FOURTH EDITION Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student Edward P. J. Corbett Robert J. Connors New York © Oxford Oxford University Press 1999I I Introduction Rhetoric is the art or the discipline that deals with the use of discourse, either spoken or written, to inform or persuade or motivate an audience, whether that audience is made up of one person or a group of persons. Broadly de- fined in that way, rhetoric would seem to comprehend every kind of verbal expression that people engage in. But rhetoricians customarily have ex- cluded from their province such informal modes of speech as “small talk,” jokes, greetings (“Good to see you”), exclamations (“What a day!”), gossip, simple explanations (“That miniature calculator operates on dry-cell better” ies’), and directions (“Take 2 left at the next intersection, go about three blocks to the first stoplight, and then . . .) Although informative, disee- tive, oF persuasive objectives can be realized in the stop-and-go, give-and- take form of the dialogue, rhetoric has traditionally been concerned with those instances of formal, premeditated, sustained monologue in which a person seeks to exert an effect on an audience. This notion of “an effect on an audience’—a notion that gets at the very essence of rhetorical dis- course—is implicit in such definitions as Marie Hochmuth Nichols’: “a ‘means of so ordering discourse as to produce an effect on the listener or reader”; Kenneth Burke's: “the use of language as a symbolic means of in- ducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols"; or Donald Bryant's: “the function of adjusting ideas to people and of people to ideas.” ‘The classical chetoricians seem to have narrowed the particular effect of thetorical discourse to persuasion. Aristotle, for instance, defined shetoric as “the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given situation.” But when one is reminded that the Greek word for persuasion de- tives from the Greek verb “to believe,” one sees that Aristot’s definition can be made to comprehend not only those modes of discourse that are “ar gumentative” bus also those “expository” modes of discourse that seck to win seceptance of information or explanation.But whether we are secking, as the cightcenth-cennury Scottish rhetori- cian George Campbell put it, “to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the will,” we must adopt and adapt those strategies that will best achieve our end. Sirazegies is a good therorical word, because it implies the choice of available resources to achieve an end, It is no accident that the word serategy has military associa- tions, for this word has its roots in the Greek word for army. Just as a general will adopt those resources, those tactics, which are most likely to defeat the enemy in a battle, so the marshaller of language will seek out and use the best argument, and the best style to “win” an audience. Ler us look at one of the commonest forms, in our society, of a discourse designed to influence an audience, a magazine advertisement. Following the ad, there will be an analysis of the rhetoric of that piece of discourse. Rhetorical Analysis of a Magazine Ad Perhaps the most common, most ubiquitous, form of persuasive discourse in our society is advertising. Whether in the visual medium or in the sound medium, advertising is inescapable. Ads appear in newspapers, in maga- zines, in catalogues, in flyers, on billboards, on the radio, and on television. ‘Ads are primarily forms of spoken or graphic discourses (or combinations of spoken and graphic discourses, such as the commercials on TV) that try to get the reader or the listener to buy a product or a service. A huge in- dustry has developed in our society to prepare and disseminate these ads. “Madison Avenue” is the figurative way of referring to this industry. (Ia the chapter on style, you will find out that the figure of speech repre~ sented by the term “Madison Avenue” is antonoraasia.) Ad-writers are seme of the most skillful rhetoricians in our society. They may never have stud- ied classical zhetoric, but they employ many of the strategies of this ancient art to influence the attitudes and actions of those who are exposed to the ads that they compose. The analysis that follows will point out some of the rhetorical strategies that the ad-writers used in the Hewlett Packard magazine ad. ‘The so-called “communications triangle” is frequently used as a graphic representation of the components of the rhetorical act subjecemaner speaker iter istener/reader {t does not, unfortunately, monitor taste) Introducing the first color printer-copier. The HP Copylet. 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