What is rhetoric?
Rhetoric is the use of symbolic action by human beings to share ideas, enabling them to work together to make decisions about matters of common concern and to construct social reality
- Catherine Helen Palczewski
It is difficult to find a roomful of rhetoricians who will agree to a succinct definition of their field, or even to agree that such a definition is possible, or useful, or desirable. - Randy Allan Harris
Defining rhetoric is no simple task. For generations, scholars have grappled with what it means to study things rhetorically. Some argue that rhetoric should be about the construction and delivery of eloquent public addresses, and that the oratory tradition of ancient rhetoricians like Aristotle should be preserved in contemporary practice. Others claim that rhetoric should focus more on the examination and evaluation of texts through methods such as close reading and textual criticism.
Most scholars of rhetoric will say that the best practice combines these two traditions of our discipline, the oratory and the critical, to approach both novel and existing texts from a rhetorical perspective. A rhetorical perspective in this case is one that values language, symbols, and the interaction between the producers of language and symbols and their eventual consumers or interactants.
For me, rhetoric is best described by Dr. Palczewski in her quote above. What drives me to care about rhetoric is its potential to create and motivate communities, engage and change minds, and ultimately inform our conceptions and constructions of reality.
These understandings of rhetoric have influenced the way I perform as a student, an instructor, and as a writer.