What Is Rhetoric, and Why Is It Important?

Rhetoric is the language you use to communicate your writing’s core message. The type of rhetoric you use depends on the kind of writing you’re doing and the message you’re communicating. Whenever you write a persuasive essay, talking points for a debate, or an argumentative essay, you use rhetoric

What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric is language that is carefully constructed to persuade, motivate, or inform the reader or listener about the speaker or writer’s position.

• A rhetorical question is a question that is asked to get the audience thinking seriously about the question and its implications.

Examples of rhetoric

The kind of rhetoric a writer uses largely depends on the type of writing they’re doing

• While a student writing an argumentative essay or another kind of academic writing relies on logos to communicate their work’s message, poetry is pure pathos
• Some examples include: Susan B. Anthony, Jonathan Swift, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why is rhetoric important?

Rhetoric is important because it provides a framework for critical thinking

• It demonstrates your thought processes as a writer and speaker
• To understand rhetoric, you need to understand the concept of heuristics
• A heuristic is a practical approach to problem-solving or self-discovery
• Heuristics play a key role in rhetoric because speakers and writers often use them to illustrate the points they’re making

Hyperbole

An extreme exaggeration meant to highlight the issue presented

History of rhetoric

Rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse, also known as the trivium, alongside logic and grammar, that make up the seven liberal arts.

• Plato called rhetoric a combination of logic and politics, and defined it as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
• From Ancient Greece thousands of years ago, rhetoric has been the backbone of persuasive and motivational speaking.

Epistrophe

Represents the repetition of a word through successive phrases, clauses, or sentences for the purpose of emphasizing it as a concept

When your writing is strong, your rhetoric is stronger

Even if your arguments are impenetrable, you’ll have a hard time persuading your readers of anything if your writing isn’t grammatical and punctuation-correcting software, like Grammarly Premium, is not installed

The rhetorical triangle: ethos, pathos, and logos

Pathos: language crafted to appeal to logic and reasoning

• Ethos: credibility comes from the speaker’s reputation or authority
• Logos: support your position with facts and data, emotional connection with the reader or listener, and aims to persuade or inform the audience

Rhetorical devices

These tools are known as rhetorical devices.

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