INTRODUCING RHETORICAL STRATEGIES
Rhetorical strategy – a particular way in which writers craft language so as to have an effect on readers. Strategies are means of persuasion, ways of using language to get readers’ attention and agreement.
Rhetorical strategies are everywhere – every photo in a magazine, every commercial;
politics, media, advertising, marketing, branding, movies, academic writing, workplace communication, people picking each other up in bars, etc. Wherever there is persuasion and communication. They are not always conscious.
■ I see it in the talks I have with my kids – they are non-stop rhetoric machines, probing, testing and using every strategy they can come up with.
■ The Daily show – focuses on revealing and satirizing strategies used by the media and politicians. (could be called the daily analysis of rhetorical strategies show).
■ Qn: where do you see rhetorical strategies (have you used strategies to pick up someone? Perhaps in the spirit of “McLovin’” ?)
■ Consider the communicative strategies used by producers, staff and hosts in daytime “reality” shows like Jerry Springer.
■ Consider monuments, or the state of the union address
We will look at strategies in a variety of contexts – academic, popular, commercial, etc.
When describing why a strategy is used, you may want to consider alternative strategies, and think about how they would work differently. You may also want to consider what would happen if the strategy were left out – what difference would it make to the argument? This may help you figure out why the particular strategy was chosen.
Rhetoric focuses on communicative strategies and “moves”:
• Language as strategic, situated symbolic action
• How are strategies used to do texts persuade audiences? What moves are made? How do texts position themselves and readers; how do authors draw on strategies to construct debates, connect with other texts, establish credibility, frame issues?
Explain rhetorical strategies – give definition. Writers use language to persuade, to position themselves relative to other writers and to their audience, to create a persona and build credibility, to refute others, etc. Both Rushkoff and Chua do this – how?
Remember this is an interpretive process. You will learn to do identify strategies through close reading, and you may need to come up with your own way of describing a strategy.
Introducing Rhetorical Strategies
1. Visual images/advertisements (see powerpoint file on Blackboard)
2. Examples of everyday rhetorical strategies: job application/grad school applications
■ You want a letter of recommendation from a professor.
Strategy 1: simply ask the professor. It’s very likely she will agree out of professional courtesy, regardless of how well she knows you or whether she’ll write you a strong letter.
Strategy 2: Frame the question this way: “Professor, do you think you know me well enough to write a strong letter of recommendation?” This gives the professor an “out,” and gives you some assurance that you’ll get a positive letter. How you frame the question matters.
■ You are in a job interview. It’s a common genre. They will ask you about your strengths, and will also ask about weaknesses. What do you do? A) dress up a strength as a weakness (I work too hard; I’m a perfectionist; I have overly exacting standards; etc.) B) irrelevance (I’m not that great at X, where X isn’t really part of the job – e.g. sales in engineering position. C) Something trivial, yet being worked on (I’m not great at X, where X isn’t very important, and you say I’m working hard on it.)
CONNECTION – presidential debates – how do you answer if you are a democrat/republican? E.g. Clinton stated “believing the president when he said he would go to the United Nations and put inspectors into Iraq to determine whether they had WMD.” Biden: “overestimating the competence of this administration and underestimating the arrogance.” Brownback: “I don't tell my wife and kids I love them enough?” Tancredo: “I took too long to realize Jesus was my personal savior.” Romney: he “was pro-choice,” but switched to a “pro-life” position as governor of Massachusetts.
■ Section of job interview where they ask if you have any questions – what questions would you ask? (Something that shows you know about the organization, are clued up, or that show you take the position seriously – possibility for professional development, learning, etc.
3. Headlines & framing
4. Ask about Chua – what rhetorical strategies might be involved in choosing to start with the story about her aunt’s death? Why start with this? Why not start with statistics about killings of market dominant minorities?
5. Other examples
Terms & categories: War on terror (struggle against terrorist extremists); Vietnam war: (insurgency in South East Asia, civil war in south east Asia, or imperialism in south east Asia. Global Warming/Climate Change; doctor assisted suicide (death with dignity euthanasia), etc.
Metaphors, Tropes, Word Choice
Use of narrative and framing etc.
This is an interpretive process – no rigid formula – must engage in close, critical reading, careful viewing, and analysis
■ Understanding rhetorical strategies is part of moving from a focus on what texts say (content) to what they do and how they do it (rhetoric). Rhetorical self consciousness = achieving a kind of double vision – of looking “at” as well as through language.
This can be conscious and unconscious
Reframing Organizations (Bolman and Deal): metaphors for organizations often divide up into 4 types: structural, symbolic, political, and human resources (Factory, Family, Jungle, Temple)
Metaphors that may “think for us” (from Lakoff & Johnson)
1. Spatial Metaphors
The foot of the bed, the foot of the hill, the back of the house, the face of the mountain, the leg of the chair, the skin of the orange, etc.
2. Metaphors for Arguments
Your claims are indefensible…I attacked the weak points in his argument…She couldn’t counter my criticisms…his criticisms were on target…she won the argument…his position is strong…his argument lacked support
3. Life/Career
He saw no way of getting ahead. He felt he was falling behind. Where do you want to be in 5 years? His career path was working out well. She felt her life was finally on the right track. He was approaching his forties. Things were going well (note how the auxiliary verb “go” is often used to indicate the future, as in “I’m going to be a lawyer.”) [Life is a journey (the person is a traveler, purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, counselors are guides, achievements are landmarks, choices are crossroads]
4. Knowledge & Understanding
I see what you are saying (cf. “savoir” in French). She showed great insight. My view of this issue is…what is your outlook on the problem? The concept was clear to her.
For example – consider the following terms – they describe, but they also “order” the world in particular ways, and construct a certain perspective on things:
Weed
Social anxiety disorder
Male pattern baldness [medicalizes an aspect of aging]
Halitosis [makes condition sound scarier?]
Gastro Esophageal Reflux Disease (GERD)
Erectile Dysfunction (ED) [makes condition sound less embarrassing?]
Negro, Black, African American
Freedom fries
Each of these is a way of framing and constructing the world, and each involves questions of rhetoric, perspective and strategy.
• Understanding rhetorical strategies is an important skill. Revealing the rhetorical moves that writers make, the strategies they draw on, is part of achieving academic literacy, and of acculturation into disciplinary communities. When you recognize the moves you not only understand the disciplinary conversation better, you are better equipped to join it.
Advertisements and rhetorical strategy: a basic strategy is association – the repeated juxtaposition of two qualities in a strategic way so as to transfer the meaning of one thing to another. E.g. Beer + sexy girls, or Beer + fun times with buddies. This strategy (aka “conditioning”) was developed in psychology and adapted to advertising.
Consider this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al9GJifHC9s&feature=related
(conditioning = 4 minutes. 5.30 = Pavlov. NOTE strategies of video itself – sexy woman with cleavage, sitting in leather chair with books around.)
- John Watson & Baby Albert. Watson uses principles of behaviorism in advertising.
- Associations can become powerful – and we are often less aware them than we think, or of how successful these strategies have been. Consider, diamonds and weddings and love (and De Beers)[1]; the Coca Cola bottle; Santa as fleshy icon of consumption dressed in red and white, etc.
■ What are some of the rhetorical strategies you’ve noticed in advertising?
(repetition, imprinting on memory – jingles, rhyme [Gillette, the best a man can get], humor, shock) social acceptance, sex, fear, etc.)
FRAMES, CATEGORIES, DEFINITIONS, AND METAPHOR
“Are we not coming to see that the whole works of scientific research, even entire schools, are hardly more than the patient repetition, in all its ramifications, of a fertile metaphor? Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change”
Rhetorical strategies can be identified in the ways authors create frames, choose categories and metaphors, and construct definitions.
Frames are typically constructed through the use of metaphors, definitions, narratives, categories and metalinguistic commentary. They are used to get an audience to attend to certain elements of a situation and ignore others; to construct a particular way of seeing an issue, event, person or group, and to shape the way an audience understands the context of communication. They can have persuasive effects. To identify:
1) Look for the “root” metaphor in an argument (the “God term,” Burke) and the “entailments” the metaphor constructs. This will often tell you much about the frame/conceptual logic governing an argument. Look for the interests, silences, ideologies and values identifiable in particular uses of metaphor. Example: The “desktop” metaphor could perhaps be thought of as the “root” metaphor for much personal computing. It is used to organize information in terms of files, file folders, a trash can, etc.
2) Identify a cluster or network of related metaphors and examine the “entailments” this constructs
3) Examine how a particular metaphor is “inflected,” appropriated and contested by opposing interests. This can help you understand the ways in which cultural and political struggle are mediated in language.
4) Examine shifts in metaphors that occur over time. This can tell you a lot about how an object or event is being constructed and framed, and the forces, actors, and ideologies at play in that construction.
5) Consider how some new object of event is captured in metaphor; how metaphors can function as creative resources in imagining new visions of an object or event, or as a creative resource in constructing new knowledge.
CONSIDER – Names, Categories & Definitions as Strategic.
Viagra (why name it that – what does the sound of the name connote?)
Department of defense/war
War on drugs
Axis of Evil
War on Terror
Collateral Damage
Body bag/transfer tube
Department of Corrections
“The Patriot Act” – why this name for a piece of legislation? (P.A.T.R.I.O.T = “Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”) [It’s about revising civil liberties in relation to new security threats, and new forms of government surveillance – it’s thus potentially a very sensitive issue.])
Homeland Security (vs. National Security – pathos?)
Doctor assisted suicide
Vietnam War/Insurgency in South East Asia/American Imperialism in Asia
Conflict in Iraq = insurgency, civil war, terrorism, occupation, all of the above?
Rape – in the past, there was a question about its definition as related to being inside marriage or not – where do we draw the line around a set of actions or entities? Why and how does the line shift?
“The economy shed 5000 jobs last month”
REBUTTALS
Rebuttals as rhetorical strategies - example: consider rebuttals as a strategy to anticipate and “inoculate” the reader against competing claims; to seem “fair and balanced”; to use contrast – show what against in order to clarify what you are for; to join a conversation, position oneself within a community, and claim a position in a community.
What do academic articles and telemarketing scripts have in common? Rebuttals!
Here is a standard template for telemarketing:
Pre-introduction: (Ask to speak to the decision-maker)
Introduction: (Introduce yourself and the reason for your call)
Attention Getter: (Mention the key features of the offer and qualify them for eligibility)
Probing Questions: (Always ask for information that will be useful for rebuttals)
Offer: (Explain the product/service and terms of commitment)
Close: (ALWAYS ASK FOR THE SALE)
Rebuttal (deal with objections)
Sales Continuation: (Agree, use rebuttals, sell benefits, CLOSE)
Up/down/cross-sell: (If there is another product of less-price this is the time to sell it.)
Confirmation Close: (Review the terms of the offer to reduce buyer remorse)
Final Close: (End on a positive note. Thank the customer and leave a dial free number for customer support)
Telemarketing Rebuttals
A telemarketing ploy you may have experienced is the offer of a “free trip” which requires that you take a brief tour of a resort which turns into a high pressure sale of a timeshare. Here is an excerpt from a website that describes the argumentative strategies used:
Phase three is what telemarketers refer to as overcoming objections with rebuttals. Rebuttals are basically responses for every possible objection the telemarketer might receive. The telemarketer literally breaks objections into three categories: spousal, credibility, and time-off-work. For a spousal rebuttal the telemarketer will say things like 'why don't you surprise you wife or husband with a free getaway?', or 'doesn't your family deserve to get away?,' or a defensive tactic 'aren't you allowed to make decisions?' This is usually said if a male answers the phone. The longer the telemarketing agent can keep someone on the phone without hanging up, the more likely they will get someone to agree to the trip… the most common objection is not being able to get off work. This is when the telemarketer would say if we could fit this vacation in with your schedule would you take it? The purpose of the rebuttal is to reduce the objection down to just one problem. (http://www.funandsun.com/vacations/ripoffs.html)
Note – leading questions (pack question with assumptions and values. “Have you stopped beating your girlfriend yet?”)
Telemarketers – don’t you think you and your family deserve a free vacation? You work hard, don’t you? Etc. See used by politicians and media all the time. Why do you oppose the liberation if Iraq? Why do you refuse to support our troops? See cable news.
SEE in commercials – “wouldn’t you like to feel better, have more energy…”