Rhetorical Analysis: Understanding - Selzer

This piece was interesting to read, especially since I know we have a rhetorical analysis paper coming up in the semester. It began by talking about rhetoric and how most people define it. It went on to say that a rhetorical analysis is about understanding, not just reading or communicating. This made a lot of sense to me because you can't fully understand how something persuades if you don't first understand the methods that is communicates with. The reading also explained the difference between a textual analysis and a contextual analysis. The textual analysis is an approach that emphasizes the text, not the context. It analyzes what is in a work and nothing more. The contextual analysis takes into account everything; what is written, what it connects to, the history when the piece was written or produced, and more. It makes more sense to me to provide a contextual analysis, because it offers a far greater and deeper understanding of the artifact, however it may also be more difficult to produce because it requires more research and effort.

The text also talks about different kinds of rhetoric, which I found interesting as well. It mentioned forensic rhetoric, deliberative rhetoric, and epideictic rhetoric. It explained forensic and deliberative rhetoric as making judgements or decisions, including guilt or innocence. It then explained epideictic rhetoric as asking the audience to reconsider values and beliefs. This seems to me to be a much trickier form of rhetoric because it's much more personal. It's easy to try to persuade someone using facts, but to persuade them based on their beliefs and values would be much harder because you would need to have a very clear understanding of where they stood and how that matches up with what you're trying to persuade.

The text also brought up several terms, but historical and current. It mentioned inventio, dispostio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio. These and their definitions were all straightforward for me, but I'm glad the terms have evolved into words which are easier for me to remember. It mentioned that ethos, pathos, and logos are associated with the first, inventio and invention. This helped to give me more of an example, since I've studied ethos, pathos, and logos in most of my major classes here at Tech. The text went on to introduce more terms, such as exordium as an introduction, narratio as forecasting, confirmatio as proof, and peroration as a conclusion. This all went on into more explanations and examples, and it got me to thinking about terms. There are so many parts to rhetoric, and many can be referenced to other words, like introduction. It makes me think about the compulsive need for humans to classify and term things, giving names.

Giving a thing a name is holding or exerting power over the named thing. I think this power is especially helpful to those who study (and term) rhetoric because it is such a vague field because so much of it is dependent on the message. Maybe that's why there are so many terms being thrown around in this article, both old, "traditional" terms, and new or newer terms. The need to rename a term is probably for a few reasons. First, to make the word more modern and to make it easier to say and remember, but also to create some sort of power or authority. At least for me, this is what it seems like.

The rest of the text talked about two specific examples, which helped to further clarify my understanding of textual and contextual rhetorical analysis.