Rhetorical Form Research Articles

Риторична компетентність учнів: зміст, структура та шляхи формування

The article examines the formation features of students’ rhetorical competence. The essence of rhetorical competence as the individual ability to rhetorical activity in order to realize himself in professional and socio-cultural life is revealed. The methodological scholars’ views on the content and structure of rhetorical competence are presented. Based on the analysis of works on the research topic it is identified the main rhetorical competence components: motivational component (awareness of the importance of rhetorical activity in future personal life and professional development, students’ readiness and ability to perform rhetorical activities successfully); cognitive component (systemic rhetorical knowledge that is basic for the rhetorical competence formation), activity component (rhetorical skills and abilities that ensure the rhetorical activity effectiveness). Methods of rhetorical competence formation are presented: methods of theoretical rhetoric study, methods of practical rhetoric study, methods of theoretical and practical rhetoric study. The exercises system of analytical, speech-communicative, creative character and rhetorical tasks is characterized. The gradual rhetorical competence formation through the application of tasks aimed at teaching the logical, linguistic and psychological and psycholinguistic rhetoric foundations is proposed.

Luther’s Works: Companion Volume. Sixteenth-Century Biographies of Martin Luther ed. by Christopher Boyd Brown

Reviewed by: Luther’s Works: Companion Volume. Sixteenth-Century Biographies of Martin Luther ed. by Christopher Boyd Brown Timothy J. Wengert Luther’s Works: Companion Volume. Sixteenth-Century Biographies of Martin Luther. Edited by Christopher Boyd Brown. St. Louis: Concordia, 2018. 728 pp. In 1959 Concordia Publishing House produced a companion volume to Luther’s Works [American edition], written by Jaroslav Pelikan: Luther the Expositor: Introduction to the Reformer’s Exegetical Writings. Not only was that volume extremely limited in scope (focusing chiefly on the Lord’s Supper), it quickly became outdated, especially as the study of Reformation biblical interpretation accelerated in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Now Christopher Boyd Brown has produced a second companion volume, which promises by contrast to serve Luther studies for many years to come. Unlike its predecessor, this volume provides not one scholar’s opinions of Luther but instead new translations of the most important biographical works on Martin Luther from the sixteenth century, the influence of which continues to shape our views of Luther. Accompanied by impeccable notes and a stunning introduction of nearly one hundred pages, this book needs to be on the shelves of anyone interested in the theology and history of Wittenberg’s central reformer. [End Page 472] The book begins with several smaller, early contributions by Luther’s Wittenberg colleagues and friends and concludes with Johannes Mathesius’s large set of sermons (seventeen in all), in which the Wittenberg graduate and pastor in Joachimstal presented a detailed look at many aspects of Luther’s life and career. Readers can now read Luther’s preface to a catalogue of his works, the report of Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius (court preacher to the counts of Mansfeld) on Luther’s last days in Eisleben, the funeral sermon of Johannes Bugenhagen, Philip Melanchthon’s funeral oration, and the latter’s preface to the second volume of Luther’s works from June 1546. Johann Walter, a musician and collaborator with Luther on hymnody and other compositions, produced an interesting and (for modern ears) very different genre of remembering, a sixty-four stanza poem outlining Luther’s life and teaching, “A New Spiritual Song about the Blessed, Precious, and Highly Gifted Man, Dr. Martin Luther, the Prophet and Apostle of Germany.” All these works fill only 100 pages; the remaining 500 pages consist of Mathesius’s sermons. The translations are excellent, including Kevin G. Walker’s highly readable, entertaining rendering of Mathesius’s work. If one reads no other section, the seventh sermon, preached on Shrove Tuesday for Mathesius’s mining congregation, contains selected fables and other stories recounted by Luther, Melanchthon, and Mathesius. This lighter side of the reformers is often lost in today’s biographical works and demonstrates aspects of Luther’s personality easily stifled by overly pious or intellectual approaches. Editor Brown demonstrates his excellent command of sixteenth-century Latin with his translation of the two Melanchthon pieces into remarkably clear and accurate English. The annotations and introduction are of the very highest quality. Brown shows his complete mastery of the secondary literature and, in the case of Melanchthon’s work, proves among other things how relatively little Erasmus figures in those writings, countering a popular (and mistaken) theory of James Michael Weiss regarding the various versions of the funeral oration. He also thoroughly appreciates Melanchthon’s use of rhetorical forms in constructing both the oration and the preface. Throughout, Brown succinctly informs [End Page 473] the reader about historical problems—for example, debates over the posting of the 95 Theses—using recent bibliographical sources. The annotations also help the reader through the thicket of occasionally incorrect renderings of Luther’s biography, especially in Mathesius’s work. Even so, Brown reminds us that Mathesius’s work continues to set the parameters of Luther biographies. (One of the few exceptions to the Mathesius model may be the unique and still valuable contribution of Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil [New Haven: Yale, 1989].) What kind of Luther do we find on these pages? Perhaps the varied answers to this question demonstrate the importance of this collection, as we discover Luther the scholar (and humanist), Luther the...

Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate

Reviewed by: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate Sharika Thiranagama Bernard Bate. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia. E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. In 2016, when Bernard Bate passed away, he left behind a collection of texts, some chapters in finished form, some in draft, and a series of notes and fragments. Assembling these pieces, this pathbreaking book is a labor of love. It represents Barney's labor over decades of love for his work and for the Tamil language. It is also a labor of love by E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, who have painstakingly put together this manuscript in such seamless and brilliant fashion that it has the edge of a single author. Barney was a friend as well as an exemplary anthropologist full of life. This work is a testament to the best of what community, friendship, and love can look like. Bate's previous book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic (2009), examined oratory within new forms of democratic praxis in South India. In Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern, Bate explores the formative pre-history of this oratory. The South Indian state of Tamil Nadu (renamed from Madras State in 1969) was formed out of political mobilizations centered around linguistic nationalism and Tamilness. For anyone who knows Tamil Nadu, the place of oration within political movements is, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy explains in his foreword to the book, undeniable. How did this communicative praxis of Tamil democracy arise? How did 20th century Tamil politics and identity become so invested in a naturalistic relationship between a vernacular Tamil and a Tamil "soul" and spirit, in what had been a profoundly heteroglossic pre-colonial South India? How did these changes relate to the Protestant homiletic sermon, a style of speech [End Page 725] propagated by Tamil missionaries? Barney's answers to these questions in this new book go to the historical heart of contemporary Tamil politics by emphasizing oration and speech as a fundamental political infrastructure of contemporary nationalism and politics. While some of the arguments in this book, such as the fashioned Tamil neo-classicism of contemporary Tamil politics (the "newness of the old" [Bate 2009:xv]), were central to Bate's first book, this second work introduces the Protestant homiletic sermon as a foundational rhetorical form—exploding many assumptions of contemporary Tamil scholarship. The role of print media—and Anderson's (1983) associated notion of print capitalism—in creating new kinds of national imaginaries, politics, and publics has, as Barney points out, been well explored. However, unlike print, the Platform—political speech—is, by virtue of its embodied sensuous form, difficult to capture in an archive, even as we know intuitively that the emotions and sentiments mobilized around speech are central to modern politics and nationalism. This book represents an effort to recover and locate political speech in specific modern forms of language that were simultaneously new and Tamil. Bate centers new forms of public speech and political practice through which politicians and orators mobilized new constituencies across class and caste into new populist and nationalist formations. There are multiple ancient Tamil genres and practices of speech, writing, performance, and theater across nearly 2,000-year-old written records. Bate argues, however, that no prior genre resembled the homiletic sermon, addressing an "undifferentiated mass of lower-status" (5), and that this uniquely new 19th century Protestant missionary form would become the heart of modern Tamil democratic praxis. To tell this story, Bate, unlike many scholars of South India, looks to both South India and northern Jaffna in Sri Lanka, understanding text, language, and tradition across the borders that contemporary scholarship still so faithfully follows. Tamil Souls "The Christians who wanted to capture souls for Jesus knew that their own texts must first have Tamil souls." (29) [End Page 726] Christian missionaries entered a South Indian and Sri Lankan (then Ceylon) world profoundly marked by multiple languages and heteroglossia that would only later be distinguished as 20th...

Logic is (Somewhat) Overrated: Image-Based Versus Concept-Based Rhetoric in Crowdfunding Narratives

Drawing on image-based versus concept-based rhetoric research, we test whether concept-based rhetoric—evoking rational, logical, and concrete thinking—could be less useful than image-based rhetoric—evoking more primal, imaginative, and irrational imagery—in driving crowdfunding performance. We further examine how these forms of narrative rhetoric might serve to moderate the relationship between narcissistic rhetoric and crowdfunding performance. Based on a sample of 75,636 Kickstarter projects, image-based rhetoric is positively related to crowdfunding performance, and concept-based language suppressed the relationship between narcissistic rhetoric and crowdfunding performance. Our findings have implications for understanding how narrative elements interact to influence crowdfunding outcomes.

The American Jeremiad: A Specifically American Genre

This paper offers an overview of a "specifically American genre" – the American jeremiad, whose origins lie in the Puritan political sermon and which, with certain historical and cultural modifications, exists to this day. This overview, like most studies of this rhetorical form, is based on the work of Sacvan Bercovitch, who established it as a genre and offered the most exhaustive interpretation of its structure and meaning to date. The American jeremiad aims to homogenize the American community, and to steer it towards a common national goal, as reflected in its three-part structure: an evocation of the ideal/the ideal state of the community, a denunciation of its current state, and an affirmation of the goal and a vision of progress. As, according to Bercovitch, the American jeremiad despite historical and social changes retains the cultural hegemony of the symbol of America, later studies have tested this thesis by looking at political speeches, public addresses, American films, etc., through the concepts of the contemporary secular jeremiad, historical, Afro-American, film jeremiads, etc., and almost without exception conclude that this symbol, in one form or another, is alive and well.

Paradoxical relationships between Less and More in architectural Form

Nowadays, almost all forms that surround us, in our building's environment and even on papers became similar to each other. The problems with the form are related to the inability of creating it from scratch because the process of creating form today is a process of displacement of a previous formal perception towards a new formal one, or by the aid of computer, and that leads to creating the monotony in forms due to their similarities.
 What is predominantly accepted as logical may not necessarily be true. The idea that is generally accepted by all architects is that the role of the architect is to build by adding, it sounds illogical to expect architects to focus on the question of builds by subtracting.
 Our initial hypothesis assumed that the paradoxical soul of “less and more” in architectural form is revealed in the rhetorical figures, where the subtraction strategy is alternative of the addition strategy.
 For that, the concept of form in architecture in this research has been deconstructed to its primary elements: Type „deep structure‟ and style „surface structure‟. In addition, the research clarified and set up the primary variable represented by the subtraction, and secondary variables (Fragmentation and segmentation, Transparency, Geometrical rigor, Distortion of scale, Identical repetition, Erosion) which help of creating rhetorical forms, in another word, it makes us get 'More' from 'Less'.
 As a conclusion, the distinctive thing that the research revealed about the strategies of architectural form besides the subtraction strategy and the concept of rhetorical numbers, is the concept of the conceptual golden subtraction, where the research detected it in Islamic architectural design and interpreted and connected it with the disconnected letters of the holy Quran, Al-Jarjani theory of subtraction, and the design language of the architect Sinan.

Germán Bernácer’s Analysis of the Great Depression

The self-made Spanish economist Germán Bernácer (1833–1865) drew up a coherent theory of economic fluctuations—the theory of disposable funds—during the 1920s that has recently drawn the attention of historians of economic thought who appreciate its original approach and have weighted his possible influence on the Cambridge economists. This article analyses how Bernácer updated the model to the new formal rhetoric of the 1930s in light of the publication of Keynes’s A Treatise on Money. On the other hand, the article also analyzes how Bernácer, as a member of the Research Department of the Bank of Spain, applied the theory of disposable funds to interpret a wide range of economic, monetary, and financial events in a series of reports that he drafted for advising the board of the bank during the period 1932–36, in the midst of the Great Depression.

Legitimizing the First Black Presidency: Cinematic History and Rhetorical Vision in Barack Obama’s 2008 Victory Speech

ABSTRACT Rhetorical studies has traditionally separated the mental images of rhetorical vision from other forms of visual rhetoric. This essay seeks to ease this distinction and show how visual culture complements visual language. I argue that contemporary culture has unique visual logics, techniques, and ways of seeing that influence how audiences engage with rhetorical vision. I examine Barack Obama’s 2008 election night address and argue that he presents a cinematic history in order to legitimize the first black presidency. This essay combines ancient and modern visual theories to highlight three strategies: phantasmatic montage, synecdochical gaze, and frames of enargeia and energeia. Ultimately, this analysis calls for more attention to the enthymematic nature of rhetorical vision and its connection to visual culture.

POETIC WORKS AND RHETORICAL QUESTIONS (On the example of Erkin V of Erkin Vahidov's epic "Nido s epic "Nido")

Background. This article analyzes the Uzbek poet Erkin Vahidov's ability to use rhetorical forms of questioning on the example of his epic Nido. This linguopoetic theme demonstrates the poet's ability to describe the lyrical hero's experiences through the rhetorical forms of interrogative sentences, to ensure that the events of the work are effective and colorful. Through his jeweled approach to linguistic units, his unique style and the boundless possibilities of our language have been criticized. In addition, this article analyzes in detail the specific methods of expression of the poet's inner experiences and compares them with the methods of expression of other literary figures. The role of the rhetorical question in his work and the extent to which this linguistic combination enriched the poet's work are illustrated. The role of rhetorical questions in linguistics and its significance are also covered in detail in this article. Additionally, besides the poems of E. Vahidov, some other examples for rhetorical question will also be stated and analyzed in a detailed w

Re-membering comfort women: From on-screen storytelling and rhetoric of materiality to re-thinking history and belonging

ABSTRACT This essay aims to contribute to the development of invitational rhetorical theory, using the tragic and sobering story of “comfort women” as an illustrative case study. By focusing on the relatively recent mediated and special turns in the rhetorical studies, we propose a critical cultural analysis and eventual addendum of mediated texts as well as the rhetoric of materiality as essential means to understand and apply invitational rhetoric. Our project demonstrates how—in a socio-political context of cultural erasure and forgetting—material and visual messages serve as the most invitational modalities. The material and visual rhetoric intervene in the context of strategic amnesia, endurance, and as they center the voices and experiences that historically have been made completely subaltern. Utilizing a selection of artifacts of the rhetoric of materiality and pieces of media rhetoric, we demonstrate how those forms of invitational rhetoric create and encourage safe dialogical spaces for traditionally silenced, marginalized communities. Ultimately, we aim to demonstrate how the new understanding and utilization of invitational rhetoric can become a mechanism for social change and enable a shift in the public consciousness.

The Lincoln Project and the Conservative Aesthetic.

This election season, a rogue band of Republican Party operatives has attracted considerable media attention, and the Twitter wrath of President Trump, with a series of negative advertisements attacking the incumbent. The Lincoln Project strategy demonstrates how social and cultural conservatives are attracted to a particular aesthetic, prompted by their psychological attraction to rhetorical forms that are threat-oriented, clear, efficient, hyperbolic, emotional, and authoritative.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTommi Alho is a researcher at the Åbo Akademi University. He publishes on neo-Latin, history of Classical education and Latin linguistics, and has recently edited (with Jason Finch and Roger D. Sell) the volume Renaissance Man: Essays on Literature and Culture for Anthony W. Johnson (John Benjamins, 2019). His publications include Classical Education in the Restoration Grammar School: A Case Study of Orationes et Carmina aliaque exercitia (Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Lit. MS E41; PhD diss., Åbo Akademi University, 2020).Jonathan Burton is professor and chair of English at Whittier College. He is the author of Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (2005) and coauthor with Ania Loomba of Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (2007). His recent publications treat the entwined histories of race and empire, Shakespearean education, and American appropriations of Shakespeare.Nicholas Fenech is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he is a Mellon Foundation fellow. His research is animated by transnational approaches to Renaissance literature and the study of primary sources, examining how cultural change is registered atomically in the circulation of textual fragments and rhetorical forms. His work on tragedy and political theology has appeared in the German Quarterly, and an essay on Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the rhetoric of exemplarity in Elizabethan political manuscripts is forthcoming from Studies in Philology.Aleksi Mäkilähde is an affiliated researcher at the University of Turku and currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at University College London. He works in the fields of linguistics and philology, having focused especially on historical multilingualism, particularly in his monograph dissertation The Philological-Pragmatic Approach: A Study of Language Choice and Code-Switching in Early Modern English School Performances (University of Turku, 2019). He has also recently coedited (with Ville Leppänen and Esa Itkonen) the volume Normativity in Language and Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2019).Elizabeth Sandis is a theater historian specializing in neo-Latin dramatic traditions of the early modern period. Trained as a Classicist, she moved into English studies to complete a doctorate at Merton College, Oxford, on the place of student drama in the culture of English university life, before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her monograph Growing up Dramatically at Oxford and Cambridge: University Men and Their Plays in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press) is the first study of university drama to cover the Tudor and Stuart periods.Andrew Sofer is professor of English at Boston College. Since 2012 he has taught at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, where he has helped develop over sixty books-in-progress by emerging scholars. His books include The Stage Life of Props; Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance; and Wave, a poetry collection. His Theatre Journal essay “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus” received ASTR’s inaugural Oscar G. Brockett Prize for the best essay in theater research.William Steffen is an assistant professor of English at American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. His doctoral thesis, “Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage,” which was awarded the Shakespeare Association of America’s J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize for 2020, revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the nonhuman world on the early modern stage. His work, which celebrates accident, unpredictability, and nonhuman elements as productive agents in performance, traces strategies from early modern performance practices for confronting modern ecological crises. His previous publication, “Grafting and Ecological Imperialism in John Fletcher’s Bonduca,” appeared in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 48, Number 2Fall 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712375 Views: 115 © 2020 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Rhetorical Analysis of Surah An Naba of the English Translated Version by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall

The subject of the Quran is a man, and all its teaching is to give guidance to human beings on the right path. It is impossible to get real guidance without understanding the message of Allah existing in its rich text. The Quran is the richest and authentic book regarding its style, and it is abundant with rhetorical devices and other forms of language and literature. No book can even compete with the Quran with its choice of words and rhetorical devices. This present study attempts to throw light on some of the rhetorical devices employed in Surah An Naba, the 78th Surah of the Quran of the English translated version by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall. This study aims to determine the rhetorical devices used in its English translation, so understand the real and true lessons lying between the texts. For this purpose, the major rhetorical devices as persuasive words. Amplification, hyperbole, simile, metaphor, parallelism, etc. were found. This study is qualitative. A content analysis technique is used to complete the objective of the study. The analysed data and findings are presented in the descriptive form. This study further recommends the researchers to research the other Surah of the Quran as well.

Tweeting for Hearts and Minds? Measuring Candidates’ Use of Anxiety in Tweets During the 2018 Midterm Elections

ABSTRACTThis article considers whether candidates strategically use emotional rhetoric in social media messages similar to the way that fear appeals are used strategically in televised campaign advertisements. We use a dataset of tweets issued by the campaign accounts of candidates for the US House of Representatives during the last two months of the 2018 midterm elections to determine whether candidate vulnerability predicts the presence of certain emotions in social media messages. Contrary to theoretical expectations, we find that vulnerability does not appear to inspire candidates to use more anxious language in their tweets. However, we do find evidence of a surprising relationship between sad rhetoric and vulnerability and that campaign context influences the use of other forms of negative rhetoric in tweets.

YouTube and Political Ideologies: Technology, Populism and Rhetorical Form

Digital (participatory and shareable) media are driving profound changes to contemporary politics. That includes, this article argues, important changes to the production, dissemination and reception of political ideas and ideologies. Such media have increased the number and political range of ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ promoting forms of political thought, while also giving rise to distinct genres of political rhetoric and communication. All of this is affecting how people come to be persuaded by and to identify with political ideas. In developing and justifying these claims, I draw on the Political Theory of Ideologies, Digital Media Studies and Rhetorical Political Analysis. I begin by showing how a populist ‘style’, induced by broadcast media, has been intensified by digital media, affecting ideological form and content. Next I consider, in detail, a particular example – YouTube – showing how it shapes political, ideological, communication. I then present a case-study of the UK-based political YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson. I show how the political ideology he propagates can be understood as a blend of Conservatism and Libertarianism, expressed in a Populist style, centred on the ‘revelation’ of political truths and on a promise of therapeutic benefits for followers. In a closing discussion I argue that this may be understood as a kind of ‘charismatic’ authority, and that such a political performance style is typical of these kinds of media today.

Decolonising Design Education through Playful Learning in a Tertiary Communication Design Programme in South Africa

AbstractThis article introduces playful learning as part of the decolonising project at institutes of higher learning in South Africa with specific reference to the discipline of communication design. Not only does the article interrogate the content of design education, specifically design for development, but more specifically the way that design for social innovation is taught. The article begins with a contextualisation of the decolonisation debate both locally and internationally, which is followed by a brief historical overview of formal design education. Design education’s trajectory informs the contemporary conception of design as a form of rhetoric. Design and play are then interfaced theoretically, and pragmatically through a case study to explore how deeper learning was made possible by play in a curriculum‐based project. Ultimately, the article aims to highlight the value of playful learning in design higher education to nurture alternate modes of design thinking that favour localised practice, intersubjective relationships between designers and their stakeholders and the enabling of students’ self‐realisation through real world experience.

Inviting Scientific Discourse on Traumatic Dissociation: Progress Made and Obstacles to Further Resolution

This paper emerged from a five-part exchange on trauma-related dissociation in forensic contexts between the authors and Merckelbach and colleagues (2017–2019). We find important areas of consensus, including that trauma exposure is associated with depersonalization and, occasionally, memory errors; reports of dissociative symptoms may be elevated due to non-trauma factors; error rates for diagnosing dissociative identity disorder are low; and multiple sources of information are required for assessing any symptom, including dissociation, in forensic contexts. Our goals in this paper are to accurately summarize our evidence-based position about dissociation as it relates to forensic contexts and to call for more scientific discourse and less motivated skepticism by all involved scholars. We enumerate and demonstrate our critics’ reliance on eight forms of rhetoric that are largely rejected by the scientific community. We illustrate these forms of argument using Merckelbach et al.’s published responses in this lengthy debate as exemplars. Recognition of our critics’ reliance on these forms of argumentation is crucial to making further substantial progress in this debate. We argue that recovered memories of trauma should be evaluated in court using the same criteria that would be used with any other memory, including seeking out and evaluating corroborating and disconfirming evidence. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of comprehensive, unbiased assessments of dissociation in reported trauma-related forensic cases and suggest areas where research is needed.

Understanding the Political Ideology of Legislators from Social Media Images

In this paper, we seek to understand how politicians use images to express ideological rhetoric through Facebook images posted by members of the U.S. House and Senate. In the era of social media, politics has become saturated with imagery, a potent and emotionally salient form of political rhetoric which has been used by politicians and political organizations to influence public sentiment and voting behavior for well over a century. To date, however, little is known about how images are used as political rhetoric. Using deep learning techniques to automatically predict Republican or Democratic party affiliation solely from the Facebook photographs of the members of the 114th U.S. Congress, we demonstrate that predicted class probabilities from our model function as an accurate proxy of the political ideology of images along a left–right (liberal–conservative) dimension. After controlling for the gender and race of politicians, our method achieves an accuracy of 59.28% from single photographs and 82.35% when aggregating scores from multiple photographs (up to 150) of the same person. To better understand image content distinguishing liberal from conservative images, we also perform in-depth content analyses of the photographs. Our findings suggest that conservatives tend to use more images supporting status quo political institutions and hierarchy maintenance, featuring individuals from dominant social groups, and displaying greater happiness than liberals.

The Trouble with Marching: Ableism, Visibility, and Exclusion of People with Disabilities

ABSTRACT Marching in public, as members of a public meant to be seen in public, has been one of the most frequently deployed forms of collective social protest in the United States. For people with disabilities, however, this type of rhetorical action is fraught with normative assumptions that go beyond presumed needs for accommodation, access, and alternative modes of participation. This essay identifies the far less visible constraints created by previous historic and rhetorical practices, including some of the discourse of other progressive social activists. Both the prospect and the practice of marching as a rhetorical form of performative public argument are thus complex for people with disabilities who are too often not seen as equal citizens. The trouble with marching is thus ableism and its sustained invisibility.

The Rhetorical Style Structure of the Personal Letter Genre: Contemporary English, Spanish, and Middle Ages Style Structures Compared

A look at rhetoric from a stylistic standpoint allows building understanding of current rhetorical practices as evolved forms of rhetoric. By following a qualitative research design described as content analysis by Leedy and Ormrod (2001), the present study describes the style structure differences and similarities in contemporary personal letter writing in English and Spanish as compared to the style structure of letter writing in the middle ages. It was concluded that personal letter writing in both English and Spanish does not fully comply with the style structure cannon of letter writing established for each class. Also, English and Spanish contemporary personal letter writing are rather similar, and the style structure cannons for contemporary personal letter writing in both English and Spanish can be traced back to that of the Middle Ages.