Victoria Vance

ENC 3371

Defining Rhetoric

Rhetoric is a very powerful communication tool used all over the world. Rhetoric has the

ability to persuade, inform, and argue. Most importantly rhetoric helps us gain a better

understanding of our connection to others and the world around us. Rhetoric does all of these

things by appealing to situations, emotions, reasoning, audiences, language style, ideas, and even

habits. Whether its persuading you to buy a product or agreeing with your partner on business

plans rhetoric is always working within our lives.

Rhetoric allows us to communicate amongst one another effectively. By using

tools of rhetoric like the rhetorical situation triangle, we learn appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos.

Through these concepts rhetoric gives us a better understanding of how, for whom, and why we

communicate specific concepts, ideas and beliefs. Logos helps the speaker to sound rationale and

knowledgeable. When a speaker sounds rational and reasonable their ethos will increase. Their

credibility goes up and this make the audience feel confident and comfortable that they are

listening to somebody who knows what they are talking about. Once the audience feels

comfortable and satisfied this acts upon the pathos, their emotions and values are touched upon

and maybe even the speaker was able to change an audiences belief or attitude about a certain

matter. Rhetoric shows us how to be aware of these connections in order to be effective.

 Different settings will influence the way you go about using logos, pathos and

ethos. Rhetoric provides insight on how to adjust to the situation, and also persuade your

audience. Aristotle himself claimed that rhetoric was the ability in any given situation to find all

available means of persuasion.

Rhetoric allows us to question what exists (conjecture), to what degree it exists

(degree), and what possibilities or impossibilities there are out there. This allows us to gain a

better understanding of how the world around us is connected, as much as ethos, pathos, and

logos are connected. We may look for signs or words that express an understanding of what is

trying to be said in any given context and adjust ourselves to the situation.

We may consciously or unconsciously assume something based on experiences or

beliefs and rhetoric allows us to become aware of this in order to relate and connect with others.

In this way stasis may be achieved and our interactions with others will result in agreement and

even persuasion. Nonetheless rhetoric is a tool for understanding points of differences in order to

come to solutions. Rhetoric also helps us to understand our connection to events through the use

of Kairos. Kairos gives us insight into when the right moment or opportunity arises in our lives.

This further expands our connection to the world around us through synchronicities and relative

events.

To conclude rhetoric is a tool that is used in order to understand and connect to

others and the world around us through various concepts. Some of these concepts include pathos,

logos, ethos, kairos, and persuasion. We ourselves use these very concepts in our personal lives

as well as in our social lives. Rhetoric helps us to interpret and communicate our thoughts and

beliefs effectively in order to persuade or agree with others even when points of differences
arise. As natural rhetoric users we all adjust to changes around us in order to adapt to who we are

talking to, for what reason we are talking, and how we will communicate our message across.