My Rhetorical Situations and Discourse Communities

Article about discourse communities

Using Rhetorical Situations to Examine and Improve Vaccination Communication

Opinion polls have documented a considerable public skepticism towards a COVID-19 vaccine. Seeking to address the vaccine skepticism challenge this essay surveys the research on vaccine hesitancy and trust building through the lens of the rhetorical situation and points towards five broad principles for a content strategy for public health communicators in regards to vaccination: 1) vaccine hesitancy is not irrational per se; 2) messages should be tailored to the various hesitancy drivers; 3) what is perceived as trustworthy is situational and constantly negotiated; 4) in areas of uncertainty where no exact knowledge exists, the character of the speaker becomes more important; and 5) the trustworthiness of the speaker can be strengthened through finding some common ground—such as shared feelings or accepted premises—with the audience. Such common insights are on offer in the literature on rhetoric and persuasion and linked here with the research on vaccine communication and trust focusing specifically on the latter and character.

LGBTQ+ Epistolary Rhetoric/Letter Writing

Approaching letter writing as a rhetorical practice—as epistolary rhetoric—is not an obvious priority for queer studies in communication. Yet the importance of letters to LGBTQ+ studies of rhetoric have come to the fore in two key ways. In a first approach, following the long-standing use of letters as evidence within interdisciplinary LGBTQ+ histories, letters serve as vital primary sources in histories of LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Letters act as evidence of LGBTQ+ romantic, erotic, and sexual relations within queer studies of public memory. Also, acting as so-called hidden transcripts, letters document other kinds of background information about rhetorical situations. In a second approach LGBTQ+ letters have been analyzed as rhetoric. Receiving the most attention are obviously public and political letters, such as those appearing in movement publications, the rhetoric of public officials and their political campaigns, and activist letter-writing campaigns. Especially in the case of LGBTQ+ life, however, letters often blur the lines between genres that are public and private, political and intimate. As such, even those letters considered most intimate, such as romantic and erotic letters, have been theorized as forms of epistolary rhetoric. Both approaches persist and are in productive tension with each other. Whether scholars underscore how LGBTQ+ letters are rhetoric or simply draw on them as records of information, letters are indispensable sources for the development of LGBTQ+ histories of rhetoric, studies of public memory, and research on communication.

How Feedback From an Online Video Game Teaches Argument Writing for Environmental Action

Literacy researchers have explored how video games might be used as supplementary texts in secondary English language arts (ELA) classrooms to support reading instruction. However, less attention has been focused on how video games, particularly online educational games designed to teach argumentation, might enhance secondary ELA students’ writing development. In this article, we describe how the pedagogical feedback provided by one such game, Quandary, influenced two seventh graders’ written arguments in advocacy letters addressed to the state governor regarding a local environmental disaster. We compare these two embedded cases to data from 10 focal students, as well as patterns from 114 seventh graders (in five ELA classes). Based on our analysis of screen-capture video of students’ gameplay, drafts of their advocacy letters, and video-stimulated recall interviews, we conclude that game feedback rewarding or penalizing predetermined right or wrong player moves may encourage students to develop argumentation strategies that are less effective in more complex rhetorical situations and may foster a false sense of competence.

Speaking to algorithms? Rhetorical political analysis as technological analysis

In the last few years, research studies and opinion pieces have tried to account for the new polarisation and dealignment of US politics after Trump and the post-Brexit UK politics. It is now well-established both by academic research and by Facebook’s own research that Facebook leads to more polarisation in its users’ political views, but rhetorical analysis has not yet accounted for the role played by algorithms in political communication and persuasion. What does social media do to rhetoric? The situation of speech in social media is often treated like in a public sphere when it should not be. This misconception prevents rhetorical studies to take into consideration the question of technology. By using the recent literature in critical algorithm studies, I develop a new approach in rhetorical criticism. I argue here that the increasing agency that algorithms have acquired in delivering and mediating rhetoric means that we must consider the role played by intermediaries when examining rhetorical situations. This paper sheds light on what I call the four conditionalities of algorithms on rhetoric: (1) programmed speech content, (2) the verticalisation of political communication, (3) the new biases produced by digital media, and (4) the rhetorical machine learning.

The media provocateur: A rhetorical framework for studying an emerging persona in journalism

With the proliferation of digital and social media in particular, non-traditional actors are entering journalism based on their personal rhetorical competencies, rather than their formal journalistic credentials. Among such actors are public debaters who establish themselves as professional opinion-makers and media personalities via ‘media provocations’. In this article, we develop a conceptual framework for studying how these media provocateurs emerge as influential personas in journalism. Whereas previous research has provided important insights into how similar non-traditional actors have challenged journalism from a sociological perspective, we adopt a rhetorical perspective on the phenomenon and describe how the provocateurs’ public persona constructions evolve in a sequential, cumulative, and transformative communicative process that cuts across different rhetorical situations in a hybrid media system. The proposed framework points to several future avenues of research into how non-traditional actors, such as media provocateurs, (micro-)bloggers, and social media influencers, may reflect the current state and direction of journalism.

Rhetorical Features of the Book of Revelation

Despite its literary distance from Greco-Roman speeches, the book of Revelation exhibits rhetorical features and strategies that are comprehensible within Greco-Roman rhetorical practice. John weaves epideictic and deliberative elements together to move audiences in a variety of rhetorical situations in the direction John would promote for the sake of maintaining the distinctiveness of Christian identity and witness in the Roman imperial setting. He gives careful attention to the construction of authority (ethos) throughout the work, often employing strategies that are distinctive to revelatory (as opposed to discursive) literature. He relies on the strategic arousal of emotions in regard to particular landmarks within his hearers’ landscapes or particular consequences of courses of action as a part of his strategy for guiding their responses. John also incorporates appeals to reason to a surprising degree, both through explicit deductive reasoning and through strategies that are once again distinctive to apocalyptic literature (e.g., narrating future consequences).

Breaking Communication Stereotypes: The Discourse of Armenian Velvet Revolution

In its most basic sense, communication – the transmission and reception of information between the addresser and addressee, the generation of certain meaning, and the powerful source of information in the society – is a social multidimensional semi­otic sys­tem which today, along with traditional oral and written discourse modes, is realized through numerous other media or modes – live-streaming and online text messaging as well as pictures, graphic designs, cartoons, colors, music, clothing, theatre-like scenes/actions, etc. The collection of these modes or elements, contributes to how multimodality affects different rhetorical situations, or opportunities for increasing the audience’s reception of an idea or concept. Hence, the present paper aims at outlining the different modes of multidisciplinary communication tactics with a focus on the complex nature of language/discourse/text and other multimodal communication practices in terms of the aural, spatial and visual resources or modes used to compose the message of the 2018 Armenian Velvet Revolution. The case study shows that the Armenian Velvet Revolution is a master-class in the application of multimodality, i.e. various modes of communication to convey information and impact the public, thus securing the success of the Revolution