Rhetoric Part 2

Going through this class has improved my definition of rhetoric, opposed from changing it entirely. At this time in our 1900 English class, I have learned that rhetoric is an art of persuasion utilizing effective speaking and writing eloquently in order to convince an audience by making a whole, concise argument. As an art, rhetoric utilizes different compositional styles in order to achieve persuasion for an argument. For example, persuasive appeals, arrangement, style, and delivery are imperative in the emphasis of arguments and how effectively they are delivered.

            The more and more I learned in this class, the more I was able to interpret and recognize different uses of rhetoric in everyday life. I understood how persuasive appeals worked when filming movies or TV shows, how different word meanings or inflections affected consumers in advertisements, and even when I utilized rhetoric myself when persuading someone to agree with my argument. Let’s take advertisements, for example, and how they use words with different inflections to persuade consumers into buying their product. Commercials will play with words that evoke emotion, utilizing the pathos persuasive appeal. Before this class, I always recognized logos, pathos, and ethos before this class, but I didn’t understand how they were utilized and what service they provided in an argument. What’s funny is that when I notice these persuasive appeals unfold in everyday life, I think back to whatever lecture we had when we discussed them. Seeing the juxtaposition between class and everyday life is interesting to me.

            We, as humans, are argumentative by nature. Learning more about rhetoric and how to eloquently phrase our arguments can help strengthen them. Utilizing rhetoric further employs us to challenge other’s points and allows us to see the weak and strong points within an argument. We always find more and more about how to analyze a conversation and argument through what what we’ve learned in this class. Though many people were critical about the paradigms in TS/IS, utilizing them helped strengthen our papers and whatever arguments we had in Fight Club or whatever we discussed an issue. After learning more about rhetoric, I now understand how to create and and consolidate arguments pragmatically. An audience would not pay heed to a speaker who does not have a sense of what he or she is talking about, let alone follow in his or her argument. Rhetoric allows me to target any audience, whether specific or broad, and appeal to their views. It presented me with an opportunity to engage with my audience better through different persuasive appeals and paradigms. Applying rhetoric in my arguments will help me examine my debate better and how to search for information to strengthen it effectively, while simultaneously pinpointing weak spots and searching out naysayers. Overall, learning rhetoric is greatly appreciated, and will be applicable in whatever I need to do.

Burton, Gideon. "The Forest of Rhetoric." Silva Rhetoricae. Brigham Young University, n.d.Web. 04 Dec. 2015. http://rhetoric.byu.edu