Virtue-Centered Rhetoric

So, this was a bit heavy for reading at 9am on a Monday, but nevertheless, I understand the point of this reading. Ding's style in this piece was (or what my understanding is) what our next paper is supposed to have the tone of. It is about the different methods of comparative rhetoric as Confucius defined it as the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world.

The overall layout of the piece began by giving a historical context for virtue-centered rhetoric, and how Ding plans to achieve the goals set by Liu and Mao by examining non-Western rhetorical text and within that text's historical, political, and cultural context. Ding's first methods include conducing a piece-by-piece analyses of each important text and author and then put them together into a larger picture.

The pieces that he seemed to focus on the most was the Analects from Confucius, which was a span of writing collected and recorded over 230 years after his death. 20 of these years encompasses all but the last 20 years of during the first political unity of China by Emperor Qing. His analyses were both by computer and hand-tagged keyword extraction, analyzing a handful of words and how often they occurred, their distribution, and the word meaning to isolate the word from its surrounding context and to analyze it in that context. Overall, Ding found that Confucius's main ideology was that only through virtue can a rule ensure the effectiveness of his orders and that his nation will follow suit.