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Rhetorical Principles

Purpose

The following principles will give you a useful vocabulary for talking about what you and other writers are doing with your respective texts.

Ethos
An appeal that relies upon the character of the rhetor or the character of another

Pathos
An emotional appeal; moving your audience by getting in touch with what they value

Logos
Rational appeal; the truth of the word

Techne
An art; rhetoric has often been articulated as an art, strategies that can be taught

The Five Canons of Rhetoric

Arrangement The order in which the content is organized for a communication (think five-paragraph essay); genre

Invention The process of coming to the content we are going to communicate; rhetors have debated whether this is a process of developing knowledge or not.

Heuristics Strategies for developing knowledge often through investigation, especially useful in local contexts

Epistemology The study of how we come to knowledge

Topoi A form or strategy of argument usable in demonstrating propositions on any subject

Style The signs-often words-one chooses for communication

Tropes Figures of speech, often refers to metaphors, apostrophe (addressing a person who is not there or addressing an abstraction), metonymy (substitution for an arbitrary or suggestive word in place of what is actually meant), synecdoche (understanding one thing with another); in our current age tropes are often problematized for be valued as reality

Memory The pedagogy for remembering what one will state during a given communication

Delivery The process of relating the word to the given audience; often understudied, but becoming more important in an electronic age