Jackie Grutsch-McKinney
English Department

What is Rhetoric?

Rhetoric is an important tool for both the creation and analysis of writing or speech. Although it may sound intimidating to beginners, when students get even just the basics of it, they realize how it can help in every college class they have. Rhetoric traces its roots back to the ancient Greeks and Aristotle who defined rhetoric as the art of persuasion. Today, we see rhetoric as more than just a study of arguments, but we still borrow from Aristotle his basic tool for thinking about rhetoric: the rhetorical triangle (seen below).

Speaker/Writer
 

(make triangle)
 
 
 

Message/Subject Audience

The triangle (also called the triad) is a way to visualize relationships between the writer (or speaker), audience, and the text (message or subject). It’s in the shape of a triangle to show how interrelated each of these is. For example, what a writer writes—the text—is shaped by the writer’s conception of the reader—the audience. And likewise, what an audience hears from a speaker is influenced by what the audience already knows about the speaker; it makes a difference, for instance, if it’s Hillary Clinton, Dan Rather, or Madonna speaking. The study of rhetoric takes into consideration each of these elements and the relationship between them.

Why Would I Use Rhetoric in the Classroom?

If you’re teaching a class where reading or writing is important, rhetoric can be a helpful tool to help students think more both about what goes into the texts they’re reading and how to make their own writing more effective. It asks that students read texts at a deeper level, and it has them think more consciously about their writing tasks and the choices they make in order to complete them. The good news is that many students learn this basic triangle in their first-year composition classes or in communication courses, so you would be building on knowledge they already have.

How Can I Use Rhetoric in the Classroom?

The best thing to begin with is an introduction (or reminder) of the rhetorical triangle. Bring in a specific text to talk about the elements—print advertisements, articles from the school newspaper, and editorials work well because they’re short and are usually of interest to your students. Have your students find the writer, audience, and message. Ask them how they know this—can they point to it in the text? Then you can talk about the choices the writer may have made if any of the elements were different. How would an ad for Coke change if the audience wasn’t teenagers but moms? What would the editorial writer write differently if she were male or over 65? Doing this activity, your students begin to understand the many choices that they make in their own writing that affects their audience’s reaction.

Then, your students can also use rhetoric to do rhetorical analysis of the reading you assign. For rhetorical analysis, you define the elements of the triangle, and then you look at the relationship between the points (Who is the writer? What do we know about the writer? Who is the audience for this piece? What do we know about the audience? What is this we’re reading—what’s the genre? What language is used? Why? How does the writer feel about this audience? How do we know? How does the audience feel about writer and what the writer is saying? What’s our reaction as an audience?). In this pursuit, you’re not looking for what a text means per se, but rather what a text does.

In addition, you can have your students think, talk, and write about the rhetoric of their own writing assignments. This will have them think about the language they use, the format, the tone as well as the relationship they have to their audience and how they want to sound—who they want to be—in their writing. Asking students who their audience is and what format, language, paragraphing, citation style, cover sheet, page numbering, introduction, content, conclusion, personal examples, etc. that their audience expects (mostly likely you, the instructor) will help them be conscious of these things and get closer to producing the type of writing that you’re expecting.

Your students eventually will be able to do mini-rhetorical analyses on each other’s writing in their peer groups. In the end, teaching your students the basics of rhetoric will give you all a basic vocabulary to talk and think about the complexities of writing.

For more background information and teaching applications, Erika Lindemann’s A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers is an excellent starting point.