Rhetorical Analysis Research Articles

”Det känns inte jättebra”

“Doesn’t feel great” – how digital technology can promote children's telling’s in child investigations The aim was to study children’s participation in child investigations both when a digital application was used and when it was not used. Theoretically, the children’s participation was explored through positioning- and rhetorical analyses of the documentation. In investigative texts where the digital tool was not used, the children’s perspective was presented, but with a lower degree of agency. Two ways of motivating evidence have been identified. One is to alternate the official text, which contains theoretical concepts such as risk and protection factors, with more general descriptions from the child's situation. In the second approach, the genre of authority has been used together with the child’s own words so that the child is given more agency in the investigative text. The proposals for decisions are in both cases presented from the authority genre and legitimised via “the child's best interest” and “risk and protection factors” as well as through weaving in witnesses as a rhetorical resource, where children’s voices might be used as evidence. When comparing child investigations with or without the use of the digital tool, the assessments have similar illations. However, a digital tool adapted to children’s perspectives can increase participation in terms of their agency and presence in the investigative text.

Revising Writing Assignments in Response to Generative AI

The author describes how she revised writing assessments in the university’s first-year writing sequence to emphasize rhetorical analysis of multimodal texts, prompts to which generative AI and ChatGPT struggle to respond.

“What it is exactly that circulates”: Affective value, re/production, and rhetorical exchange

Revising Marxist theories of circulation with affect theory, this article establishes a new model of rhetorical analysis that positions rhetorical exchange as a circulatory infrastructure of late capitalism. By measuring the value produced by rhetors and audiences in rhetorical exchange, we can see how the daily rhetorical activity of neoliberal subjects captures our behavior, positioning us a raw material for late capitalists. This new theory of rhetorical circulation is tested and revised by a qualitative study on the mundane communication of neoliberal subjects, in this case, the group chat of one fantasy football league. Fantasy football communication creates an ambient backdrop for its users, leading to quotidian rhetorical exchanges in clearly defined social networks. The study shows the contours of rhetorical exchange in one league's GroupMe chat. I found that, in exchange, subjects transform their investments into social and cultural capital (Bourdieu's capital forms). Ultimately, subjects can produce what I call affective capital, a uniquely neoliberal capital form. I find that the immense value of affective capital produced by league members in rhetorical exchange points to the reasons why neoliberal subjects repeatedly return to platforms that harvest our data.

Retorika Krisis: Analisis Pidato Presiden Indonesia dan Korea Selatan pada Tragedi Kanjuruhan dan Itaewon

This study compares the responses of the Indonesian and South Korean presidents to man-made disasters and investigates the presence of shift-blaming in their speeches. Utilizing Rhetorical Analysis (RA) to examine how speeches are constructed to achieve specific objectives, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to explore historical and social contexts, the study focuses on President Jokowi’s speeches following the Kanjuruhan tragedy and President Yoon’s speeches after the Itaewon disaster. RA delves into the rhetorical strategies, including invention, disposition, style, and delivery, to analyze how each president uses ethos, logos, and pathos to construct their messages. CDA further examines the discourse of shift-blaming characteristic of autocratic tendencies. The findings reveal differences in how each president addresses responsibility and accountability. While the trace of shift blaming is prominently evident in Jokowi’s speeches, Yoon’s speeches are characterized by a strong emphasis on image-saving. This comparative analysis provides insights into the distinct communication strategies employed by leaders in response to man-made disasters.

Holy Kaaba Names in the Holy Qur’ān: A Stylistic Study

The current study attempted to stylistically examine the names of the Holy Kaaba mentioned in the Holy Qur’ān in order to reveal the rhetorical expressions of each name. The study intended to reveal that each name of Kaaba is related to its linguistic and lexical meanings. It reflects the accuracy of the Holy Qur’ān to link these names with their meanings. Moreover, the study also focused on the most important structures and systems of the verses that encompass these names. Scholars believe that considering the Qur’ānic context is one aspect of the Qur’ānic Ijaz (inimitability). The rhetorical analysis of a text depends on the stylistic view of all its facets. Every name of Kaaba is fixed in its position and designed to fit in its context, based on the preference rule. Thus, the preference of the name comes in that particular position, not in the other one, since each name has its own definite aspects and characteristics which harmonize with the verses’ systems and contexts.

A Text-centred rhetorical analysis of 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16

A Text-centred rhetorical analysis of 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16

Desiring God and Christian Hedonism: awakening an immanent joy

ABSTRACT In the following rhetorical analysis, the contemporary evangelical philosophy called Christian Hedonism is examined. This philosophy was initiated by John Piper during the eighties through the now classic text Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Using rhetorical conceptions of immanence and transcendence, the artefact demonstrates a desire to transcend the contemporary bounds of evangelicalism through the immanent substance of joy. By challenging Kantian philosophy, which rejects emotions, Piper awakens interlocutors to an eligible process of transcendence within the then metaphysical dialectic of conservative evangelicalism. Through immanence, incongruity emerges allowing, most significantly, for suffering to become synonymous with joy thus giving rhetorical scholars further insight into the rhetorical inner workings of this modern day Christian philosophy.

Verses of Impossibility in the Holy Quran: A Grammatical and Rhetorical Analysis

Verses of impossibility are those that refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use, things that are impossible to find or futile efforts. Impossibilities can be classified into logical, physical, causal, nomological, temporary, permanent, partial, total, objective or subjective impossibility. This study sought to analyze verses of impossibility in the Holy Quran, their grammatical structure, rhetorical features, types of questions and conditional, emphatic, and/or negative particles used. Results of the analysis showed two kinds of impossibility (i) those in which Allah challenges the disbelievers and those in which the disbelievers ask the Prophets for what they consider impossible demands. In addition, verses of impossibility in the current study use a combination of grammatical structures and rhetorical devices that mainly contain conditional sentences beginning with conditional particles أن /?an/ (if), لو ,حتى /Hatta:/ (until), لولا /laula:/ (if), negative, imperative, interrogative, and emphatic structures, few modals and rhetorical questions, some metaphors, hyperbole, antitheses and counterfactuals to describe challenges, futile efforts, stubbornness of the disbelievers and their incongruous behavior. They also focus on logical, temporary and permanent impossibilities. Other rhetorical features of the Holy Quran, such as antiphrasis, asyndeton, cadence, chiasmus, epizeuxis, equivoque, isocolon, palindrome, polyptoton, and synecdoche are still open for further investigation by future researchers.

Comparing verbal and visual rhetoric – and the danger of “empirical shorthands”

Abstract This paper will evaluate the quantitative content analysis of visual rhetoric which has been put forward by George Rossolatos in the context of audio-visuality and marketing research. Rossolatos bases his taxonomy of visual rhetorical figures on Groupe µ’s adaptation of classical rhetoric in Rhétorique génerale (1970). With the aim of creating a systematic model for marketing analysis, he and his collaborators have coded and classified an extensive number of audiovisual commercials from the top international strata of economically valuable brands. For comparison, I have during a period of four years given undergraduates the task of collecting and categorizing a minimum of ten audio-visual commercials, each of which should exemplify one of the figures referred to by Rossolatos. The outcomes of the task indicate that a random explorative study with a minimum of operationalization and training of coders is enough for obtaining results akin to those reported by Rossolatos. This may be regarded as a positive outcome from a pedagogical point of view, but it may also raise the suspicion that Rossolatos’s criteria are merely intuitive. If the incidence of visual rhetorical figures is to be studied as an independent content variable of audio-visual enunciations, the values/figures should be described with greater caution.

Strategies in Communicating and Enforcing Covid-19 Measures: A Rhetorical Analysis

The emergence of the COVID-19 virus in late 2019 initiated a global crisis, leading to millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. Governments worldwide implemented various measures to curb the spread of the virus, including lockdowns, social distancing, and hygiene protocols. In response to these measures, leaders employed persuasive language techniques to encourage compliance and reassure citizens. This study explores the linguistic strategies used by four national leaders—Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, and Uhuru Kenyatta—in their speeches addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on the rhetorical strategies employed, including ethos, logos, and pathos, as well as linguistic devices such as metaphors and enumeration. The findings of this study show that leaders strategically utilize persuasive language to convey information, evoke emotions, and inspire collective action. The study underscores the importance of understanding linguistic persuasion in effective communication during crises and highlights the relevance of classical rhetorical strategies in contemporary political discourse.

Is Genre Enough? A Theory of Genre Signaling as Generative AI Rhetoric

ABSTRACT OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students’ experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were “consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication.” Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of “writing degree zero” (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

Critical Rhetoric Meets Community-Based Participatory Research

ABSTRACT This project responds to a set of methodological challenges for the critical commitments of rhetorical fieldwork and investigates how community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods can help address them. As an example, we draw on Bailey Flynn’s CBPR research with Resilience, a not for-profit “rape crisis center” that provides services and therapy to thousands each year in Illinois. CBPR, like participatory critical rhetoric (PCR) methods, privileges field data as objects of rhetorical analysis. Unlike PCR and other approaches, CBPR methods prioritize the formalization of collaborative relationships with community stakeholders at every stage of research. We argue that greater integration of CBPR methods in rhetorical field methods will aid in privileging the epistemological perspectives of community stakeholders, solidifying critical communication scholarship’s commitment to conducting research with consequences, and providing a common ground for interdisciplinary exchange between critically trained rhetoric scholars and qualitative communication researchers.

Bridging gaps in image meme research: A multidisciplinary paradigm for scaling up qualitative analyses

AbstractThis paper outlines a multidisciplinary framework (Digital Rhetorical Ecosystem or DRE3) for scaling up qualitative analyses of image memes. First, we make a case for applying rhetorical theory to examine image memes as quasi‐arguments that promote claims on a variety of political and social issues. Next, we argue for integrating rhetorical analysis of image memes into an ecological framework to trace interaction and evolution of memetic claims as they coalesce into evidence ecosystems that inform public narratives. Finally, we apply a computational framework to address the particular problem of claim identification in memes at large scales. Our integrated framework answers the recent call in information studies to highlight the social, political, and cultural attributes of information phenomena, and bridges the divide between small‐scale qualitative analyses and large‐scale computational analyses of image memes. We present this theoretical framework to guide the development of research questions, processes, and computational architecture to study the widespread and powerful influence of image memes in shaping consequential public beliefs and sentiments.

“Crafty” Rhetoric

Building on mental health rhetoric research (MHRR), I explore how legal advocates in non-profit organizations guide survivors of domestic abuse in obtaining orders for protection (OFPs). State statutes not only dictate what a petition for an OFP must contain, but these statutes and resulting documents also reflect cultural and structural biases about domestic abuse. Through rhetorical analysis of state statutes and personal interviews with legal advocates in this inductive and qualitative study, I discovered that these advocates engage in subversive rhetorical intervention, what the advocates call “crafty” intervention. Such intervention is designed to meet the requirements of state statutes for an OFP and also provide a way for survivors to tell their stories in their own way. This intervention sets the stage for helping survivors heal from the trauma of domestic abuse, convincing judges that survivors need OFPs to stay safe, and demonstrating to state legislators that domestic abuse statutes may be too restrictive.

Concept of Stigma in American Psychiatry

This essay presents a rhetorical analysis of how the concept of stigma has functioned in American psychiatric discourse by tracing the concept across nearly two centuries of publications issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Specifically, I analyze how the concept of stigma circulates in discourses that seek to (re)establish psychiatry as a moral and scientific enterprise by managing discontinuities that potentially threaten this desired professional status. These discourses perpetually reconstitute psychiatry’s institutional identity through processes of emplacement, or recurrent spatiotemporal figurations that generate a sense of the present as placed in time. My analysis identifies three spatiotemporal figurations, or chronotopes, that persistently cluster around the concept of stigma as it circulates in psychiatric discourse: emergence, approach, and elevation. These chronotopes establish and maintain psychiatry’s professional identity by recursively (re)orienting the present against stigma, and toward an imminent future characterized by the fulfillment of psychiatry’s scientific and humanitarian mission.

Exploring disciplinary authors’ conflict negotiation in published research article discussions

Research article (RA) discussions require authors to underline new research findings through negotiating conflict, known as academic conflict (AC), with a specific strand of literature. However, AC has been either inadequately represented in particular disciplines, or left unnoticed across disciplines in academic writing research. This study follows a cross-disciplinary perspective to examine and compare AC negotiation in published medical and applied linguistics RA discussions based on Hunston’s framework. A specialised corpus consisting of 60 RAs, 30 from each discipline, from prestigious journals was screened for AC frequency and recurrent features through manual rhetorical analysis. The findings revealed little variation in overall AC realisation across the two disciplines. In terms of AC components, medical RAs included frequent proposed claims and recurrent conflict resolution features, indicating authors’ tendency to overuse self-interpretations in arguing against previous claims. By contrast, applied linguistics authors relied more on opposed claim components to discuss new findings and resolve research tensions. These findings help enrich our understanding of AC realisations across discipline RAs, which in turn might offer helpful insights into more proportionate academic writing practice and pedagogy.

Rhetorical analysis techniques in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy

The diversity of languages of the digital real has led to the creation of new communication models which incorporate formal, synthetic, and approved-by-areas codes for smart communication. The emblem of our society is the Mood virtual communicator: this replaces words and sentences with algorithms and acronyms. Our course of direction is heading inexorably towards digital codes that transmit pre-established semantics generated by a fixed sentence. Thus, it makes sense to discuss communication styles. And what does education consist of? Although we can take sides with fixed and standardized synthetic communication, we also call for respect for traditional and cultural values in individual societies. Still, we call into question the methodologies of study and reference models, which are currently used for virtual communication. The disciplines of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematics, quantum physics, sociology, psychology, pedagogical theories, and other related subjects are all included in Social Sciences and Digital Media. This work aims to present an unwavering logical progression that transitions from normative grammar to formal grammar to then examine the features of a poetic text, such as Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, from several perspectives.

The Politics of American Values in Barack Obama’s Life Narratives: A Rhetorical Analysis of National Ethos

Barack Obama weaves a sequence of his personal story rhetorically to evoke American national ethos, with a special emphasis on American values making them an integral part of his memoirs, especially his The Audacity of Hope (2006). This paper interrogates why he narrates the story of typical American values in his political memoir in general and ascertain them in a dedicated section titled ‘Values’ in particular to explore the implicit dimensions of his storytelling. Form the theoretical parameters of Walter R Fisher’s ‘narrative paradigm’ this paper contends that, by way of recognizing (assimilating or internalizing) typical American values, Obama prepares a ground for Fisher’s ‘narrative rationality’ to identify himself with American character and American people, and thereby evokes American national ethos to assume a statesmanship.

Messy queer rhetorics: homonationalism and gay Asian American triad in Fire Island

ABSTRACT Fire Island (2022) represents how three gay Asian American men (Noah, Howie, and Will) navigate tensions of whiteness, homonationalism, classism, and gay sexual desirability while on vacation with their friends. What begins as a narrative of gay Asian American men’s queer friendships becomes an intraracial romance of sticky rice – an Asian man dating another Asian man. Through use of a queer, Asian American rhetorical methodology informed by a queer of color critique, which challenges reliance upon citizenship, we analyze the messiness inherent in Fire Island. Our queer rhetorical analysis locates two themes present in Fire Island. First, Fire Island portrays an Asian American triad (or a narrative centering on three Asian American men) which ultimately succumbs to whiteness. Not without its shortcomings, homonationalism impacts both Fire Island and the film’s namesake. Second, the representation of three gay Asian American leading men comes with a cost, as an invisibility of romantic relations between Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian American men, that reify the white-Asian binary. Simultaneously influenced by and disrupting homonationalism, Fire Island demonstrates the queer (im)possibilities of optimism, pessimism, and failure.

Asking for solidarity: embodied feminist practices in digital space

ABSTRACT The Woman, Life, Freedom movement, beginning in September 2022, is a key chapter in the ongoing process of women’s rights activism in Iran. Social media has constituted a significant arena for asking for global solidarity with women in Iran since the initial days of this movement. The overall aim of this paper is to understand how TikTok users, including Iranian young women, have used the digital platform and transformed it into a virtual public space for media solidarity and transnational feminist activism. More precisely, it aims to shed light on how content creators, via their agency, rhetorically utilise and politicise the TikTok platform. In particular, we examine how they engage with audiences via the embodied form and affective performances in their attempt to persuade their audiences to viewership and solidarity action. The data in this paper consist of 107 top-ranked videos appearing under the hashtag #mahsaamini viewed through netnography, while the analytical method is multimodal rhetorical analysis with a focus on the mediality of the body in interaction. In addition, we adopt an embodied feminist framework and a decolonial perspective. The resulting analysis demonstrates how emotions function as one of the key elements in online mobilisation and protest in social media, not only as a motivational force but also as a part of the persuasive argument visually presented.