Rhetoric Analysis Assignment | Essay Help Services

For Assignment 3, complete the following two tasks:
1. Course Reading – part 1
Write a 2 page summary response essay to “Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech” by Patricia Roberts-Miller on pages 7-12 of Bad Ideas about Writing online textbook

RHETORIC IS SYNONYMOUS WITH
EMPTY SPEECH
Patricia Roberts-Miller
Recently, I was at a meeting of faculty whose research and
teaching interests concerned issues of environmentalism. A
colleague from another department asked me what my area was.
“Environmental rhetoric,” I replied. He looked slightly shocked
and then commented, “Good environmentalism doesn’t have a
rhetoric.” I’m in a department of rhetoric, so I teach rhetoric, read
scholarly pieces on rhetoric, and attend conferences on rhetoric.
However, I often forget that other faculty members’ views on rhetoric
might be different than mine.
A popular view of rhetoric is that it is a straightforward model
of how communication should work: A person can speak the truth
simply by using words that refer to true things in the world. If she
chooses not to use sentences filled with words that refer to true
things in the world, then she is engaged in rhetoric. Rhetoric, in
this view, is something you add on to sentences (such as metaphor)
that decorates and obscures communication. If I say, “The
cat is on the mat,” I am using language correctly. However, if I say,
“The elegant feline languishes mournfully on the expensive carpet,
waiting impatiently for what he sees as his lazy servants to open a
can of salmon,” then I have added rhetoric to the first sentence, or
chosen rhetoric over clear communication.
For many people, the simpler, plainer version of the sentence is
not just a stylistic choice, it’s a moral one. Many people believe that
the addition of more complicated words obscures the meaning of
the sentence. Rhetoric, to them, is something that hides the truth.
If you look at the two sentences, though, you can see that the elaborated,
supposedly more rhetorical one communicates quite clearly.
In fact, it communicates more effectively and precisely than “The
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cat is on the mat.” It might, of course, be false—there might not be
such a cat; it might not be elegant; it might not be thinking much
of anything; it might be quite cheerful; it might not like salmon.
But the same is true of the simpler sentence—there might not be a
cat; it might not be on a mat. Thus, linguistic simplicity and truthfulness
aren’t necessarily connected, and linguistic complexity and
truthfulness aren’t necessarily opposed.
Or, to put it another way, for a long time, philosophers of
language insisted that language works by sentences having propositional
content—“the cat is on the mat”—which can be expressed
in various ways. Rhetoric is what we layer onto the proposition.
Or, as the old saying goes, “Rhetoric is clothing on the idea.” In an
Edenic world, we would all wander around naked, and we would
all simply and clearly speak our thoughts; rhetoric is something we
must have in this fallen world.
People who believe that rhetoric hides meaning believe
that we could return to Eden by using simple, plain, and rhetoric-
free language. One of several underlying assumptions is that
it’s harder to lie in plain language, or that lies are more obvious
when the language is less complicated. Therefore, we can trust
plain language and should treat complicated language with suspicion.
Oddly enough, this seemingly straightforward proposition
isn’t true. In other words, this simple belief shows that an idea can
be untrue and persuasive at the same time. It is also interesting
that the master deceivers have generally relied on simple, yet false,
claims. It’s quite likely that people believed their assertions were
clear and plain and, therefore, assumed that they must be true.
The Edenic view isn’t a helpful way to think about rhetoric.
It isn’t even how language works. While it’s true that the same
thing can be said in different ways, there is a way of saying that
thing without rhetoric. “The cat is on the mat” is still a style—the
simple style—with internal rhyming and prose rhythm. It’s also
structurally the rhetorical figure of chiasmus—the sentence begins
and ends in an almost identical way. We can’t get away from rhetoric,
but we can choose its kind.
As in all interesting arguments, it’s a question of how we’re
defining terms. And rhetoric has a variety of definitions. It was first
used in Platonic dialogues with very little precision. It comes from
the Greek word for a person with a certain role in the Athenian
Assembly (rhetor). It is believed that it was Plato who added the
-ic later.
He used rhetoric in terms of speech-making as opposed to
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arguing in small groups. Plato wasn’t opposed to argumentation,
and he wasn’t even opposed to some verbal sleight of hand. After
all, Socrates—often read as a kind of spokesman for Plato’s views—
relied heavily on some fairly dodgy logical moves in the dialogues.
Plato’s point seems to be that speech-making isn’t a very useful
skill because making speeches to large groups (Athenian juries
might have hundreds of people) is not very effective for getting
to the truth. It might be effective for getting others to accept the
truth one has already figured out (that seems to be the point that
Socrates is making in the dialogue Phaedrus), but, if you want to
find out what’s true, argue with another individual. Do not make
a speech.
Of course, Socrates makes a lot of speeches in Platonic dialogues.
So, it is still murky whether or not Plato noticed the contradiction,
was making a different point despite noticing the proposition, or
didn’t write the dialogues to get to the truth. In fact, Plato’s overall
attitude toward rhetoric is murky, even though his school, the
Academy, did have rhetoric classes. They were taught by a man
named Aristotle.
On the other hand, Aristotle, who was a teacher of rhetoric,
neither defined rhetoric as style nor as something you add to
language. He described it as a discipline and a skill that enables
you to see the available means of persuasion. For Aristotle, rhetoric
is about public speaking to large groups, and it is different from
philosophy. So, he did share those two assumptions with Plato.
But he didn’t agree with Plato about rhetoric not getting us to the
truth. He thought that it could get us to the truth, but that it could
also be used to deceive. It depends on the motives of the person
using it.
Aristotle loved syllogisms, and seems to have believed that all
reasoning could be done through them. In philosophy, to get to
the truth, you try to begin with a universally valid major premise
(e.g., all men are mortal). Then you have a more specific proposition
related to that premise (e.g., Socrates is a man) that enables
you to draw a conclusion (e.g., Socrates is mortal). But Aristotle
said that this kind of reasoning doesn’t work in large assemblies
for two reasons. First, during a speech, people don’t have the time
to reason from universally valid major premises—if you’re arguing
about whether Philip of Macedon represents a threat, it’s useless
to try to find universally valid premises about tyrants or war or
people from Macedon. You don’t have time. Second, the kind of
things about which we make speeches—politics, ethics, military
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strategy, guilt or innocence, honor and dishonor—aren’t subject
to certainty. There are no universally valid major premises about
tyrants that will help us figure out what we need to do now and
here to assess Philip. We must rely on what is probably true.
According to Aristotle, what you learn from rhetoric is how
to approach political, ethical, and legal problems, how to come
up with an argument when you can’t be (or, at least, shouldn’t
be) certain that you’re right. You also learn how to assess other
people’s arguments. Aristotle, unlike many other philosophers,
doesn’t present rhetoric as an inferior discipline to philosophy (he
says it’s a “counterpart”). It’s just different. It’s a pragmatic skill
that helps us in decision-making.
Aristotle, being an astute observer, noticed that people
argued about different things in similar ways. He came up with
28 approaches, called “lines of argument” (they’re also sometimes
called “formal topoi,” which makes it seem as though they have
long dresses and white ties). If I am making a speech trying to
persuade people to become more active in politics, I might argue
from precedent (listed as #11 of his 28 lines), or argue that the
consequences of political activism are good (#13), or point out
inconsistencies in the argument for political quietism (#22), and
so on. Those different lines aren’t ornaments I hang on the proposition
that people should be politically active; they are all different
ways of thinking about the situation.
Take, for instance, Aristotle’s first line of argument: consideration
of the opposite, a strategy that might structure my entire
case. I might spend all my time trying to show that political activism
is good because political quietism is bad. I might, however,
make that just part of one speech, in which I move from how good
it is to be politically active to a moving description of the tragedies
associated with political quietism. Or, I might make it one paragraph,
or one sentence. I might say, “Ask not what your country can
do for you, but what you can do for your country.” In other words,
the forms—such as consideration of the opposite—can be used
to structure a clause, sentence, paragraph, speech, or (in John F.
Kennedy’s case) political philosophy. Rhetoric is a way of thinking.
It is not just something added to a thought derived by other means.
Does that mean that rhetoric is always good? Of course not.
Rhetoric is a contingent, pragmatic, and generally (but not always)
verbal way of approaching problems we face as members of communities.
It is the cause as well as the consequence of thought. If we
tend to think in binaries and divide everything into this versus that,
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then we’ll probably be drawn to the rhetorical figures that divide
things into two. Continually presenting and interpreting issues
in that divided way will reinforce our sense that things really are
divided into two. We might then act in ways that divide things into
two—we might believe that everyone is either an ally or an enemy,
and thereby alienate neutral parties. Thinking and talking about
everyone as ally or enemy might mean we are likely to end up in a
world in which people end up treating us in that manner. Rhetoric
isn’t always good, and it isn’t always bad, but it’s rarely neutral.
For instance, we might be tempted to use metaphors of disease,
infection, or contamination for those groups that we don’t like.
That might be a calculated decision to mislead an audience. We
might not dislike the groups as vehemently as we project but we
still perform for the audience to get votes, money, popularity, sales,
sex, or something else. It is insincere. These types of people might
make us feel unsettled and disgusted. They might even come
across to us as dangerous. Thus, we call them slimy or a cancer on
the body politic. We proclaim that they spread ideas, weaken our
community, and threaten our children. Those metaphors and that
rhetoric would feel accurate, and it would convey our meaning—it
is not added on; it is not ornamentation. It is what we mean. And
it can hurt us as a community because it can mean that we then
interpret that group’s actions through a lens of disease, threat, and
danger. We can end up killing them or getting them killed because
of the rhetoric we used. We can’t get away from rhetoric, but we
can choose the kind of rhetoric we use.
Further Reading
For further reading on rhetoric as more than “mere rhetoric,”
see especially Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Rhetoric, which
distinguishes between “rhetrickery” and rhetoric as an inclusive
method of deliberation. Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An
Art of Character is an elegant introduction to Aristotle, and Debra
Hawhee and Sharon Crowley’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary
Students, though a textbook, explains classical and current conceptions
of rhetoric usefully.
Keywords
conceptual metaphor, deliberative rhetoric, public argumentation,
rhetorical topoi
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Author Bio
Patricia Roberts-Miller is a professor in the Department of
Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where
she also directs the writing center. Her scholarly and teaching
interests include the history and theory of public argumentation—
as she likes to put it, she’s a “scholar of train wrecks in public
deliberation.” More about Trish can be found at patriciarobertsmiller.
com.