Rhetoric in Writing

Above all, my education in rhetoric has influenced the various writing projects I have completed throughout my time as a PhD student and candidate. Below, I briefly describe the scholarship I have written in three topic areas: the spheres of argument, online and networked rhetorics, and memes. In addition to these sub-areas, my study of rhetoric has greatly influenced my dissertation project, which you can read more about here.

 Spheres of Argument

 In his seminal 1982 essay, G. Thomas Goodnight argued that the personal, technical, and public spheres of deliberation consist of separate standards for argument and evaluation. He argued that the technical sphere is the most stringent, often relying on technical or disciplinary norms for evaluating effective argument. The personal sphere is the least restrictive, allowing anything from personal experience to observed phenomena to contribute to the success of an argument. The public sphere, in this conception, must navigate between these two and develop standards for evaluating arguments that transcend either esoteric technical spheres or individual personal deliberation.

In my work, I argue that the separation between the personal and technical spheres is not as strict or identifiable as Goodnight originally described. Though Goodnight does allow for some flexibility in his original conception, I argue that there are instances in which personal and technical arguments become intertwined to the point of becoming indistinguishable. To illustrate this phenomenon, I analyzed a public figure known as the Food Babe, a social media influencer and activist who claims to work toward establishing a safer and healthier food system. Food Babe relies both on seemingly technical evidence about food additives, genetic modification, and nutrition to argue that certain foods should be avoided. At the same time, she uses images of herself and her children as evidence that her “Food Babe Way” works. She and her children appear to be healthy and beautiful, and if you follow her method you will be too. Because she simultaneously uses appeals both to technical data and to feeling, I argue that she can be considered a pseudo-technical expert: someone who is able to rhetorically transcend the boundaries between the technical and personal sphere.

Online and Networked Rhetorics

Over the course of several writing projects, I have explored the ways in which rhetorics are networked on online spaces. Drawing on scholarship from DeLuca, Hahner, Pfister, and others, I investigate questions of how audiences engage with content online, the rhetorical dimensions of social media engagement, and the rhetorical power that is granted to viral artifacts. Specifically, I have studied how pre-COVID anti-vaccination advocates use visual and verbal rhetorical techniques to persuade others not to vaccinate. In online discussion spaces, such as Facebook groups, speakers will diversify the types of evidence they use to appeal to anti-vaccination. Posts with images, either of people or memes, often have higher engagement than posts without. Some of this is due to algorithmic selection and the preferential treatment that is given to image-based posts on platforms like Facebook, but higher engagement is also, I argue, due to the persuasive power of image as a source of evidence in networked spaces.

Memes

In addition to looking broadly at the implications of rhetoric as an online, networked activity, I have specifically analyzed the power of memes as rhetorical artifacts. Memes were originally defined by Richard Dawkins as “units of cultural transmission” that have the power to disseminate cultural ideologies in unique ways. In my work, I argue that this power is due at least in part to the rhetorical power of images in general. Because images create a visceral reaction that text alone often does not, memes are able to generate a unique form of attention and engagement. More specifically, I have analyzed anti-vaccination and anti-GMO memes as forms of argument. When images or memes are shared as evidence for avoidance of vaccination of consumption of GMOs, they are able to use their power as images in addition to the persuasive power of text captions to reach broader and more diverse audiences than text alone.