A Brief (and Reductive) Review of the Classical Art of Rhetoric

The 3 genres of rhetoric

• forensic: past, justice, courtroom
• deliberative: future, expedience, the assembly (senate)
• epideictic: present, honor, ceremonial occasions

The five canons of rhetoric

• invention: coming up with arguments
• arrangement: arranging arguments in strategic order
• style: choosing words, sentence structure, and figures of speech
• memory
• delivery

The invention of arguments

• Stasis: used to determine the points of conflict
  • forensic: ?s of fact, definition, quality, proceedure
  • deliberative: ?s of problem, solution, feasibility
  
  
• Types of arguments
  • artistic: ethos, logos, pathos
  • inartistic: authority, testimony, statistics, torture
  
  
• The three artistic arguments
  
  • ethos: good morals, good sense, good will
  • pathos: emotions of attraction or repulsion, mild or passionate
  • logos: deduction (enthymeme) or induction (example)
  
  
• Logos: reasoning
  
  • deduction: enthymemes are rhetorical syllogisms. A syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.
  • induction: examples are precedents taken from similar circumstances in history, hypothetical instances made up by the author, or instances taken from the same class in which your subject exists.
  
  
• The topoi: places to find arguments
  
  • definition: to set boundaries
  • classification: to put into categories
  • comparison/contrast: to show likeness or differences
  • cause/effect: to show that A results from B
  • description: to create vivid images that cause emotion
  • narration: to tell a story
  
  
• Rebuttals can be built from the same topoi and should address logos, pathos, and ethos. The fallacies help you find weaknesses.
  
  • material falacies: hidden generalization, insufficient sampling, unrepresentative sampling
  • logical fallacies: faulty cause, eithor/or, rigged ?, equivocation
  • psychological fallacies: pity, ad hominem, force, bandwagon, ceremony, authority, tradition, ignorance, humor, name-calling

The seven parts of the classical pattern

• exordium: attention
• narratio: background and history
• explicatio: explains issues
• partitio: presents thesis and divides argument
• confirmatio: arguments supporting your position
• refutatio: arguments rebutting your opponent's position
• peroratio: summary and urge to action

The three levels of style

• plain (to teach)
• middle (to please)
• grand (to persuade)

Stylisms

• colloquialisms: spoken style, but not written
• localisms: soda in Boston is pop in Nebraska is tonic in Florida
• slang: group-identifying informal language (often teenage)
• jargon: technical language of a specialized group
• cliches: worn out expressions or phrases

Figures of speech

• tropes: shifts in meaning
• schemes: artificial structures

Tropes

• metaphor: the students went down in flames on the test
• simile: he fell like a rock
• synecdoche: all hands on board
• metonomy: we gave him the cold shoulder
• personification: the trees breathed a sigh of relief
• hyperbole: if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times
• litotes: it wasn't my best moment
• irony: the best solution to overpopulation is to eat children
• oxymoron: parting is such sweet sorrow
• paradox: he worked hard at being lazy
• rhetorical question: what do I propose we should do?
• onomatopoeia: The saws buzzed with blaring roars of blasting bursts

Schemes

• parallelism: I had a desire for money, order, fame, and food
• chiasmus: ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country
• climax: let a person praise his colleagues, his family, and his God
• apposition: pollution, our biggest problem, is the issue
• zeugma: she discovered New York and her world
• asyndeton: I came, I saw, I conquered
• polysyndeton: I studied math and science and English and music
• anadiplosis: She was enriched and enriched others
• polyopton: I agree if agreement is required
• anaphora: I have a dream . . . I have a dream . . . I have a dream
• alliteration: while I traverse this treacherous territory
• assonance: no pain, no gain