![]() ![]() ![]() Her book has proved highly persuasive to outside activists and mainstream politicians alike, which demonstrates the power of her rhetoric. In the book, Alexander uses a combination of logical arguments, historical context, and emotional human stories to show the harm caused by the modern criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow was only published a few years ago (2010), but already it’s become highly influential in the world of politics. Examples of Rhetoric in Literature and Scholarship Example 1 Similarly, your success at the interview stage will depend largely on the way you use rhetoric to present yourself. How will you do this? By using effective rhetoric in the letter. And it’s not just an academic skill! Think about the job process: when you write a cover letter, your job is to convince the employer that you are the best person for the job. If you can persuade people to come around to your point of view, you can be more successful in all sorts of subjects. Rhetoric matters because arguments matter. Are they stimulating your appetites, such as your desire for food or companionship? Are they using the emotions? Are they presenting logical arguments? Knowing this, you can analyze the various techniques that advertisements use. Every advertisement you see is an attempt to persuade you that you should take a certain action – usually buying a product or supporting a political candidate. Example 2Īdvertisements are a very subtle form of rhetoric. Although Lincoln wasn’t trying to persuade his audience of anything in particular, he was presenting an overall view or understanding of the war, which he wanted his listeners to accept as their own. In those two minutes, Lincoln summarized all the pain and suffering that had been brought by the Civil War and looked forward to the good that might someday come from a Union victory. Though the speech took less than two minutes to deliver, the country was deeply moved by it. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.Ībraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is widely praised as one of history’s greatest speeches. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. Calhoun was an extremely talented rhetorician who used his skills to argue in defense of slavery!Īlthough rhetoric is often connected with making speeches, it applies just as well to writing. This is an important point – a person can be good at rhetoric without actually having good ideas! To use an extreme example, John C. For example, they might say that a politician is “all rhetoric and no substance,” meaning the politician makes good speeches but doesn’t have good ideas. Today, people sometimes use the word “rhetoric” in a negative light. That’s why the politicians of, say, the 19 th century were so eloquent and well-spoken in comparison with modern politicians. In the classical world, rhetoric was considered one of the most important school subjects, and no gentleman was raised without extensive formal training in the skill. It’s a way of presenting and making your views convincing and attractive to your readers or audience. That put my mind at rest and made me once again pleased and proud to point to our ‘integrated free online thesaurus’ without recalling to mind nearly all of the dialogue from Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer whose main(ish) character speaks in a sort of parallel English constructed of synonyms and near-misses: ‘Forgive my speaking of English, Jonfen, as I’m not so premium with it.’īut that book is a subject for another wandering.Rhetoric is the ancient art of persuasion. I tweeted Stephen King’s quote a few days ago, and found the responses from most green_knight MacDictionary I’ve found a thesaurus useful to chase down weird translations: how did he get from here to there, where there=exact green_knight MacDictionary Sometimes I reach for a thesaurus to avoid five repetitions of a perfectly good word – or to avoid a rare one. Poetic … but confusing.Īt the end of this train of thesaurusean (I know that’s not a word!) thoughts I was thinking: so, a thesaurus can be confusing for the non-native speaker and it can be a dissembling tool for native speakers (I promise dissembling came to mind before concealing), so is a thesaurus only good for a crossword puzzler? But then I cast my mind back to those English teaching days – sitting in a class of high-school students in the neon-clad city at the end of a long day … all of the students keying words furiously into their pocket translators, flicking desperately through their chosen English dictionary answering questions such as: ‘Where are you going for Chinese New Year?’ with ‘Myself will roam primarily to the kin’. ![]()
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