The above quotes reflect two notions of rhetoric which sometimes conflict, but are often and paradoxically held simultaneously. Francis Bacon emphasizes the ability of this subject to aid in the advancement of one’s learning and opinions within society. Contained within Whistler’s humor is the equally serious suggestion that voices will frequently encounter competition in the form of other spea...

The NTSB’s use of rhetoric can provide us as rhetoricians, professional writers, and others with new insights into rhetoric as a persuasive tool. The NTSB relies wholly on its rhetoric to persuade those who have decision-making authority to follow its recommendations. In this paper, I will discuss how the NTSB provides new insights into the persuasiveness of documents from a bureaucratic organi...

Anthony Downs assumed no false information, and no irrationality. Neither of these assumptions is realistic in politics. Adam Smith recognised the role of rhetoric (deliberative eloquence) in political debate. The significance of propaganda was recognised in the 1940s. Modern approaches to political processes, agenda setting and discourse analysis also emphasise persuasion. This paper begins by...

Serious Games is an emerging technology which can be used in a learning environment. This technology is an effective interaction design paradigm which can be embedded as a persuasive learning tool to attract learners’ attention. This article will explore the concept of game rhetoric as an element in game systems for persuading students to engage with the learning context. We identified three ty...

Our first tendency is to look outside Europe when searching for ancient rhetorics that do not follow the Greco-Roman tradition. After all, much of European culture was strongly influenced by Roman culture, especially following the conquests of Julius Caesar in 58-51 BCE and subsequent conquests that brought most of Europe under Roman control. Rome’s civic practices, including variations of Grec...

Most rhetorical readings of Confucius’s Analects have focused on his views on eloquence, reflecting an insuppressible impulse among comparative rhetoricians to match Confucian rhetoric to Greco–Roman rhetorical framework. My reading of the text argues that Confucius was more concerned about the suasory power of the multimodality of ritual symbols than narrowly verbal persuasion. To achieve the ...

While presidents are often credited with agenda-setting powers over the public, empirical support is limited. Important exceptions to this limited evidence were provided by Cohen (1995, 1997) and Hill (1998). They found a link between the content of State of the Union addresses and subsequent pub lic concern about policy problems for the period 1953-1989. Recently Baum and Kernell (1999) demons...

ESL students who write in English may present written material in a rhetorical and organizational mode that reflects the pattern which is valued in their native culture and rhetoric. Considering the violation of English code of writing in the writings of Iranian students, we will notice one common characteristic: They are reluctant (or ignorant of) to write a unified paragraph. Their writing co...

In this paper we apply a computational text analysis technique used for measuring moral rhetoric in text to analyze the moral loadings of tweets. We focus our analysis on tweets regarding the 2013 federal government shutdown; a topic that was at the forefront of U.S. politics in late 2013. Our results demonstrate that the positions of the members of the two major political parties are mirrored ...