rhetorical analysis
Recently Published Documents

Deliberative pedagogy holds promise for improving democratic society by cultivating practical wisdom in students as a means to tackle the problems of democracy, such as polarization. This study embraced an opportunity to consider civic education in the 21st century through deliberative pedagogy by considering practical wisdom in a synchronous, virtual deliberation among university stakeholders and local political candidates concerning our role in 21st-century politics. This civic site enabled an analysis of practical wisdom across three student roles: facilitators enrolled in a deliberation course; students from the wider university; and student alumni of the university’s deliberation center, who had been exposed to deliberation in curricular and cocurricular practice. Using a constructive rhetorical analysis to understand practical wisdom within deliberative pedagogy discourse, we contend that students in these three different roles demonstrated three key aspects of practical wisdom through their discursive responses to rhetorical exigences that arose during deliberative engagement. This analysis offers insights beyond outcomes and informs deeper thinking about curricula and better pedagogical practices. Additionally, such studies, focused on the discourse itself, contribute to understandings concerning the connection between rhetoric and deliberative pedagogy.

The paper points out the benefits of rhetorical analysis and rhetorical criticism in developing business communication skills. At Zagreb School of Economics and Management, both the American and the European approach to business communication have been combined, with LSP courses taught in the first year and business communication and rhetoric courses taught in the second year. An experiment was conducted on a sample of 99 students, including 57 female and 42 male participants, who were asked to assess the teenage activist Greta Thunberg and her speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. The research focused on the role of the gender in perception of quality, attractiveness of the speech, the use of ethos, pathos and logos, persuasiveness and the influence potential. The results showed that male students gave lower grades to Greta and her speech, unlike the female students, who would also be more willing to change their behavior as the result of listening to Greta’s speech. Nevertheless, these differences were statistically significant only for a limited number of questions. The potential gender bias to speakers should be addressed in the rhetoric and business communication course design. Exposing students to a diverse set of speakers increases their critical thinking skills, ensuring higher objectivity and bias-free assessment of speakers including their peers.

Inefficiencies naturally form as organizations grow in size and complexity. The knowledge required to address these inefficiencies is often stove-piped across different organizational silos, geographic locations, and professional disciplines. Crowdsourcing provides a way to tap into the knowledge and experiences of diverse groups of people to rapidly identify and more effectively solve inefficiencies. We developed a prototype crowdsourcing system based on design thinking practices to allow employees to build a shared mental model and work collaboratively to identify, characterize, and rank inefficiencies, as well as to develop possible solutions. We conducted a study to assess how presenting crowdsourced knowledge (votes/preferences, supporting argumentation, etc.) from employees affected organizational Decision Makers (DMs). In spite of predictions that crowdsourced knowledge would influence their decisions, presenting this knowledge to DMs had no significant effect on their voting for various solutions. We found significant differences in the mental models of employees and DMs. We offer various explanations for this behavior based on rhetorical analysis and other survey responses from DMs and contributors. We further discuss different theoretical explanations, including the effects of various biases and decision inertia, and potential issues with the types of knowledge elicited and presented to DMs.

The inaugural speeches mark the beginning of a new term in office for a community or government leader, such as the president. This reaction must persuade the people to believe in the government and the programs will be enacted. This research aims at finding the rhetorical appeals of President Joe Biden's inaugural address on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States. The research is based on Aristotle's theory called a rhetorical theory. The resercher employs descriptive qualitative as a methodology to analyze the data from the spoken utterances of the speech. The result shows that Joe Biden uses all of the Aristotelian rhetoric strategies in his inaugural address, which are: ethos, pathos, and logos. The data shows that Joe Biden uses pathos as 55% of his speech, followed by ethos 37%, and logos 8%.. Joe Biden skillfully used and implied Aristotle's rhetorical theory in his inauguration address to engage and build trust with the American people. From the analysis, the researcher has concluded that a good speaker can use all of the three elements of the rhetorical theory and imply them in the speech or writing.

This research analyzes rhetoric which is uttered by President Trump in his political speech in Palm Beach, Florida on January 2020 on the killing of Qassem Soleimani. The analysis involves its context, arguments, and also the effects caused by his speech. The research method used is descriptive qualitative method. The data were taken from the video, the transcript of the speech and the news related to the speech. Martin theory (2014) of rhetorical analysis on political speech and Cicero`s theory in Aristotle (2008) of the classical principle of rhetoric are used to analyze the data. The research results are the rhetorical context of President Trump`s speech is to respond and clarify the killing of Qassem Soleimani; and the accusation of started a war, thus the rhetorical argument shows that the speech used all the classical principle of rhetoric and the rhetorical effect of the speech is escalating the tension in the region. 

This article promotes closer rhetorical analysis of the current trend in higher education to institutionalize equity, inclusion, diversity, and access (EIDA) work without routinely interrogating the orienting terms used in such efforts. It may be easy to mistake the intentions of EIDA work as determining its value, thus discouraging a critical examination of the rhetorical outcomes it produces and the rhetorical effects it invites. We suggest that one insight such analysis could offer is a better account of the rhetorical constraints of the term “diversity.” In this article, we review a range of compelling critiques that have been offered of the limitations of “diversity” as it appears in higher education discourse. We suggest “dignity” as a promising alternative to “diversity” as an alternate orienting term for EIDA work in higher education.

Language is the fundamental element of communication and understanding in society. It relates immediately to human thoughts and is embodied in written or spoken signs or signals. The field that scientifically studies language (its forms and structures) is called Linguistics. Among the linguistic studies of language is Rhetoric which studies the importance of speech or texts for the audience. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; it comprises different arguments raised by the speaker/writer depending on social, religious, moral or even traditional evidence in order to prove that the raised arguments are real. In this way, the writer/speaker associates the language to similar or related realities in order to reach the purpose of her/his language. However, presenting arguments and evidence it not always accurate because there are arguments that rely on weak evidence. The purpose of argumentative techniques is still to persuade the audience about a personal view or a societal concept. From this perspective, the feminist linguists suggest that rhetoric is actually masculine; that is, rhetoric is anti-feminist. Therefore, linguists presented a great deal of evidence to prove this theory and bring the feminist ideology into rhetoric. This study aims at providing a feminist rhetorical analysis of the anti-feminist poetry to study the status of women in rhetoric and whether the arguments that demean women are true or not. For this purpose, the current study utilizes Fiorenza’s (1995) model of analysis; a feminist rhetorical tool to analyze anti-feminist poems written by male poets in English and Arabic in order to study the arguments as well as the evidence the poets present against women.

This article examines the relevance of rhetorical analysis for the theory and practice of rights-claiming. Recent work in the field of human rights proposes that what is important about rights is not what they ‘are’ but what they ‘do’. Utilising performative theory, they suggest that rights-claiming is best understood as a perlocutionary practice of persuasion. The question is, ‘How might rights claims be most persuasive?’ This article applies insights from the field of rhetoric to investigate how practices of rights-claiming by migrants in France contest French citizenship. It argues that rights claims are ethico-political negotiations of a political situation and that such practices are persuasive when they mobilise transcendent principles embedded within particular political communities. Rhetorical analysis explains how rights can be both inventive and efficacious. In so doing, this article extends the human rights literature by providing a refined rights-claiming analytic.

In his speech at Miletus (Acts 20:18–25), Paul talks about himself repeatedly. Such stress on the character of Paul inevitably raises some questions regarding the function of the emphasis. This article attempts to understand the function of the emphasis on the character of Paul in the Miletus speech. The method used to analyze the speech is the classical rhetorical method. Classical rhetoric follows the convention of ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric to examine how a speech persuades the audience to act according to what the speaker intends. In studying the Miletus speech, the writer will investigate several elements from classical rhetoric, such as the rhetorical invention, with particular discussion to ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (the logic of the argumentation), the rhetorical species, the rhetorical arrangement, and the rhetorical effectiveness. The main argument of this article is that the emphasis on Paul’s character functions as the basis for the accountability of Paul’s ministry and the basis for his exhortation to the elders of the Ephesian church.

The COVID-19 pandemic has augmented discourses of individual citizen responsibility for collective health. This article explores how British Columbia, Canada’s widely praised COVID-19 communication participates in the development of neo-communitarian “active citizenship” governmentalities focused on the civic duty of voluntarily taking responsibility for the health of one’s community. We do so by investigating how public health updates from BC’s acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry articulate this civic imperative through the rhetorical constitution of the “good covid citizen.” Our rhetorical analysis shows how this pro-social communication interpellates citizens within a discourse of behavioral, epistemic, and ethical responsibilisation. The communal ethos constituted through this public health communication significantly increases the burden of personal responsibility for health beyond norms of self-care. Making the protection of community health primarily the responsibility of individual citizens also presumes a privileged identity of empowered, active agency and implicitly excludes citizens who lack the means to successfully fulfill the expectations of good covid citizenship.