily available to organize and interpret experience” (24).
This is a useful way of understanding what you are being asked to acquire in a college or graduate school education, the commonly held concepts that each discipline accepts as givens.
A rhetorical orientation is especially prominent in the following places in Writing Analytically:
short take on Writing in the Disciplines in this chapter, which explains why you should think about disciplinary formats rhetorically
Chapter 3, where analysis is defined rhetorically
Chapters 15 and 16, where paper organization and types of introductory and concluding paragraphs are explained rhetorically
Chapters 17 and 18, where word choice and sentence structure are treated rhetorically
WRITING ABOUT READING: BEYOND “BANKING”
Both the amount of reading and what you are expected to do with it will undergo significant upgrades in college. It is fairly common