Rhetorical Principles Research Articles

Diagrammatics and the Visualization of Legal Data in Proactive Legal Design

The visualization movement in Proactive Law seeks to transform legal communications to improve access to law for disadvantaged, illiterate, and less-than-fully literate persons, and to improve the understanding of legal relationships and agreements for all persons through illustration, simplification, engagement, and inclusiveness in the text and visual components of the communication. Guided by principles of visual legal rhetoric and visual literacy and with the goal of transparency, Proactive Law and Legal Design seeks to build knowledge and understanding in all audiences of legal communications. The goal with regard to contractual relationships and agreements is to better carry out the present will and intentions of the parties and to anticipate their future needs through legal instruments that secure a clearer understanding of terms of the relationship. This article focuses on one mode of visual legal communication: diagrammatics and the visualization of legal data. By legal data, I mean facts, processes, procedures, timelines and time periods, statistics, mathematical calculations, accounting, formulas, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of research, interviews, polls, surveys, and other scientific information. The lens will be applied to evaluate and critique five aspects of proactive visual legal instruments: • Immediate Visual Context, • Immediate Verbal Context, • Visual Cultural Context, • Mise en Scene and Arrangement, and • Visual Rhetoric, Ethics and Professionalism My primary motivation for the visual legal rhetoric scholarship I have researched and published is to inform and educate lawyers, judges, law students, and law professors about the need to become more visually literate in this contemporary visual, digital world of law practice, and then further to explain and demonstrate that visual literacy requires not only the ability to read and comprehend visual works, but also the skill to design works and critically analyze the meaning and implications of works offered by others. That is why in my works I use the same steps of analysis I have developed to examine not only the visual elements of works (visual context and mise en scene design) but also the verbal context of multimodal works (text plus visuals), and the visual cultural context (the ability of works to be understood across language and cultural barriers).

Lingua-Ethological Causes of Communicative Failures: Pragmatic Aspect

The paper reveals and describes communicative failures caused by differences in structures of communicants’ lingua-ethological encyclopedic knowledge based on the cognitive theory of dynamic construal of meaning. А communicative failure is viewed as a speech-behavioural act, where there is no semiosis (the addresser’s verbal and/or non-verbal utterance does not evoke any conventional conceptual content in the addressee’s mind) or there is ambivalent semiosis (the addresser and addressee privilege different aspects of the conceptual content structured by different frames (scripts)/domains, which results in the divergence between the addressee’s inferences and addresser’s presuppositions. It is alleged that communicative failures can be caused by differences in structures of communicants’ lingua-ethological knowledge of general principles regulating communicative behaviour. The addresser’s verbal and/or non-verbal utterance triggers different aspects of the conventional conceptual content in the minds of the communicants structured by different frames (scripts)/domains, which leads to the divergence between the addressee’s inferences and addresser’s presuppositions. Differences in structures of communicants’ lingua-ethological encyclopedic knowledge result from the addressee’s failure to select the most relevant way of interpreting the addresser’s utterance due to the violation of interpersonal rhetoric principles, in particular, Relevance Theory principles caused by a disregard of lingual and extra-lingual context of a communicative act. This results in a false interpretation of homonymous verbal utterances, utterance implicatures enabling both literal and metaphorical interpretation or implicatures connected with recognizing irony/sarcasm as well as the addresser’s communicative intentions and utterance addressing.

Stereotyp kapłana wpisany w XVII-wieczne kazania pogrzebowe

17th century funeral sermons, a set of approximately 600 texts, structured following the antic rhetoric principles, modified in modern times, are a genre of panegyric literature, praising the deceased. Among preserved prints, sermons prepared on the occasion of funerals of the clergy constitute a large collection. Their structure, although basically convergent with the principles of laudation applicable to that type of expression, shows certain differences on the level of the degree of a realisation of its individual elements. The element which depicts the time preceding the birth of the clergyman and arguments referring to his lineage are eliminated or significantly reduced. On the other hand, emphasis is put on all aspects which show the piety of the deceased priest, his merits for the Church, relationship towards the faithful under his care. The image of the clergy presented in the sermons is poorly individualised, in fact, it could even be referred to as a stereotypical one.

Reconsidering an Essential Premise in Kessler, M. M., & Graham, S. S. (2018). Terminal Node Problems: ANT 2.0 and Prescription Drug Labels. Technical Communication Quarterly, 27(2), 121-136

ABSTRACTI appreciate that this paper was applauded for its thoughtful approach to assessing “prescription drug labels (PDLs)” using rhetorical principles. However, I believe the authors’ invention of the composite artifact “PDL” and their subsequent assessment based on this flawed concept is problematic and may weaken the validity of their conclusions.

The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies

Writing, in English, for Publication in Science and Technology, and Policy: The Example of Nuclear Security

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss publishing scenarios and challenges facing such authors and offer guidelines for producing clear, effective, publishable articles, in English, for international discourse. My approach is based on traditional rhetorical principles, plain language studies, research pursued at nuclear security conferences, feedback from internationals at writing workshops, and my experience as editor of the International Journal of Nuclear Security.

Retorica e logica nella critica di Lorenzo Valla del quadrato delle opposizioni

In this paper I discuss Lorenzo Valla's criticism of the traditional Square of Opposition displayed in the second book of the Dialectica. I show that, according to Valla, the opposition rules of the propositions must take into account both common speeches and the correct use of Latin language, not the formal link occurring between the parts of propositions. In Valla's perspective, this theoretical change is carried out through rhetoric and philology, and it involves a reassessment of the arts of the trivium. As regards this topic, I argue that Valla aims niether to reduce dialectic to rhetoric nor to replace the former with the latter, but rather to establish some rhetorical principles as a better-suited way to set the opposition rules, because they take into account the linguistic context in which these rules apply.

Moving Inside Out: Success and Failure Navigating Race-Based Class Discussion

Every day educators encounter successes and failures in the classroom. While both are valuable experiences, failures tend to stick with us longer and, perhaps, create more incentive for growing and learning. As a white professor, I have had successes and failures addressing race in a diverse American Southern classroom. While this article explores the success of relinquishing the direction of class conversation to the students, it is more a meditation on processing and learning from one's failure. I recount a recent experience in my English 102 class, a class dedicated to the rhetorical principles of critical reading and writing, where conversation on Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life moved from a productive co-communal examination among students to an impassioned interrogation of my seemingly intimate relationship with African American culture. I take up my subsequent failure to adequately respond to my students' questioning as a chance to better understand the implications of white privilege in the college classroom.

G. F. Meiers rhetorisierte Logik und die freien Künste

A peculiar feature of the philosophy of Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) lies in its being based on rhetorical principles. We are in front of an important construct that claims for attention in the context of the growing literature on eighteenth-century rhetoric. The syntagm ‘rhetoricised logic’ indicates a specific function of rhetoric as the basis for rethinking philosophical discourse. The paper shows that Meier's philosophical programme is consistently based on the trivium. On top of this, the paper compares Meier and Immanuel Kant on the ancient topos of the artes liberales, thus making it clear that the position of Meier can be assessed as a model for a rhetorically founded theory of knowledge, which was transformed and overcome by Kant.

The ‘reel’ Jesse Owens: visual rhetoric and the Berlin Olympics

ABSTRACTThe story of Jesse Owens has become one of the dominant sports narratives of the twentieth century. The compelling visual record of his performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics has been used to argue for a number of political and social causes. What is particularly fascinating about the images of Owens’s win is the ways in which it functioned for diametrically opposing ideological viewpoints. The story behind the footage reveals an interesting confluence of history and visual rhetoric. This essay considers how the Owens footage was put to work as both an example of American exceptionalism in one case and a transcendent appeal designed to mitigate the stigma of Nazi ideology in another. The principles of visual rhetoric elucidate the ways in which imagery like the Owens footage is purposefully packaged to portray these types of messages.

A Study on the Argumentation by Television Dramas

이 연구는 한국의 드라마가 극도의 경쟁 환경에 처해 있어 다른 장르의 프로그램에 비해 더 높은 단계의 설득을 필요로 한다는 사실에 주목하여 시청자들의 수용욕구를 자극하는 심층구조를 밝히고자 하는 것이다. 본고는 지금까지 드라마의 설득 기제에 관한 연구가 경제적 권위에 집중되어 학문적으로 소홀히 해 왔던 텍스트 주변의 구조를 밝힘으로써 방송의 경쟁주의와 복잡 한 시청자 유도 혹은 유혹의 전략을 분석하는데 타당성을 부여했다. 그리고 분석을 위해 디제시스의 외재적 논증구조를 특징짓는 두 가지 결정적인 요소들, 즉 파라텍스트와 텍스트의 상호성을 분석의 대상으로 설정하고 이를 통해 드라마 소구의 논리를 밝혀냈다. 결과로서 텔레비전 드라마가 커뮤니케이션 주체들 사이의 공모적 장소이며 사회적 장임을 확인했다. 결국 논증이론의 차용을 통해 드라마의 수용자들을 같은 목표를 향해 가는 새로운 공동체로 설정하고, 이들이 텍스트에 관여하면서 공동체 의식을 느끼고 사회적 관계에서 오는 즐거움을 공유한다는 사실을 이론화 했다. 따라서 이 연구는 서사분석을 통한 개별텍스트의 구현에 집중되었던 드라마 연구에 논증이론을 적용함으로써 수용자 연구와 미디어 중심의 영역으로 지평을 확장하고 새로운 논의를 제시 한다는 점에서 학술적 의의를 갖는다.This study attempts to analyze the origin of this fundamental aspect of television. As a methodology, the rhetoric allows us to take into television’s original status as a social praxis. Thus we have shown how the connivance between manufacturers and the audience has become the key word of contemporary television. Korean TV dramas have developed a specific communication process with their viewers, based on a strong proximity established between the audience and the program. In studying this issue we will apply the principles of the epideictic rhetoric. Two aspects are especially relevant and will thus receive particular attention: first, the thresholds (titles, opening credits, etc.), and then the phenomena of intertextuality and transtextuality. Thresholds have become the loci of a sort of game between the discourse producers including the network, creators, producers, writers and the audience: navigating between industrial conventions and personal creative dynamism, they go alongside the TV viewer in its entrance and exit of the series and embody significant marketing issues. The phenomena of intertextuality and transtextuality, on the other hand, are particularly in a continuum of processing ranging from quotes to reference. Altogether they lead to the constitution of a text-cento. Ultimately, they transform TV shows into a palimpsest, in which each text echoes thousands of other texts, becoming key events of our contemporaneousness as well as reminders of the audience’s own life. In summary, TV series have become a ritual in their own right, not only of consumption (watching an episode a week), but also in the sense that epideictic rhetoric gives to the concept: they create a community united around shared values.

Pragmatic Rhetorical Principles in Isocrates

While Isocrates regarded rhetoric not as a rigid discipline, but as a creative and pliable art, it is not possible to standardize art. According to his point of view (Against the sophists 13.13), good speech depends on certain principles: opportunity (kairos); suitability (to prepon) and novelty (kainos). The sophists, according to Isocrates, did not pay attention to these principles, and that was their main mistake. The problem was, however, that it was difficult to teach these principles to the disciples, precisely because rhetoric was a flexible art. Still, although it is not possible to provide fixed rules concerning rhetorical principles, the ancient rhetor provided some useful suggestions in his works which make it possible to reconstruct the nature of these principles.

Pragmatic Rhetorical Principles in Isocrates

While Isocrates regarded rhetoric not as a rigid discipline, but as a creative and pliable art, it is not possible to standardize art. According to his point of view (Against the sophists 13.13), good speech depends on certain principles: opportunity (kairos); suitability (to prepon) and novelty (kainos). The sophists, according to Isocrates, did not pay attention to these principles, and that was their main mistake. The problem was, however, that it was difficult to teach these principles to the disciples, precisely because rhetoric was a flexible art. Still, although it is not possible to provide fixed rules concerning rhetorical principles, the ancient rhetor provided some useful suggestions in his works which make it possible to reconstruct the nature of these principles.

Irony and Incomprehensibility: Beethoven's “Serioso” String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, and the Path to the Late Style

Beethoven acknowledged the radical nature of his “Quartetto serioso” (1810) when he noted that it had been written for “a small circle of connoisseurs” and was “never to be performed in public.” The coda to the quartet's finale, with its sudden reversal of tone, has proven especially problematic, eliciting responses that include incomprehension (Marx) and outright dismissal (d'Indy). More recent accounts have pointed to irony as a strategy of negation, but Beethoven's contemporaries were inclined to embrace it as a constructive, liberating device. The Schlegel brothers, among others, championed it as the primary instrument of an epistemological framework that promoted the accommodation of multiple perspectives. The antifoundationalist nature of irony encourages a mode of understanding that precludes the possibility of any one “correct” perspective. Beethoven's use of “serioso” here and elsewhere, moreover, evokes a sense of the word that conveys pathos bordering on bathos. The “Quartetto serioso” is Beethoven's most extreme essay in irony, a device that would permeate his later works in more subtle but no less far-reaching ways. Opus 95 also reflects the growing prestige of artistic incomprehensibility, part of a broader shift from an aesthetics based on the principles of rhetoric, in which the artist bears the burden of intelligibility, to an aesthetics based on the principles of hermeneutics, in which the audience assumes responsibility for comprehending a given text. Beethoven's “late” works, often regarded as products of self-critique or turning inward, can thus be heard as part of a wider effort to engage audiences as active participants in a community dedicated to a dialectic of critique.

How the Visual Rhetoric of Online Discussions Enables and Constrains Students’ Participation

AbstractWhole‐class discussions, in which students share and refine ideas with others, can now take place in online forums. In face‐to‐face classrooms, previous research has identified conversational techniques, such as open‐ended questions and uptake of what others have said, that can promote dialogic, whole‐class discussions. However, few studies have examined how students’ participation can be enabled and constrained by the visual design of online forums. This article evaluates three online conversations among students of different disciplines and geographic regions at secondary, postsecondary, and graduate levels, evaluating the success of each example based first on conversational techniques and then on the visual design of the online forum. Rhetorical principles such as contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity may help teachers evaluate and redesign potential online forums for more effective online discussions, including how classroom setup, routines, and multimedia can shape students’ participation.

The Perils of Accommodation: Jesuit Missionary Strategies in the Early Modern World

The notion of accommodation, or the adaptation of one’s message to one’s audience, has been regarded as a central feature of the Jesuit way of proceeding at least since the seventeenth century. In recent years, scholars have come to understand accommodation as a rhetorical principle, which—while rooted in the rules of classical oratory—permeated all the works and ministries performed by the Jesuits of the Old Society. By comparing the theoretical notions about accommodation and the advantages and risks of adapting both the Christian message to native cultures and vice versa, this paper shows how and under what conditions the Jesuit missionaries were able to translate this rhetorical principle into a proselytizing praxis. By focusing on the examples of José de Acosta in Peru, Matteo Ricci in China, and of those Jesuits working in the missions in Paraguay and Chile, this essay will show how the needs in the missionary field superseded and overruled the theoretical requirements set beforehand. They revealed the ways in which the political and cultural context in which the missionaries operated determined the negotiations needed in order to achieve a common ground with their would-be converts if their mission was going to happen at all.

Rhetorical Principles on Uncertainty for Transdisciplinary Engagement and Improved Climate Risk Communication

Rhetorical Principles on Uncertainty for Transdisciplinary Engagement and Improved Climate Risk Communication

Beginning from the End: Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme

Beginning from the End:Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme Venla Sykäri (bio) Having studied why rhyming couplets are such an effective vehicle of lyrical communication in contemporary Cretan tradition for over a decade, the first time I attended a freestyle rap battle in Helsinki the expression seemed profoundly familiar to me. At first sight differences between the two oral poetic cultures might seem striking: language, style, communicative contexts, and social implantation—in two socially and linguistically distinct corners of Europe. Nevertheless, the major argumentative images developed within the improvised flow of rapping tended to be verbalized in a couplet form very similar to that in Crete. In addition to the structural similarity of these core units, both traditions share the role of end rhyme as a primary parameter in composition, as well as the argumentative ambition. These qualifiers also characterize the rhetorical structure of several other traditional forms of contest poetry, which I have recently been able to verify in the performance of improvised gloses in Mallorca. The target of this paper is to analyze the structural and rhetorical principles that seem to be emblematic of extempore composition in all three of these rhymed forms of oral poetry.1 The analysis focuses on the methods that improvisers employ in the construction of end rhyme patterns and in structuring the semantic hierarchy of verse units in the spontaneous composition of verses in these traditions. End rhyme is a poetic device that ties verses together with parallel sound patterns situated at the ends of the lines. Although Richard Bauman (1977:18-19) specifically states that "the structural principles underlying the parallel constructions may serve as mnemonic aids to the performer of a fixed traditional text, or enhance the fluency of the improvisational or spontaneous performance," the role of rhyme is often acknowledged only as a mnemotechnic device that is utilized to help the memory in the performance of an existing, pre-composed text. In this paper, by contrast, I will speak of end rhyme's role as a creative and cognitive device in the improvised oral composition of verses. The methods of structuring the poetic discourse by situating sound patterns at the ends of the lines are the very heart of the cognitive practice, skill, and art of lyrical improvisation with end rhyme. These methods further relate to a model of semantic hierarchy, in which semantic weight, the argument, is also at the end of a structural unit of composition. The fact that the improviser has to command a technique of structuring the verses in a manner that is often the reverse to what the audience perceives is largely unknown outside the communities of improvisers. I also address a type of orally composed poetry, rhymed poetry with an argumentative core, which, in spite of the historical depth of its roots and nearly universal distribution, has so far received little attention in English language research. In what follows I focus on the poetic traditions of the Cretan rhyming couplets called mandinadhes, Mallorcan gloses, and Finnish improvised rap, freestyle. These poetic idioms all have end rhyme but they differ in their culture-specific conventions of performance and also in how the utterance as a whole is structured and composed. Mandinadhes represent a short, compact couplet form that states a desired point within its two lines. Improvised gloses are one example of the contest poetry stanzas of approximately eight to ten lines with a fixed rhyme pattern typical of the Southern European and Ibero-American areas. In Finnish improvised rap the length of the strophe can be either free or regularized by a time limit, but utterances often contain 16-24 lines. In addition to the length of utterances, the speed of rapping is very rapid. Both of these factors contribute to a greater variety in structuring the utterance as a whole. Each section of this essay will introduce the basic characteristics of the poetic idioms addressed, give one or several textualized examples of utterances in the tradition, analyze the rhyming and placement of semantic weight in these utterances, and then look at how individual improvisers explain their method. Following this I draw some conclusions concerning the similarities and differences...

"Everything Has Two Handles": The Rhetoric of Metonymy in Emerson's Later Work

"Everything Has Two Handles":The Rhetoric of Metonymy in Emerson's Later Work Sean Ross Meehan (bio) All conversation, as all literature, appears to me the pleasure of rhetoric, or, I may say, of metonomy [sic]. " To make of motes mountains, and of mountains motes," Isocrates said, "was the orator's office." Well, that is what poetry and thinking do. Whatever new object we see, we perceive to be only a new version of our familiar experience and we set about translating it at once into our parallel facts. Of course, we have hereby enriched our vocabulary. Everything has two handles. —Emerson, "Art and Criticism" (1859) According to James Elliot Cabot, Emerson's literary executor, Emerson remarked late in life that he would have become a professor of rhetoric at Harvard College, his alma mater, had the position been offered to him.1 Unlike Adams Sherman Hill, the fifth Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and author of the influential handbook The Principles of Rhetoric and Their Application (1878), Emerson was never offered the professorship. However, Emerson celebrated throughout his work and embodied in his lecture career the value of what he names in "Art and Criticism," by way of Isocrates, "the orator's office." Although he was not a rhetoric professor, Emerson did teach two lecture courses at Harvard (in 1870 and 1871), and he would observe and evaluate Adams Sherman Hill in his rhetoric classroom in 1875 while serving as a Harvard Overseer. Despite these professional engagements with the art of rhetoric, the longstanding assumption from Cabot forward [End Page 359] has been that Emerson somehow failed in his desire to be a rhetorician.2 To read Emerson as a writer who both performed and professed rhetorical thinking is thus to trace something of that elusive circulation of truth he represents in "Progress of Culture," his 1867 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address. There, echoing his essay "Circles" (1841), Emerson characterizes "[t]ruth in the intellectual world" as one whose "centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere."3 Rhetoric may be centered everywhere in Emerson's work, yet his rhetorical legacy has been difficult to describe. Emerson was certainly at the center of nineteenth-century American rhetorical culture, given his status as one of the century's most prominent lecturers, America's "first public intellectual," as Lawrence Buell proposes.4 Emerson used the rhetorical circumstances of some fifteen hundred lectures delivered from the 1830s through the 1870s as a foundation for his published work and a forum for the thinking and reading he began with his journals and notebooks. Moreover, he was an active thinker and observer of nineteenth-century oratory, not just one of its most prominent performers. He delivered one of his most popular lectures, "Eloquence," on numerous occasions between 1847 and 1875, publishing different versions in his last two essay collections, Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875). Emerson's views on the public importance of eloquence and its vital cultivation in the American college, furthermore, emerge in the many academic addresses he gave throughout this period, occasions when, as in his 1861 Tufts College commencement address, known as "Celebration of Intellect," Emerson urges scholars, even in the face of war, to stand by their "art and profession as thinkers."5 For good reason, Roger Thompson argues that "Emerson's writing carries in it the DNA of American rhetorical history." And yet, curiously, with a few exceptions, the DNA evidence of this rhetorical Emerson, "Emerson read as a rhetorician," [End Page 360] as Thompson puts it, has for many critics been insufficient or ignored.6 In Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (1984), James A. Berlin confronts this neglect, locating in Emerson's "romantic rhetoric" a substantive model of "social and democratic" nineteenth-century American rhetoric that is "designed to be counteractive to the eighteenth-century rhetoric of its day." However, Berlin also demonstrates persuasively that Emerson's legacy was replaced, if not altogether rejected, by the pedagogy of "current-traditional rhetoric" that prevails in the new university.7 Reading Berlin, one begins to understand why even rhetoric scholars might struggle to make a case for reading Emerson as one...

Rhetorik und Musik in England (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert)

Abstract The article deals with the influence of rhetoric on musical thinking and musical practice in England from the end to fifteenth century until the eighteenth century. The humanistic rediscovery of sciences and arts led to the revival of the artes liberales and to an insight in the relationship of ars oratoria and ars musica and the affinity between poetry and music. The close connexion is based on the similarity of effects,which are produced by the eloquence of speech and the affective power of vocal and instrumental sounds: They convey a message and move the heart. The relation of the sister arts was primarily considered not in theoretical musical sources but in writings dealing with poetry or rhetoric by George Puttenham, Henry Peacham the Elder, Francis Bacon, Charles Butler and others. However, the treatises by Christopher Simpson,Thomas Mace,Charles Avison and William Jones attestagrowing importance of rhetorical principles on the creation of music. Ayres and wordless pieces by Campion, Dowland, Purcell and Händel give evidence, that the composers applied rhetorical procedures and figures to intensify the expressive and persuasive qualities of their art.