Rhetoric, Critical Reading, and EAP Writing

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Rhetoric, Critical Reading, and EAP Writing

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1. Define critical reading
2. Define rhetoric
3. History of rhetoric focusing on contemporary
   rhetorics
4. The rhetorical qualities in academic writing

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Ways of gaining knowledge

• Non-critical reader
• by memorizing the statements within a text.
• learn facts.
• Critical reader
• what a text says how the subject matter is
  said.
• Appreciate a particular perspective and a
  particular selecting of facts can lead to
  particular understanding

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What is Rhetoric?

• From Ancient Greece formal public speaking
  (political, legal, celebratory speech making)
• To Any spoken or written form of nonliterary
  discourse (many would include a great deal of
  literary discourse.)
• The art of persuasion
• George Kennedy the energy inherent in emotion
  and thought, transmitted through a system of
  signs, including language, to others to influence
  their decisions or actions.
• Employing symbols effectively.
• achieving the purposes of the symbol-userpersuas
  ion, clarity, beauty, or mutual understanding.

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Characteristics of rhetorical discourse

1. Planned
2. Adapted to an audience
3. Shaped by human motives
4. Responsive to a situation
5. Persuasion-seeking
6. Concerned with contingent issues

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Social functions of the art of rhetoric

1. Rhetoric tests ideas
2. Rhetoric assists advocacy
3. Rhetoric distributes power
4. Rhetoric discovers facts
5. Rhetoric shapes knowledge
6. Rhetoric builds community

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History of Rhetoric

• Antiquity Plato Aristotle Cicero
• Middle Ages Augustine.
• Renaissance Erasmus Italian humanism.
• Peter Ramus (1515-1572, the turn toward
  dialectic).
• skeptical about the value of Aristotles and
  Ciceros treatment of rhetoric and dialectic
• humanistic studies studies to the development
  of a free and active human mindrhetoric,
  poetics, ethics, politics.
• Rhetoric in timeline.doc
• Enlightenment
• Contemporary

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Ciceros five canons or categories of oratory

• Invention
• Arrangement
• Style
• Memory
• Delivery
• A pattern for rhetorical education
• A template for the criticism of discourse
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Invention finding something to say what is to
be said.Arrangement how one orders speech or
writing.Style the artful expression of ideas
how something is said
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The Enlightenment

• late 16th Cearly 18th C
• Logic, dialectic, and mathematics
• Managerial view of rhetoric
• The discovery of knowledge through reasoning, as
  opposed to the communication of knowledge in
  earlier period.
• Issac Newton (1642-1727) physical laws governs
  the universe
• John Locke 91632-1704) empirical basis of human
  knowing
• David Hume (1771-1776) rational operations of
  the human mind
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) theory of
  government centered on the individual citizen.
• Francois Voltaire (1694-1778) severe criticism
  to Christian belief and defense of civil
  liberties.

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18th and 19th Century Rhetorics

• Giambattista Vico on Rhetoric and Human Thought
• British Rhetorics
• The Elocutionary Movement
• The Scottish School
• Richard Whatelys Classical Rhetoric

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• Vico the rhetoric of imagination
• 1. intuitive poetic2. The need for education in
  arts of practical decision making about matters
  that did not yield to scientific analysis, such
  as morality, law, art, politics.3. The decisions
  are contingent.

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Rhetoric in British education

• 1. Christian apologetic, preaching and
  writing2. Shift from oral to written
  discourse3. English became the language of
  scholarship4. Women admitted to the
  universities5. Urbanizationchange accent for
  personal advancement in the bigger cities.

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The elocutionary movement

• Public life
• Speech marked one as belonging to a particular
  social class
• rhetoric as an important skill in professions
  such as law, politics, and religion.
• Rhetoric for upward mobility. (speaking good
  English
• Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788) Irish actor
• Emphasis on delivery.

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The Scottish school

• The Belletristic movement Lord Kames and Hugh
  Blair
• Belles lettres (beautiful language from France)
• Study of literature, lit criticism and writing
• Focus on the examining the specific qualities of
  discourse and their effects (on readers and
  listeners).
• Taste, style, beauty and decorum
• Help students develop the qualities of taste,
  eloguence, critical acumen, and style with the
  goal of living the good life.
• Pursuing personal grace, leisure enjoyment and
  social advancement.

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George Campbell (1719-1796)

• Incorporate 17th, 18th Century British
  philosophical thoughts
• Eloquence psychology
• Seek a science of eloquence
• Mental faculties Every speech is intended to
• enlighten the understanding
• please the imagination
• move the passions
• influence the will
• Persuasion is a matter of addressing both the
  emotions and the reason

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Richard Whately (1787-1863)

• Traditional logic and rhetoric like Augustine,
  Cicero, Quintilian, and Renaissance humanists
  art of promoting and defending divine truth.
• Types of reasoning Scientific and Moral
• Reasoning from evidence to more or less probable
  conclusions on practical issues.
• Theory of persuasion
• to excite some desire or passion in the hearers
• to satisfy their judgment
• Education in eloquence
• Elocution the ability to speak with grace,
  force, and clarity.
• Argumentation defend a proposition with sound
  inference and solid evidence.

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The 20th century

• From the end of 19th century to the beginning of
  the 20th century, the study of rhetorical theory
  had reached its lowest point.
• Scientific thinking was ascendant.
• However, scientific thinking could not provide
  solutions to human problems like aggression,
  racism, economic exploitation, and others.
• Toward the end of 20th century, scientists
  started to admit the discourse of science was not
  formulary, clinical, and syllogistic but
  decidedly strategic, argumentative, and
  rhetorical.

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Contemporary Rhetoric I Arguments, Audiences,
and Advocacy

• Chaim Perelman and Madame L. Olbrechts-Tyteca
  The New Rhetoricuniversal, particular, audience
  of one, self as audience.
• Stephen Toulmin The Uses of Argumentanalyzed
  everyday or marketplace arguments and drew legal
  cases to establish his system for assessing
  arguments.
• Application of Rhetoric in scientific inquiry,
  economics, anthropology, social psychology
• Criticisms of the Rhetoric of Science

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--What are the qualities that make academic
disciplines rhetorical? --Advocacy

1. Choice of a project and the presentation of a
   rationale for research
2. The field of science is a collective enterprise
   sustained within a highly specialized network of
   communication
3. A part of public discourse technical information
   is available to all of us.

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Contemporary Rhetoric II Rhetoric as equipment
for living

• Kenneth Burke identification symbolic
  inducement terministic screens and being human.
• Lloy Bitzer rhetoric as a response to a
  particular kind of setting, and as structured by
  that setting in predictable ways.
• Mikhail Bakhtin Polyphonic Novel relationship
  between rhetoric and narrative generally.
• Wayne Booth and the Rhetoric of Fiction
• Jurgen Habermas and the Conditions of Rational
  Discourse rational society built on the
  foundation of rationally liberated individuals
  speaking to one another as equals toward the goal
  of agreement and thus action.

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Contemporary Rhetoric III Texts, Power, and
Alternatives

• Michel Foucault Discourse, Knowledge, and Power
• Jacques Derrida Texts, Meanings, and
  Deconstruction
• Richard Weaver Rhetoric and the Preservation of
  Culture
• Feminism and Rhetoric Critique and Reform in
  Rhetoric
• Queer theory
• George Kennedy and Comparative Rhetoric rhetoric
  in ancient China.

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• Four teachers, out of 150, were attacked by the
  students.
• Two percent of the teachers were attacked by the
  students.
• Ninety-eight percent of the teachers were not
  attacked by the students.

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James Paul Gee. Discourses Reflections on M. A.
K. Hallidays Toward a Language-Based Theory of
Learning.

• If you look in the brain of the finch you see
  high sexual dimorphismA/B/C regions are robust
  in males and atrophied or non-existent in
  females. (38)
• a very long history in Western culture in which
  women have repeatedly been seen as less
  developed or less evolved than men. (38)

A
C
B
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Academic writing is always value-laden

• Hyland, K. Disciplinary Discourse Writing
  Texts, Processes and Practices. Ed. C. N. Candlin
  and K. Hyland. London Longman, 2005.
• studies on how academic writers intervene in
  their texts not only to present their findings,
  but also to evaluate these findings, comment on
  them and build solidarity with their readers
  (124).