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C. The Rhetoric of Form

Thus far, we have talked about form primarily in relation to the search for meaning. We’ve demonstrated that some forms of arranging ideas (5 paragraph form, for example) interfere with a writer’s ability to have ideas in the first place. Whatever form one uses, we’ve argued, it has to be flexible enough to allow ideas to evolve. The point is that there are various factors influencing a writer’s decisions about forms and formats. These include both the demands of the subject itself and those of the discourse community within which the writing seeks to communicate.

We now wish to expand on the role that a writer’s sense of his or her audience plays in determining the formal presentation of ideas. We have entitled this section “The Rhetoric of Form” to emphasize the effects that a chosen form has on an audience—on its receptiveness to a writer’s ideas, for example.

The study of rhetoric is primarily concerned with the various means at a writer’s (or speaker’s) disposal for influencing the views of an audience. In early rhetorics, Greek and Roman writers divided these means into three large categories—ethos, logos, and pathos—that you encountered earlier in this book in our definition of analysis (see Chapter 3). We’ll use these categories for organizing what we wish to say about the relationship between formal structures and audience.

Ethos refers to the character of the speaker or writer. If an audience perceives a speaker to be ethical and rational, it will be inclined to perceive her or his argument as ethical and rational too. Thus, writers attend to the kind of persona they become on the page, the personality conveyed by the words and the tone of the words. In classical orations—the grandparent of virtually all speech and essay formats—the first section was always allotted to particular means of establishing an appealing persona, one whom an audience would want to listen to and believe. (See the next section, “The Classical Oration Format”.)

Logos refers to the character of the thinking itself: the rational component, evident in the presence and development of the ideas.

Pathos includes appeals to the audience’s emotions—which writing does all of the time, whether a writer wants it to or not. It is possible to think of the form of a paper in terms of how it might negotiate the likes and dislikes, the hopes and fears, of its assumed audience. If, for instance, you were to present an argument in favor of a position with which you knew in advance that your audience was predisposed to disagree, you would probably choose to delay making a case for this position until you had found various ways of earning that audience’s trust. By contrast, when presenting an argument to an audience of like-minded people, you would be much more likely to start out with the position you planned to advance.

THE CLASSICAL ORATION FORMAT

All-purpose formats have been around a long time. Some are very simple. Others are more elaborate. The simplest organizing scheme consists of three parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. The format of the classical oration has a more elaborate form:

exordium, introduction

narratio, statement of facts

divisio, outline of the points or steps in the argument

confirmatio, proof of the case

confutatio, refutation of opposing arguments

peroratio, conclusion

If you read or listen to (for example) political speeches, you will find that many of them follow this order. This is because the form of the classical oration is suited primarily to argument—to the kind of writing in which the writer makes a case for or against something and refutes opposing arguments. As we have been demonstrating throughout this book, analytical thinking does not fit well into formats calling for an upfront statement of a predetermined claim, which is then simply proven to be correct. And so the book offers alternative organizational schemes that allow the space