Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [16]
Today, training in rhetoric continues to be especially helpful for all people who wish to enter public discourse and contribute to civil debate on key issues. In one of the best current textbooks on classical rhetoric, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (Pearson/Longman 2004), authors Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee say about rhetoric that “its use allows people to make important choices without resorting to less palatable means of persuasion—coercion or violence” (2).
Unfortunately, the word “rhetoric” has suffered a serious decline in popular perception. To some people, rhetoric has come to mean something like empty, willfully deceitful, and sometimes just plain dishonest uses of language. People who think of rhetoric in this way will say things like “It was all just rhetoric,” that is, all talk and no substance.
In order to make use of all that a rhetorical orientation toward writing and thinking can offer, you will first need to understand rhetoric as something other than a way of dressing up lies and making poor decisions sound respectable. We offer the following two ways of thinking about rhetoric—not just the rhetorics of the ancient Greeks, but the various kinds of rhetorics that have been invented since:
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,