Writing Thresholds: A Website about Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies
Rhetoric
Key Threshold Idea: Rhetoric helps writers craft their ideas and maximize the impact of their writing.
Audio Brief Overview: Rhetoric
-
Rhetoric helps people design our communication to maximize its impact on our audience(s) (see Grant-Davie, 1997).
​
-
For Aristotle, rhetoric is the “art of persuasion” (Aristotle) in that rhetoric is crafted to elicit a specific response from the recipient. It is also always linked to the time and situation in which we communicate (Lunsford et al., 2009).
​
-
Rhetoric is in every piece of communication and interaction. We unconsciously use rhetoric every day, and we “project our personalities outwards” (Toye, 2013, p. 3) to those with whom we interact.
​
-
Whether our audience responds the way we intend often depends on the quality of our rhetorical approach.
Audio Example
Quotes from the Field
-
Rhetoric is a “plastic art that molds itself to varying times, places, and situations” (Lunsford et al., 2009, p. xix).
​
-
“A further difficulty in defining rhetoric is that the meaning of the English word ‘rhetoric,’ like the Greek word logos, encompasses both the art of rhetoric and its products (e.g., persuasion, speeches, texts, advertisements, etc.)” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 5).
​
-
“All of us project our personalities outwards in some way, visually, verbally, and even virtually (through social networking websites). Just as politicians position themselves with voters, we position ourselves in relation to a peer group (real or imagined), with rhetorical inflections of which we are frequently unconscious” (Toye, 2013, p. 3).
References
Aristotle. (Long Ago, but this version, 2004). Rhetoric. Dover.
Grant-Davie, K. (1997). Rhetorical situations and their constituents. Rhetoric Review, 15, 264-279.
Lunsford, A.A., Wilson, K.H., & Eberly, R.A. (2009). Introduction: Rhetorics and roadmaps. In A.A.
Lunsford, K.H. Wilson, & R.A. Eberly (Eds.) The Sage handbook of rhetorical studies (pp. xi-xxix). Sage.
​
MacDonald, M.J. (2014). Introduction. In M. J. MacDonald (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (pp. 1-30). Oxford UP.
​
Toye, R. (2013). Rhetoric: A very short introduction. Oxford UP.
123-456-7890