1310 Exam I

Terms

100

Content and relationship meaning

Look up

200

Identity

refers to individual and social categories people identify with as well as those categories that are attributed to them by others.

Primary identities are consistent and enduring identifications in our lives.

Secondary identities stem from roles or characteristics that are more likely to change over the course of our lives.

Identities can exist at the individual or social level.

Identity is both fixed and dynamic.

Identities are shaped through interactions with others.

Identities are tied to historical, social, and cultural environments.

300

Cicero

• Cicero was a great orator (public speaker) who believed rhetoric should be used only for the public good and found that public speaking typically strives to inform, to entertain, and to persuade.

400

Augustine

• represented the Catholic Church’s thought that rhetoric could be used to represent divine truth.

500

What Is Rhetoric?

• The specific definition of rhetoric varies based upon the person offering the definition and the historical period in which the definition is offered.
• Every rhetor (a person or institution addressing a large audience) holds a social position that determines his/her right to speak or to access civic speaking spaces.

Chapter 1

100

What are the 7 components of Human Communication?

Message creation involves converting ideas into messages (encoding) and interpreting meaning from messages (decoding)

Meaning Creation

• Content meaning includes denotative and connotative significance.
• Relationship meaning describes who parties are to one another.

Setting refers to the location and environment of the communication.

Participants are the people engaged in communication.

Channels are the means by which messages are transmitted (i.e., radio, e-mail, face-to-face, etc.)

Noise is any stimulus that interferes with the quality of a message.

Feedback refers to verbal or nonverbal response to a message.

200

The Synergetic Model

A transactional model views communication as occurring when two or more people create meaning as they respond to one another and their environment.

• It is based on the premise that individual, societal forces, contexts, and cultures are important to a communication experience.

300

Ethics

• Ethics are a system of moral principles by which actions are judged as good or bad, right or wrong.

400

Communication Ethics

Communication ethics describes the standards of right and wrong that one applies to messages that are sent and received.

• Absolute ethical standards would apply equally across all communication situations, while relative ethical standards would vary across each situation and for each person.
• 
  

500

The Rhetor: Rhetoric’s Point of Origin

• The study of rhetoric acknowledges the relationship between societal and individual forces, such as artistic proofs, position in society, and relationship to the audience.
• B.   The proof of ethos has to do with the credibility of the rhetor.
• C.   The proof of pathos has to do with a rhetor’s use of emotions in public communication. The use of emotions can help align the audience with a particular perspective, if used effectively.
• D.  The proof of logos has to do with the use of rational appeals in a rhetor’s public communication. Logos refers to all use of reasoning, not only logical arguments.

Chapter 2

100

Contemporary Approaches to Studying Human Communication

There are three main ways to study communication: the social science, interpretive, and critical approaches.

200

The Social Science Approach

• The social science approach focuses on the individual or, less frequently, the dyad.
• Predicting communication patterns is a strength of this approach, but a weakness is that human communication is not always predictable outside of a controlled setting, nor is it only influenced by individual factors.
• Quantitative methods

300

The Interpretive Approach

• This approach focuses on the individual in specific situations, from the perspective of the communicator.
• The approach looks at the uniqueness or creativity of human behavior in constructing individual realities, rather than the predictability of peoples’ actions.
• Qualitative methods: content analysis, ethnography, rhetorical analysis
•  A strength of the interpretive approach is its in-depth understanding of communication in specific situations, but a limitation is that it usually does not include a large number of participants, which prevents researchers from making generalizable conclusions. Another limitation is that interpretations may not be correct because researchers are outsiders to the communities they study.

400

The Critical Approach

• The critical approach is interested in how societal forces such as power and hierarchy interact with individual forces, with the goal of changing society for the better.
• Qualitative methods: ethnography or textual analysis.
•  Limitations include the lack of attention to face-to-face interaction and an inability to generalize conclusions.

500

Content analysis

Look Up

Chapter 3

100

The Importance of Identity

Our identity influences the communication we will use in an interaction.

Interactions help shape the identities of the participants.

Identity is prominent in expectations and behaviors during intercultural communication.

Individual and societal forces converge within the concepts of identity and meaning-creation in communication.

200

The Individual and Identity

Symbolic interactionism 

Reflected appraisals/looking glass self.

Social comparison (evaluations of ourselves in relation to certain reference groups).

Explicit communication about expectations, a self-fulfilling prophecy, shapes our understanding of who we are and what roles we are expected to fulfill.

300

Symbolic interactionism

states that meaning is found only through social interaction with others.

400

Reflected appraisals/looking glass self

is a term used to explain how people’s sense of self stems from their observations of the way others view them.

500

Aristotle

• viewed rhetoric as a way to discover all possible means of persuasion in a given situation.

Chapter 12

100

The Importance of Rhetoric

• Rhetoric is communication used to influence the attitudes or behavior of others.
• Rhetoric can help strengthen democratic societies by enabling people to think critically and make decisions together.
• Rhetoric can help people pursue justice, through judicial systems or through public opinion and action.
• Rhetoric helps people clarify their own beliefs and actions.

200

Rhetoric as a field of scholarship is useful for four reasons:

• The study of rhetoric helps people understand viewpoints surrounding large social issues.
• The study of rhetoric helps people to understand their own and others’ cultures.
• The study of rhetoric can help people critically evaluate persuasive messages and respond to these messages appropriately.
• The study of rhetoric can help people become better communicators.

300

Sophists

• taught persuasive speaking skills to use for matters of urgency, and that truth was relative to the situation.

400

Plato

• rejected the relativist approach and believed that speakers should use rhetoric only to search for universal principles of truth.

500

 The Individual, Rhetoric, and Society

• Distinct social, cultural, and technological contexts should be considered in the study of the rhetorical tradition of any group.
• In the United States today, four main functions arise from most rhetorical events (events generating a significant amount of public discourse).
• 1.      Each event will bring out a range of rhetors seeking to explain the event and to reaffirm cultural values.
• 2.      Rhetorical events can increase democratic participation among citizens.
• a.      Deliberative rhetoric functions specifically to argue for what a society should do in the future, and allows citizens an opportunity for critical listening and decision-making.
• b.      The public sphere is the arena in which deliberative decision making occurs.
• 3.      Rhetorical events can help bring about justice.
• a.      Forensic rhetoric is a type of public communication seeking specifically to achieve justice.
• The use of forensic rhetoric dates back to ancient Greece.
• Although we find it easier to see the “just choice” in hindsight, forensic rhetoric enables an ongoing discussion to occur at the societal level regarding standards for justice.
• 4.   Rhetorical events can prompt social change.
• 5.   If mobilization occurs through rhetoric, it can lead to a social movement, or a large, organized body of people who are attempting to create social change.