Key Terms
The specific features of texts, written or spoken, that cause them to be meaningful, purposeful, and effective for readers or listeners in a given situation.
What is rhetoric?
A text becomes rhetorical only when this reads or listens to it and responds to it.
What is the audience/reader?
The character that a writer or speaker conveys to the audience.
What is persona?
Being skilled at rhetoric =
speaking and writing + these two skills.
What are reading and listening?
In "How to Mark a Book," Mortimer Adler argues that reading a book should be this thing between you and the author.
What is a conversation?
The speaker or writer who uses elements of rhetoric effectively in oral or written text.
What is a rhetor?
This component of the rhetorical triangle needs to be treated fairly, fully, and effectively.
What is the subject?
Word choice, which is viewed on scales of formality/informality, concreteness/abstraction, Latinate derivation/Anglo-Saxon derivation, and denotative/connotative value.
What is diction?
Being skilled at rhetoric =
understanding the main points of what you read + doing this.
What is analyzing why?
In "On Keeping a Private Journal," Henry David Thoreau uses a metaphor to compare human lives to these items.
What are literary works (books)?
The appeal of a text based on the logical structure of its argument or central ideas.
What is logos?
Also known as intention or aim, this is what the rhetor wants to happen as a result of the text.
What is purpose?
What is an enthymeme?
Being skilled at rhetoric =
doing this with compositions + writing them.
What is planning?
In "Judging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets," Benedict Carey explains how new research-driven strategies have decreased the need for good-cop / bad-cop scenarios to leverage confessions. Instead, they are shifting the focus of interrogations from confessions to information-gathering, and from suspects’ behavior to the ___________ of their speech.
What is content?
The appeal of a text to the emotions or interests of the audience.
What is pathos?
Rhetorical transactions always take place within this component—a convergence of time, place, people, events, and motivating forces.
What is context?
The textual features, such as diction and sentence structure, that convey a writer's or speaker's persona.
What is voice?
Being skilled at rhetoric =
Examining a situation + doing this to people.
What is persuading them to take action?
The ________ of Steve Martn's "Writing Is Easy" could accurately be described as "lighthearted," "satirical," and "comedic."
What is tone?
The appeal of a text to the credibility and character of the speaker, writer, or narrator.
What is ethos?
This component is a text classified by its type—for example: email, essay, or advertisement.
What is genre?
An issue, problem, or situation that causes or prompts someone to write or speak.
What is exigence?
The three main purposes in speaking/writing.
What is to inform, to persuade, and to entertain?
The combination of two or more elements in a dramatistic pentad in order to invent material.
What is a ratio?