Rhetoric, Critical Reading, and EAP Writing

施 雪 清國立嘉義大學外語系

1. Define critical reading

2. Define rhetoric

3. History of rhetoric focusing on contemporary rhetorics

4. The rhetorical qualities in academic writing

Ways of gaining knowledge

• Non-critical reader: by memorizing the statements within a text.learn facts.

• Critical reader: what a text says + how the subject matter is

said.Appreciate a particular perspective and a

particular selecting of facts can lead to particular understanding

What is Rhetoric?From Ancient Greece: formal public speaking (political,

legal, celebratory speech making)To Any spoken or written form of nonliterary discourse

(many would include a great deal of literary discourse.)

• The art of persuasion:George Kennedy: “the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions.”

• Employing symbols effectively.achieving the purposes of the symbol-user—persuasion, clarity, beauty, or mutual understanding.

Characteristics of rhetorical discourse

1. Planned

2. Adapted to an audience

3. Shaped by human motives

4. Responsive to a situation

5. Persuasion-seeking

6. Concerned with contingent issues

Social functions of the art of rhetoric

1. Rhetoric tests ideas

2. Rhetoric assists advocacy

3. Rhetoric distributes power

4. Rhetoric discovers facts

5. Rhetoric shapes knowledge

6. Rhetoric builds community

History of Rhetoric1. Antiquity: Plato; Aristotle; Cicero

2. Middle Ages: Augustine.

3. Renaissance: Erasmus; Italian humanism.– Peter Ramus (1515-1572, the turn toward dialectic).

skeptical about the value of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s treatment of rhetoric and dialectic

humanistic studies: studies to the development of a free and active human mind—rhetoric, poetics, ethics, politics.

Rhetoric in timeline.doc

4. Enlightenment:

5. Contemporary

Cicero’s five canons or categories of oratory

1. Invention2. Arrangement3. Style4. Memory5. Delivery

A pattern for rhetorical educationA template for the criticism of discourse (..\

美人腿節.jpg) and

Invention: finding something to say; what is to be said.

Arrangement: how one orders speech or writing.

Style: the artful expression of ideas; how something is said;

The Enlightenment• late 16th C—early 18th C• Logic, dialectic, and mathematics• Managerial view of rhetoric• The discovery of knowledge through reasoning, as

opposed to “the communication of knowledge” in earlier period.

• Issac Newton (1642-1727): physical laws governs the universe• John Locke 91632-1704): empirical basis of human knowing• David Hume (1771-1776): rational operations of the human mind• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): theory of government

centered on the individual citizen.• Francois Voltaire (1694-1778): severe criticism to Christian belief

and defense of civil liberties.

18th and 19th Century Rhetorics

• Giambattista Vico on Rhetoric and Human Thought

• British Rhetorics The Elocutionary MovementThe Scottish SchoolRichard Whately’s Classical Rhetoric

• Vico: the rhetoric of imagination

1. intuitive poetic2. The need for education in arts of practical decision making about matters that did not yield to scientific analysis, such as morality, law, art, politics.3. The decisions are contingent.

Rhetoric in British education:

1. Christian apologetic, preaching and writing2. Shift from oral to written discourse3. English became the language of scholarship4. Women admitted to the universities5. Urbanization—change accent for personal advancement in the bigger cities.

The elocutionary movement

• Public life:Speech marked one as belonging to a

particular social classrhetoric as an important skill in professions

such as law, politics, and religion.Rhetoric for upward mobility. (speaking good

English

Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788): Irish actor;

Emphasis on delivery.

The Scottish school

• The Belletristic movement: Lord Kames and Hugh BlairBelles lettres (beautiful language from France)Study of literature, lit criticism and writingFocus on the examining the specific qualities of

discourse and their effects (on readers and listeners).Taste, style, beauty and decorum Help students develop the qualities of taste,

eloguence, critical acumen, and style with the goal of “living the good life.”

Pursuing personal grace, leisure enjoyment and social advancement.

George Campbell (1719-1796)

• Incorporate 17th, 18th Century British philosophical thoughts

• Eloquence + psychology• Seek a science of eloquence• Mental faculties: Every speech is intended to

♠ enlighten the understanding♠ please the imagination♠ move the passions♠ influence the will

• Persuasion is a matter of addressing both the emotions and the reason

Richard Whately (1787-1863)

• Traditional logic and rhetoric: like Augustine, Cicero, Quintilian, and Renaissance humanists; art of promoting and defending divine truth.

• Types of reasoning: Scientific and Moral Reasoning from evidence to more or less probable conclusions

on practical issues.

• Theory of persuasion: to excite some desire or passion in the hearers to satisfy their judgment

• Education in eloquence: Elocution: the ability to speak with grace, force, and clarity. Argumentation: defend a proposition with sound inference and

solid evidence.

The 20th century

• From the end of 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the study of rhetorical theory had reached its lowest point.

• Scientific thinking was ascendant.• However, scientific thinking could not provide

solutions to human problems like aggression, racism, economic exploitation, and others.

• Toward the end of 20th century, scientists started to admit the discourse of science was not formulary, clinical, and syllogistic but decidedly strategic, argumentative, and rhetorical.

Contemporary Rhetoric I: Arguments, Audiences, and Advocacy

• Chaim Perelman and Madame L. Olbrechts-Tyteca: The New Rhetoric—universal, particular, audience of one, self as audience.

• Stephen Toulmin: The Uses of Argument—analyzed everyday or marketplace arguments and drew legal cases to establish his system for assessing arguments.

• Application of Rhetoric in scientific inquiry, economics, anthropology, social psychology

• Criticisms of the Rhetoric of Science

--What are the qualities that make academic disciplines rhetorical? --Advocacy

1. Choice of a project and the presentation of a rationale for research

2. The field of science is a collective enterprise sustained within a highly specialized network of communication

3. A part of public discourse; technical information is available to all of us.

Contemporary Rhetoric II: Rhetoric as equipment for living

• Kenneth Burke : identification; symbolic inducement; terministic screens and being human.

• Lloy Bitzer: rhetoric as a response to a particular kind of setting, and as structured by that setting in predictable ways.

• Mikhail Bakhtin: Polyphonic Novel; relationship between rhetoric and narrative generally.

• Wayne Booth and the Rhetoric of Fiction• Jurgen Habermas and the Conditions of Rational

Discourse; rational society built on the foundation of rationally liberated individuals speaking to one another as equals toward the goal of agreement and thus action.

Contemporary Rhetoric III: Texts, Power, and Alternatives

• Michel Foucault: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power

• Jacques Derrida: Texts, Meanings, and Deconstruction

• Richard Weaver: Rhetoric and the Preservation of Culture

• Feminism and Rhetoric: Critique and Reform in Rhetoric

• Queer theory• George Kennedy and Comparative Rhetoric;

rhetoric in ancient China.

attacked

notattacked

• Four teachers, out of 150, were attacked by the students.

• Two percent of the teachers were attacked by the students.

• Ninety-eight percent of the teachers were not attacked by the students.

James Paul Gee. “Discourses: Reflections on M. A. K. Halliday’s ‘Toward a Language-Based Theory of Learning’.”

“’If you look in the brain [of the finch] you see high sexual dimorphism—A/B/C regions are robust in males and atrophied or non-existent in females’.” (38)

“a very long history in Western culture in which women have repeatedly been seen as ‘less developed’ or ‘less evolved’ than men.” (38)

A

B C

Academic writing is always value-laden

• Hyland, K. “Disciplinary Discourse” Writing: Texts, Processes and Practices. Ed. C. N. Candlin and K. Hyland. London: Longman, 2005.

studies on “how academic writers intervene in their texts not only to present their findings, but also to evaluate these findings, comment on them and build solidarity with their readers” (124).