Available Means Of Persuasion Research Articles

Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People

Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People

Analisis Bukti Retorika Pidato Nadiem Makarim pada Hari Guru Nasional 2019

The rhetoric theory is a communication theory that has been used since Ancient Greek. Aristotle was the first theorist who considered rhetoric as an art & studied rhetorics in a serious manner. According to Aristotle, rhetoric is the discovery of the available means of persuasion in every way. Rhetoric is a proof or indication of whether a speaker is great at executing persuasive messages in every form such as speech, message, or text. One of the most important concepts in rhetoric is rhetorical proof by Aristoteles. There are two kinds of rhetorical proofs, artistic & non-artistic proof. These proofs according to Aristotle are divided into three forms, ethos or ethical proof is the speaker’s credibility, pathos or emotional proof is the speaker’s emotion that showed, & logos or logic proof is an argumentation or rationalization which made sense to the audience. A good speaker is someone who uses all three of the artistic rhetorical proofs when speaking. This study aimed to analyze the artistic rhetorical proofs in the speech of The Minister of Education & Culture of Indonesian Republic on The National Teacher’s Day 2019. This study also aimed to complete the previous study which only discussed the five canons of the rhetoric of this speech. The method used in this study was qualitative descriptive, by analyzed the artistic rhetorical proofs of the speech of Republic Indonesia’s Minister of & goodwill, pathos by showing admiration, indignation, friendliness, confidence and anger, and logos in both of its forms, enthymeme, and example.

Latvijas prezidenta Egila Levita runu valodiskais profils: ceremoniālā, juridiskā vai politiskā retorika?

Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as the art of observing the available means of persuasion is one of the most widely used quotations not only in linguistics but also in social, political, and communication sciences. Aristotle, apart from defining the elements of rhetoric (logos, ethos and pathos), has proposed three types of rhetoric that refer either to the present situation (ceremonial), the past (judicial), or the future (political). The current president of Latvia and his language use is one of the most widely discussed topics across the media and academia due to the register, style, and content of his speeches. Moreover, the president of Latvia has a direct impact on how the state is perceived nationally and internationally; thus, it is significant to investigate the linguistic profile of the linguistic expression of the ideas communicated by the president to the wider public. The current study analyses 160 speeches given by president Egils Levits on nationally significant occasions as well as internationally with the aim to investigate whether the speeches of the president of Latvia correspond to the ceremonial, political or judicial rhetoric because the president represents both legal and political discourse as the former judge of the European Court of Human Rights and the former minister of Justice, and as the head of the Republic of Latvia represents the state nationally and abroad. The study is grounded in the theories on rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis applied to political discourse and presidential language and discussed by scholars such as Aristotle (1959), Van Dijk (2006), Chilton and Schäffner (2002), O’Keeffe (2006), Van Dijk (2008), David (2014), Wilson (2015) and Wodak and Mayer (2016). The results of the current study reveal that the speeches are a clear representation of a combination of legal, political, and ceremonial rhetoric and cross various semantic fields that are marked by the use of field terminology in combination with topos of definition and name interpretation to explain the terms directly in the speeches. The speeches by Levits are furthermore marked by relatively frequent use of loanwords, neologisms, obsolete words, and compounds that is one of the main characteristics of the linguistic profile of his speeches. Additional characteristic features are the use of parallel sentence constructions, inverted word orders, rhetorical questions, and pronominal referencing to attract the listener's attention and emphasize the thematic areas of the speeches. Nevertheless, it has been concluded that such linguistic techniques as metaphors, metonymies, synecdoche, or hyperbole are used comparatively less frequently, thus making the speeches appear more formal and less emotional from the linguistic point of view.

Public Ethos in the Pandemic Rhetorical Situation: Strategies for Building Trust in Authorities’ Risk Communication

As illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, risk and crisis communication are crucial responsibilities of modern governments. Existing research on risk and crisis communication points to the importance of trust, both as a resource in and an end goal of communicative activities. In this paper, we argue that revisiting the classical rhetorical concept of ethos in combination with the modern concept of the rhetorical situation can contribute to fitting responses in risk and crisis communication. The paper examines how appeals to ethos may build trust in health authorities’ public communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews and participant observation in public health institutions that handle the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, the paper finds that understanding the rhetorical situation of the pandemic allows for a better understanding of the available means of persuasion. For instance, through the active communication of transparency and independence when faced by uncertainty and rapidly changing information.

The War of Words

The War of Words

El arte del discurso público. Una invitación a la Retórica de Aristóteles

I propose to read Rhetoric (B. I) as a presentation of the art of public discourse. I believe that in this sense its conception rests on three capital ideas, namely (a) rhetoric is an antistrophos to dialectic; (b) its function is not to persuade but to contemplate the available means of persuasion in each case; (c) rhetoric is like some offshoot of dialectic and of ethical study which is rightly called politics. (a) and (b) vindicate the condition and quality of rhetoric as a fully entitled art of speech; (c) places it in the realm of deliberative public discourse. Finally, a few notes about the topicality of some Aristotelian ideas in the debate on democracy and collective deliberation will lead to the conclusion that Aristotle, without being one of us, is one of ours.

Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms by Davida H. Charney (review)

Reviewed by: Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms by Davida H. Charney Jason M. H. Gaines Davida H. Charney. Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2017. xii + 156 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000564 This slim monograph begins with the author's modest note that she does not have a biblical studies "card to carry in my wallet" (ix); rather, Charney is a scholar of rhetoric, and she applies her skills in rhetorical analysis to a series of psalms in order to understand if, why, and how ancient Israelites worked to persuade God. Despite her lack of formal training in biblical studies, or perhaps because of it, she offers insightful, sensitive, and important new findings valuable to biblical scholars and interested lay audiences alike. "Arguing with God," she claims, "is a key theme in the Hebrew Bible." While the ancient Greeks wrestled physically and rhetorically with other Greek citizens, the Israelites wrestle physically (in the case of the patriarch Jacob) and rhetorically (in her chosen text corpus of first-person psalms) with God. When these psalmists attempt to persuade God to intervene in their lives, they engage in rhetoric, "the art/faculty of choosing from among the available means of persuasion in any given situation" (1–2). Even further, Charney deduces rhetorical situations or starting points that originally prompted the compositions. She claims accurately that these situations "are necessarily speculative, but they are not undisciplined" (9); she does not pursue the form-critical practice of attributing psalms to particular biblical episodes or cultic observances. [End Page 441] Some elements of rhetorical criticism chafe against more traditional historical and literary biblical study. For example, Charney argues that "the task of a rhetorical approach is to spell out how apparent digressions actually build a connected line of argument in a given psalm and contribute to a coherent and persuasive reading of the text as a whole" (8). However, is that strategy prudent if any given psalm may be composite, corrupt, or part of a larger corpus? Perhaps a digression is editorial or scribal rather than original. Charney does not present her understanding of the composition and/or canonization of the psalms either individually or in larger groups, an unfortunate omission. In chapter 1, Charney argues that praise is the most important currency Israelites have at their disposal for persuading God; God reciprocates by answering and protecting his people. Inspired both by Moshe Greenberg's conception of prayer-praise and Aristotle's formulation of epideictic rhetoric, she solves a possible paradox of rhetorical studies: if persuasion is concerned with changing hearers' attitudes, what changes when an Israelite praises God if that society already accepts God's value? She concludes that Israelites themselves need to praise God in order to engage continually with God. Praise can function as a "negative currency" with God in instances of death (which would cause the speaker's praise to cease), quid pro quo (praise will only continue if God rescues), and taunting (would God want an enemy to doubt God's power?). Case studies of four psalms follow, most notably Psalm 16, where Charney utilizes both lexical and rhetorical evidence to propose that the psalm's speaker is "a clear-eyed realist, not an unshakable priest" (32). Her examination of the short Psalm 131, a praise-free exception that proves her rule, failed to convince this reviewer: even if the speaker be "an extraordinarily passive person with little to say for himself" (37), how expressive and haunting (if unpersuasive) those few words remain. In chapter 2, Charney's case study of Psalm 4 exemplifies the benefits of combining rhetorical and biblical studies. In terminology belonging to the former field, "amplitude" is a strategy whereby speakers allocate material in a text based on the views of their audience. "Looking for where writers have devoted the most space is an important clue to the point they consider most important or most controversial" (40). Psalm 4 is often read as a speaker's defense against a false accusation. However, Charney shows that the bulk of the psalm rebukes opponents and tries to persuade them to return to faithfulness. She views...

All we have is words: applying rhetoric to examine how social media marketing activities strengthen the connection between the brand and the self

Social media are increasingly leveraged on for the establishment of strong consumer–brand relationships, however the causal relationships leading to them have yet to be clarified. The underlying theory suggested to contribute to this gap is rhetoric, indicating the available means of persuasion to achieve one's goal. This paper builds on Aristotle's view, that effective rhetoric is based on the combination of Logos, Pathos and Ethos and examines how social media marketing activities help strengthen the connection between the consumer’s self and the brand. The proposed framework is tested in 183 consumers, which follow a brand on Facebook. The findings indicate that social media marketing activities positively affect brand attachment, through the mediating role of self-brand connections. Furthermore, brand engagement in self-concept moderates the effect of self-brand connections on brand attachment. Significant implications both from a theoretical and managerial perspective are discussed.

Bloody Rhetoric and Civic Unrest: Rhetorical Aims of Human Blood Splashing in the 2010 Thai Political Revolt

ABSTRACT In 2010, thousands of Thai citizens from the Red Shirt Movement splashed seventy-nine gallons of their blood in Bangkok to revolt for democracy. I argue that their conduct exemplified kaya karma in the Thai culture: the intentional use of the body and physical actions to achieve an end. Drawing upon my interviews with protesters in Thailand, I show how the demonstration represented the Red Shirts’ intentions to construct a patriotic identity; build solidarity and consubstantiation; defame the prime minister; and invoke fear, intimidation, and discomfort in the government. Altogether, the protest aimed to bolster the movement’s authority and disparage the government. Examining the Red Shirts’ kaya karma, I contend, enables us to further engage “the facts of nonusage” to broaden the trajectory of comparative rhetorical studies beyond the focus on canonical texts of elite exemplars and complicate our ability to see the available means of persuasion in non-Western contexts.

Bloody Rhetoric and Civic Unrest: Rhetorical Aims of Human Blood Splashing in the 2010 Thai Political Revolt

ABSTRACTIn 2010, thousands of Thai citizens from the Red Shirt Movement splashed seventy-nine gallons of their blood in Bangkok to revolt for democracy. I argue that their conduct exemplified kaya karma in the Thai culture: the intentional use of the body and physical actions to achieve an end. Drawing upon my interviews with protesters in Thailand, I show how the demonstration represented the Red Shirts’ intentions to construct a patriotic identity; build solidarity and consubstantiation; defame the prime minister; and invoke fear, intimidation, and discomfort in the government. Altogether, the protest aimed to bolster the movement’s authority and disparage the government. Examining the Red Shirts’ kaya karma, I contend, enables us to further engage “the facts of nonusage” to broaden the trajectory of comparative rhetorical studies beyond the focus on canonical texts of elite exemplars and complicate our ability to see the available means of persuasion in non-Western contexts.

The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen

Rhetoricians first saw “the digital” flickering on screens but now feel its effects transducing our most fundamental of social practices. This essay traces digital emergence on screens and through networks and further into everyday life through infrastructures and algorithms. We argue that while “the digital” may have once been but one more example of the available means of persuasion, “digital rhetoric” has become an ambient condition.

What Is Rhetoric ?

What Is Rhetoric ?

Between Structure and Struggle: The Intellectual Legacy of James Arnt Aune

Between Structure and Struggle:The Intellectual Legacy of James Arnt Aune John M. Murphy (bio) In conversation and publication, Jim Aune often justified the practices of public advocacy and rhetorical criticism through the words of John Dewey: "The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public."1 Both parts of that task meant much to Aune. Like him, many of us have spent our careers teaching and studying the available means of persuasion, but he also focused his formidable intelligence on those conditions. What enables and constrains public discussion? What happens when we substitute culture for society, measurement for judgment, science for rhetoric? Who, in fact, is this "we" of which I speak? Jim pursued such questions with relentless energy. His answers comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. It is this intellectual legacy I wish to pursue in this short essay. I begin with rhetoric's rhetorical problem. I use that language with some care because it infused Aune's work. He began with the assumption that all was not right with the world. The "depredations wrought by the latest incarnation of the free market—that is, globalized laissez-faire capitalism" were objects of scorn in his last book, and his goal, also expressed in that book, was to overcome "the recent fragmentation of left-leaning coalitions" so that they might join to make of this nation a just society.2 To that end, he dove into contemporary social theories because he thought they offered a useful way to frame and address those issues. If ink expended is any clue, he [End Page 567] concluded that Marxism to a greater extent and liberalism to a lesser extent offered the most practical means with which to subvert libertarian and free market discourses and, in turn, find ways to increase human happiness. Yet both Marxism and liberalism shared a rhetorical problem. Early in Rhetoric & Marxism, he noted, "Marxism, like liberalism, participated in the Enlightenment project of eliminating mystification from social life—and this undertaking required a commitment to a perfectly transparent language."3 It did so because modernity sought to establish, above all else, the autonomy of the individual. Drawing on philosopher Robert Pippin and others, Aune often told the story of rhetoric's decline.4 In a study of Thomas Farrell's Norms of Rhetorical Culture, for instance, he traced the social and economic reasons for that fall, including the ascent of capitalism and modern science, the evolution of the specialized languages of public policy and public relations, as well as the development of new forms of class stratification that meant "public communicators addressed increasingly fragmented audiences more inclined to participate in public life or vote on the basis of group economic interests than on reasoned deliberation mediated by the great orator-statesmen."5 Yet social and economic forces were not the whole story: "The very philosophy of liberal democracy itself was based on a fundamental distrust of persuasion. Once the autonomous individual rather than the family or community became the fundamental building block of politics, any effort to subvert that autonomy, whether through rhetoric or violence, came to be viewed as a 'heteronomous imposition,' as Immanuel Kant put it." Any normal adult, he argued, possessed the capacity for self-government: "'No authority external to ourselves is needed to constitute or inform us of the demands of morality. We can each know without being told what we ought to do because moral requirements are requirements we impose on ourselves.'"6 Any effort to persuade another person was, ipso facto, a desire to move someone away from plainly clear, internally revealed universal moral law. That was obviously unethical. All people required of language was the plain clarity with which to articulate self-evident truth. Transparency was the order of the day.7 As liberalism's companion on the Enlightenment journey, Marxism came to share this rhetorical incapacity. At the end of a lovely summary of Marxism's assumptions, Aune claimed, "Marxism has two rhetorical problems." First, if its triumph was inevitable, why should people risk their [End Page 568] lives in support of its...

A program of research for technical communication

Distinct from prose essays as cultural expression, we use technical communication for functional purposes, addressing questions of how people learn as we craft our communications. Aristotle set out psychological principles of how people learn -- or are persuaded to change their minds -- when he laid down his foundational advice for rhetors to cultivate "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us." Building on this foundational principle, technical communicators since World War II have studied how to achieve persuasion (or change) by making information accessible, formatting documents, writing at designated reading levels, and setting out instruction steps clearly. Recently, we have also become interested in how, through the concept of rhetoric, oral and written language acquires poignant social, ethical and technical dimensions, situating Aristotle's "faculties" of persuasion within specific cultural and political contexts.

On the Term “Dunamis” in Aristotle's Definition of Rhetoric

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle’s corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle’s definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric’s ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle’s treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle’s terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.

Peri Ti?:

<i>Peri Ti</i>?:

Entertainment as Key to Public Intellectual Agency:

��� Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic’s democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar’s first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one’s discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh’s and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor’s imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively. Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual’s role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by

Multimodal Rhetorics in the Disciplines: Available Means of Persuasion in an Undergraduate Architecture Studio

Multimodal Rhetorics in the Disciplines: Available Means of Persuasion in an Undergraduate Architecture Studio

How Well Has President Barack Obama Chosen from Among the Available Means of Persuasion?

This essay answers the question, “How well did President Obama choose from among the available means of persuasion in the early years of his presidency?” by probing the ways in which his pre-inaugural speech at the Lincoln Memorial blurred the rhetorical roles of nominee and president-elect; the absence of a digestive statement in his inaugural; the failure of his nationally telecast BP oil spill address to respond to the expectations created by his campaign rhetoric and by the speech itself; the ways in which the setting of his speech after the Tucson tragedy sabotaged an otherwise powerful speech; and the insurmountable challenges posed by the decision to address the nation as the DOW tumbled in the wake of the S and P downgrade.

US and Russian traditions in rhetoric, education and culture

Traditional rhetoric attempts to find the available means of persuasion in public assemblies, law courts and ceremonials and is grounded in cultural values and beliefs. Traditional rhetoric supports the development of social communities and posits education as a primary means of maintaining these communities. In contrast, contemporary alternatives to traditional rhetoric recognize multiple cultural values both within and between social communities and seek larger unities that encompass but do not eradicate individual and communal differences. US rhetorician Kenneth Burke seeks syntheses among multiple and potentially competing persuasive acts, promotes educational practices of mutual respect and reciprocal learning and advocates a rhetorical theory and practice with potentially global reach. Russian literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin envisions novelistic practices of polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival as modes of dialogue that embrace individual differences within larger, more complex unities. These complementary rhetorical and dialogical practices support US multiculturalism and Russian transculturalism, respectively, but they also and more significantly promote dialogue across cultural boundaries as the basis of an intercultural rhetoric and an intercultural approach to curricula across a range of disciplines.